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Marketing Planning Software
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Avg Rating: Sorts listings by overall star rating based on user reviews, highest to lowest.
A to Z: Sorts listings by product name from A to Z.
Smartsheet
Smartsheet
Smartsheet is a work execution platform and collaboration tool with a familiar spreadsheet-like interface that helps teams plan, track, and manage projects in real-time. Smartsheet features include a range of project management to...Read more
BrandMaker
BrandMaker
BrandMaker is a global leader of marketing operations and MRM (marketing resource management) solutions. The BrandMaker marketing operation suite enables marketers to lead with confidence, accelerate time to market, and increase r...Read more
ActiveCollab
ActiveCollab
ActiveCollab is a project management solution for creative professionals. It offers cloud-based subscription plans or a self-hosting license. Projects are split into tasks and subtasks. Tasks can be filtered by the due date, ass...Read more
Blacksmith TPO
Blacksmith TPO
T-Pro Optimum is a pricing optimization solution that helps CPG manufacturers manage, analyze, and optimize trade promotions. It provides data harmonization tools, which combine data from multiple sources to analyze return-on-inve...Read more
Software pricing tips
Read our Marketing Planning Buyers GuideSubscription models
- Per employee/per month: This model allows you to pay a monthly fee for each of your employees.
- Per user/per month: Users pay a monthly fee for users—normally administrative users—rather than all employees.
Perpetual license
- This involves paying an upfront sum for the license to own the software and use it indefinitely.
- This is the more traditional model and is most common with on-premise applications and with larger businesses.
Rated best value for money
ProWorkflow
ProWorkflow
Founded in 2002 and acquired by ProActive Software Ltd in 2003, ProWorkflow is a cloud-based project management and time tracking software that caters to companies of all sizes. ProWorkflow includes all the features of a trad...Read more
Productboard
Productboard
Productboard is the customer-driven product management system that empowers teams to get the right products to market, faster. It provides a complete solution for product teams to understand user needs, prioritize what to build ne...Read more
Factors.ai
Factors.ai
Factors.AI helps B2B SaaS Marketers understand and scale what drives revenue. Get critical insights into your marketing activities, decode customer behaviors & up your game with AI-powered Marketing Intelligence. With a self-serv...Read more
Popular Marketing Planning Comparisons
Buyers Guide
Last Updated: June 30, 2021While marketing planning software has often been too expensive for many businesses, these days, new software offerings at every price point are giving enterprise-level capabilities to small and midsize businesses.
Marketing planning software makes it easier to understand your business' audience, create targeted marketing campaigns, and monitor their effectiveness.
There are many factors and features to consider when choosing the best software for your marketing team. This guide will help you understand the options available to your business.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
- What is marketing planning software?
- Common features of marketing planning software
- What type of buyer are you?
- Benefits and potential issues
- Market trends to understand
What is marketing planning software?
Marketing planning software gives companies the tools to plan, track, and even predict marketing campaign success. All of these features are available to your entire team in cloud applications that are accessible from anywhere. Collaborative tools allow analysts, creative designers, project managers, and other team members to work together with access to shared data. Companies can also set budgets, define goals, and measure progress with greater accuracy and ease.
Common features of marketing planning software
While features vary from product to product, marketing planning software typically offers some or all of the following functionality:
| Collaboration | Work on a project with other stakeholders using shared information in real time. Coordinate schedules and project milestones using calendars, conversation tools, and more. |
| Marketing calendar | Schedule upcoming campaigns and marketing communication using advanced calendar tools. Analyze past campaigns for audience data and cost effectiveness. |
| Goal setting and tracking | Define your business objectives and marketing goals, and then track progress over time. |
| Budgeting and forecasting | Estimate the cost of future marketing campaigns. Set, track, and modify budgets based on real-time marketing analytics. |
| Media planning | Assign teams and budgets by advertising channel and promotional vendor. |
| Presentation tools | Share creative assets across teams. Create workflows to gather internal feedback and authorize publication. |
| Predictive analysis | Apply statistical analysis and machine learning principles to predict campaign effectiveness and return on investment (ROI). |
What type of buyer are you?
Before purchasing marketing planning software, you should define your company's primary marketing strategy. The type of marketing you do will determine the solution that best supports your business objectives.
Outbound marketing
Outbound marketers should consider tools that track ad click-through rates (CTRs) and newsletter engagement. These features help outbound marketers get the most from tools such as search engine advertising, website ads, and email marketing targeting lists of leads.
Inbound marketing
Inbound marketers should consider solutions that support website analytics and other search engine optimization (SEO) factors. These features help inbound marketers evaluate their blogs, websites, and social media. Lead nurturing, such as drip marketing, is one way inbound marketers draw customers toward a purchase decision.
Social media marketing
Marketers who rely on social media channels to connect with customers should look for applications that can monitor conversations, track the source of inbound leads, and ultimately measure the success of social media campaigns. Many social media marketing platforms provide limited marketing automation tools, while advanced social intelligence is usually reserved for best-of-breed solutions.
Benefits and potential issues
Here are a few things to remember when selecting the right software for your marketing team.
- Focus on the essentials: Beware of choosing software that offers many features but ultimately lacks the essential functions you need to support your established processes. Look for software that covers your essentials needs and can grow with your business.
- Confirm all necessary integrations: Whenever you adopt new software, it's important to ensure it integrates with your existing systems and data. For example, some marketing software offers native integration with customer resource management (CRM) software and related platforms. Without native integration, developers may need to spend time making your software platforms compatible with each other.
- Consider the learning curve: Learning to use new software takes effort. Look for intuitive software options that have plenty of tutorials and self-service documentation. Online tech support is sometimes only available in higher-tier packages.
Market trends to understand
Data visualization helps marketers understand complicated metrics. As smaller companies gain access to big data, the information can feel overwhelming. Data visualization helps teams make sense of abstract analytics and spot opportunities. Ultimately, data visualization tools help companies spend money and time more efficiently.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is making sense of complex data. AI can often find important details in data much faster than humans can. AI is still considered an advanced software feature, and companies may pay a premium to get it. This reality is changing, however, and software that doesn't invest in AI is widely expected to fall behind in the coming years.