With marketing software becoming ever cheaper and easier to deploy, businesses are finding themselves in the market (pun intended) for a new or updated system. This is especially true of small and midsize businesses (SMBs), who are adopting marketing software at a rapid rate.
Smaller companies may have avoided spending money on such software in the past, either because they lack a dedicated marketing department or the resources to afford a marketing system. These days, though, you'd be foolhardy not to invest in marketing software that can allow your business to run its own marketing campaigns without any outside help—even if your marketing “department" is just one person.
“Small business marketing software" is not a specific type of marketing software, so much as it is a general set of marketing software that caters to smaller businesses with fewer monetary and marketing resources.
This guide will help you pick the best marketing software option for your own small business.
Here's what we'll discuss:
What Is Small Business Marketing Software?
What Makes Small Business Marketing Software “Small"?
Common Features of Small Business Marketing Software
Marketing software (as we note in our marketing software Buyer's Guide) helps organizations perform the following functions:
What small business marketing software does, then, is provide these features on a smaller scale to smaller businesses. In practice, this doesn't look any different from any other type of marketing software; it's just a matter of which features you choose and the size of your budget.
Rather simply, small business marketing software is just marketing software that is used by a small business. What differentiates it as “small business" software is that smaller businesses won't be looking for the expansive software suites provided by some vendors, and will instead want to choose between tighter, more focused packages that provide only the key features needed by a small business.
Small businesses may not need all of the features of a larger organization, at least at first. In fact, many companies may simply be looking to automate marketing tasks or to have a dashboard through which they can track their email marketing campaigns and manage their social media. Fortunately, many vendors will let you decide what features you want as a part of your package, so that you don't need to spend money on functionality you're not yet ready to utilize.
Most vendors don't cater specifically to small business, but they will provide beginner packages for small businesses which can be upgraded at a later date, as that business grows. This means that you need to not only find the perfect marketing software vendor for your business, but also explore their offerings to find the exact right set of functions and features for your own specific needs.
Below is a table listing some of the most common features of small business marketing software.
As discussed above, these are features that will be a part of marketing software for all business sizes, but that small businesses will find particularly useful. Other features will be available as a business grows, which you can learn more about in our marketing software Buyer's Guide.
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Marketing automation |
This is the key feature of marketing software. It helps business develop, execute and track marketing campaigns. It will also automate workflows, track prospect behavior and qualify leads. |
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Lead generation |
Automates the capture, segmentation and assignment of leads to improve targeted marketing communications and shorten sales cycles. |
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Lead management |
While lead generation automates how you can find leads, lead management automates the movement and tracking of those leads you've already discovered through the life cycle from acquisition to conversion. |
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Email marketing |
Create, send and track email campaigns and autoresponders. |
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Social media management |
Create, launch and administer social campaigns and promotions, as well as to manage creative assets on social media platforms. |
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Social media monitoring |
Identify words used in association with brands, and locate where on social media platforms these conversations are occurring. |
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Social media analytics |
Measure campaign performance and impact, and track a brand's share of voice across social channels to determine how effective social media efforts are. |
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Mobile marketing |
Handle the routing, management and delivery of SMS messages and campaigns. |
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Marketing analytics |
Measure marketing activities across multiple online and offline channels to get a view of those channels' return on investment (ROI). |
As you can see, a great deal of marketing software focuses on creating and managing campaigns, as well as tracking and analyzing the success of those campaigns. A tracking and reporting page of that kind may look like this:
Delivra's tracking/reporting page
Other factors to take into consideration when picking the best small business marketing software for your business include:
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