8 Must-Haves Features for an All in One Inbound Marketing Software

When you are sold by the idea of digital marketing or Inbound Marketing for your business, you need to implement a well-rounded, all in one marketing software to effectively attract visitors to your website, convert them into leads and close them as customers.

Here are 8 features that your business must have when selecting an all in one inbound marketing software

1. Software for Both Marketing and Sales

It is important to have the sales team on board with the platform because they are the ones who will benefit the most from the whole system. Marketing will work on developing content to drive traffic to the website and generate leads. But once the leads are passed on to the sales team, they need to have the required software to continue the work until they close them.

This means that the sales team need to have the sales software where they can create and assign tasks, create deals to forecast income, send a link to book a time on their calendar and create email sequences to automate follow-ups by email.

2. CRM

The marketing platform that you select needs to include a CRM (Customer Relationship Management). A CRM keeps track of all the activities and online behaviour of your contacts in which anyone in the organization can access. The CRM is powerful for the sales team as they can view what blog articles or web pages contacts visited on your site. They can also see when and what emails are opened and the links that are clicked. Such marketing intelligence data will help advisors plan out their outreach and upcoming steps.

3. Email Marketing Tool

There are a ton of email marketing tools out there, but do look for one that is already included in the Marketing platform. This will ensure that your CRM within your marketing platform has the right email marketing data. Also, it would be a hassle to have a separate email marketing tool as you would need to find ways to synchronize or export contacts in order to send marketing emails.

4. Automation for Both Sales and Marketing

Look for a marketing platform that offers automation for both sales and marketing. Quite a few out there provide the marketing automation so that whenever a person fills out a form, they will receive a series of emails to move them forward in the buyer’s journey.

Automation should not be exclusively for marketing initiatives. Your sales team need that feature as well as they can save a huge amount of time by automating follow-up emails.

5. Smart Content

Smart content (or dynamic content)  is basically content on your website that changes based on behaviour or interest. The information that a prospect sees on your web page can be different from a customer in order to address their needs accordingly. You can also set Smart Content in your emails.  

6. CMS for website, blogging and landing pages

A CMS (Content Management System) will allow you to edit your website, add blog articles and create landing pages without needing a web developer. It is important that you can produce content on a regular basis in order to continue attracting the right visitors with the right content.

7. Social Media Publishing

Having a social media publishing tool enables you to post in bulk for multiple channels (platforms) and multiple accounts. You can schedule these bulk posts to be published at a later time.

8. Educational Content

To be the best salesperson leveraging online technology, it’s important to constantly know the best practices and upcoming trends. However, because it’s quite difficult to figure it all out on your own, find a marketing platform that provides courses on how to take advantage of digital marketing or Inbound Marketing to better sell solutions and how to attract prospects through online activities.

Our #1 Choice for an Inbound Marketing Software - HubSpot :

Our top choice is HubSpot. Not only are they the pioneer of Inbound Marketing, but they provide all the 8 must-have features and many more for yoru business. They are heavily invested in education in order to make sure that you are up to date with the best practices in both sales and marketing. Their platform is excellent for businesses who are looking to implement an Inbound Marketing system to drive traffic to their website, generate leads and close more deals better and faster.