Marketing automation: software and tools

What can you use HubSpot for?

What once began as a pure marketing automation tool grew into a complete software for Marketing, Sales, and Services. You can use the different HubSpot modules on their own (stand-alone) or opt for an integrated approach (growth stack) that combines different solutions.

HubSpot can help you with

CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

• Manage your sales funnel and close more deals with the (free) HubSpot CRM Software.
• Optimise the processes for Marketing, Sales, and Service processes.
• Improve your performance and achieve steady revenue growth.

Marketing automation

• Detect new leads.
• Automate recurring marketing tasks.
• Set up (nurturing) campaigns to win leads.
• Build workflows.
• Send and manage emails.
• Manage and track your social media channels.
• Build landing pages, pillar pages, blogs, CTAs, forms, etc.
• Optimise for search engines (SEO: Search Engine Optimisation).

Sales software

• Allow your sales team to work more efficiently and offer a better buying experience.
• Create personalised emails and determine when and how often they are sent.
• Create email templates and share them with your team.
• Upload documents (presentations, proposals, etc.) and track who is viewing them and for how long.
• Lead scoring: automatically assign scores based on online behaviour so you know which leads should be given priority.
• Keep track of all sales calls and activities with automatic registration (calls can even be recorded).
• Measure (and learn) through email tracking and notifications.
• Let contacts automatically book a meeting in your calendar.
• Use live chat.
• Report your sales activities.

Read more about the HubSpot sales software here.

Services

• Tickets allow you to respond to questions and problems and follow them up effectively.
• The conversations dashboard gives an overview of all interactions between your customer and your organisation, helping to manage and improve the customer relationship.
• Customer feedback helps you to survey customers regularly (e.g. an NPS survey).
• Knowledgebase.
• Bots allow you to answer frequently asked questions using the bot.
• Live chat lets you chat with your website visitor in real-time.
• Use the health score to predict whether you will lose a customer and respond to this.
• Reporting.

HubSpot CMS (Content Management System)

• It allows you to build web pages, landing pages, and blogs intuitively and easily (just as you could with WordPress).
• The hosting of your site is included in the price; HubSpot guarantees 99.999% uptime.
• Recent research shows that the CMS is up to 2x faster than an average website, which is important for search engine optimisation.
• You can personalise the website based on location, device, language, or available personal data.

Inbound marketing

HubSpot created the term ‘Inbound Marketing’ and the philosophy behind it. This platform is fully based on the inbound methodology: you can attract visitors, convert them into leads, and further serve them as satisfied customers.

SME or Enterprise?

In the past, HubSpot was mainly seen as a tool for and by marketers, mainly for the (larger) SME market. In the meantime, the platform has evolved into the perfect tool for larger, international companies.

With HubSpot Enterprise, you can offer a platform for multiple countries or brands that are part of a group, with a clear distinction in data and assets.

Easy to use

The code word at HubSpot is ‘user-friendly’. You don’t have to be an IT professional to work with this system; the threshold is very low. In addition, HubSpot helps you to get the best out of the platform with its HubSpot Blogs (information, roadmaps, etc.) and HubSpot Academy (instructional videos, templates, etc.).

Eloqua: the marketing automation tool for the most demanding automation, lead nurturing, and reporting

What’s Eloqua?

Eloqua – Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud in full – is one of the most advanced marketing automation solutions on the market according to independent and reliable sources such as Gartner and Forrester.

Like most marketing automation solutions, Eloqua helps marketers with their personalised 1-on-1 buyer experience across multiple channels.

What can you use Eloqua for?

The possibilities within the Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud platform are almost inexhaustible. These are several basic functionalitie

• Digital Body Language: With Eloqua, you can follow all the activities of a website visitor, lead, or customer and you get insights based on their behaviour so that you can approach each person better and more efficiently.
• Advanced Lead Scoring: Depending on the type of business model (vertical, need, etc.), you can set different score models.
• Campaigns: Build advanced and dynamic marketing campaigns based on data and customer behaviour.
• Email marketing: Create and send emails with dynamic content.
• Landing pages: Create landing pages with dynamic and personalised content.
• Forms: Create personalised forms that people can use to submit their data.
• Social: Manage and oversee your campaigns on various social media.
• Partitioning: Keep all processes neatly separated, which is useful when working in an international context, with different divisions or brands (possibility to split per company, divisions, business units for respective countries or verticals).
• Toolset: You’ll get a lot of extra tools that you can use to develop and customise modules yourself using general programming tools.

The list of features and options in Eloqua is very long. Other automation tools offer similar functions, but there is a big difference: Eloqua gives you more freedom and possibilities to customise the solution for your (larger) organisation.

An additional advantage is that Eloqua is part of a larger portfolio (Oracle Marketing Cloud) within Oracle with which you can integrate seamlessly.