By: Ricky Wolff

Founder of Markletic

Business and marketing automation tools are critical for the scalability of your company. I started using business automation tools to increase the productivities of my team and reduce the number of human errors.

The main marketing automation tools I currently use are CoSchedule, Hubspot and Marketo. I'll describe these tools below:

CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a tool very suitable for in-house marketing teams or growth hacking agencies. CoSchedule provides a platform that allows you to create an integrated marketing calendar with team management functionality.

When you are creating your content marketing plan, you need to think about timings. Where is your target audience based and what would be the best time to get blogs and social media outings in front of them?

· CoSchedule combines the marketing and social media calendars so you have a clear overview of your omnichannel marketing approach. You can even connect your email marketing platform to include that as well.
· The tool also comes with a neat feature called ReQueue. This essentially allows you to automate your social media and therefore easily enlarging your social media footprint. ReQueue will detect if there are gaps in your social media calendar and automatically fill the gaps with evergreen content.

If you have an in-house marketing team, or you are working at a marketing or growth hacking agency, CoSchedule can really save you a lot of time with managing editorial and social calendars.

HubSpot

The team at Hubspot are the kings and queens of inbound marketing. What I

love about Hubspot is their focus on customers. Hubspot supplies software for marketing, sales, and service to help you growth hack your company to the moon.

· Hubspot provides a free CRM platform and in addition has many packages available for lead generation, marketing analytics, marketing automation, email automation for sales, scheduling meetings, and much more.
· Basically, Hubspot provides all-in-one inbound marketing software for your entire team. It allows you to create landing pages without writing code, it provides real-time SEO suggestions, allows for advanced personalization, and lead management functionality.

Hubspot provides a bunch of tools for free, including chatbots for conversational marketing and live chat functionality.

Marketo

I’ve used Marketo a lot and it is a great tool for marketing automation, email marketing, and lead management. Marketo integrates with your website perfectly and helps you keep track of the entire buyer journey.

· With Marketo, you can track every move of leads on your website. If they download something, you will know. If they visit a webpage, you will know. If they watch a video, you will know. You might think, what is the difference compared to Google Analytics… Google Analytics data is anonymous whereas with Marketo you have personally identifiable data.
· Marketo lets you assign scoring to leads. For example, if a leads downloads a whitepaper, you give them 10 points. When the lead has reached 100 points, you can mark the lead as MQL.
· Marketo lets you segment the database and therefore you are able to create an extremely personalized experience. You can send your leads different emails based on their location, or if they clicked in an email, or if they visited a certain page and much more.
· Marketo also provides you with advanced analytical tools. You can track exactly the impact of your marketing campaign and calculate the ROI. You can track how many touches you need to average to convert a lead into an MQL and much more. A growth hacker should be data-driven and Marketo is a dream come true.