More and more companies are joining inbound marketing with the aim of reaching their target audience with more valuable content and fewer ads. Without a doubt, a more humane and much less invasive way to connect with your audience and get conversions.
If you optimize your processes by thinking about working from the “inbound” perspective, you will be able to get closer to those consumers who know that your product or service can improve their quality of life.
But to follow an inbound marketing strategy, you have to take into account various phases, from lead generation, to web analysis, email campaigns, or social media and content creation.
For this last important point, the support of professional services is essential, such as those that a translation agency can offer you if you share content in different languages.
Therefore, outsourcing services and looking for alternative solutions through inbound marketing platforms will allow you to optimize, speed up and automate processes. Something that manually or internally would be difficult and even impossible.
Would you like to know what those platforms are to help you with your inbound marketing strategy and your internal work processes? So let’s get to it!
Inbound Marketing Platforms: What are they?
Inbound marketing platforms, together with the services offered directly by inbound marketing agencies and other digital professionals, are an excellent way to automate marketing, collect data and optimize the conversion funnel processes that the user goes through until they convert.
So the objectives of these platforms are:
- Improve conversion rates.
- Get an idea of user behavior and their needs.
For this reason, marketing automation is so important in the inbound methodology since it first favors the attraction of leads and, later, conversion and loyalty.
The 18 Best Inbound Marketing Platforms
These platforms have great potential, and we can differentiate between two types; all-in-one inbound marketing tools; and the specific tools suitable for each of the phases of the inbound strategy.
All-in-one Inbound Marketing Platforms
Also called all-in-one, these are tools with which you can perform many functions and solve several problems at the same time. These are the ones we recommend:
HubSpot: The most popular inbound marketing platform and one of the most complete, as its functions include attracting leads, converting them, and managing sales. All this with the help of modules that it integrates dedicated to SEO, content, user interactions in networks, and lead optimization.
Marketo: Very similar in features and price to the previous one. Its differentiating point is its potential in lead scoring campaigns (lead qualification).
Keap: Infusionsoft by Keap is more affordable than the former, making it ideal for smaller and medium-sized businesses. It incorporates a CRM and stands out for the management of partners and suppliers, for the sales team, and for its editor for email campaigns.
Specific platforms
In this second group, we want to mention those tools that are used in specific phases of the inbound methodology.
Platforms for content creation
When it comes to creating more visual content, there are tools to help you create professional designs quickly. These are:
Envato: It is a space that hosts different marketplaces. For example, at Graphicriver, you will find a wide variety of templates created by professional designers like the ones at MadridNYC.
FlexClip: It is an online video editor that can help you with marketing video creations in munites with various stunning pre-made templates.
Visme: With its editor, you can make original designs aligned to your brand, where you include your logo or corporate colors. It has a wide variety of templates for social networks, infographics, presentations, banners, and much more. All of them are editable to convey your message.
Inbound Marketing platforms to generate leads
One of the most important goals is to attract traffic to your website to convert them into registrations and, thus, start having contact with them. For this, it is important to create and design an attractive landing page so that they leave their data.
Here are some top tools for creating landings:
Leadpages: It has a very intuitive drag and drops editor to create a professional landing page to suit you. Then, you can easily integrate it with the email marketing platform you use.
Unbounce: It has more than 125 templates that you can completely customize to your liking. Besides, it allows you to create pop-ups, change the URL and associate it with the domain you want and offers tutorials and support to answer any questions.
Instapage: With a very intuitive system similar to the previous ones, Instapage also allows you to add Analytics and measure your campaigns.
Platforms for email marketing
After you get the data on your cold leads, you’ll need to create a closer connection with them. These email marketing tools are perfect:
Benchmark: A tool that includes an editor to easily design your emails, in an attractive way, with a drag and drop system, by blocks. And with a powerful automation system to send the right message to the right person.
Getresponse: Very useful for planning campaigns, designing your newsletters, and using autoresponders. It has to carry out A/B tests and a CRM to manage sales processes.
Mailrelay: Surely you will know this tool. And it is that it is the one that we use in our team, offering you excellent customer service already from its free version (among other functionalities).
Platforms for SEO
The next step in inbound marketing will be to do keyword research to write the content of interest optimized for your target. And thus get visibility in search engines and increase organic traffic.
SEMrush: One of the best for analyzing keyword search volumes, analyzing the competition, or generating content ideas.
Ahrefs: The most useful to analyze links that point to your domain and those of your competition. The latter is of great value in this way. You will be able to understand what link-building strategy they are applying and follow their steps.
Übersuggest: This Neil Patel tool gives you useful information about the search volume of a keyword and gives you suggestions of other related ones that users are also searching for.
Platforms for Social Media
After creating content, you will have to spread it so that it reaches more users. These tools will help you to program content, manage interactions with your followers and analyze the metrics to reorient or not your strategy. These are the top ones:
Metricool: You can start testing it with the free version and upgrade to the paid version when you need more advanced features.
Depending on the paid version you choose, you can manage more accounts, add team members, make use of custom templates or even put links in the Instagram bio.
Agorapulse: Another tool to manage your social networks from the same platform. It also has a free trial (28 days) and various payment plans. It stands out for its personalized reports and competitor analysis and integrates a great CRM to follow the evolution of your brand’s followers.
Platform for analytics
Finally, it is worth highlighting the tools that measure the actions that you have executed in the strategy, which serve to draw conclusions.
Google Search Console: You can check web traffic and that the content has been successfully indexed. You can also remove content so that Google does not index it. Check those rich snippets are displayed correctly or detect security problems on your website.
Google Analytics: To obtain information from your site about the number of visitors and conversion rate in real-time.
Similarweb: We love this one because it gives you information about the number of visitors per month, traffic sources, and other references from your competition.
Conclusion:
As you can see, there are many inbound marketing platforms, both specific and more general, that integrate many functionalities.
Which inbound marketing platform have you found most useful? What part of your internal processes do you consider essential to outsource to support your strategy?