Top 5 Tools to Improve Your Marketing Strategy in 2023

Are you tired of putting all your energy into a marketing strategy that isn't getting you the results you want? Fear not, because we have a plethora of tools that can help us increase our impact. Seasoned marketers have tried and tested countless tools, and today we're excited to share our top five picks that will help you improve your marketing strategy and create amazing results.

What's needed to improve marketing strategy?

Before we explore these tools, we must first clarify what's needed to improve marketing strategy, and what criteria a tool must meet to be considered a good solution for improving strategy. From our perspective, these tools must meet at least one of the following criteria:

1. Broad visibility - Good strategic decisions require marketing leaders to see the big picture. This means understanding their marketing performance across channels, understanding the effectiveness of essential marketing elements (messaging, content, mentions, etc.), understanding competitors, benchmarks, and more.
2. Collaboration capabilities - Marketing is a team effort, and a good strategic tool should help teams work together efficiently. This means being able to share data, insights, and reports across teams, and collaborate in real time to make informed decisions.
3. Customizable reporting -  Every business has unique goals and objectives, and a good tool should allow marketing leaders to customize their reporting to suit those specific needs. This means being able to create reports that deliver the most relevant information in a format that is easy to understand. This can also include translating marketing results into business outcomes.
4. Agility and adaptability - Marketing strategy is an ongoing process that requires continuous monitoring and adjustment. A tool should be able to adapt with it to continuously support marketing teams with relevant and timely insights.
5. Actionable insights - The tool must provide actionable insights to inform your strategic decisions, not just data or raw numbers.
6. Scalability -  The tool should be able to handle large amounts of data and scale with your business needs, priorities, and the complexity of your marketing strategy.

Without further ado, let's explore the top 5 tools to improve your marketing strategy!

1. BrandOps

BrandOps is the most complete platform for improving your marketing strategy and the only platform on this list that's specifically geared for strategy. It offers an all-in-one view of all your brand's activities and results across all digital channels and funnel stages, including social channels, review sites, news sites, search, and more, and then correlates them to business outcomes. This full-funnel listening approach helps you see the big picture and spot any gaps or opportunities in your marketing strategy. Because all these insights are in one place, BrandOps is an ideal way for marketing teams to collaborate and for marketing leaders to keep their teams focused on what matters most. BrandOps also provides you with competitive insights and benchmarks, allowing you to compare your strategy, activities, messaging, and results to those of your competitors. It helps you understand your relative strengths and weaknesses, and find ways to surpass competitors.

Although BrandOps provides a lot of data, you don't necessarily have to spend hours analyzing all this data yourself. Its AI system does the heavy lifting, analyzing all the data for you, and then highlighting the key areas for improvement. Once you have a clear understanding of where to focus your efforts, BrandOps helps you define your objectives, set SMART goals based on past performance, benchmarks, and competitors, and make those goals known by sharing them in one place. And with automatic progress tracking, you can ensure your team stays on track to meet your marketing objectives.

The platform collects all this data automatically and continuously, saving you hours of busywork and providing insights that would otherwise not be available. This frees up your time to focus on higher-value activities, instead of having to pore over data.

You can also use BrandOps to monitor your brand's online reputation, including product reviews, social sentiment, and employer reviews. This can help you to identify any issues or vulnerabilities in your brand's reputation and take action to improve it. Overall, BrandOps is ideal for marketing leaders who want a comprehensive way to optimize their marketing strategy and drive business outcomes.

PRICING PLANS:

• BrandOps for Startups - Significant discounts for teams under 100. Contact for pricing. 
  
• BrandOps Core - $2,000/month.
• BrandOps Pro - $2,500/month.
  

2. HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot Marketing Hub is a powerful marketing automation platform that can help companies improve their marketing strategy in several ways. First and foremost, instead of having to use different tools, HubSpot provides businesses with an all-in-one platform that makes it easy for businesses to manage their marketing efforts as they grow. This allows for better collaboration and communication between teams and ensures consistency in messaging and branding.

It offers a wide range of features and tools that help businesses attract, engage, and delight their audience. This includes email marketing tools that allow marketers to segment their audience and send targeted emails. It also provides features for social media management, SEO optimization, landing pages, and lead generation.

On the analytics side, HubSpot Marketing Hub tracks every touchpoint with a lead or customer, providing valuable data to help marketers optimize their campaigns. This data, supported by attribution models, helps marketers identify which marketing tactics are most effective at driving inbound leads and conversions.

What sets HubSpot Marketing Hub apart from other marketing automation platforms is its focus on inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is a methodology that focuses on attracting, engaging, and delighting customers through helpful, educational content. HubSpot Marketing Hub provides a suite of tools and features designed to help businesses execute an inbound marketing strategy, from content creation to lead nurturing and even sales alignment. Overall, HubSpot Marketing Hub's all-in-one design, wide range of features, analytics capabilities, and focus on inbound marketing make it a great choice for marketing leaders looking to improve their strategy and orchestrate marketing from the top down.

PRICING PLANS:

• Marketing Hub Starter - $45/month.
  
• Marketing Hub Professional - $800/month.
• Marketing Hub Enterprise - $3,600/month.

3. Planful for Marketing (formerly Plannuh)

Planful for Marketing is a Marketing Resource Management (MRM) platform. What makes Planful an excellent choice for creating and managing marketing strategies and plans is that it provides real-time tracking of KPIs such as leads and website visits, among others. This means that marketers can see how their campaigns are performing and adjust their strategies accordingly to maximize their ROI.

Another key part of an effective marketing strategy is comprehensive budget management, and Planful offers just that. In fact, managing big budgets for large marketing teams is Planful's biggest strength. By importing budgets and configuring them for tracking across teams, regions, and functions, users get visibility and control over their expenses. Additionally, Planful's automated budget setup saves time and ensures accurate tracking and reflection of budgets within the platform.

Planful's all-in-one platform takes marketing strategy a step further by offering cost-per-outcome (CPO), return on investment (ROI), and lifetime value (LTV) calculations in real-time. By measuring and managing marketing plans and budgets, marketers can make informed decisions based on data and improve their overall marketing strategy.

Finally, Planful provides automation and integration features that allow marketers to streamline their workflows and collaborate effectively with their teams. The platform's native integrations with leading CRMs such as Salesforce and HubSpot and ad networks like Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Facebook Ads make it easier for marketers to stay focused on strategic tasks and align their marketing efforts with overall business goals.

All these powerful features for marketing planning, budgeting, value measurement, and automation make Planful a great tool for improving marketing strategy. Marketers use it to become more agile, make data-driven decisions, and create more impact.

PRICING PLANS:

• Plannuh - Starts at $9,000/year.

4. Uptempo

Uptempo (formerly known as BrandMaker, Allocadia, and Hive9) brings together data from different sources into one easy-to-use platform. This creates real-time insights that can inform marketing decisions and help marketing teams achieve better results.

One of the best things about Uptempo is that it helps marketers align their marketing plans with the company's strategic goals. With Uptempo, you can see how your planned campaigns, programs, or investments fit into the bigger picture. This way, you can focus your marketing on achieving measurable results that support the company's overall success.

Another great feature of Uptempo is its sophisticated campaign attribution logic. With this tool, you can quickly identify which programs, channels, or activities are performing best. This data-driven approach allows you to make informed decisions to improve your results and ensure that marketing dollars are focused on strategies that deliver the best ROI.

Uptempo's budget management capabilities are also incredibly useful for businesses looking to improve their marketing strategy. With real-time budgeting and always-on reconciliation, marketers can forecast, control, and quickly shift their budget as needed. The solution supports multiple views and budget structures, making it an ideal choice for bigger companies looking to conduct reporting and accelerate month-end close.

It's important to note that while Uptempo helps with improving marketing strategy, it has a range of additional use cases as well. For example, its budget management capabilities can be used to optimize spending in other areas of the business, like procurement or operations. Its real-time insights can also inform strategic decision-making in other departments, like sales or finance.

PRICING PLANS:

• Customer Engagement Central - Custom pricing (contact for information)
• Marketing Efficiency Cloud - Custom pricing (contact for information)
  

5. Analytic Partners

Analytic Partners offers a cloud-based software platform called GPS Enterprise. This platform is a managed solution that helps businesses with their marketing needs and more. By analyzing various types of data, GPS Enterprise can turn all that information into actionable insights for clients. And who doesn't love insights that lead to commercial success?

This always-on platform takes into account customer data, operational data, and touchpoint data to provide a complete view of the customer journey. Additionally, GPS Enterprise offers econometrics and cohort-based analytics to create accurate reports, plan scenarios, test and optimize, budget, and forecast for some of the biggest brands in the world.

Analytic Partners doesn't stop there. They also offer a range of services such as Integrated Brand Impact, Customer Franchise Value, Digital Deep Dives, Pricing Optimization, and Marketing Mix Modeling. These services help brands optimize their spending and improve business performance by digging deep into the drivers of performance and identifying the root causes.

All this makes GPS Enterprise a great tool for improving marketing strategy — especially if you're a large, global company.

PRICING PLANS

Analytic Partners doesn't provide pricing information on their website. Contact them to learn more.

In conclusion

So there you have it! Whether you're looking for a comprehensive way to optimize your strategy and drive business outcomes like with BrandOps, or an all-in-one platform like HubSpot Marketing Hub that can help you execute an inbound marketing strategy, these tools all offer a variety of ways to improve your marketing strategy and help you create more impact.