You don’t need software to implement an inbound marketing program for your company, but it sure does make it easier. It’s going to help you in three very specific areas: education, analytics and automation. For most of you, this is going to be your first inbound marketing program. Some guidance and education is necessary when you do something for the first time. Software provides that guidance. For example, you might forget to include one of your keywords in the title of your blog post. You want a software tool that reminds you. You might forget to tag a new landing page, but if your software recommends keywords that makes your job easier.

 

 

There is a community of inbound marketers and if your software connects you to that community you benefit from their experience, knowledge and learning. Now you become a better, more effective inbound marketer, too. There are a lot of marketing analytics tools. Google Analytics is a free tool available to everyone, but marketing automation software typically comes with everything you need to gain insights into the performance of your marketing and make the necessary adjustments to see you reach your goals in short order.

 

You don’t want to spend your time creating charts and graphs and you don’t want to spend your time trying to interpret them either. It should be quick, clear and flexible enough for you to drill down into important areas on an as-needed basis. Part of inbound marketing is executing a consistent and repeatable set of tactics like blogging daily, emailing monthly, nurturing leads as they come in and sharing content across all your social media sites. Marketing software helps make these regular tasks easy and it helps make them fast. Remember, you want to be spending your time thinking, being creative, coming up with new ideas to generate leads – not posting every single blog post to all your social media sites. There are a variety of good marketing automation software tools including Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua and Infusionsoft. If you are looking to automate some of the marketing tasks you execute today all of these software tools provide a lot of value, but if you are planning to implement an inbound marketing program, HubSpot is the only one that helps you with all aspects of inbound marketing including connecting you with a community of inbound marketing experts.