Today’s digital landscape is accelerating everyday, and that’s great news for marketers. Thanks to a wave of innovation in the space, marketers have more options than ever for generating demand and building a healthy pipeline that converts for their business. Read on for the top tools in the digital marketing space that we think might be worth adding to your toolkit.
Today’s marketing landscape is changing faster than ever, and with that change comes a significant challenge for marketers. With more channels through which customers can be reached to date, it can be difficult to know which tools will truly help one’s business get the best return on investment possible.
Thanks to a recent wave of innovation in the space, though, marketers now have more options than ever for generating demand and building a healthy pipeline that converts for their business. All of those options can lead to a lot of noise though, so we’ve done the research for you to identify which marketing startups are truly delivering on their promises – and why you should consider using them at your organization as well. Read on for the top tools in the digital marketing space that we think might be worth adding to your toolkit in the second half of this year.
BounceX is a marketing platform that helps companies identify, segment, and market to anonymous users on their websites. The platform allows marketers to drive conversions and opt-ins by setting up behavioral triggers and buying intent indicators, all while capturing valuable data about prospect activities across their sites. BounceX’s proprietary Consumer ID Graph uses cookie-less technology to unlock additional marketing opportunities for brands and retailers. This boasts a 98% accuracy rate across a wide range of supported devices. Earlier this year, BounceX raised $37M in Series B funding to help it further scale its marketing platform and accelerate hiring.
Toronto-based StackAdapt provides a fully-fledged native advertising solution for brands and agencies. Its programmatic advertising platform boasts a wide array of features for marketing power users, ranging from dynamic retargeting to their proprietary “Conversion Journey” tool, which gives users a highly detailed look at every touchpoint that prospects go through before ultimately converting. For marketing automation specialists that are constantly focused on delivering the most accurate conversion data possible, these features alone make StackAdapt’s platform worth the price of admission. StackAdapt also supports several different types of programmatic advertising, including custom content and content widgets.
Influential bills itself as “the world’s premier AI-powered influencer marketplace.” Its mission is to help brands select the perfect audience to market to based on their targeting criteria, and then find qualified personalities to assist with influencer marketing efforts. Influential’s platform uses predictive analytics and machine learning to help brands project the impact of prospective influencer marketing campaigns, and allows its users to deploy campaigns directly through the platform as well. Via a technology partnership, the Influential platform also incorporates capabilities from IBM’s Watson solutions that help brands identify the most promising influencers for potential campaigns.
Convertro offers marketers a new way to conduct multi-touch attribution and better understand their marketing ROI – all while having the ability to forecast the ROI of their next campaigns. The company’s unified marketing activation platform allows marketers to unsurface marketing insights across multiple channels, and act on those insights by employing necessary tweaks to campaigns in real-time. Though Convertro is a relatively new vendor in today’s marketing landscape, it’s already built a client base of more than 180 companies around the world.
Outreach is a marketing platform that helps organizations boost customer engagement and drive revenue. Outreach’s solutions can also be used by inside and outbound sales teams as well. Its customer engagement platform integrates with conventional CRMs (like Salesforce) as well as most marketing automation tools (such as Marketo or Pardot). It’s an excellent platform to use for boosting collaboration between sales and marketing, but it also has powerful tools that can help you optimize your customer lifecycle for maximum revenue and client satisfaction.
Segment helps marketing organizations capture data from disparate sources throughout the customer lifecycle, and share that data with their marketing automation platform and CRM. Marketing automation practitioners can then use this data to customize their marketing campaigns and segment their audiences accordingly. As an added bonus, Segment is fully open-source – meaning that enterprising marketers can also build their own extensions to plug into the platform as well. In a world where the amount of marketing data collected by companies is increasing more rapidly than ever, Segment is critical to simplifying that data collection and helping companies take action on it.
New Engen’s customer acquisition platform helps marketing automation teams drive revenue growth for their organizations. It does this through a unique approach that combines elements of machine learning, predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to dynamically test, optimize, and review multi-channel marketing campaigns on the fly. New Engen’s platform boasts deep integrations with dozens of other marketing vendor solutions, and it recently emerged from stealth mode to make its software solutions available to the general public.
LiveRamp is a revolutionary platform that helps marketers get an omnichannel view of their audiences and create unified buyer personas for each target audience. LiveRamp’s key differentiator is a tool called IdentityLink, which enables marketers to perform identity resolution across hundreds of platforms. In an era where marketing data is often messy (and where duplicate contacts sometimes abound), IdentityLink is an excellent feature that cuts through the noise that’s so prevalent in the CRMs of many companies today.
Sizmek is a marketing and advertising platform that has an AI-powered decisioning engine, which helps marketers decide where to deploy their advertising spend for maximum ROI. By using this feature, marketers can better understand where and when it’s best to deploy advertisements across the web. Through Sizmek, marketers can also deploy complex omnichannel campaigns and track their results in real-time. In addition to its campaign deployment capabilities, Sizmek also includes an extensive analytics suite as part of its standard analytics package. Last July, Sizmek also acquired RocketFuel, a fast-rising startup in the ad-tech space, to help it enhance its digital marketing capabilities.
MentionMe is one of the fastest-growing startups in the quickly-evolving referral marketing space. Referral marketing is an often underutilized channel for most marketing departments, but it’s quickly gaining recognition amongst the digital marketing community for its high conversion rates. MentionMe’s SaaS-style platform helps marketers conduct innovative referral marketing campaigns, leverage best practices from across the industry, and do A/B testing on their campaigns in real-time. To help marketers decide what types of referral campaigns to run, MentionMe also includes a fully-featured analytics dashboard that surfaces insights and suggests areas for improvement on the fly.
After this brief assessment of some of the most innovative tools in digital marketing today, it’s clear that the marketing landscape is more exciting – and more full of opportunity – than ever. As marketers, it’s easy to lapse into using the same CRM and marketing tools on a daily basis, but it’s worth remembering that new solutions to help boost productivity are entering the market each month. If any of these tools might mesh well with your marketing strategy, we’d recommend taking a look. They just might be the secret sauce your brand needs to take its growth to the next level.
If you are a marketing technology company or would like to nominate one to be on one of our future lists, you can submit your details here.
