Have you scrolled through Instagram today? Checked your email? Googled something? Chances are you saw at least one promotional message on one of those platforms. More likely, you’ve seen multiple.
Most of us spend significant time online, whether on our phones, tablets or computers. And it only makes sense for brands to meet us where we are. Digital marketing platforms allow brands to do just that. They help companies use digital marketing tactics like a social media marketing strategy, search engine optimization (SEO) and email marketing to attract and engage target customers at scale.
With thousands of apps on the market, knowing which marketing platform best suits your brand’s unique needs can be challenging. This article will break everything down for you, from explaining what a digital marketing platform is and its benefits to offering top digital marketing platform recommendations.
What are digital marketing platforms?
Digital marketing platforms are tools and services brands and businesses use to market their offers. They help you connect with your audience, and convert prospects and leads into customers. You can also analyze and report on your online marketing efforts.
Why should you use a digital marketing platform?
Digital marketing platforms streamline your online marketing efforts. They give you:
- Centralized dashboards to easily manage multiple marketing platforms, like social media channels, or access various metrics and reports in one place
- Content planning, scheduling and multiplatform publishing functions to reduce manual effort
- Analytics and reporting capabilties that provide insights into how your digital marketing strategy is performing, allowing users to make more data-driven decisions and improvements.
Social media marketing platforms
Did you know the average person uses 6.7 different social networks per month? Even if your brand is only on half as many social media platforms, planning, creating, scheduling and publishing content across multiple channels takes a lot of time and effort. These top social media marketing platforms help make the process more efficient.
1. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a powerful, all-in-one social media marketing platform for brands who want to drive real business impact from social media. It does everything from influencer marketing and review management to employee advocacy and business intelligence. Analyze cross-channel performance and benefit from multiple platform and CRM integrations such as Salesforce and Tableau to unify customer touchpoints and keep pace with shifts in the social landscape.
Standout features include AI Assist–generative AI-powered copywriting support and My Reports–which creates customizable reports complete with multiple tables and dynamic visualizations.
2. Agorapulse
Agorapulse helps users manage social content, collaborate with team members and gather performance insights. Its core features include a unified inbox, publishing, listening, reporting and a Google Analytics integration that connects social media actions to key marketing results like sales, leads and traffic.
3. Later
Later is a digital marketing platform that helps brands, creators and agencies streamline their social media workflows. It includes a few core features—post scheduling and publishing, a link-in bio tool and analytics. It also helps users find hashtags and user-generated content and edit photos and videos.
SEO platforms
While some experts pit the two digital marketing tactics against one another, SEO and social media are critical channels for product discovery. Whether you’re posting 30-second Reels on Instagram or publishing long-form blog posts on your website, this content can educate your customers and nurture them to purchase. Here are a few of our favorite SEO digital marketing platforms.
4. Brightedge
Brightedge supports marketers through the content production cycle. Its research features determine keywords, analyze competitors and forecast opportunities. Its optimization tools provide SEO recommendations for existing content and audit your website for potential errors. Lastly, it offers site, keyword and page reporting and StoryBuilder, a marketing dashboard feature that provides real-time website performance insights.
5. Nozzle
Nozzle is an SEO marketing platform that offers brand monitoring, competitive analysis, scheduling and analytics. It also offers Pixels From Top and Above the Fold Percentage so brands can see exactly where they rank.
6. Conductor
Conductor is a digital marketing platform for SEO and content optimization. It includes keyword research, competitive intelligence, rank tracking, market share, ROI and reporting. Conductor also offers AI-powered content recommendation, writing assistant tools and website monitoring.
Email marketing platforms
Writing and designing marketing emails takes a lot of time and effort. Email marketing tools help increase productivity by offering centralized management features to keep track of all your lists and campaigns. Many digital marketing platforms also offer automation, personalization and segmentation features to help you create tailored, targeted campaigns that run on autopilot. Here are some of the best email marketing platforms on the market.
7. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is an email marketing and automation platform that includes a campaign manager tool, pre-built and custom-code email templates, audience segmentation, automated workflows and analytics. It also offers marketing CRM and ad management.
8. Drip
Drip is one of those digital marketing platforms that offers Dynamic Segmentation to automatically update audience segment lists based on actions in real time. Other key features include its automated workflows, perfect for abandoned cart and post-purchase email sequences. Its onsite marketing tools, like timed forms, pop-ups and slide-ins, capture and convert website visitors into leads.
9. AWeber
AWeber offers standard email marketing features, like email builders, forms and landing pages as well as Etsy and YouTube automation, e-commerce and subscription payments. It’s smart email designer tools uses logos, images, brand colors and text from websites and social media channels to automatically produce branded email templates.
Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms
A CRM is like a digital Rolodex mixed with a personal assistant. By consolidating customer data (e.g., contact details, communication history, purchase history and interactions across multiple channels) into one place, brands can deliver a more consistent and unified customer experience. Here are our top CRM picks.
10. Salesforce
Salesforce is an industry-leading CRM platform that offers everything from basic lead management to more advanced automation and forecasting. Users can create custom reports and dashboards. Salesforce also integrates with over 3,000 platforms. It’s well suited for scaling and enterprise-level sales, marketing and service teams. Plus, Salesforce integrates with Sprout so you can use social data to create meaningful customer journeys and send qualified social leads to your sales team.
11. Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM automates scheduling sales calls, sending follow-up emails, tracking contacts and updating sales opportunities. Its core features include lead, deal, account and contact management, automated workflows and follow-up sequences, forecasting and analytics.
12. Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a user-friendly and flexible CRM platform for businesses of all sizes. It includes standard CRM functions like lead management, sales automation and analytics and reporting. It also has email marketing capabilities like an email builder, segmentation and marketing automation.
Analytics and reporting platforms
Analytics and reporting platforms take the guesswork out of digital marketing. By offering insights into your campaign performance and audience, these digital marketing platforms help you see what’s working and what’s not so you can optimize your work and make smarter decisions. Here are some analytics and reporting tools you should have in your tech stack.
13. Google Analytics
If you have a website, you likely already use Google Analytics, but you might not know its full capabilities. Its built-in automation can predict user behavior and detect growth opportunities. Its reporting functions reveal how users find, engage with and make purchases on your site, and its advertising features show how your Google Ads are performing. Also, its Explorations tool visualizes data to better understand trends or patterns in your data.
H3: 14. Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics provides vital metrics to identify power users, acquisition sources, top customers and feature usage across different sites and products. It also offers insights into metrics like customer lifetime value and customer behavior data like active users, page views and more.
Content management platforms
Content like blogs, articles and web pages are great for educating your customers and improving your website’s SEO. Digital marketing platforms for content make creating, scheduling, publishing and optimizing a breeze thanks to their organized features and app integrations. Here are a few platforms to have on your radar.
15. WordPress
Initially developed for bloggers, WordPress is now a comprehensive content management platform and website builder. It includes design and editing tools, marketing and monetization features, a full suite of customizable templates and over 50,000 plugins to personalize and add functionality to your site.
16. Joomla
Joomla is a customizable content management system that also has built-in multilingual support. Its technical nature makes it best suited for users with strong website development skills.
Finding the best digital marketing platforms for your needs
With so many channels available to marketers today, determining the best digital marketing platforms for your brand or business depends on your strategy, goals and budget. Your experience level also plays a role, as some platforms are more beginner-friendly than others.
However, if you’re looking for an all-in-one social media marketing platform that also functions as a social CRM, review management platform and more, you can’t go wrong with Sprout Social. Try us free for 30 days and see the difference for yourself.
