Marketing automation is becoming more and more important to companies looking to grow their business and increase their brand exposure. Automation not only helps make your marketing more targeted and efficient, but it also helps businesses spend less time on repetitive or labor-intensive tasks and reinvest that time into data analysis, strategy, and other business-growth processes.
What is Eloqua and is there an alternative that could work better for your business?
One software solution that businesses have used to support their marketing automation is a program called Eloqua. Eloqua is a program created by Oracle that helps automate entire marketing campaigns for businesses, to ensure that the right message is being distributed to the right people at the appropriate part of their buyer’s journey. From demand generation, email marketing, and lead management and engagement, this modern marketing platform helps to enhance most business strategy and help customers see your brand as the solution to their need.
Eloqua makes marketing more manageable and definitely helps more businesses connect with customers and expand their reach. It’s a solid solution that has helped many organizations grow and provide helpful content and information to new and existing customers. But Eloqua isn’t the only marketing solution, and Eloqua may be an expensive or extensive solution for smaller businesses. Luckily, there are a lot of great Eloqua alternatives for small businesses worth exploring. Here are some of the more popular options:
1. Keap
Keap – This marketing automation tool was specifically designed for small businesses. It helps you deliver personalized marketing information to your customer base and generate new leads. It helps you build complete campaign timelines with simple drag and drop tools to help your business get started in automated content marketing, plus offers A/B testing features and increases overall business conversions.
2. HubSpot
HubSpot is a leader in software products for inbound marketing and sales. They offer a free version of their customer relationship management system and also have a robust marketing automation program that helps businesses grow traffic, convert more visitors, and run complete inbound marketing campaigns that can scale as your business grows. They also have built-in analytics that helps you better understand how your marketing campaigns are performing and allow you to make adjustments along the way.
3. Autopilot
Autopilot – This software helps you automate marketing campaigns and integrates with dozens of apps businesses are already using, like Salesforce and Facebook. It enables your business to capture new leads from a website, app, or blog and then nurture them into customers with personalized messages. You can automate repetitive tasks like educating new subscribers, assigning leads, booking appointments, and following up sales leads.
4. Marketo
Marketo is a popular solution for marketing automation that businesses of all sizes have used and found outreach and growth success with. It’s a more expensive option than some other solutions, but it does scale well if your business grows and helps you to handle your email marketing, marketing automation, inbound marketing, social media marketing, and reporting and analytics.
5. Act-On
Act-On – This automation software has solutions for small to medium-sized business and enterprise-level businesses. The main difference in their solutions is the number of contacts that a business can have and the reporting features. It’s a great solution for B2B marketing, as it allows account-based marketing, and also can connect to your Google AdWords account.
Small businesses have a lot of options when it comes to choosing a marketing automation tool that works for your needs. Many of the software solutions will offer product demos or free trials to help businesses understand if their program is a good fit. Marketing automation is becoming a must for successful businesses and finding the right tool to support these efforts is key.
