Have you ever felt like the software for online marketing is too complicated, too expensive, or simply not delivering the expected results? You're not alone. In today's fast-paced digital world, businesses struggle to keep up with the latest trends and tools that can help them reach their target audience and drive conversions.
However, despite the huge selection of all kinds of marketing software, they all share four common drawbacks. In this blog post, we'll explore what's wrong with today's marketing applications and answer a question, how to stop worrying about software and start marketing as a god.
Table of Contents
- Apps Are Challenging to Configure and Integrate
- The Cost of All The Different Platforms Add Up
- Learning Each Platform Is a Challenge on Its Own
- Updates Cause Troubles
- TruVISIBILITY Suite: The Platform that Solves All the Troubles
- Conclusion
Apps Are Challenging to Configure and Integrate
If you decide to choose a separate software for each marketing task, then we sympathize with you. Being an independent stand-alone application, each program you use will have to be configured individually. Plus, for your marketing processes to be effective, you'll need software integration. Otherwise, your applications won't be able to exchange data!
Making different software work together is quite a difficult task if you are not a tech-savvy person. You will most likely need to use a third-party platform for integration and automation, such as Zapier, Tray.io, Workato, and Make.com. They are quite complicated and not free of cost.
Probably, you will have to mess with an API (Application Programming Interface) — a protocol by which applications interact with each other, allowing you to use the functions of one application inside another. Of course, for an IT dude, there's nothing easier than configuring an API call. But are you an IT dude?
In the worst case, you might come to building and maintaining custom integrations between multiple software programs. And that's expensive!
Although the majority of applications support so-called established integrations (it's when application A can seamlessly exchange data with application B right out of the box), the functionality can be limited. For example, you might be able to transfer basic contact information but not more detailed data such as customer purchase history. This can make it hard to get the full benefit from using multiple software programs together.
The Cost of All The Different Platforms Add Up
At first sight, marketing software doesn't seem too expensive. That's because you are probably looking at what is called a starter pack for a new customer. If you take a closer look, it turns out that the features included in the cheap pricing plan are not enough, and you will have to pay ten times more to get full functionality.
For example, one of the popular CRM and marketing automation platforms offer a starter pack for just $20 a month. A professional plan will bite off your budget $890 bucks. And the enterprise plan is priced at $3,600 per month.
However, that's not all. They also charge for custom SSL ($100/month), dedicated IP addresses ($300/month), and even API ($500/month). By the way, a similar pricing policy applies to the integration platforms we mentioned above.
The high cost of software also has a ripple effect on other aspects of online marketing. For example, businesses may be reluctant to invest in paid advertising if they know that they will also have to pay for expensive software. As a result, they may miss out on opportunities to reach new customers.
Well, of course, you can make use of free software or dirt-cheap FOSS. But that's the way of the geeks as we explained in the article Stop Wasting Money: Tips For Reducing Software Expenses For Online Marketing.
Learning Each Platform Is a Challenge on Its Own
One of the biggest challenges facing online marketers today is the sheer number of platforms and software options available. But why is it a challenge? More options, more opportunities, isn't it? Well, simply because it can be difficult to keep up with all the new developments, and even more challenging to learn how to use each one effectively.
Each platform has its own quirks and features, which can take some time to get used to. And even when you've mastered one platform, there's always something new to learn on the next one. It can be a never-ending cycle of learning and re-learning, which can be frustrating, time-consuming, and costly, in case you have to train your staff.
What's more, each platform changes regularly, so what worked yesterday might not work today. It's a constant game of catch-up, and it's tough to stay ahead of the curve.
All this means that online marketers have to spend a lot of time and effort just keeping up with the latest software and platforms. It's a full-time job in itself, and it's preventing many marketers from being able to focus on other important aspects of their business.
Updates Cause Troubles
Does your digital marketing software get updates? Great! And your whole system keeps working properly? That's even greater. You see, it often happens that when one software program gets updated, it breaks the other software programs that are integrated together. This can cause major problems for businesses that rely on these software programs to run their online marketing campaigns.
For example, let's say you have a website that uses a content management system (CMS) to manage its content, such as Wordpress spiced up with a dozen of plugins. You also have an e-commerce platform that is integrated with your CMS. When your CMS or one of the plugins gets an update, it can break the integration with your e-commerce platform, causing your website to go offline or lose important data.
TruVISIBILITY Suite: The Platform that Solves All the Troubles
So what's the solution to all the above-mentioned issues? How to get rid of the hassle of software integration, save money, not spend time constantly learning new features and be sure that the next update does not crash your entire system? Our solution is TruVISIBILITY Suite — an all-in-one digital marketing platform.
TruVISIBILITY Suite offers applications for creating websites and landing pages, building chatbots, launching email marketing campaigns, and writing blogs. All these apps are connected with each other and hence don't need to undergo any additional integration. However, you can use API calls to make TruVISIBILITY Suite friends with third-party apps.
The pricing is very simple, it's estimated by business size. Whatever type of account you choose, you will have full access to all the features of TruVISIBILITY Suite.
The interface and logic of the TruVISIBILITY Suite are easy to understand and do not take long to get familiar with. System updates do not cause any problems with software integration.
Conclusion
As you can see, the abundance of marketing applications is not a reason to rejoice. Problems with configuration and integration, high cost, the need to constantly monitor new features and updates that are fraught with a system crash are not at all what you want to deal with.
Get a freemium TruVISIBILITY account and forever forget about problems with marketing software!
Related articles
Want to receive more articles?
Sign-up for our weekly newsletter to receive info that will help your business grow