In the era of mass computerization, most startups are focusing their efforts on finding customers through the Internet.

Social media, blogs, and search engines become places where their target audience is gathered.

However, just because you are present on the Internet doesn’t mean that your business is destined for success.

Today's client is fed up with a superfluity of offers, uninspiring content piling from all the nooks and cranny, and look-a-like websites.

Therefore, your marketing approach must be different from the average Joe.

This means that your website should be streamlined, with content based of inbound marketing strategies, and your promotional strategies tailored specifically for the target audience.

At first glance, it may seem like a challenging task, but don’t despair, you are not alone.

Marketing SaaS tools will lend their helping hand.

We’ve analyzed hundreds of services available on the Internet and are ready to suggest our top-10 marketing SaaS tools for your startup.

HubSpot

Category: Inbound Marketing / SEO

HubSpot is a skillful and versatile assistant for every Internet marketer.

In fact, this service is packed with everything but the kitchen sink. HubSpot covers all areas of Internet marketing including blogs, social networks, SEO, inbound marketing, and landing page management.

Also, this tool offers a wide range of functions for email marketing automation.

Sales tools include CRM, lead management, and e-mail management.

Besides this, HubSpot offers analytics for mobile applications and integration with a wide range of third-party services.

Additionally, you can use HubSpot as a content management system.

It allows you to update content on your website, SEO optimize and configure it for mobile devices. You can even personalize your site for certain visitors.

And if this still seems not enough, HubSpot can offer an easy-to-use website builder.

Disclaimer: We use HubSpot Pro at MezzoLab and we're loving it so far.

MOZ

Category: SEO

The platform can do everything related to keyword analysis and management. It will permanently monitor your search engine rankings and provides you with comprehensive reporting. Not to mention the browser extension that you just must have – MozBar.

The service offers several packages with different functions. You can get a limited set of functions for free. If you desire to have wider functionality, you will have to fork out. A standard paid package starts at $79 while for the most advanced package MOZ will charge $479 per month.

So what do you pay for? Moz is well-packed with a set of search engine optimization tools. They cover everything from website ranking and page optimization to full-scan across the Internet, link tracking and analysis done by Open Site Explorer and Fresh Web Explorer tools.

As an icing on the cake, the service allows you to monitor competitors without their knowledge. Moz tracks competitors' rankings and backs them up with relevant metrics.

You may also be interested in: Botify; Positionly; Hittail

Google Analytics

Category: Analytics

Google Analytics is a free service with almost limitless possibilities for analyzing the behavior of users on your website or mobile app. How does it work? First, you need to install a small code on your site. It collects information on what user did on your site as well as from where and why they came. Then these data are sent to Google servers where the information is processed and provided in the digestible form.

Google Analytics generates a multitude of reports. You can customize them to have widgets and metrics you need. These reports can be converted to PDF format and scheduled for automatic sending to your e-mail.

The most useful sections of the service, in our opinion, are Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions.

Audience shows ‘global’ characteristics of your visitors such as demographics, interests, geography, behavior (new / returned, visit frequency), and devices they used (PC or phone, model, resolution, browser version, etc.).

With Aquisition, you can examine traffic by source and medium, and analyze the number of visits, their quality, conversions, etc.

Behavior provides reports related to content such as customer journey maps, site’s speed load, search, events (the key actions that you want to track), etc.

Conversion delivers a set of reports for e-commerce. For example, multi-channel funnels and attribution report shows how many purchases a client made, through which sources, and how much time it took.

You may also be interested in: KISSmetrics; Segment; Crazy Egg; Looker; Mode; Tableau, Chartio

HootSuite

Category: Social media marketing

When almost 3 billion people use social networks, businesses simply can’t miss the opportunity to promote their products and services to this audience. To keep people engaged and increase the number of subscribers or views, an SMM marketer should apply a fair amount of efforts. Besides, it is a very time-consuming process. Wouldn’t it be great to have a tool that can make the life of SMM- and community-managers easier? Fortunately, such a tool exists.

HootSuite is a must-have for business promotion in social media. This service will allow you to manage several social media profiles at once (from 3 to 100) from a single interface. HootSuite supports popular networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, etc. What we like about this service is that it allows users to manage content, get statistics, measure audience involvement, and evaluate ad campaigns.

HootSuite provides a convenient mechanism for posting from a variety of profiles at once. Interface design mimics a browser and allows you to customize and display multiple feeds on one or more bookmarks. We really appreciate HootSuite’s scheduling tools that help create schedules of posts publications. The option of best time automatic selection and individual settings are also very pleasing.

On top of what has been already said, HootSuite has a convenient extension for Chrome – Hootlet. It allows posting content directly from a site on which it is published.

You may also be interested in: Amplirf, Buffer

Wistia

Category: video marketing

If you are racking your brain over a problem how else to generate leads, we will give a hint - try video marketing. For more than 10 years Wistia has been an indispensable assistant in this matter. You can ask a question: Why do I need to pay for video hosting when there is YouTube? The answer is simple - Wistia analyzes user interaction with video and collects detailed statistics about viewers, including their contacts. Can YouTube do this?

So what is this video service is capable of? Firstly, you can customize your videos to find a positive response from the viewers. You are able to change the color of the player, customize the control elements, add sharing buttons, subtitles, and interactive elements (links, contact forms, etc.). With the help of embedded code, you can share the video in social networks, add to the email list or post it on your site.

But the most important advantage of this video marketing service is that it gives detailed statistics for each video. You can see the average percentage of views, amount of views, conversion, etc. Also, Wistia offers detailed statistics on viewers: their location, IP address, email, landing page. And even more, Wistia is able to provide links to viewer’s profiles on social media. With all this knowledge at your disposal, you can understand which categories of viewers are interested in your content and focus your efforts at attracting this segment, or you can fine-tune your video content to improve lead generation.

You may also be interested in: Brightcove, Vimeo Pro, Vzaar

Optimizely

Category: A/B testing

Sometimes it happens that you’ve invested tremendous efforts in the creation of your site, optimized content within inbound marketing, but potential customers are still not wowed. How can you figure out what went wrong? A/B testing tools can come to the rescue. We’ve compared the functionality of several services and found a leader - Optimizely. This service provides a powerful visual editor that conducts A/B testing and gives information about which page was more effective in terms of clicks or sales. The editor is easy to use even for beginners - to create a page you don’t need to know HTML-code.

Also, Optimizely provides other tools for improving sites and applications as well as collecting statistics. The services are provided in packages so that you can select tools that will be useful precisely for your business.

One of the most handful features of Optimizely is the ability to personalize content for visitors depending on their geolocation, gender, and behavior. During the testing, the service generates statistical data on the effectiveness of this personalization.

On top of it, Optimizely allows you to improve mobile apps, programs for IPTV television, monitor user behavior and make necessary changes in real time.

In conclusion, Optimizely offers a separate package for developers to monitor sites’ and apps’ performance.

You may also be interested in: Visual Website Optimizer; IsValid

Hotjar

Category: CRO marketing

This service is for advanced Internet marketers who want to analyze the behavior of users on their website or mobile apps. The main purpose of Hotjar is to help you increase conversion through understanding the needs of visitors and fine-tuning your site for these requirements. How can Hotjar do this?

It has a number of powerful features most competitors will be jealous of. For example, Heatmaps and Visitor Recordings tools will help you find out which links and elements of a page people click and how deeply they scroll down. Based on this, you will understand how good visitors interact with the site’s interface. Another tool, Funnel, can show a sequence of actions that lead to the ultimate goal (for example, purchase). You are able to see at what stages of this process you have the biggest problems. Accordingly, you can put all necessary efforts to eliminate them. Also, this service will help conduct surveys, polls, and find out more about contact forms on your site (to learn how users fill them in or if they are bothered to do that at all)

You may also be interested in: Mixpanel, Datadog, SmartLook

BuzzSumo

Category: content management

Today any marketing strategy can’t do without content. However, businesses are pulling off the task of content marketing with different success. If you keep your eyes peeled for a way to increase the popularity of your branded messages, we can give you a steer - try BuzzSumo. This service allows you to analyze social channels and manage your content in order to increase its resonance with the target audience.

So, let's move from words to the matter and see what BuzzSumo can offer. This platform allows you to find the most shared content for a given topic, author, or domain. This information can be used to generate ideas for writing your own content or for selecting articles that you can share with your subscribers. In addition, you can find popular content authors in your niche and contact them for help.

Secondly, you can, as it were, "peek" at competitors and analyze their content to understand what really works and how they distribute their marketing messages. The service allows you to hook up notifications that will inform you every time when competitors publish new content on their website or social networks, when their brands are mentioned and when other resources publish links to the competitors’ sites.

You may also be interested in: Social Animal, Alltop, EpicBeat Epictions

MailChimp

Category: email marketing/ communication

MailChimp is a Swiss army knife of the email marketing world in terms of variety of tools it offers. Therefore, we will not even try to cover its endless possibilities. Instead, we will focus only on its most important features, which make it the world's leading service for managing e-mail campaigns.

The first thing that caught our eyes is that MailChimp has a powerful online page design editor for HTML-mailings. Even newbies can easily arrange designs for email messages of any complexity. The service offers a very clear and comprehensive way of creating co-branding. You can change the appearance of forms, subscription panels, and mailings literally with just one click. A very curious mode ‘Golden Monkeys’ allows you to manually assigning VIP status to specific subscribers, after which you will have extended features for working with them.

MailChimp can also determine where your subscribers are located and to provide you with functionality to create custom designs or mailings for each individual region or even city.

The last thing we would like to dwell on is ready-made solutions for integrating the capabilities of this mail service into third-party SaaS platforms or popular CMS. So, you can hook up all the power of MailChimp to any applications on Salesforce.com, WordPress, Drupal, Facebook, Google Analytics, and many other services.

You may also be interested in: Seventh Sense; Customer.io; Smooch; Intercom

Pipedrive

Category: CRM

Ask yourself a question: Would you like to clearly organize a sales process, keep track of the status of all your deals, monitor and coordinate performance of sales personnel and receive informative reports on the results of work? We think that the answer is obvious. You can achieve these goals easier than it may seem. Pipedrive will help you with this.

The functionality of this tool is aimed at making your sales team more organized and productive. To do this, the service provides several useful features. For example, sales channel overview allows you to view information about the status of activities at all stages of sales. The history of contacts provides information on the interactions between sellers and potential customers. Here you can also create email templates for sending to your client base. The system of reports will show the statistics on new, current and closed deals, data related to the sales funnel, and much more. All the functions of the service are tailored to the needs of your business.

Pipedrive successfully integrates with third-party apps, including Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Apps. etc. In addition, the system has the ability to integrate with various services with API interface.

You may also be interested in: Base, Evercontact

Of course, this list of marketing SaaS tools is not by any means exhaustive.

Today every business, whether it's a large company or a startup, has the luxury to choose among hundreds of services and apps designed specifically for their needs.

You can compare and combine several services to achieve the best results.

Fortunately, many of the platforms have free versions to try and see.

And what applications do you use?

Let us know in the comments below!