Announcing the Top Rated Outstanding Marketing Tools for 2019

Today, we awarded 2019 TrustRadius Top Rated badges to a number of outstanding marketing tools. The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are the most trusted in the industry because they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user feedback and satisfaction scores. Top Rated awards are the voice of the market and are not influenced by analyst opinion, the vendor’s company size, popularity, or status as a TrustRadius customer.

While many software categories have multiple products that earned a 2019 Top Rated badge (find them all on our blog here), this year eight marketing software categories have only one Top Rated winner. These products stand above the rest in each of their respective categories. Without further ado, here are the eight marketing categories and their stand-out products: 

Content Marketing Software – PathFactory 

Marketing Resource Management Software – Adobe Campaign

Mobile Marketing – EZ Texting

Public Relations (PR) Tools – TrendKite

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Tools – Google Ads

Social Media Advertising Software – Facebook for Business

Social Media Analytics Tools – Sprout Social

Tag Management Solutions – Google Tag Manager

Here’s a closer look at these outstanding marketing tools: 

PathFactory (formerly LookBookHQ)

PathFactory is an analytics-centric B2B content marketing platform which helps marketing professionals understand which content is most relevant to their audience at different stages of the buyer’s journey. PathFactory produces engagement-based attribution and real-time campaign optimization by analyzing content with AI, integrating visitor and account data, and evaluating these in light of session engagement data. This allows marketers to present content to the right viewers at a time when it will have most impact. 

The majority of PathFactory users on TrustRadius are primarily employed in larger enterprises (66%). Enterprise users praise its easy to interpret and professional UI, ability to assemble different kinds of marketing assets into customized and coherent content tracks, and easy to  interpret analytics.

“Our company was struggling to drive engagement with our content. We worked really hard to drive people to our website and landing pages but struggled to get them to stay engaged and keep learning. I ran into [PathFactory] and quickly got our team involved as I thought it something that might solve our issues. The team quickly got excited about the potential. About 6 months later we signed up and love the tool. We are seeing a HUGE increase in content consumption (binging) and it’s driving highly engaged leads into our funnel every day.”

– Trevor Rasmussen | Senior Product Marketing Manager | Financial Services Company 

Adobe Campaign

Adobe Campaign is a popular cross-channel marketing campaign management tool which features a marketing resource management (MRM) module designed to support collaboration with marketing task tracking and internal communication, approval workflow, and budgeting tools. This allows marketing managers to execute their marketing strategy in Adobe Campaign while also keeping their team on task and operating on a budget, ideally without having to integrate multiple technologies from separate vendors. 

A large majority (74%) of Adobe Campaign users on TrustRadius work in midsize businesses and enterprises. Reviewers using Adobe Campaign with its MRM module praise its business and strategy global reporting functionality for coordinating and sharing data between marketing managers and stakeholders.

“Adobe Campaign is used across various departments in our company, but it is heavily used by our strategic partnership, marketing solutions, and digital content team. Our company uses Adobe Campaign to help create marketing tools for our clients. We also use it for automation of marketing campaigns and increasing customer loyalty… Adobe Campaign is great in helping us with implementing our workflow by collecting the information, categorizing it in appropriate fields, and helping me find the best solution to present it in the best way to both my team and clients.”

– Verified User | Administrative Assistant in Marketing | Broadcast Media Company

EZ Texting

EZ Texting is a text messaging app for marketing or mass communication offered on a pay-as-you-go basis or via a monthly subscription. Users may be enrolled through sign up forms or keywords, and engaged through a variety of special offers, polls, texts with images, and other advanced SMS messaging capabilities which EZ Texting supplies. 

The majority of EZ Texting users on TrustRadius are employed in small business (59%).  Reviewers on TrustRadius praise EZ Texting’s one-to-many text capabilities for announcements of deadlines and upcoming events, and the ability to text individual customers complex or event-specific information as needed (e.g. driving directions).

“We use EZ texting to communicate important details to the attendees of our events. We notify them of weather alerts, changes to our schedule, and meeting locations. We love how EZ texting easily gets the word out, and our attendees can easily reply back to our messages… I would definitely recommend EZ texting to anyone who desires to send announcements to a large group, or who hosts events.”

– Angela Terry | Customer Care | Religious Institution

TrendKite 

Recently acquired by Cision, TrendKite is a PR analytics tool that enables PR and marketing professionals to quantify their brand’s impact by going beyond legacy metrics such as readership, mentions and ad equivalency. TrendKite enables real-time media monitoring to report on the business impact of PR campaigns. Its slick and sophisticated interface provides interactive reports and also allows users to benchmark their brand’s performance against competitors to drive campaign success. 

Most TrendKite users on TrustRadius are employed at small (32%) and midsize (37%) companies. Reviewers on TrustRadius value TrendKite for how well it combines several analytic features into one intuitive, attractive platform.

“We are using TrendKite to monitor our own, and our clients’, PR impact. Having previously used a number of different platforms to generate valuable insights and showcase the results of our work, TrendKite is plugging the gap by bringing all of those analytics under one easy-to-use platform.”

– Verified User | Account Manager | PR & Communications Company 

Google Ads 

Google Ads is an online advertising platform that enables marketers to increase brand awareness and help drive sales through placing ads on one of the world’s most popular search engines, Google. Companies can purchase a set amount of ‘ad space’ and their ads will appear on Google’s search engine pages (SERPs), resulting in an increased number of calls, clicks, bookings, or visits to a specific location. Marketers can set parameters such as whether or not they want their ads to appear locally or globally and what specific message they want the ad to include. They can also identify which keywords they want their ads to rank for. 

As Google is one of the most used search engines, buying ad space directly on Google where prospects and customers are already searching for products and services will help boost a company’s search engine optimization (SEO). With Google Ads, companies and brands become more visible to their target customers. 

On TrustRadius, the majority of Google Ads users (64%) work in either small or midsize businesses.  Reviewers of Google Ads highlight the platform’s strong targeted advertising capabilities, geographic audience segmentation, and flexibility in terms of budget and ability to pause ad campaigns when needed. 

“Google Ads (GA) is well suited for getting your name out there. Small businesses with limited budgets may be able to get incredible value if the prime real estate on your desired Google SERPs (search engine results pages) aren’t too expensive…. What we liked about it is that we knew how our ad money was being spent with a greater degree of certainty than if it were spent on traditional media ads (radio, print, TV).”

– Anthony Burke | Public Information Officer | Mental Health Care Company 

Facebook for Business 

Facebook for Business is a social media advertising platform that allows marketers to leverage Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp ads to increase brand awareness and drive sales. Facebook for Business enables businesses to create, publish, personalize, and monitor user interactions with ads across the Facebook social media platforms. It includes features such as  ad creation, ad targeting, automatic campaign optimization, demographic targeting, and lookalike audiences. 

Facebook for Business allows users to interact with potential leads through social posts, videos, photos, and events. Robust analytics track metrics such as click rate and website traffic, and allows businesses to segment results by certain criteria (e.g. demographic or behavioral) and perform A/B ad testing. 

Most Facebook for Business users work either at small businesses (43%) or midsize companies (30%). Reviewers on TrustRadius are elated that Facebook for Business allow them to reach enormous audiences through Facebook and Instagram; they are also impressed with powerful ad targeting and segmentation of audiences by almost any criteria.

“Facebook is a well-known social networking site where the number of users is very large, which entitles it for a beneficial site for marketing. More than just a social gathering place, Facebook has grown into a great marketplace where users can share and review products as well as campaign easily with family and friends. This helps our branding and has been helpful for the growth of our brand. Facebook offers its own form of advertising with Facebook ads, appearing in the feed of users, targeting potential audience and convert them to our customer. After using Facebook, our business growth has increased drastically from which our clients are very happy.”

– Verified User | Engineer | Construction Company

Sprout Social 

Sprout Social provides marketing teams with a comprehensive social media management (SMM) solution, with one module specifically dedicated to social media analytics. The module is broken up into three areas: a performance reporting suite that measures campaign success and engagement across channels; a social listening and insights suite for marketers to monitor the conversation surrounding their brand; and an advanced analytics and listening suite that provides users with interactive dashboards to compare metrics across social channels. 

Sprout Social’s analytics suite also includes a customizable report builder, and integrates with multiple social channels including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. 

On TrustRadius, the majority of Sprout Social users are employed at small businesses (32%) or midsize companies (34%). Reviewers on TrustRadius appreciate the ability to monitor comments on multiple social channels, the all-in-one nature of Sprout Social’s SMM platform, and ease of creating visually beautiful and insightful reports. 

“It’s an awesome tool that enables your business to thoughtfully schedule posts for all platforms, monitor comments, collaborate with others on your team with a really solid editorial calendar…. With everything on a single platform, Social Media Marketing teams are more efficient in their tasks. Due to the analysis that you can perform, you can create amazing reports that showcase to leadership the return-on-brand equity and investment…. Their reports are visually pleasing for those presentations to leadership, showing what the heck Social Media is actually doing for your return-on-brand investment.”

– Sylvia Flores | Chief Creative Officer + Founder | Marketing and Advertising Company 

Google Tag Manager 

Google Tag Manager is one part of Google’s Marketing Platform along with other testing and analytics tools like Google Analytics, Optimize, Data Studio, and Surveys. Google Tag Manager provides marketers and website managers with an easy to use tag management system. It includes features such as multiple different tag methods (e.g. asynchronous tag loading, reusable variable definition, tag pausing and blacklisting, and tag sequencing), instant search and autocomplete, preview mode, multi-user and multi-account support, and auto event triggers and custom event triggers. 

A large majority (73%) of Google Tag Manager users on TrustRadius work in either small or midsize businesses. Google Tag Manager reviewers value the ability to set up multiple users and different permissions, Google Analytics integration, version history and ability to revert changes, and ease of tracking triggered and custom events. 

“Google Tag Manager (GTM) is being used by our marketing team to better track customers through Google Analytics (GA) primarily and is only used by our marketing team. The integration between the two is absolutely crucial for any digital marketing team to understand and utilize… Being able to easily trigger actions on our website through Tag Manager saves me time in development and stress in the deployment of these tags. Not having to write a line of code and having the ability to trigger events on specific button clicks or scroll depth is nice, but being able to trigger events anywhere you can run a JavaScript function is incredible.”

– Verified User | Employee in Marketing | Higher Education Company

Congratulations to the winners of the Outstanding Marketing Tools Award!

Top Rated Criteria

Products included in the 2019 Top Rated Outstanding Marketing Tools list must have been in the top tier of their respective category TrustMap as of June 3rd, 2019. To qualify for the Outstanding Marketing ToolsTop Rated Award, products must have at least 10 reviews written within the past year, a TRScore of at least 7.5 out of 10, and must receive at least 1.5% of the traffic in their category.  Every reviewer is verified and every review is vetted before publication. Products are plotted on the TrustMap based on end-user data, including users’ likelihood to recommend scores as well as buyer research patterns. To learn more about TrustMaps and Top Rated methodology, check out this page.