All-in-One Marketing Platform vs Single-Solution: Which is Best?

There’s a lot you need to consider when starting a business – one of the most important things being how you’re going to grow.

Marketing is incredibly important for any business, and these days you have endless possibilities for what your marketing strategy could look like. To get this right in our digital world, you’ll need to use the right marketing tools.

This is where the question of choosing between all-in-one marketing platforms or single-service solutions comes up.

All-in-one marketing platforms seem to make perfect sense in today’s digital landscape, but are they worth it?

In this guide, we’ll cover what you need to consider when choosing the right marketing tools for your business – comparing all-in-one marketing platforms against single-solution tools to help small business owners make the right decision.

What is an All-in-One Marketing Platform?
What Marketing Software Solutions Do Small Businesses Need?
Benefits Of an All-in-One Marketing Platform
Benefits Of Single Solution Marketing Software
What Marketing Solution is Best for Small Businesses?

What is an All-in-One Marketing Platform?

An all-in-one marketing platform is a single platform that includes a complete suite of marketing tools to cover all your business’s marketing needs. This allows you to manage your entire marketing strategy through one interconnected software solution.

There are loads of different processes involved in digital marketing these days. This includes email marketing, social media management, building websites, creating automated marketing workflows, managing marketing materials, accessing analytics, and more. Using disconnected, separate systems for each of these tasks can be tricky to manage, not to mention expensive.

This is why all-in-one marketing platforms exist. They make it a lot easier to manage your marketing processes and access all of the tools you need at once.

What Marketing Software Solutions Do Small Businesses Need?

As a small business operating in today’s digital world, there are many different marketing tools that you need. These include (but are not limited to) tools for

Email marketing
Social media marketing
Marketing automation
Building websites and landing pages
Running online giveaways and promotions
SMS marketing
Graphic design
Building an online store
Running referral campaigns
Creating popups and online forms

And a lot more. You can take a look at our complete guide on the different types of business tools you need for more information.

No matter what you sell or who you sell it to, your business will need some of, or all of, these tools. This is essential for surviving in today’s world.

However, with so many different marketing tools available, you don’t want to just suddenly subscribe to all of them. So, here are some of the first things you need to do.

1. Start With the Essentials

First, you need a website, this is a must. To do this, you will need to have a good website builder.

Your website is your most important online marketing asset, and it’s where you will end up driving all of your digital marketing traffic. Before worrying about any other tools, make sure that you have your website set up.

Your website builder should make it easy to create landing pages whenever you need them. Ideally, this should be done using templates and a drag-and-drop editor so that you don’t need to worry about design skills and coding.

Once your website is set up, you will probably need a few extra tools to help you increase conversions, like a popups editor and an online forms tool. With a website builder like Wishpond, features like this come standard.

2. Understand the Customer Journey

Once your website is set up, you need to know how customers will navigate your site. Basically, you should understand what steps a person takes from being a first-time visitor to your site to becoming a paying customer.

Once you understand these steps you can understand the different tools you need to push them along this journey. This might include tools for capturing leads, tools for creating gated content, or tools for setting up drip campaigns and automations.

Check out our guide on how to increase website sales to help you optimize your site with the right tools.

3. Set Up Your Email Marketing

While your website might be the first essential online asset you create, the next important thing is to set up your email marketing strategy. In fact, 53% of marketers say that email has been the most effective marketing channel for early-stage lead generation.

Email marketing is one of the most reliable forms of marketing for absolutely any kind of business. No matter what your marketing strategy looks like, you should include email into the mix. You can check out some of these email marketing examples for ideas on what kinds of campaigns you can create.

For effective email marketing, you will need tools that do three things:

An email marketing tool to create and send out your emails
A lead management database to store your email marketing list information
Tools to capture leads and grow your email list

Of course, each of these tools needs to be integrated for a seamless experience.

The best solution is to use an all-in-one platform, like Wishpond, that covers all of these processes.

4. Establish Your Marketing Plan

You need to understand your marketing plan before you can choose which marketing tools you will need.

There’s a lot that goes into establishing a marketing plan. The most important place to start is to understand your customers. Know what channels they use, what interests they have, and what their pain points are. This will help you establish what kind of marketing content you will create.

While there are many different strategies you can take, the best option is to start small and expand your marketing plan as you see success. This will help you see what works, what doesn’t work, and find the best places to focus your efforts.

Here’s a helpful guide to get you started with an effective marketing plan. You can also check our guides on B2B marketing strategies and B2C marketing strategies.

The main thing here is figuring out what marketing channels you will use, and then establishing which tools are necessary for these.

5. Find Ways to Save Time

You don’t always need software tools to run your marketing. However, they will make your life a lot easier.

Look at your current workflow and see if there are any areas that take up too much time or effort. This might be causing bottlenecks in your operations.

If these areas exist, look towards tools that can save you time.

For example, using a marketing automation solution can help you put time-consuming marketing tasks and communications on autopilot. This will save you loads of time, making it a lot easier to scale your business.

One of the most important reasons to use marketing tools is also to grow your business with fewer people. By using the right solutions, you can scale up your marketing operations as your business grows. This means using tech tools to cover the roles that would otherwise require employees.

This reduces costs and makes it a lot easier to run and grow your business.

6. Goals, Insights, and Analytics

When choosing the right marketing tools for your business, you’ll need to establish goals that you want to achieve with the software. This could be things like growing your email list, acquiring new customers, or saving time. Whatever the case, these goals need to have clear KPIs that you can track.

Make sure that your marketing software tools cover these KPIs. This is generally available through insights and analytics that the platforms provide.

However, you might also need additional analytics tools to add to your marketing mix.

Whatever the case, always make sure that you have enough insights when choosing your marketing software. This is essential for running more successful digital marketing campaigns.

Benefits Of an All-in-One Marketing Platform

We’ve established some of the main factors behind choosing small business marketing software. The next big decision is to choose between an all-in-one solution to cover all of your needs or selecting individual software tools.

All-in-one marketing software comes with some major advantages.

First and foremost, you get all of the tools you need in one package. This makes it way more convenient to get started and run marketing campaigns. All you need to do is sign up for your platform, and you’re ready to go.

If you choose single solutions, you will have to build up your whole marketing stack and integrate each tool before you can get started with your marketing plan.

With an all-in-one marketing platform, your expenses will be a lot lower. Instead of having to subscribe to multiple tools, and pay multiple fees, you only pay for a single monthly subscription. This can save you a lot of money, while still providing access to all of the marketing tools you need.

An all-in-one marketing platform will also save you a lot of time. All of your campaigns can be managed from a single dashboard, so there’s no jumping between solutions. You can set up, manage, and monitor campaigns with ease.

Of course, all of your tools also come connected from the start. Having a fully integrated marketing stack is essential, and this is one of the major advantages of taking the all-in-one approach. You know that everything will work seamlessly together, which is far better than using different disconnected systems.

So, overall, all-in-one marketing platforms save you time, effort, and money, and make it a lot easier to run powerful marketing campaigns for your business.

Benefits Of Single Solution Marketing Software

While there are many obvious advantages of using an all-in-one marketing platform, there is still an upside to using single solutions for your marketing tools.

The main benefit of using a single marketing solution is that these tools specialize in one thing only – which often means a more diverse solution for that single task. If you have one single and specific marketing tool that your business relies heavily upon, it might be a good idea to use a single solution.

The other advantage is that you can be pickier about what specific tools and features to include in your marketing stack. You could choose different platforms for your marketing automation tool, customer relationship management (CRM), email marketing, lead generation tools, and more. This lets you choose the specific features that you want from each tool.

The downsides? This takes a lot more time and effort to connect together, and it will likely be more expensive.

What Marketing Solution is Best for Small Businesses?

If you’re a small business just starting out or scaling up, choosing the right marketing platform can be tricky. Using all-in-one marketing platforms will make your life a lot easier though.

Once you have established your marketing platform needs (as discussed above), the next step is to choose an all-in-one marketing platform that covers each of these tools. As a small business owner, you will save time and effort while getting more bang for your buck.

Wishpond is the ideal solution here.

Wishpond offers one of the most extensive all-in-one marketing platforms. The single solution covers a wide range of tools and features, as well as offering users access to professional marketing services.

With the Wishpond platform, you get access to tools for:

Building entire websites
Marketing automation
Creating landing pages
Email marketing
Leads database
Capturing leads
Running social promotions and giveaways
Referral marketing
Accepting online appointments
Accepting online payments

And a lot more. On top of all this, you also get access to expert marketing services, like graphic design, SEO, ads management, and more. This means you pay a single subscription for absolutely everything your business needs to attract and retain more customers.

You can also access flexible pricing and product solutions based on the specific needs of your business. This way, you don’t end up paying for tools your business doesn’t use.

Try it out to see how Wishpond can grow your business.

Conclusion

If you’re confused about what marketing tools to choose, then all-in-one marketing platforms are the smart choice – especially for small businesses that need to easily cover their marketing needs.

By choosing an all-in-one platform, you will be able to simplify your marketing operations, save time, save money, and gain access to a complete suite of marketing tools with much less effort. This makes marketing your business a far easier task.

If you’re interested in trying out Wishpond’s all-in-one marketing solution, then book a demo to see how the platform can work for your business.

All-in-One Marketing Platform vs Single-Solution: How to Choose the Right Marketing Software