Digital Transformation Essentials for Your Business in 2022 (27 Essential Software for Businesses)

The primary goal of every business is to generate sales and establish a brand identity. But, if a company wants to be successful today, opening up a local shop may not be enough.

With the internet becoming the most significant globally available marketplace, businesses belonging to all industries and fields are rapidly going digital. 

However, is taking this one step sufficient to stay relevant and thrive in a highly competitive market?

Probably not. However, there’s a solution. 

By investing in software tools designed for helping businesses reach their objectives, you’ll be able to digitize your brand effectively. 

The tools mentioned in this article are known to be some of the best software in executing digital transformation for companies, so continue reading to find out what they are.

Table of contents

1. Lead generation tools
2. Customer experience tools
3. Marketing tools
4. Advertising tools
5. Sales tools
6. CRM tools
7. Conclusion

Automate your lead generation process

Automating lead generation is not uncommon in business process automation and is an effective method adopted by marketers worldwide. Lead generation tools generate leads from landing pages, social media platforms, and numerous other sources. These leads can then be converted into customers through various lead nurturing processes.

Here are a few lead generation tools available out there:

1. ProProfs Quiz Maker

Quizzes have emerged as one of the biggest lead magnets, i.e., tools to attract customers, no matter what your product is. Not only this, they are great for keeping your audience engaged. ProProfs Quiz Maker, the world’s #1 quiz software, represents the simplest way to create online quizzes. This lead generation quiz maker tool makes it possible to create online quizzes from built-in templates or from scratch. 

With more than 100 thousand+ quizzes, 100+ ready-to-use templates, 10+ question types, and 50 million quiz takers, it’s safe to say ProProfs Quiz Maker is the leader in this niche.

Customers can customize quizzes to make them tailored to their expectations and needs. Moreover, they can access quizzes anytime and anywhere to gain insights into delightful reports and analytics and choose from 100+ available settings and configurations to increase lead generation by up to 200%. If you have a WordPress site, you can even consider WordPress quiz plugins for quiz creation. 

Price: Starts from $20/month

2. Constant Contact

Constant Contact, Inc. is an online marketing company with a unique email marketing software perfect for lead generation.

If your company aims to build, grow and engage your customer base, boost sales, build an interactive website, or upload products to the online store, Constant Contract has all the tools, tips, and tricks you need to reach the desired results.

Price: Starts from $9/month

3. Hunter

As email marketing continues to be among the top marketing strategies for startups and across all industries, Hunter remains one of the best lead generation tools out there. 

Essentially, Hunter is an email hunter tool that finds contact information and verifies different emails across any domain.

As such, Hunter is a must-have tool for all companies that use cold emailing to grow their business. Additional services offered by Hunter include finding email addresses for companies and individuals within the specified industry.

Price: Starts from $0/month

4. Indy

Indy is an all-in-one project management software designed from the ground up for freelancers, solopreneurs, and small teams to manage their business from start to finish. You can generate new leads using Indy’s proposals, contracts, and form templates to take charge of the entire onboarding process.

Forms can be customized with a variety of elements and added with drag-and-drop ease, and can be embedded on any web page or shared with a link. Indy also integrates with Zapier, so you can connect Indy with over 1,000+ apps and automate your entire lead generation process.

Price: Indy has a free forever version of each tool. Plus, a Pro version that gives access to more advanced features of each tool that costs $9/month.

Analyze and improve your customer journey 

Businesses go above and beyond to improve their customer journey. Customer experience is critical to the sustained growth of a business, and customer experience tools can make it easier for you. 

Customer experience tools perform several critical tasks such as project and task management, sales and marketing automation, tracking and engaging online visitors, managing customer care tasks, and engaging customers across different social media platforms. 

Take a look at these tools that can help you optimize your customer experience. 

1. Beaconstac’s QR Code Generator

Beaconstac’s QR Code generator is a modern QR code platform that offers secure and scalable solutions to drive engagement. With QR codes becoming the latest trend in the digital world, companies can now increase discovery and influence with unique and trackable QR Codes and extend an immersive and personalized digital experience.

By connecting physical and digital worlds, Beaconstac’s QR Code generator provides an easy-to-use platform for modern businesses to measure and analyze their customer experience.

Price: Starts from $5/month. View full pricing here.

2. Sprout Social for Social Listening

If you are looking to uncover critical insights for your business, social listening might be one of the top strategies. The Social Listening customer experience tool by Sprout Social helps brands extract valuable information from global social conversations.

Brands can use this information to identify industry gaps, work on their brand, and thus improve overall brand health and reputation.

By implementing social listening tools, every brand is bound to be more successful than before.

Price: Starts from $89/month

3. Userpeek’s Usability Testing Solution

For companies that are developing a new product or service, rapid feedback from real people indeed sounds intriguing. With Userpeek, now that’s possible.

Userpeek offers the most flexible and powerful user testing tool to professionals who want rapid but accurate feedback on a product or service. This software tool will ensure your business grows faster by equipping it with the best possible product for building, scaling, and optimizing goals.

Having all these features within a single solution is yet another reason why Userpeek is a reliable solution for all business decisions.

Price: Starts from $55/test

4. SocialBee

SocialBee is an all-in-one social media management and reporting tool that helps businesses and professionals streamline their social media management across all social media platforms.

SocialBee enables users to plan and schedule their social media posts in advance using the content calendar, generate engaging content ideas, captions, and hashtags with the help of the AI Assistant, as well as create visually appealing posts using the Canva integration inside the post editor. 

Additionally, SocialBee’s recycling and repurposing features allow users to republish successful content and reach new audiences quickly. The Analytics Tab provides valuable insights into the performance of social media content, enabling users to optimize their social media strategy. 

Price: Starts from $19/month

Streamline your marketing workflows

In addition to saving time and money, marketing software tools help companies and organizations attract new customers and website visitors and generate revenue. 

Marketing software tools help generate leads and deliver marketing and promotional materials to all existing and potential customers, usually via an email marketing campaign or through social media platforms.

Check out some of the top marketing software tools below:

1. HubSpot Marketing

As a software tool that is designed for sales, inbound marketing, and customer service, HubSpot is one of the leaders in the marketing software industry. 

It’s a highly flexible tool that offers services to all business sizes — from small family businesses to international enterprises.

Thanks to HubSpot Marketing, you can:

• Create engaging content your clients won’t miss,
• Maximize turning website visitors into leads with personalized strategies, and
• Translate business data into valuable strategies for further action.

In addition, with HubSpot integration for WordPress, your WordPress site can benefit from multiple features such as contact management, live chats, email automation, and many more.

Price: Starts from $45/month

2. SEMrush

SEMrush is a top-class software tool designed to grow your online visibility across all key channels. With correct marketing steps, SEMrush supplies its clients with brands of all sizes and industries that can efficiently attract and grow online audiences.

SEMrush comes with useful SEO tools that help create and rank content while unveiling rivals’ marketing strategies and tactics. This marketing software also allows brands to discover how to maximize influence while minimizing costs. With SEMrush as a single platform, digital brands can build their most effective social media strategies.

Price: Starts from $119.95/month

3. Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is yet another provider of digital marketing services related to automation and analytics. 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud enables businesses to get familiar with their customers, allowing them to adapt to different customer requirements, grow relationships, increase revenue, and optimize digital impact.

Price: Available on request

4. Social Status

Social Status is a dedicated social media analytics and reporting tool that provides multi-channel dashboards and helps automate your social media reports.

While the social channels themselves provide some analytics, Social Status goes much more in-depth and provides full-funnel metrics for all the main social media channels, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Social Status can export your reports to CSV, PDF, PowerPoint slides, and Google Slide formats, and reports can be completely customized and white-labeled.

Price: Starts from $29/month

5. Colorcinch

Colorcinch is a simple and intuitive all-in-one design tool to try out. You can enhance your photos, make their colors pop, crop, and resize photos with this easy-to-use tool.

Colorcinch features a wide array of AI-powered effects & filters and hand-picked creative assets. You can upload your photo or choose from its collection of stock photos to start editing.

Price: Starts at $0/month

6. CTX Feed

If you want to grow your online business by promoting your products on various platforms, then you should check the CTX Feed plugin. 

It’s the most advanced WooCommerce product feed manager that creates product feeds for various famous channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Google, Bing, eBay, Snapchat, TikTok, and more than 100+ channels.

This plugin will automatically generate a 100% error-free product feed. Even you don’t require any advanced programming knowledge to operate this plugin.

In fact, you don’t need to add your product attributes one by one because CTX Feed contains pre-configured product attributes such as titles, descriptions, image links, shipping, price, etc.

Price: Starts at $119 for a single site.

7. Social Champ

Social Champ is an all-in-one social media management tool with automation support for all major social media platforms. The tool allows you to create, schedule and publish your posts on multiple platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google Business Profile, TikTok and YouTube. The tool is exceptionally rich with incredible features, including social media calendar, bulk upload, social inbox, team collaboration, monitoring analytics, and much more. 

Social Champ allows you to schedule Facebook/ Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and Twitter Threads so you can organize your postings in a single place and save time on social media. The tool has a vibrant UI with an easy-to-use dashboard. 

Price: Social Champ offers an exclusive free plan. However, the premium plans start from $29/month. 

8. NotifyVisitors

NotifyVisitors is a leading marketing automation software. It offers email marketing, SMS marketing, pop-ups, signup forms, and more for Shopify stores and small businesses. What makes NotifyVisitors suitable for you is you do not require any coding knowledge to run campaigns. Its easy-to-use interface helps you set up and implement campaigns easily and quickly.

Its personalization and segmentation help you offer the best experience to customers and target them in a better way. Drag and drop editor to customize email templates to fulfill all your branding needs. Apart from that, it offers in-depth campaign analytics to track performance on a single dashboard.

Price: Free plan available. Paid plan starts from $49/per month.

Reach out, interact and motivate your customers

Advertising helps brands communicate what they want and stimulate action from their customers. This can be made more accessible through advertising tools. 

Although advertising tools can come in different forms, the most successful advertising tools relate to digital platforms. Since the advertising standards and requirements are changing all the time, companies need to choose a software tool that can keep up with the latest developments in the advertising industry.

Here are a few advertising tools to look out for:

1. Google Ads

A simple yet effective tool, Google Ads works closely with other platforms made by Google, including Google Search and Google Maps. Since Google is the go-to search engine for most internet users, it’s helpful to come up first when someone is searching for a similar business.

The best thing about Google Ads is that brands pay only for results. Website visits and calls are the leading indicators of successful advertising strategies, so this is when businesses will have to pay Google Ads for their advertising services.

Price: Starts at $0/month 

2. AdEspresso

If you want to invest in advertising across multiple social media platforms while having neat access to all your advertising campaigns, AdEspresso might be just the platform you’ve been searching for.

This software tool is essential for businesses as it lets them create various advertising campaigns easily and quickly while also distributing them across multiple channels in a matter of minutes. Besides managing ad campaigns, brands can also analyze ad performances to get valuable insights essential for business success and growth.

Price: Starts at $49/month 

3. AdRoll

Ecommerce marketing supplies brands with increased visibility, higher revenue, and better performance. Adroll offers these benefits to all businesses that choose this advertising tool for their brand’s needs.

To be more specific, Adroll will help you find new customers, build profitable and long-lasting relationships, track and improve results, and protect valuable customer data. All of these features are available with Adroll’s single advertising platform.

Price: Starts at $0/month 

4. Pointerpro

Pointerpro is a software platform to create your own online assessments that generate personalized PDF reports automatically.

Use this platform to build surveys, quizzes, and assessments to collect data and engage with your audience. Offer significant value by providing your respondents with an individual, personal feedback report based on their answers. This platform allows you to pour your knowledge into an app and give your audience personalized advice in your field of expertise. This way, you can connect with the right audience and generate highly qualified leads.

Lead generation is only the tip of the iceberg with this app. 

Price: starts from $49/month with a free trial.

5. Jotform Sign

Jotform Sign is an electronic signature solution that helps you to create, share, and e-sign documents easily. You can turn PDFs into legally binding electronic documents and securely gather signatures anytime. 

This tool allows you to eliminate manual tasks and fully automate your document process. You can send documents via email, share them by sending a link or embed them on your website.

Price: Starts at $0/month

Accelerate sales and improve productivity

Sales tools enable businesses to standardize tasks, generate new leads, and convert leads into customers. The core purpose of sales tools is to generate as many sales as possible through advertising, driving traffic, or any other strategy.

Here are some of the most promising sales tools used by industry leaders: 

1. Salesforce

Once again on our list, Salesforce doesn’t only offer effective marketing software solutions but efficient sales tools as well.

With the right sales tools by its side, any business can witness rapid development and growth. Salesforce might be just the platform for your company, as it focuses on growing revenue with confidence, making virtual the new normal, and offering support every step of the way. That’s why salesforce offshore development is also very popular right now.

Price: Available on request

2. HubSpot Sales

Another tool that deserves an additional mention is HubSpot Sales, designed for helping sales teams close more deals, manage their pipeline, and deepen relationships.

This powerful sales software tool comes with a fully-featured sales CRM, all kinds of sales engagement tools, reporting, analytics features, and much more. So if you want to have all these features at your disposal, HubSpot Sales is the only tool you need in 2022.

Price: Starts at $45/month

3. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a tool developed by LinkedIn Corporation for all sales individuals and teams. When equipped with its robust set of search possibilities, enhanced visibility, and personalized algorithms, businesses can experience a much smoother and easier decision-making process.

Price: Starts at $79.99/month

4. Salesmate

Salesmate is a CRM and sales automation platform preferred by many growing companies. It includes advanced automation features that can help automate your entire sales playbook.

Some of the most useful features provided by Salesmate are Sales pipeline management, marketing automation, workflow automation, email automation, built-in calling, and texting. You can also utilize Salesmate to capture leads using features like web forms, live chat, and meeting scheduler.

It is one of the most powerful B2B lead generation software that will help you generate tons of leads. It allows you to manage your entire customer journey from a single platform, from lead capturing to lead nurturing, lead closing, and delivering best-in-class customer support.

5. Bloobirds

Bloobirds is a sales engagement platform that transforms your CRM, it’s the ideal solution for any Salesforce-enabled organization that sells to or engages with customers (individuals or businesses) and wants to drastically improve productivity, system adoption and sell more at a lower cost.

A CRM is basically designed to record and update data and not to help sales teams sell more. Bloobirds finally gets salespeople to use the CRM, because as a Salesforce App, it adds the contactability, productivity, content, and task management tools needed to help sell.

Price: Available upon request

Refine customer relationships

Customer relationship management tools, also known as CRM tools, are software developments many companies use to interact with their customers, build sales pipelines and personal relationships while engaging customers in the entire process.

It helps in streamlining and optimizing customer communications for maximum satisfaction. 

Check out some of the best CRM software of 2022 below.

1. BigContacts

BIGContacts by Proprofs is one of the top-rated budget-friendly CRM and email marketing tools due to its simplicity and ease of use. 

Best suited for small to mid-sized businesses, it makes contact management very simple and has features for automating tasks and reminders. In addition, this tool makes managing and tracking sales pipelines, commissions, and upcoming meetings easier. 

Price: Starts at $5 per user/month

2. HubSpot

Listing some of the best CRM tools without mentioning HubSpot wouldn’t be possible. HubSpot’s powerful sales software comes with a fully-featured sales CRM, a feature that focuses on enhancing customer experience and maintaining healthy customer relationships.

Price: Starts at $23/month

3. Zoho

With cloud-based tools becoming increasingly popular for personal and professional uses, Zoho offers a contemporary solution with fully-customizable CRM solutions for brands looking to implement powerful software that’ll run their entire business. 

Price: Starts at $0/month

4. Pardot

Pardot is known as the world’s #1 CRM solution for B2B marketing automation. Apart from helping companies create meaningful connections and empowering sales teams to close more deals, Pardot also generates more pipelines. Extraordinary customer success and exceptional customer support are the main attributes of this essential software.

Price: Starts at $1,250/month

5. Zonka Feedback

Zonka Feedback is a omnichannel Customer Experience Tool designed to enable enterprises as well as SMBs to collect customer feedback at all customer touchpoints. It features an easy-to-use survey builder and customizable survey templates to help your customer experience team create beautiful and interactive surveys that can be distributed both online and offline.

With Zonka Feedback, you can get real-time reports, in-depth analytics, instant alerts and ability to take action to close the feedback loop. Take data-driven decisions for your businesses and prevent customer churn.

Price: Starts at $49/month

Wrapping up

The digital world is filled with all kinds of software tools and platforms designed to help brands achieve higher success with their products and services. In a world where everything’s becoming digitalized, it’s crucial to implement tools that’ll make your brand stand out from the rest. All transformation companies are currently looking forward to creating valuable and sustainable transformation.

So, if you want to see your business succeed and break all set records in 2022, consider investing in one of the 18 essential tools mentioned in this article. This way, you can expand your brand’s digital transformation and accomplish all objectives to reach new heights.

• Author Details

Author Details

Angela White

ProProfs

Angela White is an ed-tech enthusiast with a passion for writing for the consumer market in the areas of product research and marketing using quizzes and surveys. Having a knack for writing and an editorial mindset, She is an expert researcher at a brand that’s known for creating delightfully smart tools such as ProProfs Quiz Maker.

https://www.proprofs.com/

[email protected]