The Best Apps in Salesforce AppExchange to Make Your Marketing Team More Effective

Salesforce is a leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and they provide several different solutions for businesses of all sizes and from all industries. Today, they’ve won several awards for their work, created a globally recognized brand, and are helping companies like yours develop better sales and marketing initiatives by using technology and AI. 

The modern small business needs to be agile and innovative, and they need to be able to navigate change to stay ahead of their competitors. Fortunately, Salesforce AppExchange has a lot of great resources, and Salesforce itself has a great guide to its best SMB apps. We’ll cover the highlights here in case you don’t want to wait until you have time to read the in-depth guide, and we’ll talk more about the value of using technology to make marketing more effective and efficient. 

Digital marketing is changing the landscape for all businesses, including SMBs. Fortunately, there are just as many solutions as there are for the new issues that your business is facing, including finding the key to success with marketing. Effectiveness is all about finding what your team needs, and that means taking the time to reflect on your brand and what you expect to get out of the marketing apps and tools that you use. 

Consider things like:

• What challenges or problems are you trying to solve?
• What time frame are you working with?
• What process(es) will be impacted? 

This will make it easier for you to find the apps that will get your brand on the track to success, no matter what you have in mind. 

The case for AI and technology in marketing

Marketing is an area where technology and artificial intelligence can definitely come in handy. For starters, who’s tracking all of your campaigns and their success rates? If you employ the right tools and tech, the question becomes what is tracking your campaigns? And for that, the answer is the best possible metrics tools available, if you’re doing it right. 

There are several types and categories of apps for business today, and the AppExchange in Salesforce has plenty to choose from. In the realm of marketing, you can do a lot more with the features and apps available than you might realize. You can use apps to assist with data insights and campaign tracking, productivity and task management, collaboration and teamwork, remote work, and so much more. With AI and technology, you’ll enjoy perks like:

Increased efficiency: Technology and automation ensure that your business is operating at an optimal pace and that you aren’t wasting resources or performing redundant work. It offers a chance for everyone to save time and effort on the job in a variety of ways. 

Reduced waste: When you’re reducing redundancies and eliminating bottlenecks, you’re going to reduce waste, too. This includes wasted time, wasted money, and wasted resources. 

Improved company culture: When your employees feel like their work and time are more valued, the entire morale and culture of your company will see improvement. People appreciate being appreciated. It’s simple. Use the resources that you have to maximize your people and your profits, not just the bottom line. 

Improved marketing efforts: Being able to automate things and employ the use of technology will help improve your marketing in several different ways. You can make real-time changes to fix campaigns that aren’t working, streamline processes, launch better campaigns, and more. 

Better conversions: Your ability to better manage things and monitor your efforts will help you improve your leads and conversions, too. Everything is about getting more conversions because that is what leads to profits, and this is one way to do it. 

A better customer experience: Using technology and AI also allows you to provide a better experience at every stage in the customer journey. Even if you can’t figure out the details of what people want and how to deliver it, technology can. You can implement so many tools to help you give people a better journey from start to finish and beyond. 

More time for what matters: When you automate the tedious and repetitive parts of the business, you’ll find that you have more time to spend with your clients and continue to grow and develop your customer base. Instead of having to deal with all the details, you can invest your attention in what matters most, and do the same with your sales and marketing teams. 

These are just a few of the biggest perks when it comes to enlisting the assistance of technology and AI in your business today. When you choose to do that with the AppExchange from Salesforce, you stand to gain a lot. 

In the list below, we’ll show you which apps are best for each aspect of your business and discuss exactly how they can help you get more out of your own marketing efforts, no matter what business you’re in. With more than 4,000 different apps available, just about any business can benefit from checking things out. 

The best of Salesforce AppExchange for marketers

Salesforce is big on helping businesses improve and even in their AppExchange guide, they make it simple to find the best apps based on the pain points that SMBs often face. Apps are divided into five different categories:

1. Productivity
2. Data and analytics
3. Collaboration
4. Agility and accessibility
5. Creating personalized experiences

To help make it easier to find what you need, we’ve divided the lists for you, as well. And remember, this isn’t a comprehensive list. That would take up far too much time. This is just a list of the most popular and relevant apps for marketing and the marketers in your small or midsize business. 

Productivity apps

Zapier: Zapier’s entire existence is based on improving productivity. It integrates with all kinds of apps and software platforms to help organize and streamline all of your operations. You can even get valuable insights on how Zapier could improve other efforts. 

DocuSign: DocuSign being integrated with Salesforce streamlines things even further. You can send, sign, and track all of your agreements in just minutes and keep everything managed in one place, increasing productivity for all. 

Salesforce CPQ & Billing: This app ensures that customers can get quick, accurate quotes and that companies can manage their billing seamlessly. Even the most complex quotes will be simpler with this tool. 

FinancialForce: For those who need some accounting assistance, this app is a great choice. It offers information on the financial health of your business in real-time, ensuring that you’re able to make changes where necessary and keep tabs on your spending and more. 

Data and analytics tools

Dashboard Pal: This tool makes it easy to navigate to the dashboard from anywhere on the home page and not have to take the extra step of going to the menu or dashboard option. It takes the hassle out of accessing the admin features to streamline things and make them easier for everyone. 

Gainsight: This tool makes it easy to organize data and identify customers or issues that need to be addressed to improve your relationships and ensure conversions and retention. You can also use it to improve engagement and create processes that will mitigate all of your pain points to streamline every part of the customer journey, including post-sale. 

D&B Optimizer: You can use this app to help duplicate information and enrich the data from your user accounts. It makes it easy to keep clean data and ensure that your information stays updated so that nothing is cluttered or out of date. 

Collaboration apps

Slack for Salesforce: Slack is a great collaboration tool for team communication. This message board allows you to talk individually or create groups and multi-user messages that everyone can access. It’s designed to improve communication and transparency to help drive new leads and identify new opportunities. 

OrgChart for Salesforce: This helps you manage and monitor organizational relationships all in one place and can be integrated with your Salesforce dashboard and CRM for total business management that’s streamlined and organized. 

Lightning Image Slider: This app is great for customizing and image carousels from attachments, create auto-playing slideshows and even read files. You can create shows in minutes and even use it with other tools for dynamic image sharing. 

JabberJaw: This app will fill in all the blanks for instant messaging and collaboration when you need a lightweight, free messaging tool. Users can chat in real-time, and they will be able to do it right within the Salesforce interface, keeping everything together. It’s easy to set up and you can be chatting in just minutes. 

Agile Accelerator: This free app features a user-friendly interface that makes capturing and processing information easy. As long as you know how Agile works, you’ll be able to gather all kinds of information management. 

Agility and access tools 

Trail Tracker: This is a free tool to help brands track things like user adoption and see how well people can learn and use the Salesforce platform. It’s a great resource for all kinds of SMBs that want to know what their users see and think. 

Xactly Incent Express: This is a great tool to bolster sales performance. It can help better manage your compensation plans so that you can improve your team by increasing incentives. This tool can work with bonuses, commissions, contests, and even non-cash rewards for all kinds of payees, allowing you to incentivize everyone and automate it, too. 

Magic Mover: If you want an easy way to organize, Magic Mover has what you need. The guide helps you convert attachments, notes, lists, and more, in just a few minutes. That way, you can stay organized and aren’t chasing down different apps, paper files, and more. 

Distribution Engine: This is a great inbound marketing routing tool that helps improve efficiency. Integrating it into your marketing efforts will ensure that your funnel continues to flow smoothly and that leads get sent to the right place at the right time. 

Flow Header & Footer: This tool allows you to increase the functionality of your screen flow, adding handy tools that can make it easier to improve your marketing efforts just by seeing that everything looks good and isn’t distracting or parsed out. 

Features to personalize user experiences

Salesforce Pardot: This tool offers marketing automation and lead management that includes CRM integration, lead scoring, ROI reporting, and more. This can help improve sales leads, shorten the sales cycle, and help sales and marketing teams collaborate to create success. 

Campaign Monitor: This allows you to stay within the Salesforce platform and monitor all of your campaigns and marketing efforts without having to open another program or access another platform. 

GetFeedback: This tool makes it easy for brands to gather feedback on their various efforts and initiatives. That way, SMBs can make the right improvements and even trigger actions based on feedback to ensure that things get addressed and resolved promptly. 

Increase your effectiveness by enlisting the virtual receptionists at Smith.ai 

If you really want to streamline communications and make sure that you can focus on your marketing efforts, taking some of the work off your plate is a great choice. Why worry about answering calls, being available for chats, and trying to make time for those social media messages, too? You can recruit the dedicated virtual receptionists from Smith.ai to handle the job, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 

Our agents have years of experience, and we know what it takes to deliver the best performance, including monitoring that performance every step of the way. When you hire our 24/7 virtual receptionists to act as the face of your brand, you’ll get a full-service solution for all of your admin, communication, and performance tracking needs, plus so much more. And to top it off, we’ll even take the extra step to help you customize a plan to manage it all. 

To learn more, schedule a consultation to discuss how our 24/7 virtual receptionists can take the reins so that you can take care of your marketing campaigns and more. You can also reach us at hello@smith.ai or (650)727-6484.