Marketing your business is no longer a straightforward and one-dimensional task.
It doesn't matter if you are an early-stage start-up, an upcoming agency, a small e-commerce business, or a Fortune-500 biggie, it's imperative to use a combination of strategies and tactics to promote your business to get the widest outreach.
With so many ideas and strategies going around your mind, one thing becomes very hard to get a grip on. To plan, organize, and track everything.
There was a growing need for such a tool to visually map and plan your marketing efforts.
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Funnelytics was released around the end of 2017 to be exactly that tool and still one of the best. However, as its name suggests, it's more of a funnel mapping tool rather than an entire planning tool for all your marketing and there was a real lack of collaborative planning for teams & agencies.
Also, it is significantly more expensive than Marketplan.
When Marketplan was released in September' 2018, I was relieved and pleasantly surprised that finally there is a tool to accomplish this.
It is founded by Ty Duran, who is also the founder of some really good tools like Conversion Fly and Convert Pages (which by the way is a fantastic funnel builder that costs just $69 per month for unlimited funnels and pages, almost one-fifth of what mainstream funnel builders cost). So, the initial impression is quite good.
Modules
The following modules are available to map in the canvas,
A) Pages
- Landing page
- Opt-in page
- Sales page
- Sales video
- Order page
- Upsell page
- Confirmation page
- Thank you page
- Pop up
- Blog page
- Survey page
- Webinar page
- Webinar Replay
- Members page
- Calendar
- Download page
B) Campaigns & Apps
- Ad set
- Social plan
- Keyword planner
- Blog planner
- Email sequence
- Chat
The social plan module is really super useful. To manage and track all your social media campaigns from a single dashboard can be great for social media management agencies.
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All major social media platforms are listed. A specific task list can be assigned for each platform and can be shared with team members.
The keyword planner tool can be quite handy for bloggers in particular. It is possible to have a track of how much traffic a post brings based on the initial keyword research.
C) Actions
- Tag
- Condition
- Custom action
- Wait
D) More Tools
- Custom media
- Notes
- Sticky notes
- Task
- Plan portal
With such a rich set of modules, it's impossible not to find a way to plan your marketing whether it's paid advertising, content marketing, search engine optimization, etc.
There are some neat little tricks when mapping out different modules. For example, when you connect the landing page and the opt-in page, the visitors' module pops up in the middle automatically.
Many such minute details save a lot of time when you map out the funnel.
Built-in Templates
There are a lot of built-in templates serving different niches, offers, and types of products or services to promote. It's surely a strong point of Marketplan.
The example plans or templates are available only in the paid plans.
Team and collaboration
One of the best things about Marketplan is the ability to add team members and plan in collaboration.
It is also possible to add your clients as users and display to them the plan you have built to market their product or service.
This is a great value for agencies in particular. A lot of times it's difficult to explain your vision and marketing plan to your clients. Such a visual representation is sure to impress your clients and gain authority for your work.
The number of users and clients you can add depends on different plans.
You can also start a chat or a group conversation with all your team members within Marketplan.
Ad Set Module
This module allows you to plan and manage all your ads from one place regardless of the platform. You can define the goals of each ad set in the campaign and refer to it later easily.
Kanban Module
Kanban is a very organized to-do list for collaborating within a team and it is awesome that Marketplan has this within the app.
B default, there are four lists are available and more can be easily added. Each list can be allocated a custom color so that it can be easily spotted based on the stage it is in or which team member is responsible for.
Cards represent the items that can be added to each list that has to be completed. Cards can be added to each list by simply dragging a new card from the bottom of the canvas.
Each card can be given a title and a detailed description of all the tasks that have to be completed. Additional to the lists, even individual cards can be customized with different colors.
Each card can be assigned to a team member by just clicking the user assign icon on the top right of the card. Team members will get a notification once the card is assigned to them.
Checklists and comments can be assigned to each card and as the card is moved from each phase from doing to complete, all team members can have a look at the progress based on the items in the checklist.
As many cards pile up with all the team members collaborating, the Kanban could look cluttered with a lot of information. To get a much clear view, it is possible to view the cards assigned to a single team member by clicking the solo profile icon.
Blog Planner module
This blog module is extremely useful for content marketing teams to plan and collaborate on blog posts.
Blogs can be set up as drafts or live once they are published. Once the link is live, specific UTM parameters can be set up to track the analytics and performance statistics of various posts.
The editor to write the blog is rich in features with a distraction-free medium and has a really useful section at the top to enter all the target keywords for the post.
Email Sequence Module
This module allows planning all your email sequences and drip campaigns. All the emails can be given a specific title in the sequence under a common email campaign to keep everything organized and easy to identify.
Links can be generated for each email by just entering the destination URL in the email along with any desired UTM parameters for easy tracking.
Various conditions and action elements can be set up within the different emails to plan everything exactly as you need in your email campaign.
Plans & Pricing
There are four plans in total. The free Solo plan allows up to 1 project, 1 plan, and all the mini-apps are included with even the forecasting & projections.
The Starter plan that costs $9 per month comes with 3 users, 10 plans, team collaboration, image and video collaboration, projections but no live tracking and analytics.
The Pro plan costs $29 per month and allows adding up to 5 team members and live analytics for traffic up to 10k page views per month. You also get an unlimited number of plans in the Pro plan and above.
There is also an Agency plan which lets you have 15 team members and bumps up the traffic up to 50k page views. The agency plan also provides white labeling of the entire platform under your domain. Perfect for large agencies with a lot of clients.
The agency plan provides huge value for money and quite simply an incredible deal starting at just $79 per month. You can always add more page views and users based on your requirements.
Support
There is live chat support and a very engaged and helpful Facebook group to resolve any issues.
The response times were sometimes long, but for a young company, we can expect them to get better at it.
Negatives?
The user interface could be more lively with brighter colors.
Let's all agree that planning could get really boring and the last thing you would want is the tool to plan dull and boring.
Conclusion
There are similar tools like Funnelytics and Geru, but Marketplan has some unique features up its sleeve.
A great free plan with all the templates, a full-blown marketing suite to plan rather than just funnels and features perfect for agencies like white labeling makes it the best planning and mapping tool.
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Definitely worth a try.
Have you used Marketplan or any similar tools? If so, leave a comment on your experience. I would love to know.