The world of recruitment and marketing software is massive and girl do I love a bit of software.

Many a time over my five years working in recruitment marketing I have felt like a new tool would fix everything. That we'd be more efficient, more successful and happier girls and boys if we could just have this new tool… and of course we are for about a week. 

There is a lot to think about (well this is how I'd break it down, you may disagree):

Applicant tracking systems & CRM - The most important in my opinion. Getting this right impacts everything else. Our data is precious, it's what can differentiate us in the market. Examples: Bullhorn, TalentRover, Microdec, Bond Adapt.

Website, SEO and content management systems - Central to getting the online and content strategies in place and gaining organic traffic and conversions. Examples: Wordpress, Medium, Ghost, Joomla, Jekyll.

Email campaign software - Unless you're a HTML wizz, we need email campaign tools that are as easy as possible to use, and that hook up with our ATS & CRM. The market is pretty much captured by Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor.

Website monitoring, PPC and key word tracking - Google have the monopoly on this market with Google Analytics, however there are other tools that help with click tracking as well, like Seevolution, and there are a lot of key word research and planning tools such as Ubersuggest, WordStream and BuzzSumo.

Social media management, mentions & sharing systems - Being able to manage and analyse social media activity from one place saves time and sanity. Tools like Brand24, Buffer, HootSuite are usually the most popular.

Influencer and content aggregator - Finding easy and automated ways to monitor news and content, as well as the key players is key to any content strategy. Feedly, Google Alerts and BuzzSumo are all useful in this regard.

Lead generation - Making sure we're capturing and then using all the leads that come through to our landing pages is always a battle, but there are plenty of suppliers waiting to hear our woes in this regard. Some of the solutions like Hubspot, Pardot, Marcetto and Lead Forensics capture leads and more, but it costs you! Flamingo alternatively is a basic tool I have used in the past.

So what's my point?

What I have learnt is pick one of each (that you NEED) and stick with them! There isn't a perfect solution, perhaps there never will be. We have to learn to make the most of what we've got by upping our skills, organising our time properly and analysing our performance.

What I have come across most speaking to others in the same position is that we concentrate so much on the tools we're using that we sometimes forget to have a strategy at the core:

• Who are we targeting?
• Where do we find them?
• What is our message?
• What content do we need to generate?
• Where are we seeing the most ROI?
• Why would they be interested in what we’ve got to say?

I'll never stop being a software junkie - of course we need to continually make sure we're not using out of date inefficient systems… but I've made peace with the fact that nothing's ever perfect… or is it?!