Would you pay for marketing software in addition to, or instead of, hiring a human marketer?
My cofounder and I had tension related to whether we should continue to polish or whether we should shove the fledgling application out into the wild. The marketers helped balance that with a roadmap based on trade shows and purchasing scenarios.
It is of course helpful when the marketing firm is very well connected, but we would not have had any concerns if we had one marketing expert with technical leverage.
He projected costs on a monthly basis, and we had the ability to say whether we were OK with the amount or whether we needed him to find lower-cost options.
We were pretty well capitalized (my co-founder and I are old :-)) but we paid between $8k and $25k/month, most of the high-end occurring when we were hitting competitive trade shows for premium placement. Even then, he was smart about finding spaces that were on an arterial aisle leading to refreshments and surrounded either by totally JV firms or large constructs that had a history of understaffing (so we would catch their overflow).
Edit: Just to reinforce my original comment, if we had a tool that could help this guy be superman and trim our costs even further, we would be all over it.
I'm not talking about current marketing software that mainly automates very specific marketing functions like email, social media, PPC management, etc.
I'm talking more about software that would help you build a marketing strategy road map and track what's working and what's not, and then how to adapt.