It can feel good to go solo on your marketing strategies sometimes—you can tailor your tactics and marketing channels exactly the way you want. But, after slogging through the daily grind of scheduling emails, crafting social media content and endless Googling for new blog post ideas, the burden can feel a little heavy.
Many small- to medium-sized organizations have small or one-person marketing teams and will sometimes need to wear multiple hats to carry out their campaigns. Because of this, B2B marketers must seek efficient, time-saving ways to execute on their marketing efforts.
Fortunately, we’ve compiled a short guide on several B2B marketing tools to consider using to support your strategies:
Content Management Systems (CMS) – WordPress
Before you decide to create a website to start promoting your brand and product/service, you need to consider the content management system that your site will be hosted on. Having a properly-installed CMS in place, will help you manage your content development efforts for your website and provide you with the tools to create a SEO-friendly site as well.
Regarded as one of the most popular software tools for creating blogs and websites, WordPress is an open-source CMS and is free-to-use (custom domain names and additional features are available in paid options).
With WordPress, companies can quickly and easily get a website up and running in little time. With hundreds of customizable themes (pre-built website templates) to choose from, your organization can select the one that best suits your needs.
Additional benefits of WordPress include:
- Clean, simple code makes it easier for search engines to read and index your content making your site SEO-friendly.
- Capability to scale with your business. You can create hundreds of new pages of content in your WordPress site.
- Ability to manage your website from any computer.
Content Discovery & Insights + Influencer Amplification – BuzzSumo
Have you recently found yourself struggling to come up with new topics ideas for your content? BuzzSumo is a tool that helps you discover the most shared content on social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+) allowing you to determine trending topics and build content around.
Another great feature that BuzzSumo has is Influencer Amplification. This feature helps you research and identify key influencers in your industry by searching for them via topic (i.e. SaaS, B2B Marketing, Technology, etc.) or username.
With influencer marketing becoming an increasingly important component to add to your strategy, understanding what content your influencers are promoting can give you a competitive advantage to grab influencer attention to support your brand.
Email Marketing Platform – MailChimp
In a recent B2B Marketing report released by MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute, 77% of B2B marketers reported email newsletters as being on the of the most critical tactics used for content marketing success. In that same report, 64% reported having a dedicated email platform as one of their most-used marketing tools.
One widely-used email marketing tool leveraged by over 12 million people and businesses is MailChimp. This B2B marketing tool allows users to send marketing emails, automated messages and targeted campaigns. The tool also comes with reporting capabilities that allow you to track and monitor the results of your email campaigns.
With numerous features and integrations available, MailChimp is an inexpensive and easy-to-use email tool to consider for your email marketing efforts.
MailChimp is one of several email marketing tools available in the market.
Social Media Management – HootSuite
As B2B marketers spend more of their time producing content, coordinating tradeshows and conferences, developing ad copy and executing other marketing activities, having a social media management tool that can help you save time, collaborate with your team, participate in social listening and deliver reports to determine effectiveness of your efforts has become a hot commodity.
With Hootsuite, marketers can take advantages of features such as:
- Scheduling social media posts in advance
- Managing content across various social media networks
- Creating custom-built reports from social data to track relevant metrics
- Engaging with followers and influencers straight from Hootsuite
If you’re in need of a versatile, collaborative and time-saving social media management tool, consider leveraging HootSuite.
Web Tracking and Analytics – Google Analytics
So now you’re writing blog posts and promoting them on social media, creating new landing pages for your content and produced a company video hosted on the home page – excellent! But how do you measure which web pages are getting the most pageviews, how long people are spending on your site and how do you determine the sources (organic, PPC, email, social, etc.) your audience is coming from?
This is where having a tool like Google Analytics is key to measuring the success of your B2B marketing efforts. Google Analytics is a free-to-use marketing technology tool that gives you the power to analyze data such as web traffic, time on site, bounce rate and traffic sources in order give you a deeper understanding of your audience.
Having the ability to track and monitor the results of your content marketing and paid search campaigns by analyzing data gathered in Google Analytics will make you look like a marketing rockstar and empower you to make data-driven decisions.
Marketing Automation Platforms – Marketo
According to a 2015 Marketo report, marketers who used marketing automation reported that 45% of their pipeline leads were sourced from marketing efforts, compared to just 31% of marketing-driven leads from non-users.
Marketing automation makes it easier to score and route leads through the most appropriate channels, making it easier for your sales team to prioritize their outreach. Automation platforms also simplify lead sourcing and tracking as well as content personalization and segmentation, ensuring that leads get a tailored experience that best reflects where they came from and what need your organization can meet.
Marketo is one of the most powerful and well-reviewed marketing platforms available, and was recently ranked as the top marketing automation platform for 2017. B2B marketers will appreciate how easy it is to integrate your existing CRMs (such as SalesForce) with Marketo, and leverage their powerful reporting to prove ROI and make tweaks to strategy along the way.
With Marketo, B2B marketers can amplify their marketing efforts by:
- Tracking, scoring and nurturing leads
- Creating personalized emails and landing pages
- Integrating with CRMs to track ROI on outreach efforts
- Segmenting qualified leads and filtering unresponsive ones
The effectiveness and positive impact on these B2B marketing tools have been proven time and again, and the beginning of a new year is a great time to implement them. Don’t let a fear of commitment prevent you from discovering the tools that will help you take your marketing strategy to the next level!
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