10 Must-Have Tools That Will Make Your B2B Marketing More Effective

While there are definitely more challenges in the modern digital marketing world, we are also blessed with rapid advancements in technology. There are a virtually unlimited amount of marketing tools available to choose from. Yet, although they certainly can be useful, choosing the right one for your business can indeed be a confusing task. In this guide, we will explore ten of the best digital marketing tools that can help you achieve better marketing results. This list will include some social media-related tools, B2B SEO services, content marketing, email marketing, and tools for digital marketing aspects. Each one can definitely help you to improve a certain area of your business to take it to the next level of growth. Without further ado, let us begin.

1. Google Analytics

Let’s start with the handy, and totally free Google Analytics. Google Analytics is still one of the most powerful tools to monitor -and improve- organic traffic. Organic traffic is still one of the most important aspects in growing your business, and the more you have it, the healthier your business will be. Google Analytics help you not only to monitor the quantity of your traffic, but also the. Yes, as previously mentioned, we want to have as much traffic as possible. However, it will be useless if those visitors aren’t qualified. Google Analytics will help us to learn about our visitors, and our target audience in general, such as:

• Your performance in social media: engagements, interactions, and followers growth among others
• Keywords that are driving the most traffic to your site
• The demographics of your visitors: age, location, gender, and other information
• The dwell time of your audience (i.e., how long are your visitors staying on your website)
• Which part of your site is the most popular, and which require optimization

Google Analytics is very versatile, and there are many other ways to use it to gather more data and information. The best way to use Google Analytics is to track the right KPIs according to your organizational and marketing goals. So, install the tracking code, and spend some time of trial and errors until you find the best approach.

2. BuzzSumo

In an era where content is king, and inbound marketing is THE marketing strategy to go for, BuzzSumo is a very important tool to have. BuzzSumo can help you to figure out the right type of content for your business, and the right content that can effectively engage your target audience. BuzzSumo is also an exceptional tool to find out how your competitors are doing, especially regarding their content marketing. The concept behind BuzzSumo is very simple: you search based on topic or competitor, not so different than a Google search. Then, BuzzSumo will display the best performing contents according to that topic or competitor. BuzzSumo will also display the number of shares across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+, which are very important indicators. You can use BuzzSumo in many ways: you can start with running a search for your focus keywords, as well as your closest competitors. This way, you’ll get a better idea on how to develop your contents. The best thing about it? You can try it for free.

3. KissMetrics

KissMetrics’ blog is well known for being one of the best digital marketing resources out there, but they also have a very impressive product worthy of all marketers’ attentions. In conjunction with Google Analytics, KissMetrics will be your strongest weapon to monitor, analyze, and optimize your digital marketing strategy across all channels and campaigns. Yet, a common question is, why would you need KissMetrics, a pay-to-play tool, when you have the free Google Analytics. There are many benefits and key features not offered by Google Analytics, and we’ll let KissMetrics themselves answer this. Monitoring and analytics, again, are huge aspects of your overall marketing strategy. Without tracking and analyzing your moves, you won’t which tactics are worth your time and resources. Marketing strategy, after all, will always be tied to the marketing budget, and we should only focus on tactics that can provide the best possible ROI. One of the most interesting KissMetric features is the funnel report, where you can easily monitor your sales funnel from top to bottom and optimize the necessary areas. KissMetrics is admittedly, quite expensive with its various pricing options, yet it is definitely worth it. You will save money in the long run by taking advantage of KissMetrics’ powerful analytics to find the best ROI.

4. Hootsuite

In this modern digital era, how well you do in your social media platforms can either make or break your business. Social media marketing is definitely a necessity, and yet it is very, very saturated. A social media automation tool like Hootsuite can help you get ahead of the pack, especially with how you can schedule posts in advance, saving both your time and resources in the long run. Yet, there are many other features of Hootsuite that can help you in your social media marketing, and digital marketing in general:

• Easier time to identify influencers, especially useful if you are planning to do influencer marketing
• The feature to identify and qualify leads, useful for both marketing and sales teams
• Pre-written, automated responses, can help you maintain engagement and interaction without wasting your time
• The ability to manage more than 30 social media profiles at hand

Especially if your business is social-media heavy (you should), Hootsuite can help a lot. Imagine managing more than 10 social media profiles manually, it would be enough to frustrate virtually everyone. To some extent, Hootsuite can also help you monitor your social media channels, which in turn will help you analyze the performance of each channel.

5. Crazy Egg

Our website is our modern equivalent of a storefront in days past, an extremely important aspect of our branding and online presence. If your website is performing well, you are already halfway in securing your online presence. Yet, what actually are the key factors of a proper website? How can you know what’s working and what’s need more optimizing? Crazy Egg will help with all those questions. Crazy Egg’s tagline is “Make your website better.Instantly.”, and it does deliver on that promise.It is very easy to use, and you can know the key areas to make website changes that will generate better results. Crazy Egg packed tons of useful features including:

• Complete website analysis and reporting
• Intuitive and impressive A/B testing feature
• The detailed report of your visitors’ journey
• Targeting and personalization analysis
• Heatmaps, mouse recording, scrollmaps, and others
• Detailed information about your visitors such as their country of location, the site they were referred from, and more

You can try Crazy Egg for free, and it is definitely worth your time. An all-in-one tool to help you optimize your site, which in return, will maximize your sales and leads.

6.Pitchbox

Influencer marketing is very important in this saturated digital environment. It is really, really hard to get your voice heard, and having the help of influencers can really make a major difference. Whether you are a new startup or an established business, an influencer campaign can help accelerate your growth. Even if you are a brand new business, if you can build relationships with the right influencers, you can get immediate results whether to boost your contents, promote your products, and improve your SEO. With that being said, engaging influencers can be a really tough job, and Pitchbox is one of the tools that can make your life easier. Pitchbox’s primary feature is to automate the process of contacting your influencers, without eliminating the ability to give it your personal touch. It is also a powerful analytics tool where you can see the stats of the high-authority influencers, review sites, and even your competitors’ backlinks. Pitchbox’s features are actually quite broad, and you might need to invest some time to explore it until you can find the proper way to utilize it. It is quite expensive, starting at $195/month, but you can request a demo to check its features first.

7. ActiveCampaign

While there are certainly a lot of different marketing automation platforms out there (link to marketing automation guide), ActiveCampaign remains as our top pick for two main reasons: it is very affordable, starting at just $17 a month, and it packs a serious set of features comparable to even the most expensive platforms worth thousands of dollars a month. Besides the obvious marketing automation and email marketing features, ActiveCampaign also packed other tools with its various pricings:

• CRM, complete with sales automation tools
• Lead scoring tools to qualify prospects and contacts
• Excellent third party integration with various platforms
• An attribution hub to centralize your data across all channels
• Custom domain, branding, user permission, and onboarding

And many more. The best thing about ActiveCampaign is that it remains quite affordable. Even the most premium (enterprise) package with 10,000 contacts will only cost you $399 a month. With that, you even get free design services and your own account representative. With ActiveCampaign, you get a loot of tools and features in one place, saving your time and resources with a very affordable price. Definitely worth your try.

8.Wrike

Digital marketing strategy can be a very complicated project involving a lot of different tasks. So, a proper project organization tool is a must, and our choice for this aspect is Wrike. Wrike is a tool to help you manage all your different tasks, where you can share your progress or discuss it with your team. You can access Wrike from your mobile devices anywhere, anytime, and stay in the loop for your team’s progress. In the past, email was the go-to platform to collaborate with your team. Yet, emails do have their limitations: it can get cluttered easily, leading to confusion. You might miss key messages as they went to the spam folder, and it’s really hard to keep your email thread well-structured in just a few months. With Wrike, every aspect of your marketing strategy can be mapped out and shared in one, centralized place. It is very easy to use, and you can easily create a task (or card) and assign it to specific team members. Wrike is not the only tool of this type, there are Trello and Taskworld among others. Yet, considering its various achievements, it is safe to assume Wrike is the best choice in this category.

9. Yoast SEO

If your site is WordPress-based, and you do care about SEO (well, you should), you shouldn’t overlook the Yoast SEO plugin, a very powerful tool to easily optimize your WordPress site for SEO. The best thing about Yoast is that it is very easy to use, even if you just know a thing or two about SEO. Simply download and install the Yoast plugin, and Yoast will walk you through the whole process after asking some key questions about your site and your goals. Even if you don’t know anything about SEO, Yoast can give some useful advice, and you can actually learn the basics of SEO from just using Yoast. The best thing? It is totally free, so you really don’t have anything to lose. Yet, even with it being free, Yoast packed some serious features from checking the readability of your content, keyword density, to a thorough Page Analysis functionality. It is truly an impressive tool considering its cost, and it is a must-have if your site is built on WordPress.

10. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is certainly one of the most popular digital marketing tools available, especially for SEO practitioners. Ahrefs’ key features is to track backlinks, mentions about your brands, while also being an excellent competitive analysis. With the help of Ahrefs, you can easily monitor your growth during the various stages of your business, and find out the key areas where you can improve your marketing activities. Here are just some of the key features of Ahrefs that might be useful for your marketing strategy:

• Showing you the number of backlinks linking to your site, useful for SEO efforts
• Showing the number of social media engagements
• Showing and analyzing which keywords are giving you the most traffic
• Showing the key statistics of your competitors, and what kinds of contents they are publishing

There are many other features that might be useful for you, and the nice thing is there’s a 14-day free trial. So, explore Ahrefs on your own and find out whether it is the right one for your business before committing on a monthly payment. Ahrefs, being filled with numbers, can be very confusing at first, but will be easier to understand once you’ve spent some time with it.

Conclusion

There are two main aspects where digital marketing tools can help your business: analytics and automation. Without monitoring the right metrics, you won’t be able to assess your progress, and won’t be able to adjust strategy when necessary. On the other hand, automation tools can help with some marketing tasks that are repetitive and labor-heavy, so you can put your resources elsewhere where it matters. There are certainly many other marketing tools that can be useful for your business, and you may not use all 10 on this list. Yet, even if you decided to use just one, it can have a major impact on your business.