The marketing strategy for a B2B business tends to be a little different than that of B2C companies and presents its own unique challenges. Thankfully, plenty of excellent digital marketing tools can help B2B companies achieve marketing success. From tools designed to help you attract more website visitors by optimizing your site's SEO to email marketing tools and many more, there is no shortage of excellent marketing tools available for B2B companies.
To help you choose the tools that will best position your company for success, let's take a look at the top B2B marketing tools for automation, content, leads, and more.
What is a B2B marketing tool?
A B2B marketing tool is any marketing software solution designed to help B2B companies with their marketing efforts. The categories of B2B marketing tools that we'll discuss in this article include:
Team collaboration tools
Marketing automation tools
Lead generation tools
Content marketing tools
Email marketing tools
Search engine optimization (SEO) tools
Social media marketing tools
Team collaboration
One key ingredient to successful marketing campaigns is a team that can work together efficiently. One great way to help your teams communicate and stay on track is to use team collaboration software. Today, with more and more employees working from home, team collaboration is more important than ever. If you rely on a remote workforce, or you simply want to provide your in-house employees with a great platform for staying organized, here are four excellent team collaboration tools to consider:
Teamwork
One of the leading project management and team collaboration platforms on the market today, Teamwork offers a ton of valuable tools and features, including ready-to-use project templates, time tracking, the ability to add features such as live chat to your project, and much more. If you are looking for a feature-rich project management app to let you manage your team, project, and clients all in one place, then Teamwork is the platform for you.
Learn more about how Teamwork makes working together more efficient and enjoyable.
Asana
Another well-known team collaboration platform, Asana enables you to create projects, assign tasks to different team members, easily track their progress, and provide easy-to-use communication tools for improved team collaboration. Asana also offers detailed reporting and an impressive list of integrations with other high-quality tools.
ClickUp
ClickUp is a project management platform that lets you break projects down into tasks, assign those tasks to team members, and track their progress. Along with serving as a great project management platform, ClickUp is a good platform for team communication and collaboration as well, offering live chat and the ability to share important files and documents easily.
Project Manager
Project Manager is a platform built for hybrid teams and offers plenty of features designed to improve team collaboration. This includes charts and boards for organizing projects, file sharing and comments for team communication, dashboards for viewing real-time project data, and automated workflows for improving team productivity.
Marketing automation
Executing a marketing strategy is often a tedious undertaking. With marketing automation tools, B2B companies can create automated workflows that trigger at various points in the customer journey. This allows you to market to your customers without having to be directly involved with the process at every step. Some of the best marketing automation tools available today include:
HubSpot
The biggest name in marketing automation, Hubspot offers a long list of marketing automation tools and features that allow B2B companies to create marketing campaigns that practically run and manage themselves. A few of HubSpot's noteworthy marketing automation features include:
Creating automated email campaigns
Designing custom conditions and triggers to activate your various marketing workflows
Internal notifications to let your team know when a contact has taken a noteworthy action
Marketo
Marketo is a marketing automation platform designed specifically to help B2B companies create an optimized customer experience. With Marketo, you can engage customers strategically via behavior tracking, build and scale automated marketing campaigns, and access detailed analytics to see how different marketing efforts and channels impact your company's revenue.
Eloqua
With Eloqua, B2B companies can nurture leads automatically via segmentation and targeting tools, automated lead scoring, and the ability to effortlessly create automated marketing campaigns with simple drag-and-drop commands. Another impressive feature of Eloqua is its reliance on artificial intelligence, which the platform uses to calculate customer fatigue, offer personalized content and product recommendations, score leads, and much more.
Lead generation
Few things are more valuable in the business world than high-quality leads. This is especially true for B2B companies selling specialized products that cannot be successfully marketed to consumers at large. Lead generation tools help you capture the contact information of people who visit your landing page or website, and some of the best lead generation tools for B2B companies include:
Sumo
One of the best ways to capture leads on your website is to use a lead generation popup. Sumo makes designing and installing these popups easy, offering scroll boxes, inline forms, welcome mats, and smart bars. Best of all, Sumo is completely free to use — forever.
Leadfeeder
Most lead generation tools work by encouraging website visitors to provide their contact information, but Leadfeeder is a little different. With Leadfeeder, B2B companies can identify the names of the companies visiting their website, converting anonymous visitors into real company names without requiring input from the visitors themselves. Along with shedding light on who visits your website, Leadfeeder also enables you to track their behavior for even more opportunities to learn more about your potential customers.
Intercom
Chatbots can be an excellent tool for capturing leads, and Intercom is one of the best solutions for building marketing chatbots into a B2B website. Along with automated, proactive chat messages that a range of visitor actions can trigger, Intercom also lets you create automated product tours, email campaigns, and self-service support options.
Content marketing
Creating and publishing great B2B content can accomplish several marketing objectives. For one, it can position your brand as a leader in its field and help you establish trust with your customers. In fact, most B2B customers consume an average of 4.5 pieces of content before contacting a supplier. Content marketing can also serve as a way to promote your products and services indirectly. Lastly, high-quality content can improve your site's SEO. If you would like to streamline and optimize your content marketing efforts, here are a few great content marketing tools to check out:
SEMrush
Populating the content you publish with targeted keywords is one of the best ways to improve the SEO value it offers. SEMrush is a high-quality keyword research tool that allows you to uncover millions of national and local keywords. More than just a keyword research tool alone, SEMrush also lets you schedule when to publish your content, provides customized recommendations for improving your content, and lets you track and analyze competitor websites and marketing strategies.
Clearscope
Another high-quality keyword research tool, Clearscope uses AI to analyze top-performing competitor content to pinpoint the keywords that will impact your content's SEO the most. Along with providing customized keyword suggestions, Clearscope also scores your content's SEO, scores its readability, and lets you know what your target word count should be based on the content's topic.
StoryChief
One of the most comprehensive platforms for content marketing, StoryChief provides everything that B2B brands need to execute an effective content marketing strategy. This includes features such as a content calendar to schedule when content is published, keyword research tools, the ability to track changes to content and assign tasks, detailed content marketing analytics, and more.
BuzzSumo
In some cases, finding compelling topics to write about is one of the more challenging aspects of content marketing. BuzzSumo ensures that content marketers never run out of ideas by offering research and discovery tools that let marketers pinpoint content that performs well for other brands. Along with helping you discover content ideas, BuzzSumo also works to connect brands with relevant influencers so that they can execute effective influencer marketing campaigns.
Simplified
Simplified's AI writer is a powerful tool that offers an array of benefits to writers of all kinds. With its intuitive interface, it provides a multi-faceted solution to the common challenges writers encounter. All you need to do is input your prompt and the necessary information, choose your preferred tone and output languages, and with a simple click of the "Generate" button, you'll have a polished piece of writing at your fingertips.
Email marketing
Even today, when email feels like almost outdated technology, 64% of B2B marketers still say that their email marketing strategy is effective for meeting business goals. If you would like to leverage email outreach to its full potential, here are four great email marketing tools to try out:
Mailchimp
One of the most well-known email marketing tools, Mailchimp offers all the tools B2B companies need for effective email marketing, including list segmentation tools, automation features, and detailed analytics. One of the more impressive features of Mailchimp is that it offers AI-assisted suggestions designed to help you make your email content more engaging.
GetResponse
With GetResponse, companies can create automated email marketing campaigns that are customized, professional, and targeted. Automated email marketing isn't the only function of GetResponse: You can also look forward to tools such as autoresponders, sales funnels, a website builder, website tracking, and more.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign offers all of the email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM tools that B2B companies need to create optimized customer experiences. While there is a wide range of tools and features that ActiveCampaign offers, the platform's top tools related to email marketing include list segmentation tools, email autoresponders, and triggered emails.
Litmus
A/B testing is an important part of creating effective email marketing campaigns, and Litmus makes testing your emails easy with advanced email analytics. Along with these email analytics features, Litmus offers a powerful email campaign builder, AI-powered email personalization, and dozens of integrations with other sales, CRM, and marketing apps.
Search engine optimization
Even if your website is selling exceptional products backed by highly compelling content, you aren't going to generate many conversions if no one finds it. Search engine optimization (SEO) is optimizing a website with keyword research and SEO best practices to grow website traffic. Some of the best tools available today for helping improve a website's SEO include:
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO toolset that enables brands to audit and optimize their site's SEO, analyze competitor websites to see what is working well for them, perform keyword research, and track their ranking progress. Ahrefs can be used to optimize both websites and blog content and is one of the most comprehensive and feature-rich SEO tools available today.
Moz
Moz is a platform that offers numerous features designed to help improve a website's SEO. This includes features such as a site audit to uncover technical SEO issues and provide recommendations for fixing them, rank tracking for individual keywords, backlinks analysis, and advanced keyword research tools.
Yoast
Designed specifically for WordPress blogs, Yoast makes it easy to optimize every piece of content so that as many people can find it as possible. With Yoast, you can look forward to advanced SEO analysis and recommendations provided in real time as you write your content. In addition to its popular WordPress plug-in, Yoast also offers a plug-in for optimizing Shopify stores, a video SEO plug-in, a WooCommerce SEO plug-in, and a local SEO plug-in for improving your visibility to local customers.
Social media marketing
According to a 2022 HubSpot survey, 77% of social media marketers said that social media marketing had been effective for their company in 2021. This is no surprise, given that social media is where most customers spend the majority of their time online. If you would like to improve both your social media management and social media marketing, here are a few great tools to check out:
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media management platform. It offers a content calendar for scheduling your social media posts, social listening tools for monitoring all of your keywords and mentions, trend analysis for discovering trending topics, and tools for quickly responding to social media comments. If you are looking for a single tool to take your brand's social media marketing efforts to new heights, you can't go wrong with Sprout Social.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite provides a powerful dashboard for managing every aspect of multiple social media accounts. With Hootsuite, you can look forward to tools and features such as a content calendar for scheduling social media posts, social media marketing campaign optimization tools, the ability to quickly respond to social media comments, messages, and mentions, and the ability to manage platform access without sharing passwords.
Buffer
Buffer provides an impressive range of social media marketing tools with a user-friendly dashboard for managing multiple social accounts. This includes tools for planning and publishing social content, advanced analytics and reporting for measuring the results of your social media posts, and the ability to respond to comments, messages, and mentions quickly. Buffer also offers a tool for building customized landing pages to which you can direct your social media followers.
Improve your B2B marketing efforts with Teamwork
One of the best ways to improve your B2B marketing results is to leverage the right tools. At Teamwork, we help B2B companies stay organized and on track with the world's only project management platform built for client work. If you want to learn more about how Teamwork empowers B2B marketing success, check out this resource on our best-in-class marketing features.