11 Types of B2B Marketing Tools
One of the biggest challenges for B2B companies is establishing a consistent flow of high-paying clients. While many B2B companies rely on relationships and referrals to grow their client book, establishing a clear marketing strategy can provide extra reassurance.
When you start implementing marketing tactics, however, you will need a few key tools to achieve the best results. Read on for several marketing tools that will make your marketing efforts easier and more effective.
Tactical Marketing Tools:
Email Marketing Platform
Email marketing is one of the most used and effective methods of marketing, for both B2B and B2C companies. The goal with email marketing is to establish a list of subscribers who are engaged and interested in your services. You then send consistent emails to this list to “nurture” them until they are ready to buy from you.
There are many email marketing tools to choose from, and each has its own pros and cons. Many CRMs, such as Hubspot and Salesforce, have an email functionality built-in, which you can leverage to have convenient insights into your customers. Other popular email marketing platforms include MailChimp, ConvertKit, Constant Contact, and ActiveCampaign.
Social Media Scheduler
Many companies want to be more active on social media, and using a scheduler makes it significantly easier to post consistently. The social media platform(s) you intend to use will influence the scheduler that will work best for your company. Example social media schedulers include Later, Planoly, Hootsuite, and Buffer.
Digital Advertising
There are entire agencies dedicated to managing digital advertising, so we’ll keep this list brief. If you plan to advertise on Google, whether with search terms, display ads, or videos, you will need an Google Ads account. For advertising on social media, you will need to create your business account, connect payment, and run your ads through there. Some scheduling platforms or other tools allow you to manage these ads within that platform instead. Choosing where to create the ads will vary depending on your budget and business needs.
CRM
Yes, CRMs are sales tools, but they are also very effective when used in conjunction with other marketing tools. As mentioned above, Salesforce and HubSpot allow you to maintain your CRM and run email marketing campaigns through their platforms, which gives both sales and marketing added insights into your customers. Many other CRMs, such as Pipedrive, Copper, and even monday.com, are easily integrated into various marketing tools as well.
Website Insights:
Website Analytics
In today’s digital age, it is critical that you track your website data to understand how users find and engage with your website. Google Analytics is the standard for tracking your website data. If you haven’t already set up your Google Analytics account, do it today as it only tracks data from when it was created. With Google Analytics, you will be able to create goals that can be directly connected back to your advertising account.
Website User Experience
If you’re hoping to learn even more about your website and the user experience, try out a tool that provides a heatmap and/or recording of how users interact with your site. Lucky Orange, Hotjar and Crazy Egg provide this, and you can use these insights to rework your landing pages to increase conversions.
Design Resources:
Simple Designs
Unless you went to design school, you likely find creating designs a challenging process. Fortunately, Canva.com was developed to make simple designs easier for the everyday person. Now you can quickly create flyers, posters, social media graphics, and more for your business. You can choose from pre-made templates and change every element to make it completely your own.
For advanced or special designs, it’s probably best to work directly with a designer.
Choosing Colors
If you don’t have formal brand standards in place yet, Coolors.co provides an easy way to create and compare color palettes. Once you choose the right one for your business, you can export the palette as a PDF or JPEG to then save for use throughout your business.
Closing Deals:
Proposal Content Library
With a winning marketing strategy in place, you will hopefully be fielding many client requests. When it’s time to formally propose your services, you will be happy to have a proposal content library in place. Depending on your sales team and the other tools you use, your content library might be something as simple as a shared folder with key boilerplate content that can be tweaked for each proposal. If you use a proposal tool for creating proposals or pitches (see below), then you will likely store the content directly in those platforms.
Proposal Creation
Choosing a proposal creation tool will be greatly impacted by your clients and how you submit proposals. For example, if you respond to a lot of RFPs, those proposals will typically follow a different format and structure for each opportunity, which makes it hard to work within a tool. Some platforms, like Seismic and Qvidian, make it easy to create point-by-point (or question/answer) proposal responses. Sometimes collaboration in these tools is challenging, and you may find it easier to simply work within Microsoft Word or Google Docs instead.
If you aren’t responding to RFPs as much, then tools such as PandaDocs and Proposify may work best for your needs. All of the tools in this section allow you to create a standard content library.
Pitch Creation
Many of the proposal platforms described above allow you to create and share pitchdecks as well. Canva (described above) also has pitch templates that can be exported to a PDF or PowerPoint. Of course, many companies choose to work directly in PowerPoint for creating any client pitches.
Next Steps
Now that you have an idea of a few types of marketing tools available to help your business, it's time to create your approach to marketing and begin using these tools.