If you currently work as a marketer or spent any time in the marketing department, you are well aware of the amount of B2B marketing tools currently available.
While software and different applications vastly improve the results and efficiency of marketing, it’s also important to select the RIGHT tools lest you become inundated with overlapping software.
After all, there are over 8,000 marketing solutions available to utilize (and growing). Yes, you read that correctly.
And you can see the insane visual that from The MarTech 5000 below:
Many of these marketing tools can be used in all different industries, but I’ll be focusing on B2B specifically. So if you are looking for the essential B2B marketing tools and not looking to overcomplicate your tech stack, you’ll want to dive in below.
Best B2B Marketing Tools
Are you still processing the number of marketing tools mentioned above?
It’s a jaw-dropping number that only grows every year. But what’s cool about this growing list is that more people are coming up with amazing products to better your marketing work and goals.
However, it can make the process of finding the right tools for what you need more of a hassle. Plus, many B2B marketing tools will have some overlap in features or capabilities.
Instead, I decided to share fifteen software solutions that I use currently, have used, or other marketing friends have highly recommended.
There is no particular order to these, nor is every solution going to be a perfect match for you and your team. What combination of tools and which platforms you go with will depend on your company needs and of course, budget.
Tip: Looking to take your marketing to the next level? Here are five B2B marketing strategies you should consider implementing to boost results.
1. EveryoneSocial (Employee Advocacy, Brand Awareness)
Often overlooked in B2B marketing is the value of employee influencers – the people that work every day at your company.
The majority of these employees are on social media and already sharing about your company or their work. Plus, employees have untapped networks of people unfamiliar with your brand or products.
That’s where EveryoneSocial plays an important role. It’s the easiest way to keep employees informed, creating, and sharing – no matter where they are currently working from.
For marketing, it allows you to keep new content in front of employees to engage and share, to encourage employee generated content, and to help drive engagement on branded social posts.
The impact can be felt across sales, employer branding, and internal communications as well. But it can boost brand awareness, drive better quality leads and clicks, and further empathize your company.
We’ve found the average employee has a minimum of 1,000 social connections. If you get 500 employees advocating and sharing, that’s an additional 500,000 worth of authentic reach on whatever recurring basis people are sharing.
2. HubSpot (Marketing CRM, Marketing Automation)
When it comes to marketing automation, there is certainly no shortage of options. However, what makes HubSpot stand out as a top choice of the B2B marketing tools available is their continued innovation.
Previously, the company focused heavily on the automation, email, and social media aspects. But they also made it a one-stop shop by adding a sales CRM component that makes it seamless to keep track of all prospect information, deals, revenue, etc.
For small businesses, they offer a forever free plan that is worth taking advantage of in your marketing. But if you are an enterprise business, they also have the essential features to take your B2B marketing to the next level and stay highly organized.
I’ve been using Hubspot for over five years and the product has only gotten stronger.
3. Drift (Conversational Marketing, Lead Generation)
If you are in B2B marketing, then you’d have to be living on a different planet to be unaware of Drift.
The company and product took over the marketing world in the last few years with the idea of conversational marketing, removing forms, and stellar employee advocacy marketing from employees.
Note: Ahem, this is what great work culture, employee enthusiasm for their company, and employees being encouraged to create and share on social media can do. Employees on social media can make a huge marketing impact.
Drift uses personalized chat bots for your website, where you can set up various conversation starters to get people engaging and getting information faster.
Of course, there are tons of features like calendars, email, mobile reply, and more elements that make Drift one of the top B2B marketing tools to consider utilizing. But the product has been a game changer for marketing and sales teams.
4. Clearbit (Lead Enrichment, Data)
A challenging part of marketing is finding accurate data and ensuring it’s clean information. There are plenty of tools out there, but oftentimes the data can be outdated or there are not many features.
And while your CRM may do a decent job with lead information, Clearbit is a solution your marketing and sales teams can utilize. They combine over 250 public and private data sources, which sorts through millions of data points.
And then Clearbit provides information from sources like social presence, company websites, legal filings, crowdsourcing, and more.
The software uses real-time lookups to be the most accurate source of information about your leads and contacts.
With Clearbit you can enrich current data, reveal anonymous web traffic into companies viewing your site, and they offer tons of integrations.
5. Zoom (Webinars and video conferencing)
As remote work became more of the norm and work from home increased dramatically due to the Covid-19 pandemic, marketers needed an array of marketing tools to get the job done.
Fortunately besides having accessible video for meetings, Zoom is also a powerful lead generation tool for webinars.
You may have already been using Zoom prior to the 2020 influx of remote work, but it’s been a solid tool to navigate webinars and interesting marketing discussion to attract business.
While the term “webinars” might be played out, they are still impactful if you have a solid strategy and informative topics to discuss.
Fortunately, Zoom services multiplied purposes for your organization beyond marketing so it’s typically an easy tool to adopt and get support for internally. Plus, there are tons of integrations to ensure leads are being passed to your CRM.
6. Chili Piper (Scheduling, Lead Generation)
I remember a few years back seeing Chili Piper come into my social feed and thought what an interesting and somewhat odd product name.
But it got me to click and learn more about their platform. And I quickly saw the value for marketing and how it can be an essential B2B marketing tool.
So what is Chili Piper and how does it work?
The concept of this marketing product is simple: once a contact fills out information on a form, Chili Piper brings up a sweet scheduler to help people immediately start a call or provide a calendar to schedule time.
For your marketing or sales team, now you can have an automatic calendar to connect with potential buyers quickly, can coordinate and track in-person meetings at conferences or trade shows, and soon you’ll have access to email collaboration software features which look promising.
7. Hotjar (Conversion Rate Optimization)
Making a great website and stellar landing pages is one thing, but do you know how optimized they are for your audience?
Even a small percent improvement in conversation rate can noticeably impact business revenue.
One solid B2B marketing tool to consider using is Hotjar.
With this product, you can create detailed heatmaps of how people are using your website, recordings of how a user is clicking and scrolling, insights on conversion funnels, and even get feedback from web visitors.
This is a great way to analyze how CTAs are working, menus, and any other website features to help you improve conversion rates and designs so there are less barriers for your website users.
8. Terminus (ABM, Display Ads)
Not long ago, the term Account-Based Marketing had become the hot topic for B2B marketing. While the explosion of this strategy has slowed down, it’s become a popular and important strategy for many organizations.
What has popped out in the marketing world from this strategy, are account-based marketing platforms like Terminus.
Terminus lets you and your team send personalized messages to the right audiences at the right time. You are able to push messages and various experiences via display advertising, to LinkedIn, website personalization, and chat.
Additionally, Terminus provides valuable data and revenue information about your targets and how things are progressing based on your campaigns. You’ll even find trusted intent data and sales intelligence to help your marketing and sales teams.
9. Google Analytics (Reporting, Data)
Naturally, I had to include Google Analytics into this list. Understanding how your marketing is performing and impacting your brand and website is key, which is where this free reporting tool comes in handy.
There’s no doubt in my mind that every marketer has heard of Google Analytics and a majority have probably used it in some way. While there are other analytic tools out there, I always come back to this one the most.
The reporting options get quite in-depth, you can understand conversions, event triggers, and demographics of people visiting your site. I also like it for building remarketing audiences and easily connecting goals to Google AdWords, for tracking paid ad results.
10. BuzzSumo (Content Marketing, Social Listening)
If your B2B marketing strategy does not include a heavy emphasis on content, then you are truly missing out! But, one way to step up your content marketing is through the use of BuzzSumo.
If you are looking for insights on content, new blog post ideas, do some social listening, or look to find influencers to collaborate with, then BuzzSumo is a solid tool to add to your marketing tech stack.
The platform is easy to use and as mentioned, has multiple use cases. Here are a few detailed features that might interest you:
- Easily enter competitors and discover their top content, how many social shares it has gotten, number of backlinks to the post
- Research keywords and find trends, search volume, and potential cost per click on those terms
- Find influencers and authors on Twitter to collaborate with in your specific niche
- Monitor your brand, competitors, various topics and/or products
11. Litmus (Email marketing)
While there are many B2B marketing tools that can handle email (like HubSpot), you may want to take your email game to the next level. That’s where a platform like Litmus can be crucial additional to your marketing arsenal.
Litmus has been around for over a decade and continues to be a leader in the email marketing space. And over the years, they’ve improved and added new features to make emails better.
In the platform, it pulls your email campaigns into a central location where you can easily collaborate with others and keep everyone on the same page.
You can also combine your email service provider data with Litmus analytics, which you can see things like the devices your subscribers use most, what their app preferences are, and more.
Another awesome feature is the Litmus email testing, which ensures before you send any emails to check for errors, layout issues, and how it looks in various email providers.
12. Moz (SEO, Content Marketing)
One important marketing function is SEO and technical SEO. And if you have been in marketing at any point, you definitely should recognize the name Moz.
There are quite a few good names and platforms in the SEO space, but I’ve personally found Moz to be the strongest. Now, it also can be a bit pricey but the value is definitely there.
But B2B companies must write content and should value SEO, even in the changing landscape of the search engine algorithms.
Moz lets you do quite a bit in this field including highly accurate keyword research, tracking performance of your own keywords, website audits, backlink analysis, link research, competitor tracking, on-page optimization data, custom reporting and alerts as well.
This platform is a beast, but can be critical to maximizing your content and SEO.
Final Thoughts
There you have, some of the best B2B marketing software and tools out there. Of course, you may have certain additional preferences or needs beyond what is just above.
However, the above twelve choices are extremely powerful to your marketing and can level up your marketing teams productivity and effectiveness.
Now that you are here:
If you are ready to organize your content, get employees sharing content to their networks, and enabling them in a platform to create user-generated content – EveryoneSocial can be a massive marketing tool. And don’t forget, employee advocacy benefits sales, social recruiting, employer branding, and internal communications. Learn more about us here.
