There are so many B2B marketing tools out there that building your stack can be confusing. With some platforms offering an overlap between features like CRM, email marketing, and marketing automation, it’s tough to know what suits your needs best.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through some of the best B2B marketing tools. We’ll explore different categories of marketing tools, then uncover some top picks for each function.
Content Marketing
With content marketing, you can create an ecosystem that brings you qualified, relevant leads and strong brand awareness. Content marketing strategy is all about planning, publishing, and distributing valuable content that’s relevant to your audience.
Content can take lots of different forms, but often the process involved is similar. B2B marketing tools that focus on content marketing offer a solution to one or several steps of the process — whether that’s planning, content design, writing, optimization, or content promotion.
Adobe Stock
Adobe Stock is a great source of stock photography that can really help your online content stand out. Use it to find relevant, high quality, and unexpected imagery to complement your blog posts, social media content, and landing pages.
Canva
Canva is a must-have for B2B marketing teams that don’t have a dedicated graphic designer, or who need extra capacity. This is a free, web-based design tool that makes creating header images, infographics, and social media templates easy.
Clearscope
Clearscope is a really useful content marketing tool if you’re creating blog content that you want to rank highly in search results. With its AI-powered recommendations, Clearscope is a writing tool that can help you create optimized content for your website — without needing to be an expert at search engine optimization (SEO).
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Trying to run effective campaigns as a B2B marketer is tough if you can’t easily access, store, and make the most of the data you hold. That’s where customer relationship management (CRM) software comes in.
CRM software helps you manage customer and prospect data, so you can run your marketing operations more smoothly. Your CRM is like a hub for your marketing and sales teams that allows you to understand your customers more closely, target them with relevant communications, and help plan a strategy based on their actual experiences.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a CRM system that’s built with sales teams in mind. It has some great features for marketers too — including integrations for chatbot and web forms, and the ability to craft, send, and track emails sent through the system.
Salesforce
Salesforce is one of the market leaders in the CRM space, with a fully functioning product that you can easily customize to match our business needs. Their Customer 360 CRM helps you make use of real-time data to help understand your customer better — so you can plan better campaigns.
Zoho
Zoho is another popular CRM provider, with a tool that’s designed around being customer focused. As well as being a useful place to store and use data, Zoho offers built-in marketing automation tools — so marketers can manage events and leads from one place.
Email Marketing
Email marketing should be part of every strong B2B marketer’s toolkit. Being able to create, run, and analyze email campaigns gives you a powerful way to both connect with customers and improve your own marketing efforts.
Most email marketing software gives you the tools you need to run campaigns. They’ll offer email templates that you can customize, different ways to test and optimize campaigns, and the ability to analyze data to understand how you’re hitting your key metrics.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign bills itself as the “#1 automation platform,” which means it’s more than just an email marketing tool. It’s a platform that blends email marketing, marketing automation, CRM, and support tools to give you an effective way to run and manage campaigns targeting B2B companies all in one place.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact is another popular platform that mixes email marketing with other tools — in this case it’s ecommerce, websites, and marketing automation. This means it’s great if you’re a small to medium business that wants to bundle everything in together.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp remains one of the most popular email marketing providers. Their email marketing suite is easy to use and offers plenty of marketing automation features. Like other platforms in this space, Mailchimp also offers additional features — like a marketing CRM, content studio, and personalized recommendations for your campaigns.
Lead Generation
A key metric for most B2B marketers is how many leads they can generate from their activity. This means that investing in tools and technology designed to help with lead generation can be a really smart move.
Lead generation tools is a category with a real mix of products. Some of these platforms help to capture qualified leads for your salespeople by making it easy to create impressive landing pages, while others use clever tracking software to help you identify opportunities.
Leadfeeder
Leadfeeder is a really interesting lead generation tool that helps you figure out which companies are browsing your company website, so you can begin to bring them into your ecosystem. It’s a tool that helps you identify leads, so you can then go on to qualify, nurture, and close them.
Sumo
Sumo is a really simple lead capture tool built around making it easy to capture people’s email addresses. You can use their plugin on WordPress or Shopify sites, then customize it to make the most of list building features like pop ups, scroll boxes, smart bars, and welcome mats.
Unbounce
Unbounce is one of the most popular landing page tools available today. This tool makes it easy to create customized landing pages that’ll help your marketing efforts shine and convert more leads. It’s a great way to build conversion-focused pages even if you don’t have design skills, as there are hundreds of templates included in this drag-and-drop builder.
Market Intelligence
One surefire way to improve your marketing efforts is to invest in market intelligence. Understanding your marketplace, competitors, and where you fit in can give you a huge advantage over others.
Market intelligence tools are a must-have to help inform your B2B marketing strategy. Without them, it’s hard to know what to do, who to target, and when to do it. Market intelligence brings you all the detail you need on customers, competitors, and trends, so you can make the right moves.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a really useful B2B marketing tool for understanding trending content. Its signature tool helps you generate ideas for high performing content, plus monitor your performance. Within the platform, there are also tools to help you with digital PR and competitor intelligence — so you can get a broader view of the marketplace.
Databox
Databox helps you bring all your KPIs and metrics together in one place to help you evaluate how your company is performing. It’s a business analytics and market intelligence tool that allows you to better understand your own operations, so you can refine, improve, and optimize.
ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo is a B2B marketing tool that brings company insights and prospecting data to the heart of your marketing stack. It’s designed to help you build a list of ideal customer contacts, score and rank leads, and integrate with your most-used tools — like your CRM system.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you want to invest in a digital marketing tool that helps you capture inbound leads, search engine optimization (SEO) is the way to go. With a strong SEO tool you’ll be able to plan, run, and analyze content and SEO focused marketing campaigns with ease.
Search engine optimization is all about being found online through organic search. These tools will help you understand how to improve the technical and content side of your website, plus help give you ideas for content and backlink campaigns through keyword research and more.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs boasts an all-in-one toolset designed to help you gain higher search rankings — even if you’re not an SEO expert. It’s a useful tool for small to medium businesses and enterprise companies, with tools to help you audit your site, optimize content, and analyze rankings.
Semrush
Semrush offers an intuitive platform to help you manage your search engine optimization, plus a whole host of other marketing tools. It’ll help you run audits, track rankings, and analyze your backlink profile. Semrush also features tools to help you with content marketing, advertising, and market research.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is an affordable way to get started in the world of SEO and content optimization. It’s widely known for its keyword research tool that helps you to surface relevant phrases to write or optimize content for. It also allows you to analyze your own site and backlinks — plus those of your competitors too.
Social Media Management
Social media management remains relevant — even for a B2B audience. You need to be able to show up where it matters, engage in conversations with potential customers, and monitor for brand mentions across different platforms.
The best social media marketing and management tools let you manage everything in one place. You can schedule content, conduct social listening where you monitor channels for mentions, and reply to messages all from one dashboard. This means you can publish relevant content on LinkedIn and engage with influencers on Instagram with less hassle.
Buffer
Buffer touts itself as offering “simple social media tools for authentic engagement,” and it’s something this B2B marketing tool does well. If you like an uncluttered yet comprehensive experience, Buffer gives you the tools to publish, engage, and analyze with ease.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite remains a favorite in the world of social media management tools. Something this tool does especially well is helps you see what’s happening across multiple platforms and accounts. The intuitive dashboard with multiple streams makes it easy to stay on top of brand mentions and spot opportunities to engage or promote.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is one of the best B2B marketing tools when it comes to social listening. While it’s a full service social media management suite, it offers you in-depth ways to surface relevant content and conversations using mentions, keywords, and hashtags.
Team Collaboration
The best B2B marketing tools aren’t always the ones that let you send that email or publish a blog post. Sometimes, they’re all about helping your marketing team get together to share ideas, communicate, and collaborate.
Team collaboration tools let you work together more productively. Instead of sending emails back and forth, you can catch up asynchronously or jump into a real-time live call when you need to. Finding a collaboration tool that works for your team means you can spend more time on delivery and strategy and less on email threads and meetings.
Dooly
Dooly is a sales team collaboration and deal management tool. Its interface sits on top of CRM and makes it easier for reps to manage pipeline. Not only does it help remove AEs' admin burden of reporting to management on the progress of their deals, it helps organize templates, battle cards, and playbooks.
Asana
Asana is a useful project management tool to help your marketing team execute work more efficiently and effectively. Using its task based system and built-in calendar, you can assign work, set deadlines, check things off, and share links and notes all in one place.
Slack
Slack lets you work together with people wherever they are at a time that makes sense for each of you. It’s a great team collaboration tool if you all work remotely and want to be able to ask quick questions or share links without flooding everyone’s inbox.
Zoom
Zoom seems to be the king of video calling software these days. Video calls are one of the best ways to get people together to make a decision or chat in real-time, so picking up Zoom or an alternative is a useful addition to your B2B marketing tools stack.
Website Tools
If you have a B2B business website, investing in relevant tools can really help you optimize your marketing efforts. Various website tools exist to help you collect valuable data, gain new insights into what’s working, and build stronger relationships with customers.
There’s a huge range of website tools out there, so think about what you’re looking for. Some tools help you unlock analytics so you can optimize campaigns based on real data, while others give you the ability to engage with customers in a more personalized way.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the go-to website tools for marketers. This web tool from Google helps you gain a better understanding of how people interact with your website, so you can plan and tweak campaigns to be more impactful.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is another must-have for many B2B website owners. It’s a tool that gives you greater visibility over how your website performs in search results, and offers suggestions on how you can further improve your website to stand out even more.
ServiceBell
ServiceBell offers you an unrivalled way to communicate with your website visitors through live video. Plug a few lines of code into your website, and you can offer your high value customers the kind of personalized experience they’d get from a luxury store visit.
One of the Best B2B Marketing Tools to Invest In
Being customer-focused is one of the best ways to win at marketing in 2021. You need to align your goals, campaigns, and tools with trying to offer the best customer experience possible.
If you’re ready to make customer experience a priority, consider adding ServiceBell to your marketing software stack. You’ll be able to treat your customers to a real VIP moment with one-to-one, personalized, live video calls — without leaving your website. To experience this customer engagement solution for yourself, sign up for our free plan and have this game changing B2B marketing tool live on your website in moments.