Any given marketing campaign relies on multiple platforms, a combination of strategies and a crack team ready to do the job. But a worker is only as good as their tools. The same goes for B2B Digital Marketing.
The tools in your campaign toolbox need to be as versatile as the strategies that come together to form your campaign. So this list isn’t going to recommend five different platforms that all do the same thing. Rather, we’re here with five of the best tools to address each aspect of your campaign.
Hubspot is your Swiss army knife – your all-in-one tool. Rather than having one tool for scheduling social media posts, one for blogging and yet another for monitoring activity, Hubspot brings all these functions onto one platform. It structures itself to fit into the natural stages of a sale cycle. It helps you attract visitors by facilitating social media scheduling, blogging, SEO and webpages. Then it helps you turn those visitors into leads through calls to action and direct mail to eventually close those leads and turn them into customers.
Essentially, you can build and manage your whole campaign from Hubspot, one platform accessible by multiple users. And seeing as it provides analytics throughout, you can track your progress and learn from your experience to tailor your campaign or build new campaigns.
If Hubspot is a little out of your price range, then turn to HootSuite. HootSuite is a social media tool that lets you manage multiple social media channels from one dashboard. In addition to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, Hootsuite now supports LinkedIn and WordPress. Just like Hubspot, Hootsuite allows multiple users to access the same dashboard. And for those taking the lead, it’s easy to keep track of team member activity by assigning them tasks that will pop up when they log in.
To make it even easier, Hootsuite will deliver weekly reports straight to your inbox detailing demographics, referrals and engagement. So while there might be other limbs to your campaign, HootSuite lets you manage social media on one dashboard.
Once you’ve got all your social media platforms under one roof, you’re going to need something to post. Curated content is an important part of social media, it helps to cushion your promotional messages and keep your audience engaged with your platform. BuzzSumo helps you monitor what stories are trending across the internet for your chosen keywords. You can use this content to start conversations in your various social media networks and to keep your campaign dynamic.
One of BuzzSumo’s unique features is that it identifies influencers that are relevant to your content areas and provides data surrounding their online activity including their reply ratio and average retweets. By targeting influencers that retweet often and adding them to your media list, you can grow your profile.
If This Then That (IFTTT) is the marketing tool that thinks for you. If it sounds too good to be true, it’s not. IFTTT monitors your blogs and social media pages and reads users’ responses. It then responds in kind according to a recipe you’ve laid out in advance. For example, if someone comments on a WordPress post then they’ll receive an email asking if they’d like to subscribe to your weekly newsletter. Currently, IFTTT supports over 110 platforms, so the chances of being left in the dark are low.
This tool makes the middleman redundant when it comes to following up on leads. It may take you some time to set up your recipes but in the long term, it means your leads are closing themselves.
All of the tools in this list work for different aspects of a campaign, but what about once you’ve closed the deal? That’s where MailChimp comes in. As a mailing list and newsletter manager, MailChimp is your go-to tool for customer relationship management (CRM). It’s as easy as entering email addresses or importing them from an Excel spreadsheet and selecting a template for your newsletter. Once you’ve made a template you can customise it further by playing around with the text and image nodes until you get a layout that suits you. And then just replicate it for your next mailout!
When you’re dealing with a medium as elusive as email, with no likes or comments to assess engagement, MailChimp’s detailed reports come in handy. Each mailout has a corresponding report that details reader behaviour, click rates and the number of emails sent that were actually opened.
