6 Tools Every B2B Marketing Executive Should Have

10.22.2015
By: KCD PR Editorial Staff
Category: Uncategorized

You’re a B2B marketing executive tasked with strategizing, implementing and overseeing the marketing efforts for your organization. Like most B2B marketers, you’re probably faced with the challenges of identifying target audiences, generating leads and reporting on data findings. Luckily for you, there is an evolving arsenal of tools designed to help overcome these common B2B marketing challenges and assist you in flawlessly conquering your B2B marketing campaign. Let’s take a look at the latest.

B2B Marketing Tactics

Web Analytics 

By now you’ve probably heard the fuss about analytics and reporting. Analytics are crucial to grounding any marketing campaign, they allow a marketer to set benchmarks and goals and then measure whether or not a campaign succeeded in meeting those goals. We understand, using analytics can take time to adapt to but it’s well worth the investment in the long run.

In order to determine if your marketing efforts are paying off you must be able to measure web traffic, keyword performance, audience demographics, which content is resonating, calculate ROI, etc. If your top keywords are underperforming, you will be clued into what areas need adjustments. Without a way to measure these stats, your marketing successes and failures will remain a mystery.

Google Analytics and Piwik are both free tools that can be used to track and measure your marketing performance.

Brand and Reputation Management

Keeping track of your brand’s reputation is one of the most important tasks a marketing executive faces. With an endless amount of outlets for consumers to comment on your brand, keeping track can be a daunting task. A larger challenge is missing a negative comment and failing to reply, leaving your brand’s reputation potentially exposed.

To ensure you are monitoring your brand’s consumer mentions, we suggest using a tool such as socialmention or Google Alerts. Socialmention allows users to search for the name of their brand or a keyword to determine how it is being mentioned in real-time across the web. The tool even breaks down which platforms mentions are coming from and hashtags that are being attached to them. Google Alerts serves a similar purpose, sending an email update with a link anytime a set word or phrase appears on the internet. Tools like these provide extra assurance that no brand mention goes unnoticed.

Content Readability

B2B marketing copy has a reputation for being boring and technical. Drop the bland business talk and breathe life into your content so readers will be enticed to take the time to digest the information you’ve worked so diligently to craft.

If you’re not working with outside marketing or PR counsel, using a free content readability tool is a great way to tell if your content follows proper sentence structure and grammar rules. Content readability tools are also great for spotting content filled with jargon or difficult to read sentences that will turn readers away. Try dropping a blog post or web page into Readability-Score or Read-able to get a sense of whether or not your content will connect with the average reader.

SEO Audit

You spend countless hours brainstorming, drafting and editing marketing and website collateral. If you’re not optimizing that content for search engines, you’re essentially throwing away all that hard work you just spent countless hours on. SEO is crucial to helping search engines and users find your business, content and products – with an SEO tool, optimization can be completed in a matter of minutes.

A simple plugin, such as Yoast SEO, will walk a user through identifying a keyword, personalizing a URL, crafting a meta description and more.

Social Media Scheduling

[Tweet “@SMExaminer found 88% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn and 80% plan to increase their use of the platform. “]

For a social media presence to be effective it must be consistent. One nifty tool to make sure content is consistently being generated is to use a scheduling tool. By populating content in bulk during one session and scheduling it to publish on future dates, B2B businesses can keep their focus on sales while still having a strong social media presence. HootSuite, Buffer, and TweetDeck are all great tools allowing marketers to organize their social media efforts for numerous platforms.

A quick note about auto publishing, just because your social media is automated doesn’t mean it can be left unattended. Organizations need to be diligent about replying to comments and interacting with users, this step still requires a human touch.

Keyword Research

In order for a brand to be found, users need to be able to locate its content. That means it needs to appear in searches – enter the use of keywords. Keywords allow search engines to identify what a piece of content is about and connect it to the search results that are generated when an internet user searches for that specific word or phrase.

Using a keyword research generator allows marketers to identify what specific words and phrases their audience is searching for and then tailor content to meet those needs. If your B2B company specializes in pool supplies some common keywords might include pool care, pool cleaning products, pool maintenance and so on. Generating content that includes these words and phrases will allow search engines and users to find your content and identify that specialty with your brand.

To help generate a few keyword ideas try using one, or all, of these free tools: Google Trends, WordStream, Internet Marketing Ninja.

Take your B2B Marketing a step further with lead nurturing. We’ve compiled seven B2B Email Templates to help get the conversation flowing! Download below and your B2B business won’t be sorry. 


B2B Email Template


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