Estás empezando en la estrategia de marketing B2B. ¿Qué herramientas y software son esenciales para su éxito?

When starting out in B2B marketing, having the right tools is critical for success. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software like HubSpot or Salesforce helps manage leads, track customer interactions, and automate marketing efforts. For project management and collaboration, tools like Monday.com and Slack ensure smooth communication and task tracking. Google Analytics or SEMrush provides valuable insights into web traffic and SEO performance, while Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign streamlines email marketing campaigns. Additionally, design tools like Canva or Adobe Creative Suite aid in creating visually appealing content for various marketing channels.

In B2B marketing strategy, essential tools include CRM platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot to capture your audience’s pain points and manage relationships. These CRMs help streamline outreach via email marketing, utilizing multi-touch campaigns to engage prospects effectively across different channels. With these tools, you can personalize communications, track leads, and nurture them efficiently, ultimately converting them into customers. By leveraging data insights, you’ll align your marketing efforts with sales goals for a more strategic approach to driving growth. Quick, targeted, and multi-channel engagement is the key!

Starting out in B2B marketing strategy, the right tools can make all the difference: HubSpot: Imagine building strong relationships. HubSpot's CRM helps you track leads, nurture them, and close deals seamlessly. Google Analytics: It's like having a map for your digital journey, showing you what’s working and where to improve. SEMrush: Think of it as your competitive edge—helping you identify keywords, analyze competitors, and optimize your content. Asana: For project management, ensuring everyone’s on the same page. Canva: Visual storytelling made simple.

The company's CRM software is the history book for all sales and marketing employees. It's also the perfect tool for understanding the customer journey by analyzing the procedures that customers go through.

CRMs are a must because you will use them at any point in your strategy development. Since all the customer information is logged in the system, you will get access to the customer journey, contact data, deals, opportunity progress, win/lose status, ROI, product interest and vertical segmentation. It will give you a strong basis of who is interested in your products and which channel they came from, as well as contact data to further nurture them through automated workflows/emails. If you have many customers, centralised CRM data will allow for better GDPR governance too.

Marketing metrics provide you with insights to develop the best strategy possible for your company. Gathering and analyzing data is an essential part of the decision-making process.

Your analytics tools should include some measurement of market and user intent. You can buy in tools like 6sense or bombora, or you can invent your own model of scoring content consumption and pushing that data to other channels. Regardless of how you do it, ideally you want to know who is already researching the b2b topics that you care about. This gives you a head start in identifying the audience that is already exhibiting buying signals. You can then craft content and target those individuals and accounts to bring them closer to your brand, and trigger sales actions. This advances analytics from what happened on the website, to what is happening in the market.

Many CRMs come with marketing modules equipped with the tools you need - campaign monitors, workflow management, social media stats, conversion rates, engagement metrics, web traffic and whatnot. KPIs are essential to building a successful marketing strategy and analytics tools will help you navigate your performance (and give proof of ROI). NB! If you are using several tools, be careful with your analysis. I, personally, always cross-reference my multiple analytics sources to gain a complete overview and understanding of the data. My two CRMs, GA4, my outreach tools and my SEO tools do not always agree due to different methodologies (and wrong CRM data inputs), so it is important to stick to one source of truth.

To measure marketing performance and make data-driven decisions, invest in analytics tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or Mixpanel.

Understanding customer behavior is the key to successful email automation. Creating a well-informed email automation strategy will help marketers increase leads and conversions. Moreover, analyzing the data from email campaigns is an excellent way to enhance and refine the company's marketing strategies.

All marketing strategies have a nurturing element, which is hard to achieve without streamlining and automating your messaging. Use email automation to spread the right message, to the right people at the right time. It helps with consistent follow-ups, large-scale audience outreach, brand promotions and, most importantly, the email triggers help you move MQLs down the funnel. I like to use my CRM's email tool because it collects all the marketing data in the same place, but many businesses start with just Outlook automated mass messaging or other email tools, because, honestly, how else would you reach out to 2000 people in the same day?

Streamline your email marketing efforts with automation tools like Mailchimp, Marketo, or Pardot. These tools help you create personalized campaigns, track open rates, and measure ROI.

B2B might still operate on traditional lines, but email is king when it comes to nurturing customers. As you scale, it's crucial to invest in an email marketing tool that can handle multiple campaigns across different audience segments, provides detailed analytics, and supports A/B testing. I've used Reply.io, and it made all this super easy. But don’t just set it and forget it—stay on top of your campaigns. Optimise daily based on feedback like CTRs, reply rates, and drop-offs. Keep a regular cadence with your team and ensure alignment with stakeholders. Pro tip: Use AI tools to craft killer subject lines and fine-tune your A/B tests.

Because B2B customers spend considerable time researching before reaching out to Sales, you need a tool to help you distribute and manage your nurturing content. A content system (CMS) will allow you to manage your blog and content pieces - whitepapers, case studies, ebooks, infographics - from writing, SEO optimisation and AI assistants, to scheduling and auto-distribution. CMSs tend to be more user-friendly. If your team lacks the technical knowledge to manage the website/blog content, a CMS will be a better choice. CMSs have better URL management - update the content piece, but don't change the URL. Consider how helpful that is when you need to update the content for printed QRs, for example.

A CMS is essential for managing your website content, including blog posts, landing pages, and marketing assets. Popular options include WordPress, HubSpot CMS, and Wix.

If you’re looking for a way to streamline your social media efforts, Assembly is worth checking out. We’ve been able to batch our content creation, set it to auto-publish based on their recommended posting times for maximum engagement, and then focus on other things. The best part is that we have it integrated into slack so as soon as those posts go live our internal employees can help amplify it.

Data shows that social media plays a vital role in the B2B decision-making process. Engage with your potential customers, respond to conversations and build brand awareness with the help of social media tools. Instead of logging into each channel separately, use a tool to tailor the message and distribute it to all channels from the same system. The system will then give you the data for engagement, clicks, views, followers and ROI if you do in-channel lead gen. I recommend using social tools to schedule posts ahead of time, gather trend data and do competitor listening.

Stay organized and efficient with project management tools like Asana, Trello, or Monday.com. These tools help you track tasks, deadlines, and project progress.