The B2B Marketer’s Toolbox (CRM, CRO, ABM)

Digital Marketing / February 18, 2022

If you’ve had the chance to try both, you know that marketing for ecommerce or retail businesses tends to be a little different than marketing for business products. Here we’ll take a look at some of the tools a B2B marketer needs to be successful, whether their focus is lead acquisition, lead nurturing, Account-Based Marketing (ABM), product marketing, or a bit of everything!

Ad Platforms

While you don’t need to only rely on paid ads to drive traffic, it can certainly give you a nice head start. But with so many options to choose from, and no room for wasted spend, which networks give you the best chance to reach a precise B2B audience?

LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn ads is the gold-standard for B2B targeting. Because of the importance of LinkedIn when it comes to career growth for many profiles that B2B marketers are trying to reach, LinkedIn has a massive database of accurate job function and industry data that marketers can use to send the right message to the right audience. LinkedIn also has tools that help you track which companies are reaching your website!

Microsoft Ads

Thanks to Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn, you can now leverage LinkedIn targeting on Microsoft’s search and display network. Business audiences, especially for enterprises that use Outlook or Office 365, also skew heavier towards Bing’s search engine because of integrations with these softwares.

Google Ads

Not to be forgotten, Google Ads is also a premiere ad platform to reach qualified business audiences through search, display, video, and more. With features such as offline conversion tracking, you can even send lead quality signals back to the platform to hone in on your most qualified prospects.

Traffic Quality

Now that the traffic is flowing steadily to your website, you’ll want to keep track of its growth and make sure you are reaching the right people.

Google Analytics

This free tool plugs in with Google Ads and Google Search Console to give you a clear look at where your paid and organic traffic is coming from and where it is going. You can use UTM tagging to track traffic from other sources as well, and by setting up goals and audience segments, you can easily track performance by traffic source, location, or other factors.

Leadfeeder

For marketers who want even more insight into their website visitors, Leadfeeder (and similar tools) offers traffic identification software that will match your website visitors to the companies they work for. This information can be invaluable to answer all sorts of questions like:

• Are your ad campaigns reaching the right audience?
• Are your key accounts visiting the website?
• Which prospects seem ready to make a decision?

Conversion Rate Optimization

Traffic: check. Quality: check. Next up: Conversions. If you are bringing the right people to your site in strong volumes, now you need them to convert. These tools will help you improve user experience and drive more conversions.

Hotjar

This is one of our favorite tools for understanding what visitors are doing on our landing pages. Hotjar shows you average scrolldepth and heatmaps that pinpoint which buttons and elements see activity and which are largely ignored. This in turn helps us understand which parts of the page are working well and which need improvements.

Typeform

For collecting contact info and integrating surveys into your website, Typeform has all the tools you need. This tool is pretty specialized so there aren’t many added features, but Typeform integrates well with CRMs. email marketing tools, and analytics tools, and it gives you all the tools you need to provide a great user experience for your visitors.

Google Optimize

Google Optimize allows you to easily perform A/B tests, redirect tests, and multivariate tests to help you make sure you’re always putting your best foot forward. We especially love how multivariate testing allows you to test multiple combinations of headlines, images, and other elements to discover the winning combination.

Customer Relationship Management Platform

Keeping your prospects and customers organized is important, and the right CRM can help you do that and more. These tools are designed to do more than store your contacts in an easy-to-filter platform, they also tie in with other tools in your marketing tech stack to help you get the most out of them. In some cases, they can even replace your tech stack all in one tool!

HubSpot

HubSpot incorporates a free CRM into their toolbox, but it’s normally when this piece is added to other tools like the Marketing, Sales, and Service Hubs that HubSpot’s CRM really shines. Still, even on its own, this CRM can be extremely helpful to keep your contacts organized if you want to review their attribution sources and compare quality, or to build audience lists that can be uploaded to email marketing tools and ad platforms.

Salesforce

A market leader in sales-focused CRMs, Salesforce also offers a powerful CRM to help keep your prospects organized and keep your sales team on track. As much as Salesforce is sales-team focused, marketers love it too for the way it lets you easily track prospects from acquisition to close.

Pipedrive

Another sales-focused CRM, Pipedrive offers a range of acquisition and nurturing tools built into their CRM to give marketers plenty of reason to appreciate the software as well. Pipedrive is a great CRM for small businesses and companies without a large amount of leads to keep organized. As your company grows however, you may find this CRM has trouble scaling with your business.

Email Marketing

Don’t let your prospect go cold, keep them active and nurture them through the funnel with email marketing. These tools are designed to automate marketing and sales sequences to scale your lead nurture processes.

HubSpot Marketing Hub and Pardot by Salesforce

If you’re already using HubSpot or Salesforce for their CRM capabilities, look into their sister products for a simple email marketing solution that plays extra nicely with the tool you’re already using.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign promotes itself as “The #1 Automation Platform” and has focused its service around the email sequences that you can deploy through the platform. ActiveCampaign integrates with hundreds of apps like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.

Campaigner

Campaigner is another fantastic option for email marketers looking to easily create automated email sequences. Campaigner has the standard tools you’d expect from an email software like a wide range of templates to choose from, and there are also some extra tools that will come in handy like form and landing page builders, and easy-to-use conversion tracking.

With the right mix of tools, following your prospects from awareness to conversion to close becomes a more transparent process, which will make it easier for you to understand which parts of your funnel are working well, and which ones need improvement.