While marketing automation software is the ideal way for today’s marketers to manage all of their initiatives, it’s not within everyone’s reach. For some companies it may be out of budget. Or it may be that a corporate policy prevents you from transitioning away from your current system. Whatever the reason, it’s not always possible to dive headfirst into marketing automation.
Luckily, there are plenty of other useful marketing tools that can help you effectively manage your marketing initiatives. Many of them are free or have a nominal monthly subscription fee.
Maximizing these other useful marketing tools will give you the leverage you need to make the case for marketing automation in the future. Tracking and measuring key metrics proves that your campaigns are effective and demonstrates where your company should be spending its marketing dollars.
Here are 5 types of marketing tools every B2B marketer should be using to make their job as effective as possible:
1. Website Analytics
It’s imperative that marketers understand how many people visit their company’s website and what the visitors’ behavior is like once they arrive. You need to make intelligent marketing decisions based on user behavior, so measurement is key.
EXAMPLE: Hotjar
Most companies use Google Analytics to track visitors, and that’s great. Hotjarcan supplement the info you’re getting from GA with visual, easy-to-interpret data about exactly where people are clicking on your website and how they’re moving through your funnel.
2. A CMS You Can Actually Manage
As you probably know, effective online marketing today requires the creation of an abundance of helpful content, including blogs. CMS stands for Content Management System, and if your company has a blog, you probably have a CMS. Many CMS systems are difficult to manage unless you’re a web developer. But as a marketer, you need to be able to post and manage content nimbly, not have to ask your IT person or web company to do it for you.
EXAMPLE: WordPress
WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS. It’s free, user-friendly, and lets anyone make updates easily. Your website can have a WordPress blog even if the rest of the site wasn’t built in WordPress.
3. Email Marketing Platform
Email is the backbone of digital marketing today. In a Forrester Research survey, 89% of marketers said email was their primary channel for lead generation. It’s a highly effective tool for attracting, converting and delighting prospects and customers.
Your email marketing platform should be intuitive and provide robust metrics on user behavior like open rate and click-through rate.
EXAMPLE: MailChimp
One of the best things about this email marketing platform is that it’s easy to use. MailChimp is priced based on your number of contacts, and the enterprise level allows you to set up automated email workflows which can really take your lead nurturing to the next level.
4. Social Media Management Tool
Social media is a major factor in digital marketing and is a great way for companies to engage with their audience, but it can be a pain to manage. Logging in separately, monitoring, managing, and posting on all of those different streams is a time-suck.
A must-have for marketers is a way to consolidate the data from all of these different sources and find its true business impact.
EXAMPLE: Hootsuite
This is a social media management dashboard that lets you connect all of your company’s social media networks in one place. You get analytics, monitoring, and message scheduling all in one. Tools like Hootsuite save you the headache of juggling multiple social platforms.
4. Order Management for Print and Promo Products
You order your brochures from one place, trade show banners from another, and branded pens from somewhere else. With so many demands on your time, the last thing you want to worry about is whether you have enough giveaways for that event next month or whether you’re almost out of folders.
An order management platform brings all of your marketing collateral and promo products together so you can keep track of orders and manage costs at-a-glance.
EXAMPLE: Delta 360
With Delta 360, your company gets its own online store with a single dashboard where you can easily manage all of your print and promo product orders.
Get a Taste of Marketing Automation
If you want to start using marketing automation in your company but don’t yet have the resources to do so, there’s an option for you called LeadIn.
LeadIn is a free tool for your website that lets you easily capture leads, manage your contacts, and analyze your marketing efforts. It even connects to your other marketing tools so that you can start building the integrated marketing experience your company needs.
There are hundreds of helpful marketing tools out there. For more, take a look at this great list from Buffer on how to build a $0 marketing stack using free tools.
Source: These are the 5 Types of Tools Every B2B Marketer Needs