Now that we’re in 2023 (can you believe it?!) it’s only becoming more and more clear that technology rules over all. In B2B marketing, it’s no different. Marketing technology, or MarTech, is a crucial part of making your brand strategy run as smoothly and effectively as possible. But why is it so important, and what are some of the best of these tools to use (purely coming from my suggestions)?
Marketing Technology describes any piece of software that you can employ to achieve your marketing strategy and goals. So yeah, it’s a pretty broad term. Don’t be intimidated by how expansive the list of software can be, you simply have to lay out a plan and a reason for every piece of software you use, and it’ll quickly become a lot less intimidating. Let’s start at the beginning of your B2B process. You want to identify leads to target with your campaigns and content. This can be particularly difficult when you want to send emails to new leads, how are you supposed to find their email address? You can’t just guess – imagine those bounce rates! Start your MarTech journey with free extensions like Lusha or Apollo. These are massive online databases that suggest verified contact informaiton on accounts you have indentified, simply attach them to your LinkedIn. Both are free, however Lusha has quite a small credit limit before it asks you to pay for an upgrade. Nevertheless, they offer a much more reliable way to find high-quality verified leads. I’d say it’s probably worth it.
Now how are you sending content to those indentified leads? If you’re initially going to stick to the social media platform you found them on, try content schedulers such as Sendible or Monday.com. You can use these to pre-prepare social media posts weeks or even months in advance, scheduling them to automatically be posted at a set date and time. Edit and save drafts, look at previews to see how the style will look on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and more. This allows you to come up with a consistent, engaging schedule of content to maintain reliability in both established and new leads. The only downside is you do have to pay for the majority of online schedulers, but as someone who survives on Sendible I’d definitely say it’s worth it. They also allow for you to place revamped former content in place until you can design something new – it’s always good to have content backed up to maintain that output.
But where are these leads getting sent to? Chances are, it’ll be your lovely little B2B website. Now you can’t just pitch up your website on the internet yourself, it has to be hosted by something. Not just because it’s what Stone2Stone use, but WordPress is one of the most popular hosting systems to use, and for good reason. It’s easy to use, and the admin features let you control every aspect of your website. Even for someone rather technologically challenged like myself, wordpress is easy to navigate through your pages, posts, footers and more.
Another handy tool that will do wonders for your marketing results are SEO tools. You can just try and do SEO all by yourself by doing research and ensuring you put enough keywords, links and images in, but chances are you’re going to fall rather short if that’s not what you’re trained to do as a job. I cannot recommend using an SEO extension like Yoast enough. Yoast is an easy way to choose your keyword, write a good slug and meta description, all the while rating it. It will tell you if you need to alter anything such as add more backlinks, and work with you until you get a nice green smiley face to say the SEO for the page is good, thereby placing yourself much higher on those search results lists than you would have on your own. You can also get most of the features you need with the free version, what a dream.
I hope this has already convinced you of a few benefits of utilising good MarTech, but what about after you’ve set up your social media and website extensions. Well, now it’s time to analyse the results. Semrush, Google Search Console and more are designed to provide you with in-depth analytics of your website and SEO performance. Being able to see any issues or needed improvements in real time can be crucial to staying on top in both search results and credibility to leads and clients. Being able to see what search terms and queries your website and social pages are coming up for and how many visitors and engagements you’re getting are how you ensure you are operating at the best you can be.
But what about when you want to seek leads out and funnel them towards something? Let’s face it, as B2B marketers you’re probably going to be staring at the makings of an email campaign at some point. Personally, my go-to for designing easy, engaging emails is Hubspot. Not just a great informational resource about all things marketing, they have an excellent service of email templates and the ability to store lists of contacts to send said emails to. Once you’ve sent an email to your chosen list, it then constantly analyses the results almost immediately, telling you who’s opened it, who’s clicked on the links etc. It even lets you know who’s unsubscribed or bounced so that you can remove them from your list for future emails (always look out for those GDPR laws!).
So, there you have it. I’ve merely listed the MarTech that I myself use, but I can safely say I wouldn’t be able to navigate this B2B marketing journey without them. Do your research, play about with different software (so long as you have a solid reason and outcome to using it), and watch the MarTech magic happen. Good luck!
