Marketing tools: essential for B2B and B2C marketeers

Whether you work at a start-up, scale-up or larger organization; marketing tools are essential to grow online traffic, leads and sales. At Basedriver, we also use marketing tools. This results in a monthly growth of our online reach and a well filled sales funnel.

This article is also available in Dutch.

In this article, we share which marketing tools we use at Basedriver to grow our online reach and acquire new customers.

The following topics are covered in this article:

What are marketing tools
Marketing tool for CRM
Marketing tool for SEO
Marketing tool for Leads
Content management
E-mail marketing & Marketing automation
Online Analytics
Marketing tool for social media
Excel is not a marketing tool

What are marketing tools

Marketing tools are software applications that marketeers use to increase their reach, brand awareness and leads within their target group. It often concerns online software that is purchased through a monthly subscription.

A wide variety of marketing tools is available. It is therefore important for large organizations to create a marketing architecture. Based on this, the necessary marketing tools can be determined that help to achieve the business objectives.

Marketing tools are also essential for our own startup; with a small budget, we need to achieve maximum results. Over the last few years, we have set up our own stack of marketing tools that we are happy to share with you.

An architecture with marketing tools

Marketing tool for CRM: Pipedrive

Many of our customers use Microsoft Dynamics as CRM system, which is really suitable for larger organizations. At Basedriver, we have been using Pipedrive for several years. Especially the way in which you can track leads and view the funnel with Pipedrive is useful.

Based on the deals in Pipedrive, there is always a revenue forecast available for the upcoming two months. This is particularly useful for planning and it gives direction to sales activities.

One downside to Pipedrive: the application quickly creates new contacts and organisations. This can result in double profiles. For us, this is not a problem because we use Basedriver as a central solution for data. However, this is something to keep in mind if you want to use Pipedrive in combination with marketing automation.

Marketing tool for SEO: Ahrefs

SEO is crucial for B2B and B2C marketing. Especially as a startup, it is important to select the right keywords and create relevant, valuable content. In addition, it is essential to generate sufficient backlinks from relevant websites. The most important marketing tools in this domain are Semrush, Ahrefs and Moz.

We haven chosen Ahrefs, especially because this tool has the most extensive database for backlinks. It is also possible to create overviews of keywords that score well and the tool indicates which keywords are relatively simple or difficult.

Organic search traffic is a difficult channel, because the results are only visible in the long term. However, by using Ahrefs as marketing tool for SEO, it is possible to structurally work on the visibility in search engines.

We use Ahrefs as marketing tool for SEO

CMS Website: WordPress with essential plugins

About 30% of all websites in the world run on WordPress, including ours. WordPress is indispensable; it is free of charge, a lot of information is available, and plugins can be found for all possible functionalities.

We use the following plugins in our WordPress websites:

• Yoast: the essential plugin for SEO.
• Fluent Forms Pro: we support this plugin for forms with a Basedriver integration.
• Popup Maker: helps to automatically generate a pop-up for subscriptions.
• WPML: this plugin is necessary for support in multiple languages.
• Internal Link Juicer: a plugin that provides internal links to our own pages.
• WP Knowledge base: we have created our knowledge base with this plugin.

Marketing Tool for leads: LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Leadfeeder

For every B2B marketeer, it is important to generate sufficient leads. These are partly generated from the website. With the Leadfeeder tool, it is possible to see which companies have visited the website. This gives a good indication of the visit, the quality of the content and the companies that are interested.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator enables to follow these companies, identify the most important people and approach them. This is the most direct way to get in touch with interested companies and individuals.

Marketing tool for analytics: Google Analytics

Website traffic is an essential metric for every marketeer. Marketing starts with generating visitors to your website. Then, you need to make sure to attract the right visitors and convince them to contact you.

Like almost every company, we use Google Analytics to measure online traffic. Especially as a small website, it is important to exclude your own traffic. This would otherwise result in a very different picture of the course of visitors to the website.

E-mail marketing & marketing automation: Basedriver

Approximately 40% of our customers’ online visits is generated from e-mail marketing and marketing automation. E-mail marketing is an essential way to stay in touch with customers and leads.

E-mail marketing can be used for acquisition, retention and newsletters. We use Basedriver as marketing tool for e-mail marketing with an integration with Pipedrive and WordPress. In the near future, we will also integrate with LinkedIn lead forms.

We use Basedriver as marketing tool for e-mail marketing.

Social media: Buffer

Social media is the central point in our marketing strategy. Our most important social media channel is LinkedIn, where our number of followers increase substantially every month. Recently, we are also active on Pinterest and YouTube.

We use Buffer to manage LinkedIn and Pinterest. This social media marketing tool enables us to schedule posts for multiple channels in advance, resulting in a steady flow of posts at the best moments.

Excel is not a marketing tool

Excel is often used when it comes to planning, data or keyword analysis. After all, Excel is accessible and available to everyone. However, it becomes difficult as soon as data about campaigns need to be shared. In addition, using Excel to store personal data is not a good idea. There is also always the risk of working in an old version.

Do you currently have many files, calendars or briefings in Excel? Then it is definitely worth switching to a marketing tool, that helps to keep a better overview and makes it easier to work together.

Do you want to know more about e-mail marketing with Basedriver?

E-mail marketing is an essential part of the marketing mix for subscriptions. Basedriver is email marketing software specifically designed for this challenge. For example for automatically approaching unsubscribers, sending personal newsletters or automating campaigns.

We make sure that you generate more visitors from e-mail marketing and that you can recognize those visitors on the website. This will increase the revenue of your e-mail marketing team. Basedriver fits into an e-mail marketing strategy that leads to more online visitors and subscribers.

Would you like to know more about subscription marketing with Basedriver or the combination with Copernica? Please contact us for a personal demonstration.

This post is also available in: Nederlands (Dutch)