Are you leveraging the many B2B marketing tools available to create, share and measure your content? If you’re not, you’re likely wasting time on tasks that could be done faster and easier, or worse, missing out on important metrics that tell you what’s working and what’s not.
Check out some of the most valuable B2B marketing tools for creating, sharing and measuring all the great content you create. Leverage these resources to get more out of your efforts, driving greater traffic, SEO value and profit.
B2B Marketing Tools to CREATE
1. Canva
Cost: Freemium, with pro plans starting at $12.95/month
Canva has made it easy for marketers or business owners to DIY create their own graphics for content marketing. I use Canva for all of my social media images, blog headers, and simple explainer graphics.
While you can get away with the free version of Canva for most projects, to upload a custom font, you need the pro version. While you also need the pro version to access some of their stock images, you can avoid this issue with our #5 tool suggestion.
2. Ubersuggest
Cost: Free
Keywords are essential for creating effective and optimized content for your website. Ubersuggest is one of my favorite tools for finding those keywords if you don’t want to pay for a tool. Created by marketing guru, Neil Patel, this free website makes keyword research super simple. It helps you find specific data for keywords, including search volume, a ranking rating, and potential costs for CPC and paid ads, allowing you to choose the best ones for your content.
As an added bonus, you can also search by country and language, which is very helpful if you have international customers or clients.
Download our quick and easy keyword research guide if you want more tips and tricks.
3. Yoast
Cost: Free WordPress plugin, premium version starts at $89/month
Yoast makes SEO easy, even for newbies. This plugin assesses every post and page on your site and gives you a readability and SEO score, based on your focus keyword. It then gives you recommendations on how to improve your content. Yoast also lets you easily edit your snippet for each page.
4. WP Smush
Cost: Freemium, with a paid plan starting at $19/month
This handy plugin lets you compress images on your site, which saves on storage and most importantly, increases your page speed. It’s necessary to compress images if you’re actively adding new content or media to your site, and this plugin is easy to use and works well without paying for a paid version.
5. Unsplash
Cost: Free
Unsplash is a free website for high-quality stock images. Whether it’s for social media, blog posts, or your web pages, images are a must for content creation. I always find on-brand options on Unsplash. As an alternative, you can also check Pixabay, Burst, or Pexels, but the selection isn’t quite as good.
6. HARO
Cost: Free
Using high-quality expert sources in your blog posts or articles allows you to create value-driven content. As a writer, you can sign up for Cision’s tool: Help A Reporter Out (HARO). On the platform, you submit a query asking for expert opinions on a particular topic. This gets emailed out to 800,000 potential sources, and once sent out, you’ll get emails with responses that you can sift through and choose from.
Note: The publication site, i.e., the blog or website where the article will be published, does need to meet certain standards. Check out their rules for journalists to make sure your site qualifies and you understand how to use the platform.
If you want help finding more sources for your content, make sure to check out our Blog Research guide.
Cost: Free
Part of creating click-worthy content is making sure your search snippet appeals to your target audience in the search engine results page (SERP). This WordPress plugin lets you edit your schema (the content that will show up in the SERP) to create a rich snippet. That means you can include information like a picture, reviews, event dates, and more.
8. Feedly
Cost: Free, with pro plans starting at $5/month
Feedly is a news aggregator that helps you source potential content. You can create feeds based on interests, topics, and industries and then sift through the articles to find content to fill up your content calendar with new ideas. You can also grab relevant articles to share on your social media. This is also one of the best B2B marketing tools to find sources and data for your blog posts.
Create more content with repurposing—let me teach you how on Udemy!
9. Industry Newsletters
Cost: Free
Industry newsletters can be used to find inspiration, sources, and social media content. I’m subscribed to the top newsletters in the marketing industry so I can get relevant content and articles sent straight into my inbox.
Get more tools this like in our exhaustive list of content discovery tools.
B2B Marketing Tools for SHARING
10. Hootsuite
Cost: Freemium, with paid plans starting at $29/month
Of all the social sharing tools, Hootsuite is my favorite and go-to option. It can really fall under the sharing and measuring section, because the paid version gives you key performance metrics for your social channels. The free version does only allow three accounts and 30 scheduled messages at a time, but for most smaller B2B companies, that should be plenty!
11. Twitter Lists
If you’re active on Twitter, you know how difficult it can be to find shareable content that you actually want to engage with. The thing is, you need to be active on Twitter to build your following and drive shares of your own content, making it important that you find the accounts that peak your interest.
To do so, create Twitter Lists by adding the accounts that you like most; then browse through your lists to find that engaging content, saving time and energy.
12. Later
Cost: Freemium, with paid plans starting at $9/month
Later is my favorite tool for scheduling Instagram posts. Not on does it allow you to see how your feed will look before posting, which is of course critical for Instagram, but it also offers deep analytics on when your visitors are active, which posts are performing best and which hashtags are driving the most engagements, impressions, etc.
13. Swifty Bar
Cost: Free
Sharing content is a two-way street, besides sharing your own content, you want others to share and promote on their social media as well. Make it easy for readers to instantly post your blog articles by using this plugin that has social sharing buttons. The Swifty Bar also includes valuable information like reading time and a progress bar for each article.
Swifty Bar is what I use on my site—check out how sleek and simple it is at the bottom of this page.
14. MailerLite
Cost: Free, paid plans starting at $10
I looked for months for an email marketing tool that had built-in tools for creating on-site pop-ups and landing pages—and was also somewhat affordable. I finally found MailerLite and was amazed and what the tool offers for free.
If you’re creating content and driving people to your site, you better be collecting their emails and engaging with them via email marketing. This tool makes it easy to do that, all within one place. No more connecting your MailChimp account to some other tool and hoping they talk to one another. Have everything in one place with MailerLite.
B2B Marketing Tools to MEASURE
15. Google Analytics
Cost: Free
Google Analytics is the gold standard for measuring every possible data point and metric related to your website and performance. Make sure to install Google Analytics on your site so you can begin collecting data for every visit and page view that you get. For help finding metrics that measure the success of your content, check out this guide I shared with Wave on content marketing reporting.
Check out CMI’s guide on how to use Google Analytics reporting options
16. Ahrefs
Cost: They offer 7-day trials for $7, Plans start at $99/month
Similar to other analytics-based platforms, Ahrefs offers the standard suite of tracking and tools. The uniqueness comes in robust competitor and keyword monitoring, which tells you which searches are getting people to your website and which are falling short. Ahrefs makes it easy to keep track of what your competition does, as well as identify keyword and backlinking opportunities, making this a hugely valuable B2B marketing tool if you’re trying to make the most of your content marketing efforts.
17. Unbounce
Cost: Plans start at $99/month
Use a tool like Unbounce to A/B test performance and track the metrics to see which landing pages, images and copy are converting. Their simple A/B testing features makes it easy to create and optimize on-site content easy, even for non-developers, and then track your results so you can always be making data-based decisions.
18. Social Media Networks’ On-Site Insights
Cost: Free
For social media metrics, I often use the platform’s on-site insights section. Facebook and Instagram analytics offer a lot of valuable data points, as well as insights related to your audience (I.E., best times to post). While it can be nice to get reports from a third-party tool, I find that sometimes it’s helpful to dive into the data on the network itself.
Cost: Free
When you’re keeping track of simple metrics for your content, sometimes Google Docs or Sheets really do provide the best solution, allowing you to be hands-on with the data on a regular basis. I still use Google Sheets to track and share data for internal efforts and have templates for my social media clients to use as well.
20. Accuranker
Cost: 14-day free trial and monthly subscriptions start at $79/month. Pricing depends on how many keywords you want to access in a given month, starting at 500.
Accuranker is an data analytics and monitoring tool for your website, specifically, keyword rankings. Their database updates with keyword rankings hourly keyword and you can also set up automated reports to track specific metrics based on your own KPIs and keywords.
