Want to boost your B2B marketing? Explore 9 powerful tools to streamline lead generation and content creation, including HubSpot, ChatGPT Pro, Ahrefs, and Metadata.io.
In B2B marketing, “demand generation” is used almost as much as “leads.” It is often defined by the activities that encourage individual prospects to turn into leads. As the world we sell in becomes more saturated and buyer journeys more complex, the right tools can significantly enhance the efficacy of your marketing efforts.
Although we believe tech should only be added once you’ve proven a need, let’s look at some of the more prominent tools available for generating demand. We have received $0 for these opinions, and we always recommend that you find the best tools for your specific use case, regardless of how trendy they are.
Marketing automation and CRM
1. HubSpot
HubSpot integrates marketing automation, customer service, sales, and operations software into a unified solution. It’s invaluable for managing and nurturing leads, streamlining general marketing processes, and delivering a clearer picture of your business’s health with polished dashboards, reports, and integrations with almost every prominent product.
Why it’s valuable
HubSpot centralizes customer interactions and data, providing a single source of truth for marketing efforts. This enables stronger and more personalized marketing at scale. It’s incredibly user-friendly and offers powerful automation capabilities that empower even the smallest marketing teams to operate like major players.
From automating email campaigns based on user behavior to tracking individual interactions across every touchpoint, HubSpot supports all the functions that help build demand. We believe HubSpot has outpaced any other offering in this space and is quickly becoming the go-to player for all things go-to-market (GTM).
Also Read: Hyper-targeting: The Secret Weapon for Laser-Focused Marketing
AI-driven communication and content tools
2. ChatGPT Pro
We strongly advocate using ChatGPT Pro as a brainstorming tool. Designed to facilitate human-like communication, it can be a valuable teammate for fleshing out ideas or identifying weaknesses in your competitor’s content.
Why it’s valuable
Think of ChatGPT Pro as a brainstorming engine that can take conversational input and organize your thoughts, sometimes even more effectively than you can on your own. It’s a great tool for validating demand-generation activities or campaigns by helping you explore your initial ideas further without needing additional meetings.
While we wouldn’t recommend relying solely on ChatGPT Pro for content creation, it can significantly guide your ideas and accelerate the process by 40-50%. It’s rapidly becoming a powerful tool with frequent updates and improvements, especially when you learn to leverage its full potential.
Also Read: How AI Can Enhance, Not Replace, Customer Experience
3. Originality.ai
As AI-generated content becomes increasingly prevalent across industries, Originality.ai provides a valuable service by ensuring the authenticity of your content. This can be a lifesaver, especially when outsourcing content creation or relying on AI to maintain a high output.
Why it’s valuable
Originality.ai becomes your best friend when identifying AI-generated content, particularly if you outsource content or use AI to meet production goals. This allows you to focus on injecting your unique perspective (POV) into the content, ensuring each piece aligns with your brand voice and resonates with your audience.
Social media and SEO management
4. Oktopost
Oktopost specializes in social media management for B2B companies, providing tools to track and optimize social media’s impact on business growth.
Why it’s valuable
Oktopost is a valuable tool for B2B teams of all sizes, regardless of their social media expertise. The platform helps you manage, monitor, and measure the effectiveness of your social media campaigns, providing insights into how they contribute to lead generation and revenue growth.
Oktopost goes beyond basic social media management by fostering a cohesive go-to-market (GTM) strategy on LinkedIn. It streamlines social media tasks by allowing you to schedule posts for your team, analyze engagement metrics, and motivate your sales team to maintain a consistent posting schedule.
5. Ahrefs
While we prefer Ahrefs, several SEO tools can effectively improve your website’s search ranking.
Why it’s valuable
Ahrefs offers a comprehensive suite of SEO tools, providing valuable insights into your market’s search landscape. You can track your competitors’ performance, optimize your content for organic search, and analyze backlinks to ensure you’re not targeting overly competitive keywords. Ahrefs boasts robust competitor analysis features, detailed keyword research capabilities, and a user-friendly interface that empowers you to identify optimization opportunities across individual search queries. It’s a powerful tool that delivers effective results.
Website optimization and personalization
6. Lucky Orange
Lucky Orange provides real-time analytics and screen recording tools to understand how users interact with your website.
Why it’s valuable
Heatmapping is a crucial element of conversion rate optimization (CRO), and Lucky Orange offers valuable insights that can help you and your team improve site performance. It lets you see what visitors do on your site, including where they click, how far they scroll, and where their cursor tends to hover. This actionable data empowers you to enhance user experiences and encourage the ideal behavior you’re targeting.
7. Drift
Despite mixed opinions on chatbots, their ability to engage website visitors remains undeniable. Drift is a pioneer in conversational marketing, integrating sales and marketing platforms to facilitate real-time conversations with potential customers on your site.
Why it’s valuable
Drift’s conversational AI utilizes chatbots and personalized messaging to guide customers through the buying journey, ultimately increasing conversion rates. Engaging website visitors quickly and authentically is crucial, and Drift facilitates this interaction.
While the initial cost can be high, Drift provides valuable visitor insights and allows for dynamic personalization. Conversations can pick up seamlessly from where they left off on previous visits, fostering stronger engagement. For companies that clearly define their ideal customer profile (ICP), Drift can be a powerful tool for driving engagement and boosting demand for your product across all levels.
Creative content development
8. Canva
Canva‘s story inspires startups to challenge industry giants. They offer a simplified design tool that caters to a specific audience—non-designers—and have achieved remarkable success. Their secret weapon? A deep understanding of their target market.
Why it’s valuable
Canva democratizes design by empowering anyone to create professional-looking visuals without extensive training. Their ongoing improvements make design creation faster for everyone, regardless of design expertise.
B2B marketing heavily relies on visual elements. Canva offers a user-friendly and affordable solution compared to competitors. While it may not be suitable for creating high-end commercial videos, it fulfills 95% of most B2B teams’ in-house design needs.
Also Read: Jonathan Moran on the Future of MarTech: AI, Data Privacy, and Emerging Trends
Advanced advertising and marketing operations
9. Metadata.io
Metadata.io streamlines managing digital advertising campaigns, leveraging AI to optimize ad delivery and audience targeting.
Why it’s valuable
Metadata.io addresses a common pain point for marketers: the cumbersome interfaces of social media advertising platforms. They offer a user-friendly interface that allows you to create, deploy, and track all your ads from a single location. With a click of a button, you can access comprehensive reporting metrics across all platforms, eliminating the need to navigate individual platform analytics.
Another valuable feature is the ability to run automated A/B testing for your ad campaigns. Metadata.io helps marketing teams save time by simplifying the creation of ad variations and automatically launching experiments. This can be a game-changer for optimizing your ad performance.
While Metadata.io is a powerful tool, it’s important to have a well-defined strategy before implementation. To maximize your return on investment (ROI), ensure you clearly understand your target audience, your messaging, and their online behavior.
Conclusion
Demand generation remains a top priority for marketing teams in today’s digital marketing landscape. Exploring the various technological solutions can significantly streamline and enhance your overall marketing efforts.
