5 Tools Everyone in the Business-To-Business Marketing Industry Should Be Using

The business to business or B2B marketing strategies are targeted towards other businesses, rather than individual end customers. In this age of digital communication and super-fast networks, companies are trying to reach out to their client companies through various online media.

You could also contact professional SEO companies to help you develop and manage the business to business marketing strategy to promote your products or services. Although most of their processes like content development and publishing are done manually, internet marketing companies use certain tools for performing other tasks.

The bottom-line here is to drive more target audiences to their client websites. Let us look at some of the important tools that can be very helpful for improving the effectiveness of your business to business marketing strategy.

Before getting started, it is important for you to know that there are no special tools that are specifically designed for business to business marketing online. The targeting of niche audience basically depends upon the keywords that you choose, and the contents that you develop.

Some of the important tools for internet marketing are:

1. Keyword research tool
2. Website auditing tool
3. Content readability checking tool
4. Traffic analytics and reporting tool
5. Competitor monitoring tool
6. Plagiarism detecting tool
7. Backlinks checking tools

While some of the tools are available for download as standalone apps, there are many others that are available for users through web based interfaces. Also, some of the tools are available for free, while you will have to pay for others.

Keyword research tool:

Ever since the world woke up to the importance of internet marketing, marketing professionals have been using keywords for creating contents. Keywords are basically nothing but the search terms that are being used by people on search engines, when looking for information.

After you index your web pages on various search engines, the search engine crawlers will be able to identify your contents according to the keywords that you use. In the past however, excess you usage of keywords on contents used to deliver good enough results.

Now, with the search engines becoming smarter, such practices are termed as violation of search engine terms and conditions. Overusing of keywords is now considered as spamming, and such websites, directories, and blogs get penalized by the search engines.

There are many such business to business marketing examples that have backfired. The ranking of those pages have gone down, and some of them even got banned.

As a part of your business to business marketing strategy, you will need to find the right keywords. After finding the right one that can effectively promote more sales for your business, you will need to use them in your contents, but in acceptable densities or volumes.

You will also need to use the right keywords if you are using pay-per-click marketing method to promote your business online.

By using the keywords research tools, you can gather information about:

• All the related keywords
• Number of competitors using the keywords
• Estimated searches for monthly and daily basis
• Traffic statistics, etc.

Since it is very important to find the right keywords to drive more sales, you could use a combination of multiple related keywords, and even the long tailed ones in your contents.

Website auditing tool:

Whichever business to business marketing strategy you choose to promote your services or products, you will need to be flexible for changes. Whenever the search engines come up with new algorithm updates, some of your pages might not fit into their new terms and conditions.

Also, if your website has broken links, such pages will not get indexed by the search engines. Even if they do get indexed, they will lose the rankings. Your pages could also lose their rankings, if the keywords are found to be overused.

Therefore it is very important for you to keep auditing the health of your web pages and other offsite content on regular basis. There are many website auditing tools available online, and you can choose the ones that best suit your marketing needs.

Content readability checking tool:

Gone are the days when the marketers use to create low quality contents, just to satisfy the search engines. Now with the search engines becoming more and more advanced, you will need to focus on creating the contents that are genuinely helpful for the readers.

According to this new business to business marketing definition, businesses should primarily focus on adding value to the readers through their write-ups. Some of the new search engine updates also check the readability and grammar of your website and other online contents. Websites and blogs with poor quality content and grammar will get picked up by the search engines, and their page rankings will go down.

In most cases, businesses outsource the content writing works to their web designers itself. They might not have a proper content writing team with them. Therefore it becomes imperative for the website owners to check if the contents are readable or not.

With the content readability checking tool, you will be able to identify the pages that are of poor quality. Make it a point to pull them out and have them edited or redone by professional content writers. It has now become a very important part of your business to business marketing strategy.

Analytical tools:

You can improve your business to business marketing strategies only if you are able to measure the results of your efforts, in an ongoing basis. Therefore, you will need to use the analytical tools to see the performance of your websites.

Such tools to give you information about:

1. Traffic volume
2. Performance of keywords
3. Amount of time spent by visitors on the web pages
4. Graphical representation of traffic moments
5. Location of visitors
6. And lots more.

If you look at any business to business marketing examples that have yielded great success, it is only because of accurate analysis and proper implementation of marketing strategies.

You can use the analytics tools to generate reports on how each aspect of your web elements are performing. It will give you scopes for making improvements in your marketing strategies to drive more sales.

Now we shall look at 5 best tools that you will need for success with your business to business marketing strategy. Online marketing can be very complex and time consuming. The apps mentioned below will help you in automating some of your marketing process to quite an extent.

1. SemRush – SemRush is a robust backlinks checking tools, and it is being used by many internet marketing professionals from across the world. It comes with a lot of features to check the status of your backlinks accurately. It also gives you complete information about the countries from where your website is receiving the backlinks from.

Moreover, you can use the same tool to identify the backlinks that are going to your competitor websites too. Poor quality backlinks and broken links can seriously damage the page rankings, which is why we grade this tool as a must have for all B2B marketing professionals. It is available for purchase at $149, but you can check out its effectiveness with a 14 days trial.

1. Google Keyword Planner – Google Keyword Planner is basically a tool to assist marketers with keyword analysis for Google Adwords. However, since it is targeted for the Google search engine, it is a very handy tool. By using it, you can search all the related keywords, and even download the list.

No other keywords research tools actually match up to this official tool by Google, which is why it is a very important for SEO. The best thing about it is that it is available for free. All you will need is a gmail account to log into this web tool and get started. By default it is set for global keyword search, but you also get the option to localize your search according to specific countries or geographical locations.

1. Google Webmaster Tools – Web Master Tools is another essential arsenal for all internet marketing professionals. It provides you with all the information about your blogs or websites. Some of the important data that it provides are:

• Crawl errors
• Indexing issues
• Broken links
• Internal linking
• And lots more

Since the website owners will need to validate their websites for using the tool, you will not be able to use it to analyze your competition websites with it. However, the good thing is that it is available for free. In spite of its limitation, it is still one of the top SEO tools.

1. CopyScape.com – This is a very powerful web tool for checking plagiarism of the contents that are published on your website, and on other online resources. Search engines are always looking for original contents, and you are not allowed to copy and paste the contents of other websites.

CopyScape picks up plagiarized contents in just a few seconds, and also lists out the sites and blogs, where they are originally found. You can scan the contents with website URLs for free, but it will cost you $10 for 200 text scans, of less than 2000 words / scan.

1. Web CEO – If you are worried about your site getting penalized due to Google updates, then WebCEO is a very handy tool that can help you in many different ways. It has an option of ‘toxic links analyzer’, using which you can find out the backlinks that are of poor quality. As a part of your website ranking recovery process, you will need to remove those harmful backlinks.

With WebCEO, you can also track the performance of your marketing efforts on social networks. You’ll be able to identify the performance of your contents, and make the necessary changes.

It’s a fact that there are no dedicated tool for the job, but it depends on the way you use it. I personally use these tools but the list is nowhere exhaustive. So, why don’t you guys comment on what have I left, or if there is some tool that you feel should be on this list, I will keep on updating the post.