8 Marketing Tools for Business

Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook help your brand connect with prospects and customers on social media. MailChimp, Constant Contact and HubSpot let you distribute emails to distribution lists. Microsoft Teams, Zoom and GoToMeeting help you stay connected with your team. There are many tools that marketers rely on each day. There’s a chance that you’re also missing out on some of the tools that currently exist. Read on to learn about some of the platforms and apps that can make a difference in your B2B marketing – and make your life easier.

Visual Thesaurus

Sometimes the synonym function in Word just won’t suffice. One of my English teachers in high school introduced me to this tool and I’ve been using it ever since. Dare I say that it’s even fun to use?!

Just search for a word and the app will map out all the related nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs and provide definitions for each. Find one you like? You can click on it and repeat the process to see that word’s related nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. It’s super neat, or should I say swell, groovy, great or peachy?

Planoly

Do you manage an Instagram account? Perhaps you’d like to see how your content will look alongside your other posts before you hit publish. Planoly is a tool that helps you visually plan your content, schedule it and measure performance. Plus, the tool now works for Facebook and Pinterest as well. There is a free version that lets you manage two profiles and 30 uploads per month for each profile. There are other paid versions in case you have more content to share.

Feedly

Keeping up with the latest news and industry trends can be overwhelming when there are so many different sources and sites to review on a daily basis. Solve information overload with Feedly, which uses an AI-powered assistant named Leo to filter out content that’s not of interest to you. With Feedly, you can define the topics, trends and keywords that you want to stay updated on. Then, Leo pulls relevant news to enable you to quickly review business publications, blogs, newspapers, Twitter feeds and more. Over time, Leo learns with your feedback, meaning you’ll have a carefully curated news feed with articles that interest you. Use these sources to craft a pitch to a journalist or source in a bylined article or infographic.

Moz

Search engine optimization (SEO) helps you attract more visitors to your website. It’s essential to have frequent content updates and high-quality content containing relevant keywords. Moz is a great tool for even SEO beginners. It enables you to analyze keywords to see the monthly volume, the difficulty level, the organic click-through-rate and more.

While you certainly don’t want to overfill your content with too many keywords that can disrupt the flow of the writing, you do want to make sure people see your content. Whether you’re writing blogs, eBooks, landing page copy or some other type of content for your website, incorporating keywords is a must. Consider the Pro version of Moz if you want to be able to search a high volume of keywords each month and set up campaigns.

Hemmingway

Did you know that Ernest Hemingway liked six-toed cats so much that these polydactyl felines are now commonly referred to as Hemingway cats? The famous author also inspired the name of a helpful editing app, which makes a bit more sense when you compare it to six-toed cats.

Kudos to my colleague Mike McConnell for introducing me to this do-it-all tool. It helps you write more clearly and notes when you’re using too much passive voice instead of active voice or difficult phrasing. Clear, succinct writing is key for SEO, so it’s great to have a writing wizard in your back pocket. I would also highly recommend checking out Grammarly as another option.

Hootsuite Amplify

Whether your team is made up of 20 or 20,000 employees, Hootsuite Amplify is a helpful solution for extending the reach of your social media program. A brand’s employees should be its fiercest advocates, and regularly share social content to build awareness and credibility among prospects and customers. The truth is that many organizations find it difficult to engage employees in resharing their content. Here’s where Hootsuite Amplify comes in. It gives your team easy access to approved content so they can share it with their own networks. Providing approved content helps you ensure that the messages your workers are sharing are on-brand, grammatically correct and ladder up to your marketing goals.

Bounceless

When it comes to email marketing, what’s worse than sending out an e-blast or e-newsletter and getting tons of bounces? The point is for people to receive your brand’s updates, not for them to end up in a black hole. Not to mention that if you exceed certain limits, your emails can actually show up lower in the inboxes of those who do receive them.

Bounceless lets you verify email addresses to improve deliverability and your campaign metrics. It can verify large lists with ease and help you avoid dreaded error messages in MailChimp and other marketing platforms.

CoverageBook

PR professionals know how daunting it can be to capture coverage clippings. Not anymore! With CoverageBook, you just plug in your online links or upload a snippet of your print coverage and let the software do the work of pulling statistics on readership, social shares, etc. Once you’ve collected all of the media coverage, you can download the report as a PDF and share it with your teams so they can easily see how many clippings your announcement secured and additional key metrics.

With these marketing tool examples, you and your teams can improve the way you approach social media, email marketing, writing and more.

Looking to harness the right tools to make your marketing program more effective? Contact Mulberry to discuss how we can help your brand reach prospects and customers by leveraging quality content, creative tools and different channels.

 

Jess Messenger is an Account Director at Mulberry Marketing Communications, an award-winning full-service B2B communications agency based in Chicago, London and Australia. She enjoys developing PR campaign strategies and writing for B2B audiences across numerous verticals such as retail, foodservice and healthcare.