For every brilliant, time-saving tool, there are another 10 tools that will waste more time than they save you. If you’re a B2B marketer who is looking for clever technology to increase your Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL’s) then read on. We’ve spent months going through the duds and the clones and arrived at my favourite 5 tools for the year.
This is an update to last year’s list of tools, which includes some great tech that we still use today.
How can you retarget to people who haven’t actually visited your website?
A well-used strategy for generating B2B leads is to be seen as a knowledge leader within your industry. You may frequently share industry news on social media that takes the user to an external website. With Switchy, you can shorten and rebrand those links.
How does this help you generate more leads?
Well.. the shortened link includes a tracking pixel that enables you to retarget them at a later date across the web with marketing messages.
It’s incredibly easy to use. Set up will involve asking your web developer or IT to add your branded link to the C name of your domain. For example, all our shortened links start with lnk.webstarsltd.com/ and then the link we customise. Once you’re set up, simply paste in each link you want to shorten, adding your UTM tags and select the channels through which you want to retarget. Within each social or advertising channel, you then create an audience of people that have selected a link containing your shortened domain.
So how much does switchy cost?
Membership starts at €19 per month, which gets you 5,000 clicks, unlimited links and unlimited pixels. The next package up gets you 25,000 clicks for €39 per month and the next one €99 per month for up to 60,000 clicks.
Do you want to know how well you are ranking on search engine results pages for your keywords?
We use Accuranker as one of our SEO tools to report on the share of voice our clients have around the keywords they wish to rank for. Once you've set up the domain name you want to track, simply upload the keywords you're interested in and see which websites rank highest for those keywords as well as which pages, in particular, are contributing the most towards that ranking. AccuRanker track 'share of voice' as a central part of their metrics, which they define as:
"Share of Voice (SoV) is an indicator of how your most important keywords are performing. All keywords that rank between positions 1 to 20 are used for the calculation. The average CTR for the position is multiplied by the search volume of each keyword, allowing you to see if high traffic keywords are losing or gaining ranks."
How much does AccuRanker cost?
As fast adopters, we got a really good deal on this tool for our clients so please let us know if you are interested in trialling it over a longer period of time than 14 days and we can track a limited number of keywords for you. The price starts at $109 per month for 1,000 keywords but you can do a lot of work on their 14-day free trial. For a cheaper solution you could use UberSuggest, which was covered in our 2019 article, and has recently started moved from a free tool to an $8 a month subscription service. They’re both great tools for tracking the performance of your SEO strategy and content plan.
How often do you check the keywords you’ve used in your content?
If you’re like me, you sometimes run off on a tangent when it comes to writing content. With SEO Review Tools, you can upload any text into the tool and it will give you a score for keyword density before you publish. All of this is completely free! You get a breakdown of the most commonly used single, double and triple keywords, to make sure you end up ranking for the right keywords and that the focus of your content is aligned with the objective of the piece.
See below a brief example of how this looks for this article:
As a B2B marketer, do you ever need to know what website and tracking technology your client is using?
BuiltWith is a free Chrome plugin, that also works separately from Chrome, which identifies what software a company is using on their website. As a free tool, it’s incredibly useful for any providers of tech services who are looking to see if there’s a gap, or a market, for their product before they approach an organisation. It’s also a useful way to understand the size of the marketing budget a company might have, based off some rough assumptions from the tech stack they have installed already.
Below you can see some of the IP tracking software that BuiltWith has picked up as running from our website:
Do you use Google Alerts? Okay... how often do you use them to add value?
There’s a lot of low quality, irrelevant stuff to sift through isn’t there? We use PeakMetrics to pick up stories from publications with an easy-to-use dashboard that helps you manage your own brand reputation, track competitors and measure media impact for your various campaigns or public release statements. Their dashboard allows you to easily pick out the highlights and produce a neat report for your Directors. It's a great first step to start when managing your social, before you consider partnering with a PR agency.
How much does PeakMetrics cost?
PeakMetrics pricing model is bespoke to the proposed level of features, reporting and scope of journalists that each client needs. However, once you've spoken to a member of their team, it will come in at a fraction of the cost of alternative solutions like Meltwater or Cision.
Of course, these tools are only as useful as your inbound strategy. For over 20 years we’ve been solving business problems for our clients using clever technology.
