Ever heard the saying “Two birds, one stone“? What if that number was more like a thousand birds and you had a whole set of stones to choose from, for you and every other member of your team? Well, that’s the feeling you get when using the marketing tools of today.
It’s impossible to imagine the world of business without the caches of tools that help run it. This especially holds true for B2B SaaS companies and their marketing teams, where tools have significantly altered their marketing landscape.
Businesses today have had to up their ante and take bold measures to reconstruct the way they operate. Tools that automate and simplify complex processes have been a turning point for marketers in the modern-day. Technology has also led to the evolution of various marketing processes, making them increasingly comprehensive and personalized. This has created a dependence on tools not just for marketing teams but for the world of business.
Putting together the right set of tools is a capital intensive process, however, it equips smaller businesses to compete with the best. For smaller businesses, this may serve as a stumbling block due to the high risk, high reward nature of the marketing tools out there.
What the data says
To better understand where your team stands in terms of its preparedness to deal with the competition out there, we’ve put together a list of quintessential marketing tools that drive B2B SaaS businesses today. Analyzed using Slintel’s vast technographics database, our list considered over 1500 marketing tools used by 1926 of the top-performing B2B SaaS companies in the U.S.
Here’s what we found.
Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing tools are a great example of the evolution of marketing processes. Today even small businesses can target audiences with extreme specificity using search engine marketing tools to steal the limelight from large corporations on search. While this may come at a cost depending on different variables, it would seem negligible when compared to the output if executed properly.
Google Ads
Search engine marketing has made personalized ad targeting accessible to everyone. A platform like Google Ads is directly used by 73.5% or 1416 of the top-performing B2B SaaS businesses in the U.S. It provides a level playing field for everyone looking to reach their intended audience.
Search Engine Optimization
Search has also provided businesses with a platform to seize the opportunity of organically ranking for specific keywords. This requires strategic planning around various search variables termed as Search Engine Optimization. Today there is no dearth of tools that can help you plan and execute your business’s journey to the top of search.
Moz
Moz is a tool that over 55% or 1077 of the best B2B SaaS businesses in the U.S use. The tool offers a wide variety of functions such as site audits, rank tracking, keyword research and backlink analysis that can help you make decisions to organically rank higher on search.
SEMrush
2.8% or 53 of the top ranking B2B SaaS businesses in the U.S use SEMrush for their SEO needs. The tool offers similar key features including link building, content creation and distribution functions, social media management and keyword research to name a few.
WordStream
The third most used SEO tool used by 2.2% of the top performing businesses in the U.S is WordStream. Much like Moz and SEMrush, WordStream offers a variety of features that will help you build effective strategies to help your business rank better on search. A unique feature WordStream offers is the keyword generator that provides you with keywords that relate to your industry which your business can rank for.
Marketing Analytics
With the evolution of technology more and more variables affect business processes and outcomes today. Marketing analytics tools enable businesses to derive insights into various marketing variables. This helps marketing teams troubleshoot, strategize and execute plans more efficiently.
Google Analytics is by far the most popular analytics tool out there. However, marketers would require something better suited to what they have to work with.
Optimizely
A 6.4% majority of Top B2B SaaS businesses in the U.S stick to Optimizely for marketing analytics. The tool provides detailed marketing statistics and insights among other useful features such as A/B testing and feature flags that help marketing teams strategize more efficiently.
Mixpanel
The second most popular marketing analytics tool used by 3.2% of top businesses in the U.S is Mixpanel. In addition to the features common to most marketing analytics tools, Mixpanel offers a powerful graph search, various funnel functionalities and great customer support.
Heap
Heap comes in third with 2.9% of businesses using the tool for marketing analytics. Some interesting features of Heap include the ability to track entire customer journeys with great detail and presentation-ready reports.
Marketing Automation
Repetitive marketing tasks are every marketer’s bane. They’re not just time and resource-intensive but also hamper your business’s productivity. The expanse of technology means that there are more variables at stake and, as a result, more manual tasks.
Marketing automation enables businesses to automate a variety of marketing operations. This further enables marketers to cut out colossal amounts of monotonous processes that would otherwise be unfeasible to do manually.
HubSpot
Over 19.6% of the top B2B SaaS businesses in the U.S use HubSpot to automate different marketing functions. HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing automation tool that allows marketing teams to automate a ton of tasks from CRM processes to personalized emails and social media posts.
Marketo
Marketo is the second most popular marketing analytics tool used by over 8% of the best B2B SaaS businesses in the U.S. Apart from the general marketing automation features, Marketo offers detailed technical insight into various aspects of your website, its content and traffic, doubling as a powerful analytics tool.
Pardot
Pardot comes in at third position with 6.4% of top B2B SaaS businesses using the tool. It offers features such as automated lead assignment, progressive profiling and closed-loop reporting on top of general marketing automation features.
Conversational Marketing
Conversational marketing is an extra avenue that provides marketers the opportunity to reel in potential leads. By providing your visitors the ability to reach out to your sales team instantly, you’re much more likely to boost your deal conversion rates.
Intercom
Intercom is the most popular conversational marketing tool used by over 10% of the top-performing B2B SaaS businesses in the U.S. It offers businesses the ability to build custom bots on their website with the customizability of various in-app features such as behaviour-triggered messages, A/B testing, audience segmentation and email campaign creation.
Drift
Intercom is closely followed in second place by Drift with 8.9% of top B2B SaaS businesses in the U.S using the tool to connect site visitors with sales teams. Drift offers AI functionalities that enables the chatbot to learn from interactions and can be trained by bot developers to automate visitor queries.
Email Marketing
Email marketing tools are another avenue that can help you cut out unnecessary manual work for your marketing team. It allows you to automate your marketing emails and responses, giving you the ability to manage all your email interactions from a single platform.
MailChimp
MailChimp is the most widely used email marketing platform with 8.5% of our analyzed population using it. It allows you to automate and personalize emails, further providing you with key insights such as email tracking, click-through rates and subscription stats.
Zoho Campaigns
Zoho Campaigns comes in at second place with 3.8% of top B2B SaaS businesses in the U.S using the tool for automating their emails. Apart from email automation and tracking, the tool gives you access to an intuitive email editor with drag-and-drop functionalities that make designing emails a breeze.
Constant Contact
The third most popular email automation tool based on data, Constant Contact, is used by 2% of top performing B2B SaaS businesses in the U.S. Apart from email automation and personalization functions, Constant Contact gives you the ability to enrich your readers’ email experience with autoresponders and the ability to add features such as coupons.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing platforms are a great way to get your businesses’ name out there. They help connect and manage your businesses relationships with large affiliate networks and performance advertisers, allowing you to showcase your product or service to high intent niche audiences.
TUNE
TUNE is the most popular affiliate marketing tool used by 7.7% of our analyzed population. It provides businesses with the ability to manage marketing partnerships with influencers, affiliate networks agencies among other business relationships. From large ad networks to fraud tracking TUNE is a comprehensive affiliate marketing solution.
ShareASale
ShareASale is used by 2.4% of the top performing B2B SaaS businesses offering them access to over 3900 affiliate networks. Coupon deals, product links and video creatives are some of the avenues through which ShareASale connects your business to niche audiences.
Outbrain
Outbrain is the third most used affiliate marketing platform used by 1.6% of the best B2B SaaS businesses in the U.S. The platform allows businesses to target niche audiences through native advertising across a network of marketers, publishers and consumers. The tool also enables you to organically personalize and enhance consumer experience.
Bonus: Voluum
Voluum is one of the most effective tools for tracking affiliate advertising campaigns, and offers a wide range of features to help affiliate marketers monitor and improve affiliate ad performance. With a unified dashboard and the ability to track over 30 metrics, Voluum helps you manage all your affiliate advertising efforts with ease. It also has a mobile app that can help you stay on top of your affiliate ad efforts around the clock, and you can use the tool’s targeting feature to fine-tune your ad campaigns on the go.
PR Marketing
Public relations is the way to go if you seek to gain widespread publicity towards your product or service. PR marketing tools give you access to a large number of PR functionalities that help you reach out to blog, newspaper and magazine audiences.
Newswire
Newswire is the most popular PR marketing tool according to our study with 9.1% of our the top performing B2B SaaS businesses in the U.S using the tool. It connects businesses to a large network of journalists, bloggers and media outlets. It also helps you create and distribute hyperlinked press releases with a 2-tier editorial process.
GlobeNewswire
Used by 3.8% of top B2B SaaS businesses in the U.S, GlobeNewswire allows you to distribute press releases, financial disclosures and multimedia content to a worldwide network of press and media outlets.
PR.com
PR.com is the third most popular PR marketing tool used by 3% of top performing B2B SaaS businesses in the U.S. The tool provides businesses with the platform to feature on top search engines, niche websites, blogger and social media networks, print, broadcast and radio among other channels.
To Conclude
Tools have been milked for all their worth and then some more by businesses today. This means that tools aren’t just an integral component of the modern marketing landscape but rather an essential for businesses to stay afloat.
If you’re trying to emulate the success of top-performing B2B SaaS businesses, using the tools they use might help put you on that trajectory. However, a lot more research and experimentation would be required on your end before your business can find that perfect balance between manpower and technology. We hope this post gave you a good idea of what your business is up against and how you may need to equip yourselves.
Would you like to uncover the marketing/sales/product tech stacks of your prospects, competitors, or customers? Talk to our team to know how you can use Slintel to get the job done.
