Inside a B2B Marketer’s Arsenal of Productivity Tools

The year 2018 will see competition in the B2B industry to become bloodier. We’re not saying that there’s going to be literal blood splattered around. But it’s the fact that B2B players big and small will try to come up with more aggressive tactics for their lead generation and appointment setting campaigns.

For sure, there are trends to watch out for this year, and companies will do themselves a serious disservice by taking these trends in stride. Obviously, generating high-quality leads remains to be the most compelling challenge that B2B marketers will have to face. But unlike the previous, the focus right now is about engaging B2B prospects and emphasizing their needs for specific solutions over your need to go beyond your revenue expectations.

At least 91 percent of B2B marketers have content campaigns that opt to bridge gaps between them and their target audiences. This is according to a Twitter blog post by Heather Eng, who also said that scores of marketers are finding less than stellar successes with their current content marketing campaigns. According to her, 53 percent of content marketers have pointed out moderate successes with their campaigns last year.

Nevertheless, marketers must keep their eyes set on making impactful campaigns that resonate well with their target clients. And as competition in crucial and highly competitive sectors such as IT and financial services continues to grow, effective audience outreach methods should be the main goals for companies wanting to get heard.

This will also compel marketers to go the extra mile when it comes to producing effective content that not only offers something new to the table but also converts site visitors into hot leads. When your main goal is to achieve record sales numbers, you will have to become a productive member of the marketing team. But in order to become one, you need to equip yourself with all the needed tools and apps that will certainly help you in your outputs.

Here are some of these nifty tools you can carry around on your smartphone.

CoSched

To most people, managing a blog doesn’t too much effort. The reason is that not much resources and energy are expended on composing a piece of content and hitting the publish button once you’re through revising the whole thing. But what a lot of people don’t know is that blog management takes a lot of factors into account. One of these factors is time management.

Handling a corps of content writers and graphics artists involves a lot of coordination. This means that everything has to run like clockwork. Deadlines must be met and certain blog posts should be published on dates that matter. This is something that tantamounts to a nightmare for a lot of B2B marketers, which is why some of them use CoSched. This handy little tool can help you manage your team’s workflow on top of scheduling important activities. The app also has an analytics component that will help you measure your projects and give you a clear view of what’s going on. When it comes to keeping strict schedules, CoSched will certainly make life easier for you and your team.

Sococo

Communication is vital to increasing your team’s productivity. But to be able to lead a more successful marketing campaign, it pays to use an application that rightly delivers on your need for effective teamwork. Sococo is more than a messaging application with features such as IM and video calling. It is a platform that emphasizes the high points of active collaboration.

Buffer

If you think developing content that hits the right chords in your audience is difficult, then you’re not alone. Content marketing is actually an area that exhausts you to the bone. And we’re only talking about conceptualizing the next blog post or infographic you will be publishing.

Marketing thrives on new ideas, but sometimes, you could barely find one that will rightly serve as the basis for your next line of content materials. Curation is an important and, more often than not, a complex part of content development. But applications like Buffer can make the task a lot simpler. With Buffer at least, you are provided a platform that lets you share content and schedule your social media activities, all through the power of automation.

Did we miss any important apps? What do you think are the best tools that B2B marketers should use? Share them in the comment section below.