5 practical marketing tools for agencies that can be useful to B2B companies in 2020

The year is slowly coming to an end – time for all marketers to review the projects and their implementation in 2019. What was successful? Where is there room for improvement? Or what was particularly helpful? And so our marketing department has also collected some marketing tools that were not only helpful and useful for us in 2019, but are also suitable for B2B companies for 2020.

 

Especially in content marketing, we as marketers are constantly faced with the challenge of creating informative texts with added value, emotional and appealing images or regular social media posts. To make your work a little easier, we have put together practical tools in this article that not only support us as an agency, but can also take some of the work out of B2B companies.

 

We had great pleasure in writing this article because a suitable tool can be found for almost every position in the company.

 

In order to shed some light on the subject, we have put together five useful tools to help you research current topics and SEO keywords, create quick graphics and displays, schedule social media posts and, finally, create tracking links so that the measures implemented can be tracked accordingly via different channels.

 

1. Google Trends

When creating new content, every content manager is faced with the challenge of recording and processing current topics. With the tool Google Trends the research of current topics is easily done. It shows the number of search terms entered over time and puts them in relation to the total search volume. Thus, relevant keywords for your own content can be identified quickly and easily.

Google Trends
Quelle: Google Trends.

The handling of the tool is, as known from Google, very intuitive and simple. It not only shows you the search terms that users searched for most often, but also allows you to enter your own keywords and find out how popular a particular topic was on the net at a particular time. For example, editors and marketers can use Google Trends to find out what marketing trends were circulating in the summer of 2018 or, more generally, how often the word “Brexit” was searched for last year.

 

Another exciting feature of Google Trends is that you can compare different keywords. This allows you to quickly determine which keywords are currently more searchable and which can therefore be more effective. Google Trends is an extremely helpful tool for us to discover keyword trends and thus supplement our content with SEO-relevant keywords. Click here for the tool.

 

2. Yoast SEO

But current keywords alone are not enough for good content. In order for the content to be optimized for search engines, i.e. SEO-relevant, the content must also be provided with a meta description in the respective CMS. We use the Yoast SEO tool for this purpose, which helps to design the content in such a way that it achieves the highest possible SEO ranking on Google or other search engines. The plugin can easily be used for WordPress. But it also has extensions for TYPO3 or Drupal.

 

The Meta Description will be displayed in the search engines as soon as the page has been indexed, or even when sharing on the social media channels. This text is basically a short summary of the text that should convince the user to read it. Finally, a traffic light system will show you whether the choice of focus keywords, which by the way should only exist once on the page, is appropriate. In addition, the “readability analysis” shows whether the content has enough subheadings so that the reader does not get lost in a so-called “lead desert”. Certainly, this tool is helpful for quick and easy SEO optimization, but SEO should always be treated as a permanent topic in companies. Click here for the tool.

Yoast SEO
Quelle: Yoast SEO.

3. Canva

Now we have checked off the topic of content and SEO. But content is only successful with activating and appealing images. While the classic “stock images”, which are increasingly used for post pictures, are easily available on various platforms, the situation is usually somewhat different with individual graphics. To avoid the design team having to create them, the tool Canva allows even design beginners to create individual graphics. Within the tool you can use templates for the respective platforms Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, choose backgrounds and fonts and add your own text fields and graphics. This tool is ideal for the quick creation of banners or social assets. Click here for the tool.

Canva
Quelle: Canva.

4. Buffer

Now we have content & the appropriate image material for social media, but who is posting over the Christmas holidays when no one is in the office anyway? Na Buffer. With this tool you can easily schedule different social media posts via the channels used in each case.

Buffer
Quelle: Buffer.

From Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram we plan our posts in advance. With Facebook this is also possible directly, but not with Twitter and LinkedIn. Click here for the tool.

Google Campaign Builder

Quelle: Google Campaign Builder.

5. Google Campaign Builder

Finally, we would like to introduce the Google Campaign Builder, which we can no longer do without, especially with regard to campaigns. With Google Campaign Builder you can quickly create UTM codes to track performance across different sources and media. This tool is a great time-saver – its ease of use allows you to create different tracking links for campaigns within a few clicks.

 

In addition, by filling in fields such as “Campaign Source” we can directly identify the source in our Google Analytics account. This is especially helpful because by using different tracking links we can see exactly which conversion banners are best, which campaign channel performs best or which text links work and which do not. Click here for the tool.

 

Conclusion

Of course, there are many more tools that not only make our day-to-day marketer work easier, but to list them all here would be overflowing the barrel.

It is important that you first get to know the first helpful tools, try them out and then you will quickly find out whether they are suitable for your everyday work. But just give it a try in 2020!

Image Source: iStock / HAKINMHAN