We write a lot about sales and sales enablement—everything from tools and techniques to methodologies to enable modern sales organizations. So, for our marketers in the audience, this one’s for you!
We looked at many of the popular and emerging marketing tools available today and curated a list of the best of the best for every sized business. If you’re looking to build a new stack or optimize the one you’re currently using, consider this list before you go any further!
Defining the B2B marketing tech stack
For the purposes of this article, let’s agree to define the marketing technology stack as the full suite of tools that help a marketing team conduct marketing initiatives and understand their impact.
This might include tools for sending marketing messages (email, landing pages, automation tools, video tools, and other content), automating marketing activity, and understanding the impact of the activity (analytics tools).
To take this a step further, the team at Together has put together a more comprehensive landscape of tools that modern marketers use. This includes data sources, storage, data usage, analytics, and attribution.
When thinking about your marketing tech stack and reading this article, think about your processes, your goals, and your needs. Later on in this article, we’ll recommend some specific solutions that we think are great, but they might not all be right for your team’s needs and budget.
As you read, consider your priorities and where it might make sense to invest. You want to choose tools that will help you move towards your goals and that your team will actually use.
Think strategy first, technology second.
Technology is not a silver bullet. When preparing for any technology implementation, your first step is probably to head straight to Google or G2, compare feature sets and pricing, and maybe kick the tires with a free trial to see if it’s a good fit. In fact, today’s B2B buyers spend more time researching before buying products, and most of that time is spent on independent research. Only 17% of the time spent researching B2B products is dedicated to talking to sales reps. At the same time, 77% of buyers believe that purchasing has become much more complex.
But here’s the thing: a tool is not a strategy. Sure, you can compare different software packages by their features, but that’s like marrying someone based on their dating profile. The real value marketing software offers is in the strategy and approach it enables — and how it impacts customer experience (the desired end result).
Before you start building (or updating) your marketing technology stack, it’s crucial to devise your marketing strategy. This approach must be shaped around your product, your desired audience, and how to reach them. You’ll have to carefully analyze your current marketing practices and identify where they match the strategy and where they block it.
Source: The ultimate marketing technology stack for 2023
As with our recommendations for the best sales tools, we chose the ones we think are best, but the right tools for your teams, regardless of roles, are the ones you’ll actually use and find value from.
Choosing the right B2B marketing tool for your business
When it comes to choosing your ultimate marketing technology stack, there are some things you want to keep in mind as you’re evaluating different tools and types of technology you want to introduce to your team. Before we dive into specific product recommendations, here are some things you’ll want to consider as you evaluate the different solutions.
How big is your marketing team, and what marketing channels do you leverage?
When determining what tools you might purchase or add to your technology stack, start by thinking about how big your marketing team is and what channels you leverage (or want to leverage). You also want to consider whether your team is focused on outbound or inbound marketing strategies. For example, if your bread and butter is email or SMS marketing, a tool that helps with scheduling on Meta and TikTok might not be the best investment.
If your team plans to double down on video, email marketing tools or an email segmentation tool might not be the right move at this time.
And if your team does more traditional (offline marketing), like experiential events and trade shows, many digital marketing tools might not move the needle for you now.
Regarding team size, this is a consideration because even automation tools take manpower to set up and monitor. If you have a really small team, adding too many tools (or too many channels) might risk spreading your team too thin.
Are there any tasks your team is doing manually that you’d love to be able to automate?
Once you’ve thought about your team and the channels you’re leveraging (or wanting to leverage) most, think about the current team’s workload. Are there things that are being done manually that might be worth automating?
This could include reporting, scheduling social posts, rounding up links for content marketing like the company newsletter, or even lead generation. There are tons of marketing automation tools on the market, and you can choose which ones you might want to leverage based on your team’s needs.
What is currently in your martech stack, and where are the gaps?
One thing we talk a lot about on the sales tech stack side that heavily applies to marketing technologies is integrations. Choosing tools that work well together will help save your team time and money. Instead of combining data sources, having the sources flow into one report or dashboard means more time to act on the data instead of just working to get it compiled.
For example, having data from Google Analytics and your social listening tool all flowing into one data studio report automatically can save time and effort to set up a report every week or month. Allowing you more time to take action.
So, when thinking about adding to your stack, think about what you have and what you might need. For example, having your customer relationship management system (CRM) integrated with your proposal generation software can save time and reduce duplicate entries. This is why Qwilr is designed to integrate with popular CRMs like Hubspot and Salesforce.
How much time and money do you have to invest in adding or upgrading tools?
Fancy social media management and account-based marketing tools can take time to learn, implement, and manage, so if your team is already stretched, this might not be the right use of your budget, even if you have the dollars.
Think about your team’s time as well. If you don’t have the time (and can’t bring in some support) to run the tools, they won’t serve you well. So, before making an investment, consider the implementation plan. Who will set up and manage a new tool, and how much time will they need in order to do it right and see the return on investment?
How do you measure the success of your marketing program, and what metrics are you measured on?
Finally, think about how you and your leadership team evaluate the success of your marketing team. Are you measuring lead generation volume? In that case, boosting your b2b lead generation tools might make a lot of sense.
In a small business or startup environment the metrics will be totally different than in an enterprise organization. In the former website traffic might be a critically important success metric, whereas in the latter it may not matter as much.
Eight must-have B2B marketing tools
As we’ve already discussed, not all tools are created equally. Some stand out from their competition by offering more robust features and integrations that can help make your marketing efforts go further. (Work smarter, not harder — right?)
These eight stand out to us, but before investing, remember to think about your needs and workflows and how these tools will fit in. Adding another tool just because it looks helpful can also add some administrative burden and make team members resistant to adoption.
Best marketing automation solution: HubSpot
When it comes to marketing automation software, HubSpot is likely the most well-known and most popular marketing automation platform on the market. With a broad range of tools and functionality, everyone from smaller businesses to larger enterprise teams can benefit from its marketing automation prowess. It helps marketing teams save time spent on repetitive actions like lead scoring and sending out follow-ups.
Best marketing analytics software: Funnel.io
Funnel bills itself as your mission control for your marketing data, and for good reason. It allows marketers to connect data from any source and store, organize, and share it. They say “Funnel empowers marketers to make data-driven decisions and create value for their business. Own your marketing data and use it independently from other teams.”
The Funnel team claims their tool can give marketers back 125 hours by automating reports each week - that’s a lot of time that could be put to better use, building and optimizing campaigns or strategizing with the sales team.
Best messaging testing tool: Wynter
Not just for testing messaging, Wynter can help find or confirm product market fit. Wynter gives marketers access to their proprietary network of over 50,000 B2B professionals. Marketers can find out how target customers see their product and messaging, understand prospects’ biggest pain points, and how they buy. It can also help teach marketers exactly what buyers need to hear in order to convert straight from the horse’s mouth!
All of this is available on demand any time you need it. Whether you’re working to optimize your go-to-market strategy or want to test key messaging for landing pages, or email marketing initiatives, including specific email campaigns, Wynter can help marketers get real-time feedback from real potential customers.
Best proposal & enablement tool: Qwilr
This list wouldn’t be complete without Qwilr. While we’re known for being the best proposal software tool around, we don’t just help sales teams; we also address many of the marketing team’s needs.
From our intuitive and user-friendly interface to our ability to create high-quality, customizable, branded proposal templates, we can help marketing teams reach out to their target audience, too.
Once a piece of sales collateral is out in the hands of potential b2b buyers, our analytics capabilities help marketers understand what prospects are reviewing and how much time they’re spending engaging with each section of the marketing proposal. This information can help with content creation by showing marketers where they should focus their time and resources.
When you invest in Qwilr, consider using it as an internal enablement resource, too. Create beautiful and interactive playbooks, battle cards, and one-sheets your sales and marketing teams can use when they’re on sales calls with prospects or writing messaging for the newest marketing campaigns. Having all the key details at their fingertips will save hours of searching.
You can also learn how to write winning sales proposals and even try our AI proposal generator for free to create your own professional looking proposal in minutes.
Best website heatmap & analytics tool: Hotjar
If you want to know more about what your website visitors are doing once they get to your site, consider installing Hotjar and getting some highly detailed data from heat mapping. This allows you to understand the customer journey that’s happening within your site. Where are people coming into the site? What are they clicking on once they get there? Are there pages with significantly higher conversion rates? If you see this information, you can scale up what is working and spend less time and effort on what’s not!
Best SEO keyword research tool: Ahrefs
When it comes to bringing traffic to your website, you understand the importance of search engine optimization. So, having a tool like Ahrefs to provide keyword research is critically important. While there are other keyword research tools, and SEM Rush is one of the other most commonly used tools, we think Ahrefs is a superior tool to have because it helps marketers see not only what content they’ll need to rank, but also how many backlinks.
Best phygital marketing tool: Uniqode
Uniqode emerges as a premier phygital (physical plus digital) marketing tool, blending digital experiences with physical ones through its sophisticated and secure QR Code generator. Renowned for its exceptional rating of 4.94/5 on G2 and endorsements from heavyweight corporations like Pepsi, Amazon, and Marriott, Uniqode specializes in creating dynamic QR Codes.
This enables businesses to track engagement, retarget audiences in real-time, and capture leads instantly by linking scannable QR Codes directly to email lists or CRMs. With its ability to integrate seamlessly with over 4000 applications, including powerhouse platforms like Salesforce and Zapier, Uniqode stands as a comprehensive solution for enriching your marketing campaigns.
Whether you're exploring the realm of contactless digital interactions or delving into detailed analytics, Uniqode offers a suite of tools designed for every scale of marketing needs, from its free plan for static QR Codes to advanced offerings tailored for expansive business strategies.
Best design tool for marketing teams: Canva
With templates for almost any design need and the ability to share brand colors, fonts, and images across your marketing team, there is almost nothing Canva can’t do. While the tool does offer a free plan, the pro plan provides access to even more features and functionality to help marketing teams design polished and professional graphics, presentations, and social media posts for every platform.
Consider leveraging Canva’s capabilities to create custom LinkedIn banners for the whole team to use.
Four emerging B2B marketing tools
In B2B business, things move fast, so it’s always important to understand the available toolsets to help marketers working in B2B companies get the word out more efficiently. These four emerging tools can be extremely helpful to B2B marketing teams now:
Best marketing audience creation tool: Primer
Primer claims to make account-based marketing easier and helps marketing teams create and segment audiences for targeted outreach. And with Primer, you can get really specific about who is in each of your audiences. According to their website, Primer is radically transparent about audience membership. They allow users to see the specific individuals going into audiences - on any channel. With high cross-channel match rates, the chance of your audiences being 1:1 goes up dramatically.
Although it’s designed for B2B marketers it allows for audience visibility even on B2C channels like Instagram, Youtube and, and Facebook to expand your reach.
Best website personalization platform: Mutiny
Mutiny is an AI-powered product that allows for personalization at scale. In the past, A/B testing was a time-consuming process and involved additional support from design and engineering to code additional pages. Now, any marketer can get started in minutes with Mutiny.
This tool allows marketers to customize and personalize pages on their website in just minutes, with a few clicks. If conversion optimization is on your list of goals this year, and investment in Mutiny might be a wise one.
Best SEO content optimization tool: Clearscope
No one knows what goes into Google’s algorithm, but when it comes to SEO tools, Clearscope is one that can give marketers an advantage. From recommending keywords to include in an article to helping writers structure their content to get the most bang for their buck, it’s a powerful tool that should be in every search marketer’s toolbox. In fact, there’s a good chance this article was optimized using it.
If you outsource some of your team’s content creation to freelancers, it’s easy to share Clearscope links with them and instruct them to create their assigned content to the Clearscope target score.
Best webinar management tool: Livestorm
Livestorm bills itself as a simple meeting and webinar platform with built‑in tools, to grow and collaborate. These engaging tools include virtual whiteboards, the ability to showcase up to 25 speakers, instant replays (hello bio breaks), the ability to add calls to action, and so much more.
You can create webinar sign-up pages that are optimized to convert, and the platform integrates with other marketing tools like Hubspot, Marketo, and Pardot.
Host your product demos, continuing education, and even panel discussions on this platform and enjoy new and engaging ways of interacting with your audience, plus a robust suite of analytics tools to understand your impact and results.
Building the Martech stack to fuel business growth in your organization
If this article has helped you discover or reconsider some tools that might help streamline your workflows or optimize your marketing operations, we’ve done our job of helping you build the martech stack that will fuel your business growth.
But, we felt that wasn’t enough and want to offer you the opportunity to see Qwilr in action. If you’re looking for a robust solution for creating marketing collateral like one sheets and proposals, we’re here for you. Sign up today for a product demo.
About the author
Marissa Taffer|Founder & President of M. Taffer Consulting
Marissa Taffer is the Founder & President of M. Taffer Consulting. She brings over 15 years of sales and marketing experience across various industries to a broad range of clients.
