What technologies work together? Which technologies are must-haves vs nice-to-haves? What are the main categories of technologies that B2B marketers need?
These are some of the questions that I get most when talking with B2B marketing leaders. Everyone wants to know about the 'magic bullet' for a high performing, lead-generating marketing stack that will both integrate and align with the sales organization.The truth is there is no one perfect system, as every organization has a unique situation and existing systems to deal with.
The good news is that there are major buckets of technologies that all B2B marketers must consider and some very good technology vendors that work nicely together
CRM
This is a no brainer - every sales and marketing team need a CRM system to work with and must be a core of any performing technology stack. This foundational element tracks leads through their entire life-cycle, report on revenue impact and is the life-blood of all good sales and marketing alignments. Salesforce is the clear market leader with an huge integration and app exchange. Microsoft's Dynamics and SAP's Cloud for Sales are also good alternatives. Depending on your existing CRM ecosystem you may have your choice already committed to.
Marketing Automation
Every marketer knows how important and essential a marketing automation platform is. As your CRM is the life-blood for the sales team - the MAP is the life-blood for marketers. Pretty much all inbound/outbound campaign, demand generation and lead activities live in your MAP. Since we chose Salesforce as our CRM - Pardot (acquired by Salesforce) can provide the deepest and seamless integration. There are some really awesome MAPs including Marketo, Act-On and HubSpot just to name a few.
Once you have these two technologies firmly in place, you must then put together your fine-tuned B2B marketing and lead generation machine together. Feed the beast with these must-have supporting technologies...
Social Media / Social Selling
In 2016, another necessary technology is a social media platform that both lets the sales team efficiently engage with their prospects and allows marketing to syndicate key pieces of marketing collateral + 3rd party content to influence buyers. A major decider in naming rFactr as the best social selling platform to do this is because of deep and seamless integrations with Salesforce as well as the other CRMs mentioned. Other good choices include Spredfast and HootSuite.
Account-Based Marketing
This system is necessary to compliment your brand marketing efforts and to help the sales team communicate with individual prospects or customer accounts. This requires content specifically designed to engage prospects with relevant insights - typically based on industry insights, named accounts or buyer persona. A new but powerful entrant is Forbes SocialPort which provides real-time access to their publication organized uniquely for each sales rep according to the buyer's journey, their named accounts, or by buyer persona. Content services and sponsored content are also available. Since Forbes SocialPort integrates with both rFactr and Salesforce it is the most powerful option for B2B account based marketing while platforms like Triblio and Terminus are also good choices.
Analytics
The importance of an analytics platform cannot be understated since it provides real-time metrics as to the performance of different channels and campaign on website traffic as well as conversion goals. This is yet another must-have in any stack to accurately measure and optimize online campaigns. Without a doubt the market leader is Google Analytics for its direct integrations with Google products like Adwords, Search and robust web measurement capabilities. Good alternatives are WebTrends and Adobe's Omniture.
Landing Pages
Some marketing automation platforms offer great landing page builders however but often involve coding or development expertise to optimize them. The best landing page builder I've used is called Unbounce - which allows you to easily build, optimize and test landing pages for B2B lead generation. If you prefer to stick with your MAP's builder, Pardot, HubSpot, Act-On and Marketo all provide awesome options.
List Building
List building offerings are necessary for efficient use of time as well as success for both standard demand generation and account-based marketing/selling campaigns. My suggestion for a great list building platform for B2B marketers and sellers is SalesLoft.