When it comes to business-to-business (B2B) marketing, there’s an endless number of tactics brands can try to spread the word about their company, increase sales and generate revenue. In today’s tech landscape, there are always new concepts, platforms, and tools sprouting up to help businesses communicate the value of their offerings and ultimately win over more customers.

First, what exactly is B2B marketing? In a nutshell, B2B marketing refers to the marketing efforts a business takes to sell their product or service to another business who will use it to benefit their own company. For example, running a paid ads campaign that’s selling a software service that helps other businesses in their sales efforts would be considered B2B marketing.

Like regular marketing, B2B marketing can fall into a wide variety of modern tactics, tools, and campaigns—from email marketing to podcasting and beyond. No matter your business goals, we guarantee there’s a tool, platform, or agency out there that can help you achieve them and more (and if there isn’t, then you may have just identified a gap in the market!). 

Without further ado, let’s take a look at some examples of the best agencies, tools, and platforms you can use in your B2B marketing efforts. Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s a great place to start:

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Agencies

1. Quill Podcasting

Launching a podcast is currently one of the trendiest marketing tactics a brand can undertake. Businesses of all industries, shapes, and sizes are dusting off their microphones and hitting that record button for a variety of reasons.

Not only are podcasts popular among everyday listeners with 464.7 million listeners worldwide, but they’re also becoming a popular tool for B2B marketing purposes, too. A branded podcast is a great way to establish your company as an authoritative voice in your field, lead the charge in thought leadership, and grow your network to increase sales and customers.

Quill is a full-service podcasting agency that can help you with all your podcasting needs, from creative conception and recording to distribution and promotion. The agency has experience working with major brands and corporations, many of which are speaking to audiences on a B2B basis. 

Some of the B2B shows Quill has produces include:

• Powering Travel by Expedia Group
• New World of Work by Oyster
• CIBC Innovation Banking Podcast
• The Marketer’s Journey

If launching a podcast is at the top of your list when it comes to B2B marketing tactics, reach out to Quill to get started on your audio journey today.

2. Velo

Velo is an award-winning B2B marketing agency that specializes in clients that work in technology, industrial, and professional services spaces.

Made up of a team of specialists who are knowledgeable about brand storytelling, campaigns and programs, content strategy, and much more, the agency can help you with all of your niche B2B marketing needs.

Some of the agency’s notable clients include:

• Cisco
• McGraw Hill
• Nokia
• Anaplan
• Deloitt

3. Earnest

Earnest is another award-winning B2B marketing agency focusing on doing away with the ordinary to help your business really shine in the eyes of other companies.

The agency provides a variety of services including content creation and strategy, digital campaigns, experiential programs, and overall brand strategy. 

Some of Earnest’s notable clients include:

• Oracle
• Vodafone
• Canon
• Google
• Samsung

4. Viral Nation

Viral Nation has consistently been named one of the best agencies in the game for their analytical approach to digital marketing and excellent client service. The agency provides a wide variety of services including influencer marketing, brand strategy, paid and earned media, and the list goes on.

Specifically, Viral Nation is known for its success with influencer campaigns—hence the name, viral nation—and has even become well-known as the world’s number-one influencer marketing agency. Some of the big-name brands the agency has worked with in the past include:

• ViewSonic
• Bud Light
• Meta Quest
• Energizer

5. SmartSites

Global web design and digital marketing agency SmartSites is known for helping brands exceed their marketing goals. The agency has completed over 900 websites, generated more than $100 million in sales for their clients, satisfied more than 500 clients, and employs more than 80 designers and developers.

Some of the services SmartSites provides their clients include:

• Web design
• Pay-per-click advertising
• Search engine optimization
• Email and SMS marketing
• Social media marketing

The agency will help you increase traffic to your website, acquire more customers, and in turn, sell more products and services.

6.  Omniscient Digital

Omniscient Digital is an organic growth agency that builds content & SEO programs for ambitious B2B brands. They're a nimble team of cross-functional specialists in growth strategy, SEO, analytics, editorial, and digital PR. 

Omniscient helps companies both build custom strategies, execute content production at high velocity, and attribute business value to the program with analytics dashboards. They've worked with big-name brands like:

• Jasper
• HotJar
• Order
• AppSumo
• GatherContent. 

7.  Skeleton Krew Agency

Skeleton Krew Agency is a top B2B marketing agency in Toronto, Canada working with software-as-a-service (SaaS) startups and technology companies across North America. With a focus on custom packages covering brand, content, distribution, partnerships, events, and more, Skeleton Krew drives tens of millions in pipeline for clients.

Skeleton Krew believes that marketing should have a strong return on investment. Their team builds effective marketing strategies and executes campaigns on winning channels to enable top-of-funnel growth for pipeline-driving marketing campaigns.

Some of their key offerings include:

1. Brand creation
2. Website and CMS design and development
3. Content, SEO, and distribution
4. Budget and strategy
5. Analytics, tracking, and marketing operations/stack
6. Partnerships
7. Internal or employer brand marketing

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Tools and Platforms

Next, let’s move on to specialized tools and platforms that can help you bring your B2B marketing strategy to life.

1. HubSpot‍

As its name suggests, HubSpot is your one-stop-shop hub for all things B2B marketing. The CRM software platform serves as a hub for all your sales, marketing, and customer service needs, offering something useful for every member of your team from marketers to salespeople and even operations folks.

With HubSpot, you can perform a variety of valuable functions like tracking and analyzing sales activities in real-time, gaining insights into customer data, and much more, including: 

• Contact deal and task management
• Email tracking and engagement notifications
• Email templates and scheduling
• Document sharing
• Meeting scheduling
• Live chat
• Sales quotes

2. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is another valuable tool for gaining insights into your B2B marketing efforts, generating new content ideas, and analyzing data. The platform has an archive of 8 billion articles from around the world, so it’s great for getting inspired, finding engaging new topics, and tapping into viral content. 

Having an excellent content strategy is a major component of any B2B marketing strategy, so it’s important to use all the tools at your disposal to make sure you’re generating content that will resonate with your target market. BuzzSumo is just one platform that can help you do this effectively.

3. CoHost Podcasting

Once again, if a podcast is in the cards for your business now or in the future, one tool that you won’t want to miss out on is CoHost Podcasting. The podcast analytics and insights platform is uniquely positioned to serve brands in the B2B space. Through real-time podcast data and deeper insights on the companies that are listening to your show, CoHost makes it easy to understand your audience and if your content is resonating. 

CoHost gives you insights into podcast metrics like:

• Consumption rate: The length of time your audience is tuning into your podcast
• Listener profiles: A breakdown of who your audience is through demographic and geographic information
• Downloads & unique listener data: Track data around downloads and unique listeners overtime, top performing episodes, and episode comparisons
• B2B Analytics: See which companies are listening along with characteristics like size, industry, and revenue

4. The Juice

The Juice is the latest platform here to usher in a brand-new era of content marketing. The platform is on a mission to change content marketing for good by connecting content consumers with the best B2B resources from trusted brands through a frictionless, privacy-controlled experience—doing away with forms and follow-up sales emails for good.

Some of the services and features provided by The Juice include:

• Building an audience for the right accounts and personas from day one
• Syncing with your website
• Content distribution across the platform
• Reporting on the ROI of your content

5. SharpSpring

SharpSpring is your one-stop shop for email and CRM marketing automation tools. The platform can help you save time by starting conversations that lead to conversions using personalized messages and automated campaigns.

With the SharpSpring email marketing platform, you can track leads and gain detailed analytics on all customer interactions.

Just a few of SharpSpring’s features include:

• Email
• Ads
• Forms
• Automation
• Visitor ID
• CRM 

6. Clearscope

Looking to improve your SEO so you can drive more traffic and give your B2B marketing efforts a boost? AI-powered platform Clearscope makes it easy to do just that by helping you produce content that’s relevant to what your customers are searching for.

Some of the big-name companies that have used Clearscope include:

• Condé Nast
• Intuit
• Adobe
• Shopify
• Deloitte 
• YouTube

One customer, Omid Ghiam, Organic Growth Manager at Webflow, said they were “able to grow SEO traffic from non-branded keywords on the Webflow blog by 130% in 2020.” 

7. Paperflite

Paperflite is another useful content platform that can help businesses—big and small—manage all their sales and marketing content in one place. The platform will help customer-facing teams find and share the right content, and then track how leads are engaging with it to continue driving sales forward.

Some of the brands that have used Paperflite in the past include:

• Canva
• CBRE
• Carlsberg
• Siemens
• S&P Global

8. SparkToro

If you really hope to do a deep dive into your audience profile so you can understand them better than they understand themselves, you’ll want to check out SparkToro: a platform that helps businesses find out what your audience is talking about and where you can reach them. 

Using the SparkToro tool, you can search for a certain topic or keyword and find out the types of content your audience is engaging with most—whether it’s websites, social media, press, or podcasts. 

Brands use SparkToro for a variety of purposes including community building, influencer marketing, and ABM since it’s able to deliver actionable data in a matter of seconds.

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The best B2B marketing agencies, tools, and platforms

The list of B2B marketing agencies, tools, and platforms that can help you in your journey is truly endless. This list is just the tip of the iceberg of the amazing companies in the market to help bring your B2B marketing efforts to life. 

If you’re hoping to reach other businesses through marketing, explore these tools and more so you can ensure you’re reaching your ideal audience, growing your network, and optimizing your B2B marketing strategy.