Hollinden Inbound Marketing for Professional Service Firms

The Best Inbound Marketing Tools for Growing Traffic Leads and Revenue in 2021

A highly successful inbound marketing program requires the right blend of technology and strategy.

A great strategy combined with subpar tools or poor strategy combined with great tools will generally yield dismal results.

Yet, the right strategy, with the right tools, will almost guarantee success with inbound marketing.

We've hand selected 13 of our favorite inbound marketing, SEO and sales enablement tools ranging from paid foundational platforms to free niche chrome extensions all designed with a common purpose, to grow your website traffic, increase your lead conversions and help you gain more customers. 

1. SEMRush

Keyword Research for Accountants

Pricing: SEMRush pricing starts at $99.95 per month for their Pro version of subscription.  

Audience: Marketing and SEOs

SEMRush offers a treasure trove of information on keyword data: monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, average Cost per Click, position changes, your competitors positions and their paid advertising spend, keyword Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) for various locations and historical time frames and much more.

Thorough keyword research is a necessary component for a successful inbound marketing program and SEMRush provides the largest and most accurate database of keyword data available.

Before you even think about creating an editorial calendar, spend the time in SEMRush to make sure you are targeting the right keywords for your business.  

What we love most:

  • Massive database of actionable keyword data
  • Daily project reports of keyword SERPs
  • Historical Google performance of individual keywords by time frame, location, device and more.

2. HubSpot Marketing Hub & CMS

Pricing: HubSpot CMS pricing starts at $300 per month.

Audience: Marketing, Web Developers and SEOs

The HubSpot CMS and HubSpot Marketing Hub is where all the great content that you plan to create will reside. 

Whether it's web pages, landing pages, emails, blogs, forms and Calls-to-Action, the HubSpot Marketing Hub and CMS will help you create, manage and measure the effectiveness of these assets in your campaigns.

The HubSpot CMS is a perfect blend of speed and security as well as end user friendly for marketers to make changes on the fly with no coding experience.

The Marketing Hub will help marketers automate the process of scoring leads, lead nurturing and data management with a powerful workflow engine.   

Marketing professionals that are tired of having to manage multiple tools and systems will love having a single platform perfectly designed to execute inbound marketing campaigns at scale with complete visibility into every stage of the funnel. 

What we love most:

  • A single platform to create, manage and measure our inbound marketing program
  • The ability to tie revenue directly back to specific marketing assets for example, revenue by first page seen.

 

3. HubSpot CRM

HubSpot | Best Free CRM Software for Businesses

Pricing: HubSpot CRM is free with paid versions starting at $50 per month.

Audience: Business Development Reps and Sales Account Executives

HubSpot CRM is hands down the best free CRM software on the planet. It's so good you'll end up subscribing to one of their paid offerings down the road but for small sales teams looking to align sales with your inbound marketing efforts it's a match made in heaven. 

HubSpot CRM will enable your sales team to track tasks, emails, deals and more with a clean, user friendly UI designed to eliminate repetitive task.

And since it shares the same database as the Marketing Hub and CMS Hub, marketing is able to tie revenue directly back to marketing initiatives.

Say goodbye to the day's of making assumptions about how effective your marketing programs are or how much revenue you think you might have generated through that campaign last spring.

What we love most:

  • LinkedIn Sales Navigator Teams Integration: Send connection request in InMails directly from HubSpot's CRM contact record.
  • HubSpot Documents: See how long prospects view your attachments.  HubSpot Documents provides insights into what pages are of interests to your prospects with real time alerts
  • HubSpot Meetings: Enable prospects to book meetings with your sales reps right from their email signature
  • Vidyard Integration: Send 1 to 1 custom videos to prospects on the fly with ease.
  • HubSpot ChatBots: Build simple or sophistic chatbots to help visitors find what they are looking for.

4. Ahrefs

Keywords Explorer by Ahrefs: Discover Keyword Ideas and Analyze SEO Metrics

Pricing: Ahrefs pricing starts at $99 per month.

Audience: Marketing & SEOs

Ahrefs is an incredible SEO tool, similar to SEMRush in that it provides keyword tracking, SEO insights into competitors, SERP analysis and more, however it's mostly used by SEO's for backlinks research and analysis. 

If you are actively involved in backlink acquisition programs or about to kick one off you need a tool like Ahrefs to know what you are up against in terms of the competition. While Ahrefs keywords database is not as large as SEMRush's it's still really good.  

What we love most:

  • Content gap analysis: Enter your target URL and your competitors URL to see what keywords your competitors rank for you but you currently don't.
  • Traffic Value Report: See in real time the value of your organic keyword positions compared to their PPC counterparts to show your clients/managers the value you are saving them each month by not spending money on AdWords
  • Keyword Difficulty: See how many backlinks you need to rank on the first page of Google for each keyword you are targeting
  • Paid Ads by Competition: See what keyword and Google ads are driving the most traffic for your competitors.

5. Typeform

Apply a theme to your typeform (Classic builder) – Help Center

Pricing: Typeform pricing starts at $35 per month.

Audience: Marketing & SEOs

In a nutshell, Typeform is a form builder on steroids. Typical forms are static, often asks for too much information and generally create needless friction, whereas Typeforms are interactive, provide information your readers are looking for and they are fun to interact with.

One of the best features about Typeforms is that you can easily build quizzes and questionnaires easily utilizing logic jumps based upon user inputs, providing your prospects a customized experience based upon the information they are looking for, while politely asking them for their information, making it a win-win situation.

Typeform natively integrates with HubSpot allowing for seamless lead conversion and workflows to be triggered off your Typeform submissions. 

What we love most:

  • Native HubSpot integration
  • Build complex quizzes with zero coding

6. Conversational Landing Pages

Pricing: HubSpot templates cost around $200.

Audience: Marketing & SEOs

Conversational landing pages are a fancy way of saying, a landing page that has an embedded ChatBot pane within the landing page so readers can directly engage the ChatBot without having to click the bottom of your website to trigger engagement with chat. 

By making the ChatBot front and center readers are much more likely to engage. You can pull off conversational landing pages with native HubSpot tools and pre-built templates or you can also leverage 3rd party products like Drift.

8. HotJar

Pricing: Business plans start at $89/month.

Audience: Marketing and SEOs

Have you ever wondered what your traffic thinks of your website?

Or perhaps you cannot figure out why your traffic is getting stuck on a particular form and not converting?

Hotjar can provide the insights you are looking for.  

Hotjar gives marketers feedback on website behavior with heatmaps.

Heatmaps tell you where your visitors click and scroll and what they look at and what they chose to ignore.

These visual insights will help you to create a better version of your site based upon real traffic insights.

Hotjar also provides marketers with recordings of actual traffic sessions so you can watch how your readers interact with your website and content. 

What we love most:

  • Watching real recorded interaction with our favorite web pages.

9. LinkedIn Outreach Automation with AI

Pricing: Varies depending upon vendor.

Audience: Business Development Reps and Sales Account Executives

CoPilot AI and Dux-Soup are some of the leading LinkedIn automation products available today.

Both of these products help you standardize and automate repetitive task associated with building out your LinkedIn network and starting meaningful dialogue.

For those familiar with HubSpot Sequences or other outbound prospecting automation tools, these two options are conceptually like "Sequences" but built specifically for LinkedIn outreach.

If you've had success with generating leads via LinkedIn but have limited bandwidth this is a great tool to ratchet up the volume to create even more sales ready leads.  

10. Zoominfo

Pricing: Pricing based upon company needs, features and database size/access.

Audience: Marketing, Business Development Reps and Sales Account Executives

Zoominfo is the holy grail of data for sales and marketers.  Zoominfo provides you with demographics, technographics, website behavior and buyer intent all on a single platform that integrates with your CRM & Marketing Automation software.

Having this data at your finger tips allows marketers to reduce the need for lengthy forms with multiple required fields. Plus, it helps sales reps better prepare for discovery calls.    

ZOOMINFO WEBSIGHTS ANALYTICS

WebSights (a Zoominfo feature) takes anonymous web traffic and identifies the companies coming to your website and the pages they are visiting.

Marketing and sales teams can prioritize outreach by focusing on page visits that identify bottom of the funnel web behavior (e.g. product pricing page or free trial page).

With this visibility you can automate the outreach of these companies and contacts into a relevant lead nurturing track via your marketing automation platform to identify who might be a match for your product or service.  

ZOOMINFO REACHOUT CHROME EXTENSION

If you're an existing Zoominfo customer you must download the ReachOut Chrome extension.

This Chrome extension will provide you the direct phone numbers, email addresses and social media profiles for the contacts you are looking for directly from the business's website or their LinkedIn profile page.

The extension also provides the companies technographics data along with buyer intent directly from the prospects website! By having all this data in a single place will will save your sales reps significant time and help them to identify ideal leads and prospects.  

11. SEOMinion Chrome Extension

Pricing: Free

Audience: Marketers and SEOs

Curious about what your top ranking competitors are using in their titles, H1's, meta description, links or the word count of their content? 

SEOMinion, a chrome extension provides a quick snapshot of this on-page SEO information quickly, directly from the URL you analyzing.  (Ahrefs has an extension for this too, but we like the look and feel of SEOMinion's better)

12. WhatFont Chrome Extension

Price: Free

Audience: Marketers and Web Developers

Have you ever come across a website where you really liked the font style, colors and weight but unsure of the font family they are using?

With the WhatFont Chrome extension you can hover over any section of the content to see their font settings. 

This is a handy little tool when planning to build out new templates and website and looking for inspiration.   

13. Vidyard or Loom Chrome Extension

It's likely your ideal prospects get tons of sales outreach emails everyday. 

How do you enable your sales reps to cut through all the noise? One way is through 1-to-1 personalized video outreach.

With Vidyard and Loom's Chrome extension your sales reps can quickly send a personalized video explaining the reason for their outreach and ideally something of value.

The extension supports both screen share and webcam simultaneously making video creation both personal and helpful.

Pricing: Starts at $15/month for Vidyard and Loom starts at $10/month

Audience: Business Development Reps and Sales Account Executives

14. MobileMonkey


If you're looking for cross channel chat automation to reach audiences via Facebook Messenger or SMS MobileMonkey is a product worth exploring.

MobileMonkey providers marketers with a multi-channel chatbot platform that allows non technical users to quickly build chatbots for messenger, SMS, webchat with no coding experience required.

It is currently free for unlimited contacts, but with limited features.

Price: $49/month

Conclusion

One final bit of advice that will save you substantial time and money is to consider building your marketing and sales technology stack around a platform, instead of a best of breed approach.

By having your website (CMS), marketing automation and customer relationship management software share a single database will make it incredibly easy to share insights across marketing, sales and support teams making both reporting and automation a breeze, (not to mention delighting your customers in the process).

If you are just getting started with Inbound Marketing and unsure of the software you should use, let us help you decide.

Not only can you leverage our experience but there's a very good chance we can save you a bunch of money and time in the process too.

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