I’m sitting at Digital Summit Atlanta right now in a session about the fragmented marketing system. I’ve sat in a few other sessions about SEO, email and content marketing so far today. Yet again, I’ve experienced the same trend at every conference I go to – consumer marketers get all of the love and B2B is the redheaded stepchild that gets thrown a few bones here and there, but rarely is the point of the conference to help B2B marketers get better at their craft.

(FYI, the conference does have a lot of great content, some of which is great for B2B – especially on the email marketing track.)

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What we do know is that as long as content is king, we have to do more with less, create more with less. B2B marketing isn’t vastly different from consumer marketing because our targets are ultimately still consumers. They get bored at work and go on Facebook just like the rest of us. They share the photo they took of their kid at daycare that morning on Instagram. They search for last minute vacation ideas even while putting the finishing touches on an annual report or shareholder presentation.

Just as mobile is the center of a consumer or a potential customer’s world, mobile is the center of our world. Embrace that! Every day, stable|kernel builds apps designed to improve lives. Maybe the app lets you change your home’s temperature settings or lets you pay your tab at a restaurant without pulling out your wallet. Perhaps it helps financially-insecure families to find resources if they need help. Maybe it helps workforces do their jobs better. Or maybe the app helps you narrow your target email contacts. There are many mobile products out there we use every day to help us manage our workflow – here’s a list of our favorites.

9 mobile apps for B2B marketers:

  1. Slack. Bless your heart if you haven’t heard about Slack yet. This app didn’t exist 2 years ago and now has 60,000 TEAMS on their platform. Slack is essentially a chat platform; it allows your team to communicate in real time, tag certain keywords and topics, share files and cat gifs. Lots and lots of cat gifs.According to TechCrunch, “The average [Slack] user spends 10 hours per weekday plugged into Slack. The tool saw 320 million minutes of active usage per weekday as of February, which comes out to 140 minutes per user per weekday.”apps-banner.png
  2. Google Hangouts. Video conferencing with team members is super accessible with Hangouts. I can talk to my partners in the UK in real-time, see their faces, share my screen and have a convo from the comfort of my office or couch. No paying for international calls, and video conferencing allows us to be more connected to our remote teammates. Screen Hero is also a good tool for screen sharing.
  3. Hubspot. OK, I have a love/hate relationship with Hubspot. It makes managing email campaigns, landing pages and content so simple. It serves up reports in an easy, consumable fashion and allows users to do social publishing and listening, social ads, Google ads, etc. However, you need some CSS knowledge to use it and the tools for optimizing for SEO could be better. Still, the data we gather from email campaigns truly helps us figure out what content is driving engagement. Additionally, its mobile iOS and Android apps make it very easy to check your campaign dashboards on the go.You can also use Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Everypost, Buffer and Tweetdeck (is that still a thing?) to schedule your social publishing to multiple channels. Great tools that help you become far more efficient at building a social brand.
  4. Feedly. Struggling with content creation or curation? Check out feedly! Smart Insights says, “Feedly offers a variety of helpful features, including a ‘Popular’ section at the top of each feed to ensure that certain content isn’t overlooked as well as a ‘Custom Sharing’ preference which allows pro members to send articles straight to their chosen clipper.” It’s a great RSS reader if you are in need of fast content.
  5. Evernote. So much better than Apple Notes. Evernote is great for to-do list building, but it’s so much more than that! The mobile app allows you to snap a picture of something you wish to remember, and Evernote pulls out both the text and context from the image. So cool!
  6. Trello or Asana. These are fantastic apps for project task management. Our team uses Trello for everything from onboarding new employees to assigning tasks and organizing responsibilities, but Asana accomplishes the same tasks. If you prefer pen and paper for your to-do lists like me, don’t worry – it’s easy to use, and there is so much satisfaction in dragging a tile from “to-do” or “work-in-progress” to “done!” It’s also very easy to share tiles or boards, assign tasks and alert team members when you update a board.trello-mobile-app.jpg
  7. Nimble. I haven’t actually used this one yet, but I downloaded Nimble today and can’t wait to get started. It helps you view contacts across all of their social media properties. This is awesome for marketing and sales teams that want to take a person-to-person approach to marketing.  How better to tailor your messages to one individual than to have all of their interests aggregate to one place?!
  8. Over. OMG. Hey marketing-teams-of-one….or one-hundred. I know you see all these sexy images on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram with really cool font overlaid on the image. Over is perfect for on-the-go social posts, blog images, etc. In seconds, you have a beautiful, shareable piece of content that will grab your audience’s attention.photo-editor-app.png
  9. WiFi Finder. We work on-the-go all the time! In an uber, an airport, a bar, the daycare pick-up line, you name it! WiFi Finder helps you…. find wifi. (yeah, mind blown, I know.)

Hope these help your teams work more efficiently! What are your favorite apps? Comment below or tweet at me @agirlnamedsew! Want to read more? Here are 9 Things Every Marketer Should Know About Mobile!

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