When you look up “marketing tools” in Google, over 2 billion results appear.
The internet is saturated with performance marketing tools that support both growth hacking and growth marketing strategies.
Because of the overwhelming number of websites and apps out there, it can be hard to parse out the ones that actually work to drive sustainable results for B2B companies.
So, we used our decades of expertise to collect a list of the 22 best performance marketing tools you can use to enhance your marketing efforts.
Before getting into the list, we wanted to explore our most-used tools at ProperExpression. These are the ride-or-die performance marketing platforms and apps that we use daily, and if you’re looking to invest in or try out some tools, you should start with these.
Our award for best performance marketing (for growth hacking and growth marketing) tool goes to HubSpot. HubSpot software has “hubs” for marketing, sales, customer service, and content management (CMS) that let you manage, automate, and optimize your entire sales process in a centralized location.
Whether you’re looking to launch a one-goal email marketing campaign, target a specific audience segment with an offer to gain webinar attendees, or pretty much anything else, HubSpot intuitively lets you launch, track, and iterate on your performance marketing campaigns. Plus, if you work with a partner agency, like Proper Expression, HubSpot offers deals and will waive onboarding fees.
If your business has any involvement with search engine optimization (SEO), SEMrush is the top tool for conducting the keyword research you’ll need for everything from PPC ads to content clusters. This keyword tool also has analytics, competitor research, content strategy features, a powerful backlinking tool, and more.
SEO can take a while to yield results, so it’s not always considered a quick fix. Still, using SEMrush to find out what users search for and how competitors perform can give you invaluable insight for performance marketing campaigns.
The king of conversation rate optimization (CRO), Lucky Orange offers site heat maps, session recordings, surveys, and more so you can see how visitors interact with your website. Want to know where they stop reading, which button they click on the most, and other behaviors? Lucky Orange has you covered.
By understanding visitor behavior, you can make rapid changes to your website to optimize for conversions and drive real growth fast. HotJar is a similar tool that offers heat maps and behavior analytics tools; it could be worth using both, but we lean toward Lucky Orange.
Google Analytics isn’t for the faint of heart, but this free data application lets you track and report website traffic and other related metrics. It also creates helpful dashboards and reports that you can use to improve your website.
Whether you’re a performance marketer, growth hacker, growth marketer, or a combination of the three, using Google Analytics can help you understand the customer journey, guide you toward effective campaign strategies, and prove marketing return on investment (ROI).
Now that we’ve covered our four all-time favorite tools, we’ll move on to the top automation and optimization performance marketing tools. These tools help you automate processes, efficiently collect information, produce compelling content, and easily fix common marketing challenges.
You probably haven’t heard of this one before, right? ChatGPT, of course, is the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot taking the world by storm. Simply type in a question, request, or prompt, and ChatGPT will quickly produce an answer based on its ever-evolving algorithm—the more specific your prompt, the better.
ChatGPT has become a performance marketing phenomenon that’s already generated over a billion responses. Users can prompt the open AI bot to optimize a page for conversion, outrank a competitor page using SEO practices, develop video and email marketing content, and much more. Of course, its speedy nature aligns well with the rapid-fire core of growth hacking, but it’s also beneficial for performance marketing.
Subjectline.com is a tool that tests and ranks the subject lines of your emails. Based on best practices and various criteria, including urgency, punctuation, length, buzzwords, and more, the website gives you a score out of 100 and provides suggestions for improvement.
Consumers receive endless marketing emails; subject lines are the first lines of defense determining whether a recipient deletes your email without opening it or is curious enough to click. Writing a perfect subject line is critical for performance marketers that rely on both strategic and tactical emails, and this tool can help make it happen.
Looking for your ideal prospects? Apollo.io gives you a chance to set detailed criteria based on demographics, firmographics, and more to gather a list of people who might want to buy what you’re selling. While not infallible, Apollo is especially great for collecting lists for cold outreach.
Performance marketers use Apollo for its streamlined engagement workflows and its promise to “reach every buyer on earth.” For marketers who don’t have the time or resources to curate a database of warm contacts, using Apollo can set them on the right path to engaging with future customers.
The risk with using a tool like Apollo is that you might contact prospects with invalid email addresses, leading to an increased bounce and spam rate. That’s where ZeroBounce comes in. This email validator provides fast, accurate, and secure email validation of your entire list, then lets you download results easily.
Performance marketers that send out emails as part of a one-goal campaign can’t afford to have high bounce rates that put their domains at risk. That’s why B2B marketers should clean up their old and new databases to minimize the risk of jeopardizing their campaigns.
A website profiler tool, BuiltWith technology tracking tells you what widgets, analytics, frameworks, content management systems, advertisers, content delivery networks, web standards, and web servers are used on a specific website.
BuiltWith helps growth hackers and performance marketers understand their competition and gain actionable business intelligence. The tool, which offers integrations with standard applications like Google and Salesforce, gives users a comprehension of what clients are using competitor technology.
BrowserStack is a web and mobile testing platform that lets developers test websites and applications across various browsers, operating systems, and device types. With minimal setup and maximum security, BrowserStack gives you the information you need to launch successfully tested websites.
Performance marketing is often quickly executed, but that doesn’t mean marketers shouldn’t test new pages to ensure optimal performance. This tool makes app and browser testing easy so users can have a seamless experience that drives conversions and growth.
Growth hackers and performance marketers need to stand out in all ways. Developing uniquely sourced content (instead of regurgitating what’s already out there) can make the difference between a campaign that works and one that doesn’t. Plus, Help a B2B Writer minimizes how much time content creators spend searching for sources.
Collecting feedback is a great way to engage with customers and leads and get actionable guidance on what you can improve. Typeform specializes in online form building and survey creation, so you can easily engage with your audience using proven templates.
Surveys help growth and performance marketers understand their target audience, gather feedback, scale event attendance, and gauge brand awareness and reception. This allows marketers to collect invaluable information to use in their campaigns quickly.
Don’t have the time or budget to hire a designer? Unsplash has thousands of free, high-resolution stock images that are searchable and downloadable. The website is free, but a Plus subscription gives you access to even more options.
Performance marketing is often about speed, which sometimes means taking shortcuts to execute short-term, tactical campaigns quickly. Using stock images isn’t always ideal, but it’s often a great way to find high-quality photos for campaigns you want to execute right now.
The small challenges that arise when executing performance marketing can cause a world of frustration. Tinypng alleviates one of those minor hiccups by letting you compressive or resize images to make your website run faster without hiring a designer or developer.
Performance marketers are often self-sufficient and like to know how to do things autonomously to save money (and time). Tinypng not only speeds up a website, making for a better user experience, but it lets you do so at little to no cost without needing to rely on outside help.
Now that we’ve covered automation and optimization, we’ll head into the final category of performance marketing tools: those related to search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is notoriously known for its long-term, strategic nature, so it is the perfect aid for performance marketers looking to drive growth.
Google Search Console is a free tool provided by Google that helps website owners monitor and improve the visibility of their site in Google search results. It provides valuable insights into how Google crawls and indexes your site and identifies issues that may affect your site's search performance.
As a performance marketing tool, Google Search Console can help you identify opportunities to increase your site's traffic and improve its search engine rankings. Marketers can address technical issues and optimize content to quickly grow a website through search performance analytics, index coverage, mobile usability, and other features.
Another free Google tool, Google Keyword Planner helps website owners and marketers discover new keywords and estimate the traffic and cost associated with those keywords. It allows users to find relevant keywords related to their product, service, or topic and analyze their potential traffic and competition.
For performance marketers looking to execute ad campaigns, produce competitive content, and conduct speedy keyword research for SEO or non-SEO efforts, Google Keyword Planner is a cost-effective option for finding relevant and profitable topics.
Google Trends is a free tool provided by Google that allows users to track the popularity and interest of search terms over time. It provides insights into how search behavior changes over time and allows users to compare the popularity of different search terms and topics.
For performance marketing, Google Trends can help identify growth opportunities and give marketers insight into their audience for optimal campaign success. By analyzing the popularity of top keyword searches, you can visualize what topics to focus on in your campaigns.
For those looking to improve technical SEO, the free Google PageSpeed Insights tool is a great way to analyze a website's performance and gain suggestions for improving page speed and user experience. It measures various aspects of a website's performance, including page load time, speed index, and time to first byte.
The tool can help marketers improve website performance, increase user engagement, and ultimately drive more traffic and conversions by figuring out how to fix issues, optimize images, reduce file sizes and bounce rates, and improve search engine rankings.
SEO Minion is a free browser extension that provides various SEO tools and features for website owners and marketers. It allows users to analyze on-page SEO factors, check broken links, and preview SERP snippets, among other things.
By using SEO Minion, marketers can quickly identify and fix various SEO issues on a website. For example, the on-page analysis feature can help users optimize their content by analyzing meta tags, headings, and image alt tags. The broken link checker can help users identify broken links on their websites and fix them, improving user experience and search engine rankings quickly.
Content creators and performance marketers rejoice! Buzzsumo is a web-based tool that allows users to analyze the popularity and engagement of content across different social media platforms. It provides insights into which topics and types of content are performing well and identifies key influencers and competitors in a particular industry.
Buzzsumo helps marketers find timely content opportunities and quickfire strategies for increasing engagement and reach. Performance marketers can also better understand what resonates with their audience, which is critical information to have when creating content intended to engage and nurture.
Screaming Frog is a desktop-based website crawler that allows users to analyze and audit various aspects of a website's performance, including on-page SEO, broken links, and page speed. It provides a comprehensive overview of a website's structure and content, which can be used to identify issues and opportunities for improvement.
The tool enables marketers to quickly identify and fix various issues that may impact their website's performance. For example, the tool can identify broken links and missing meta tags, negatively affecting search engine rankings and user experience. Additionally, by analyzing the structure and content of a website, businesses can identify opportunities for improving navigation and user engagement, which can drive marked growth.
Similar to Screaming Frog and another fan-favorite desktop-based crawler, Sitebulb provides an in-depth analysis of various aspects of a website's performance and SEO. It lets users identify technical SEO issues and gain insights into site architecture and user experience.
The tool provides detailed reports and recommendations for technical issues, allowing performance marketers to make quick fixes that might disrupt their efforts. With the audit tool, they can improve search engine rankings, boost user experience, and create smooth web pages for campaigns.
There you have it! Our team has used hundreds of growth hacking, growth marketing, and performance marketing tools, but these are the top 22 that can change the game this year. Supported by these tools, you can make a noticeable impact on the bottom line.
Want to connect with a marketing team that’s mastered the fusion of growth hacking and performance marketing to drive results for B2B companies? Get in touch today!