9 Essential Inbound Marketing Tools For Startup Marketers (2023)

Let me tell you a secret.

No company has ever found sustained inbound marketing success without using the right tools.

Today, more than ever, SaaS marketers need the right inbound marketing tools in order to:

• Gain audience insights
• Personalize their messaging
• Increase conversion rates
• Optimize their content for the right topics

To help you do all that, I’ve put together a list of the best inbound marketing tools you should start using today.

Let’s discuss them one by one.

The Best Inbound Marketing Tools For SaaS Marketers

Inbound marketing has various sub categories like email marketing, SEO, content marketing, etc. While there are numerous world-class tools in every subcategory, I’ve chosen one for each to make your choice simpler.

1. Drift 

Drift is a powerful revenue acceleration platform that helps your sales teams start more conversations and close more customer deals through AI-powered insights and communication features.

It helps you expand your sales pipeline through automated conversations with your website visitors, based on your best-performing sales agent’s style.

With Drift, you get real-time alerts when a lead visits your website. This way, your agents can immediately get in touch when they’re available.

Plus, it gives you a complete marketing engine that integrates with your sales and marketing platforms. This allows you to drive valuable insights your sales agents can use to close more deals. 

2. Ahrefs

On-page SEO, keyword research, and link building lie at the heart of all inbound marketing activities.

And there’s no better product in the world to help you with SEO than Ahrefs. Which is why we’ve been using it ourselves for years.

With a backlink index of over 3 trillion external links, and a content index of 8.6 billion pages, Ahrefs has the most in-depth and updated search engine data in the world (After Google, of course.)

It provides everything you need to handle SEO campaigns for individual sites, small businesses, agencies, and enterprises.

It comes with tools for keyword research, backlink analysis, content analysis, on-page SEO, domain analysis, rank tracking, and advanced reporting. Plus, it offers extensive filters to view and analyze search data from multiple angles.

You can use these features to find new blog post ideas, develop a long-term content strategy, and find link-building opportunities.

In short, if you’re serious about SEO for your SaaS business, investing in Ahrefs is a no-brainer.

3. Clearscope

Clearscope is an AI-powered on-page optimization tool that helps you increase your content’s search engine traffic potential.

It makes on-page SEO ridiculously easy by doing all the research heavy-lifting for you. You only need to provide your target keyword based on which Clearscope analyzes the top-ranking pages and comes up with a list of keywords and terminologies your should use in your content.

To make your job even easier, it recommends how to use a keyword or phrase (for example, in H2, H3.)

You can do all of this manually. However, it will take hours of research (and you still might miss a few keywords.)

Clearscope saves all that time and provides you with a ready-to-use on-page optimization checklist that you can simply add to your content to achieve greater search visibility.

4. Unbounce

You can’t create an inbound marketing strategy without converting your visitors into subscribers and leads.

And you can’t drive conversions without optimized landing pages.

This is where Unbounce comes in.

It is a world-class landing page building platform that allows you to create stunning landing pages for lead magnets, sales campaigns, email campaigns, etc.

Its drag & drop page builder helps you create professional-grade responsive landing pages without technical knowledge or design expertise.

To make your job easier, it comes with dozens of templates for various business goals and objectives.

Its ease of use and robust features power your inbound marketing campaigns to generate more subscribers and leads every time.

5. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is among the most popular lead generation platform in the world.

It started as a simple WordPress pop-up plugin. But it evolved into a complete lead generation platform that offers much more than regular pop-ups:

• Exit intent pop-ups
• Welcome mats
• Floating bars
• Scroll boxes
• Several other opt-in form types.

You can also use OptinMonster to create page-specific pop-ups and gamified wheels to convert more traffic into subscribers on your website and landing pages.

Its innovative call to action (CTA) buttons with conversion-boosting effects are among the biggest reasons why marketers prefer using it.

OptinMonster comes with 100+ templates for all kinds of business goals that you can customize according to your brand.

6. ActiveCampaign

Email automation is at the core of all inbound marketing activities. Which is why we recommend ActiveCampaign, a SaaS email marketing platform with advanced automation and customer management features.

ActiveCampaign allows you to fully automate your email marketing funnel from lead generation to sale. It offers advanced user tagging and segmentation based on which you can trigger automated email sequences and personalized marketing campaigns.

Its user tracking capabilities also allow you to run remarketing campaigns to connect with lost prospects and increase conversions.

7. Terminus

Terminus helps you fill your sales pipeline and engage relevant customers through personalized messaging using multi-channel marketing campaigns.

It’s an advanced marketing and lead generation platform that integrates all the steps of your sales and marketing funnels and tracks the complete buyer journey of your prospects.

It comes with an exhaustive database of more than 67 million businesses to help you identify and segment relevant prospects. It gives you more data, more marketing channels, and more sales by offering personalized user experiences on your website, in your emails, and through banner ads on third-party sites.

In short, Terminus is a modern marketer’s dream platform that ensures that you know exactly where your leads are in the sales cycle.

8. Canva

Inbound marketing requires regular content creation on different social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Plus, to create engaging content, you need to create custom images and infographics that complement your content and make it more valuable.

Canva helps you achieve both these goals with its drag & drop graphics design platform. It provides you with an unlimited library of images, icons, graphical elements, and templates for infographics and various types of images.

Canva is a straightforward and easy-to-use platform designed specifically for non-technical business users. Compared to a full-time or freelance designer, it costs a fraction of money but offers immense value to your content marketing and social media strategy.

9. Hootsuite 

Inbound marketing is incomplete without an effective and elaborate social media marketing strategy.

Hootsuite is the ideal tool to help you develop your social media calendar, analyze your brand awareness and sentiment, and schedule social media content to regularly engage your audiences in their respective time zones.

It allows you to manage multiple social media profiles on a single platform and offers greater control over your social engagements.

In short, it’s an ideal product for SaaS companies looking to grow their social media influence. 

Are You Ready To Use The Best Inbound Marketing Tools?

Having the right inbound marketing tools in your armory makes it significantly easier to execute your strategy and move consistently towards your goals.

The tools I’ve featured in this article have helped us plan and execute complex inbound marketing strategies for our clients.

This is why we confidently recommend them.

If you want help developing your SaaS inbound marketing strategy or need to discuss anything related to online marketing, digital PR, or reputation management, schedule a free consultation call with one of our experts today.