We looked at content from the best B2B digital marketing agencies worldwide and combined it with our own vast experience advising clients on B2B marketing, to bring you the following 10 tactics. Use the list to identify what’s missing from your B2B digital marketing stack, and to identify the online marketing services your firm needs to look for in a B2B marketing company.
B2B email marketing
According to top B2B digital marketing company, HubSpot, 93% of B2B marketers use email marketing and 83% of B2B firms use email newsletters. But with so many companies targeting businesses with email content, how can you ensure your email content stands out?
To get noticed and increase email open-rates, the best B2B email marketing agencies recommend the following:
- Write compelling email subject lines. Spend as much time on your subject line as you do creating the messages within your B2B marketing emails. And don’t make them too long. Some email providers cut subject lines off, so a good rule of thumb is keep them at under 50 characters, including spaces.
- Segment your email list by audience. Your organization probably targets more than one audience. That means every email campaign won’t be for everyone in your customer contacts. Segmenting your email list also lends your messages a personal feel.
B2B live chat and chatbots
B2B marketing firms agree, your business needs to have a digital presence and needs to leverage digital marketing strategies. Over 80% of purchasers visit a company’s website before deciding to buy. Your business needs to have a well-designed website that’s mobile-responsive and is easy for your B2B site visitors to navigate.
The global COVID-19 pandemic forced even more businesses online, especially in industries, such as healthcare, that didn’t have as much of a digital footprint prior to COVID. But regardless of the industry, there’s emerging data that the pandemic has permanently altered B2B sales. Roughly 70% to 80% of B2B buyers prefer some form of online self-service or remote human interaction.
When designing a website, highly-rated digital marketing companies recommend adding elements such as chatbots and live chat to key pages on your site. Try the following ideas:
- Don’t use a chat bot for all interactions.To keep things personal and provide the right level of support to B2B website visitors, at the right time, use your chat bot to collect essential information and then route the visitor to a live B2B salesperson.
- Don’t run the same chat campaign on every page. Smart B2B digital marketers know to target chat messaging to the correct stage of the buyer’s journey. To accomplish this feat, tailor chat messaging to specific types of pages. For example, have your live chat messaging program ask visitors who have been on a product or service page if they need help finding a solution.
B2B SEO Optimization
Going back to your B2B website, it does your company no good having a website with landing pages for your products and services if nobody can find it on search engines, including Google and Bing. That’s why search engine optimization (SEO) is vital for every page and all content on your website. Top B2B online marketing firms help your organization with the following three B2B SEO tactics:
- Use on-page SEO. On-page, or on-site SEO, helps search engines understand and index your website content. This aspect of B2B SEO includes elements such as webpage content, page titles, page URLs, headers, meta descriptions, image alt-text, internal linking, etc. For example, researching and choosing the right keywords and topics is an important piece in the on-page SEO puzzle.
- Incorporate off-page SEO. This part of SEO involves all the digital content optimization tasks that happen off your site or page. They include things such as external links, guest blogging and social sharing. For example, when another website links to one of your blog posts or webpages, search engines use that information to gauge the authority level of your site.
- Deploy technical SEO. Technical SEO is the tactic used to optimize your website infrastructure. It’s involved in creating website navigation structure, optimizing page load times and other important page experience elements for a company’s site. However, thinking of B2B technical SEO as just the aspect of search optimization deployed when you first develop and launch your site is a mistake. This important SEO set of functions also involves diagnosing website issues that include broken links, missing alt image tags and which pages should be getting crawled.
B2B Search Engine Marketing
Besides SEO services, your B2B business needs to look for or adopt paid search marketing tactics, namely Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. PPC ads appear in search results, usually above the organic results. There are many moving pieces involved when it comes to PPC and other types of online advertising. The best digital marketing companies can recommend the right approach for your business.
- Move beyond keyword targeting PPC strategies. Top online advertising agencies will help expand your PPC and digital search ads to incorporate additional targeting elements. Today’s B2B search marketers advise also using remarketing, customer match, audience targeting, dynamic search ads, bumper ads, etc. in their efforts depending on the type of campaign or messaging.
B2B Social Media Marketing
With the typical B2B sales cycle lasting between four and nine months or longer, and with so many people involved in the B2B purchasing decision process (as many as seven or more on company purchasing committees), B2B social media marketing can seem like a daunting prospect. How to engage a diverse group of individuals at target businesses over a period of several months can be a struggle for many organizations.
We’ve come to the end of our list. The above are by no means the only important aspects of digital marketing. But this list can help guide you in understanding what a B2B digital marketing agency sales representative means when they’re describing services your business needs to reach today’s B2B buyers. Alternatively, use the tips to identify areas of B2B marketing you’d like to explore in more depth. For example, read this article next if you’re looking for help shaping your B2B marketing approach in 2021.
The post 10 Tips from Top B2B Digital Marketing Companies appeared first on Elevation Marketing.
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