Since marketing went digital, the industry hasn’t been the same. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in ‘marketing hacks’ as B2B marketers have started to realize traditional marketing methods are no longer useful in a competitive landscape.
B2B marketers are on a constant search for an effective digital marketing strategy that can give their company a much-needed presence and branding boost. Though the following techniques are by no means revolutionary, they do work and have an important place in your digital marketing tool box.
Ready to learn more? Keep reading for our favorite tried and true digital marketing strategies:
Four Tried and True Digital Marketing Strategies
1. Try Before You Buy
When you offer a freemium version of your product or service, it enables you to remove a key barrier for customers, which is adoption. We all know consumers love freebies and when you give away a free product or service, adoption rates often skyrocket. In fact, best-in-class software companies report a 60% conversion rate following a free trial (source).
However, to get the maximum result from this approach, you must offer features that allow users to see the benefits of the product without offering the entire set of features. Many companies have witnessed tremendous success by using this strategy.
Example: Slack is a networking service used for private communication within organizations. This company used a freemium model to obtain its first users. For anyone in an enterprise, it was easy to install and use.
Slack nailed the free trial/freemium offer. Why? Because they don’t force you to buy the premium model. But, as your organization grows bigger, you’re naturally inclined to move up to a higher tier of offerings. Many leading companies have also benefited immensely from this business model including Hotmail, Dropbox, and Hubspot.
2. Offer a Free Tool
Another powerful way to gain immense visibility is to create a tool and offer it for free. To have success with this strategy, you must make sure the tool you offer is valuable to your audience.
Example: Bizible (a B2B marketing attribution and planning software), offered a free tool that was of great value to their potential users and received an overwhelming response. Bizible did thorough market research and realized that majority of its customers were looking for a simple way to add UTM parameters to Bing ads. So, they created a tool which was able to serve a real customer need.
At no cost to the user, Bizible’s Bing tool successfully broke the initial barrier of adoption that plagues most organizations. Within a short amount of time, the tool generated an overwhelming response, and effectively established Bizible as an authority in their field. In fact, the Bing tool alone is credited with the initial success of company.
Example: HubSpot (an inbound marketing and sales platform) created a free ‘Marketing Grader’ tool that allows users to test the effectiveness of their website. In other words, the tool helps analyze the performance of your website and marketing campaigns. Unsurprisingly, the tool was an instant hit.
3. Rethink Content Marketing
When it comes to B2B marketing, nothing generates more leads than consistently creating and sharing informative content. The key to successful content marketing is to create educational pieces that offer insights without openly promoting your products. The purpose of such content is to engage prospects and identify and nurture leads.
Content marketing, though not a new tactic, is one that many companies get wrong. Because it takes time to create something of value, many companies look for any easy way out. Don’t! Take the time to create good, valuable content and you will reap the benefits.
For an in-depth look at content marketing, check out the following blog posts:
4. Get Social with Your B2B Digital Marketing Strategies
Social media has taken the world by storm. It’s changed the way we communicate, socialize, meet people, network—the list goes on. It’s also changed how we market our businesses.
Social media has changed the game; it’s no longer a one-way street; your customers and prospects can now share their opinions, have a conversation with you, and interact with your brand like never before.
Because social media is such a huge space, we couldn’t possibly cover every platform and every tactic in this one blog post. Fortunately, we’ve covered many of these topics before. Check it out:
Example: GE (General Electric), has created a playful yet educational social media presence. Their main strategy is sharing more posts on technology and innovation rather than promotional posts about their products.
Recently they rolled out a campaign that focused on promoting ‘Aros’, a new addition to their appliance family. ‘Aros’ is branded as the world’s smartest air conditioner that allows users to control it via their smart phones. Their marketing was a mix of videos, custom graphic designs, appealing visuals and more.
Through social media, GE successfully built an engaging community around their brand and products, effectively humanizing the organization.
Final Thoughts About These B2B Digital Marketing Strategies
In a world where everyone’s looking for the next big hack, it doesn’t hurt to take it back to the basics. Consider this, are you just following trends or are you making truly educated decisions for your business?
Contact ZoomInfo today to learn how our contact database and world-class technology come together to scale and improve your B2B marketing strategy.
Contributed by Rituraj Gill, Alliances and Communications manager at Designhill a company that connects organizations with custom graphic designs and professional graphic designers around the world.