Creating a B2B digital marketing strategy comes with challenges you normally wouldn’t have to deal with if you were a B2C company. B2B marketing has always been hard, now more than ever.
Businesses have access to an overwhelming amount of information whenever they need it, and you can bet they’re going to do their research before deciding on a product or service. Because of this, there’s very little room for you to make any missteps. You need a solid B2B digital marketing strategy if you’re going to get new, qualified leads and create partnerships.
B2B digital marketing can be extremely competitive, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Many B2B businesses excel at digital marketing, and they use multiple different channels to do it. There are several aspects to your B2B digital marketing strategy that you need to get right if you want it to work.
Coordinate Your Inbound and Outbound Approaches
This is an important first step in developing a digital marketing strategy for a B2B company. All of the effort you put into such a strategy has to match up, from your tone of voice to the audience you target. A well put together digital marketing strategy should leverage both inbound and outbound tactics to acquire leads and customers.
Jim Sullivan, the CEO of The Endurance Group, told us, “We do B2B lead generation through both inbound digital marketing as well as outbound business development efforts. We leverage our LinkedIn page posts to reflect the audience we’re actively campaigning to reach, so they are receiving both proactive outreach in tandem with seeing relevant, targeted content on our website and social media.”
Having ads or posts that don’t reflect the messaging on your website or within your content won’t do you any good. It will confuse potential customers and won’t do you any favors in trying to acquire them.
Create an overarching strategy that works in tandem together.
Leverage Email Marketing
Our society depends on emails daily, with many of us constantly checking our inboxes and responding to others. We are all aware of the importance of email in our lives, yet many B2B businesses still don’t prioritize this in their digital marketing strategies as much as they should.
Whether it’s cold outreach, a newsletter, or some other form of marketing collateral, email is an ideal way of reaching out to your leads and giving them the information they need the most. Today, email marketing is easier than ever, thanks to the number of available tools, so there’s no reason not to use it.
Tayyab Akram, digital marketing expert with WPBrigade, shared some helpful tips and tricks. “Start Email marketing by collecting the emails of your visitors and clients. That means you can update them about your new services and products through email marketing.”
Email marketing allows you to personalize your message to different groups of people. All of your contacts will be in different stages of the buyer’s journey, so how you communicate with them will vary. Is someone just learning about your business, or is this a long-time client? Naturally, we all want to feel like someone is thinking of our specific needs and how they can help, rather than something generic intended for everyone.
For email marketing to be a useful part of your digital marketing strategy, you need to stay committed to it and frequently put yourself in your leads’ inboxes. You’ll likely need to reach out multiple times for email marketing to be effective, so don’t give up after sending just a few emails.
Do SEO to Your Website
No digital marketing strategy is complete without SEO. Before you can do anything else, you need to make sure your business is visible to businesses looking for services and products similar to those you offer.
Your business needs to be at the top of search engine results for keywords that your desired customers are typing in for you to get organic attention. If they can’t find your website, you’ll be a nobody to a lot of people.
Understanding what your audience is searching for and targeting it is important in helping you get noticed, which you can achieve with SEO. Your other digital marketing efforts could go to waste if you aren’t working on SEO. Branded traffic is great, but it’s nowhere near as valuable as non-branded traffic. The size differential for the amount of people contained in each group is massive.
Not only does making your website SEO-friendly mean you’ll get noticed in the search results, but you’ll also improve a user’s experience. This can have a huge impact on how they feel about your business. Making SEO-friendly changes like improving site speed, using mobile-friendly web design, and making your website easy to navigate can make you appear more trustworthy and could ultimately help you gain a conversion.
Don’t Sleep on Content Marketing
When businesses are researching services and products they need, they want to know that the companies they’re looking into know what they’re talking about. They may be asking, “Am I doing business with a thought leader?”
Your B2B digital marketing strategy should be focused on developing trust with other businesses. There’s no better way of doing this than by producing relevant content. One of the primary goals of content marketing, in general, is to show that you’re trustworthy and establish yourself as an expert in the industry. This is extremely important for B2B marketing, so it should always be a key component of your digital marketing strategy.
When you aren’t able to be face-to-face with a potential lead, it can feel difficult to show your expertise and the company’s personality. Content marketing solves this problem and proves to prospective clients and customers that you have something to offer them. Just be sure to write the content in a tone of voice that fits your company’s personality.
Blogs, guides, ebooks, and podcasts can all be a part of your content marketing strategy. In fact, we spoke to the content marketing team at GRIN which is a B2B business and they told us, “One of our strategies is building original eguide content. We then use that to generate leads organically by having the download available on landing pages and through PPC by building ads with a CTA to download the eguide.” This type of content could be a great way to generate top-of-funnel leads.
We also can’t forget to include newsletters. Newsletters can be used as a part of your email marketing strategy as was mentioned previously.
The content you include on your website provides value to other businesses and shows them that you know what you’re talking about. In many cases, content marketing provides value to your audience without asking anything in return. However, offering your expertise in exchange for a lead’s contact information is an effective strategy to consider.
Execute Social Media Marketing
If your business isn’t already active on social media, now is the time to get started. Many tend to think social media is only valuable for B2C marketing, but that isn’t true. Social media marketing is just as important for B2B companies to utilize. However, it can be more of a challenge for B2B businesses to appeal to their target audience than a B2C business.
Knowing what to share can help boost your business’s online presence. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are all important for you to be active on, but as a B2B business, LinkedIn, in particular, should also be a priority. Maria S. Dykstra with TreDigital expressed the same thing telling us “in particular, LinkedIn and in some cases Facebook and Instagram, create immediate awareness and drive traffic to the page.”
Taking advantage of social media gives you the platform to share your content and other relevant information, in addition to making it easy to communicate with users.
Not only do you need to work on your organic social media posts, but you should also be investing in paid advertising on different platforms. Advertising on social media allows you to target the exact people who will need your business. This can help you get your business noticed by more people and works for even the smaller end of ad spend budgets.
Don’t Wait, Go Reach Your Goals
Creating a comprehensive digital marketing strategy for your B2B business means utilizing multiple types of digital marketing at once. Balancing different aspects of your B2B digital marketing strategy may seem like a lot, but a lot of what you do will actually work together. These individual parts will all come together in the end to help your company achieve its goals.
If you’re a B2B company struggling with your digital marketing efforts, reach out for some help!
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