Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the online marketing paradigm that was already underway. From an avid social media presence to traffic gaining website content, the online world has created a well-integrated and flexible marketing strategy.
As a marketer, understanding and implementing effective use of online resources can be overwhelming.
The proper use of digital marketing tactics such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), search marketing, online advertising, and e-mail marketing can navigate other businesses to your brand as the long-term goal is to turn them into potential clients.
We have fail-proof, lucrative ways to implement the B2B digital marketing strategies that help you to understand the digital marketing model and its goals fully.
Keep reading to know more.
Table of Contents
Understanding the B2B Marketing Model
While most of you will know the B2B businesses and how they work, some might still be confused. Therefore, let us have a quick overview before you jump on the digital transformation for marketing strategies.
B2B digital marketing strategies are different from the ones used for B2C marketing. For example, B2B marketing (business-to-business marketing) targets other businesses, while B2C marketing (business-to-consumer) sells its products and services directly to the customers.
As a B2B marketer, it is essential to target the marketing model to meet the needs, demands, and interests, of potential buyers who want to make a purchase for their company. Therefore, the company is the ultimate B2B buyer.
To hit the target audience on the right spot with a revenue-generating digital marketing plan, you must have an idea about the company you are developing the B2B marketing strategy for.
Here are some examples about B2B companies:
- A place that provides spaces or leases them to teams or freelancers who work remotely;
- A place that is suitable for an on-demand order completion like drop shipping, warehousing, and printing services.
- A company that serves other businesses with digital or automated tools to understand the market and boost their sales like Salesforce or HubSpot
The old-school, or should we call them the pre-digital era strategies, does not align with the B2B or any other business environment now;
You may ask why? Because things have changed for good.
With a plethora of educational content on various social media channels, customers have become smart. Therefore, it is essential to deliver authentic and valuable content to potential buyers.
Moreover, old methods like cold calls are passé, your core audiences are the millennials, and telemarketing or cold calling might not be your favorite of your marketing strategy.
This is why it is high time that the digital marketers who work along the entire B2B marketing channel embrace the digital transformation to ensure a seamless buyer journey.
Developing an Effective B2B Marketing Framework
Even though the basis of the B2B digital marketing strategy remains similar to an old framework, the approach must acknowledge an inbound, multi-person journey on online platforms.
Before developing the strategies, have a look at the framework:
- Create awareness about the brand
- Consider a multi-participant approach
- Constant upgradations based on research and discovery throughout the buyer journey
- Purchase of the goods and services
- Provide a seamless post-purchase experience
- Maintain the customer loyalty loop
You were wrong if you thought that your work would stop once you created the strategies. Marketers are entitled to ensure and maintain a loop of satisfied and happy customers for the B2B company.
An important point you must consider as a B2B marketer is that a new B2B buyer is likely to behave similarly to a B2C client. They would expect attention, a seamless purchase experience, and high-quality service.
More than 80% of any B2B company's revenue depends on the buyer's experience with the brand in this digital era. In contrast, the rest of your target audience might still be interested in the actual offering from the company.
To retain lifelong B2B customers and maximize the ROI (return on investment), the digital marketing strategy must guide the B2B audience throughout their buyer journey.
Sales-Driving Elements of a Digital Marketing Plan
Here are some key principles or elements for a sales-driving digital marketing strategy:
- Know your goals and objectives- the goals should be specific, realistic, and easily measurable (to track the process)
- Create customer-oriented strategies - Begin with a thorough B2B market research and know your target audience. Build individual buyer personas acknowledge the consumer needs and pain points. Utilize marketing tools such as content marketing, search marketing, advertising, PPC campaigns, and more to cater to those needs.
- Invaluable content -Your websites, blog posts, landing pages, and social media posts need valuable and relevant content to the customer's needs. If the information on your company website and ads does not resonate with the core audience- your strategy will be a waste of time and resources. Create optimized content utilizing marketing automation that narrates the brand's credibility and trust to the B2B buyers.
- Monitor and Evaluate- Once your marketing campaign is spread on the social platforms, it is a wait, and watch the game. Digital marketing is a long-term process that needs evaluation at every stage, even post-purchase, establishing a system that monitors marketing campaigns' progress, assesses the KPIs, acquires tangible data, and measures metrics to analyze things like customer engagement, purchase decision, conversion rate optimization and more.
Now that you have a headstart on the plan let us look into digital marketing channels to create lucrative B2B marketing strategies.
Effective B2B Digital Marketing Strategies
There are many businesses and companies that need your products and services, and you know that. But, have you may wonder why even after providing high-quality goods, the list of your potential clients is stagnant, with no increase in numbers whatsoever.
Maybe, something is missing from your marketing strategy plan.
Let us go through some exemplary digital marketing strategies that can become an invaluable asset for your B2B business.
Create a great company website:
A professional B2B website is your biggest asset in the world of digitization. It can even take your brick-and-mortar store to the next level. According to Google Analytics, a bad experience on your company's website makes it 88% less likely for the user to visit again- let alone buy from you.
Therefore, with a website, you need to understand how things work because, with time, it has to evolve. The content, images, influx of organic traffic everything has to be monitored and evaluated to become successful. Your website is the face of your B2B company. It displays your expertise and your way of keeping the customers satisfied with the world by providing an easy means of contact.
- The website should be professional but not complicated- it is a guide for the customers or the online visitors, so things should be simple. Yet, the website content should ensure and maximize customer engagement.
In a nutshell, here is how a B2B professional website should look like
- Relevant and attractive to the target audience
- More than 80% of the users visit the website from their mobile phones. Therefore, it should be mobile-responsive
- Should be fast- people are impatient, they would not wait too long for the website to open or the content to download
- The website must have an eye-catching and professional company logo
- The website should be equipped with optimized, updated, and engaging content for blog posts and landing pages
- Must have clear call-to-action - so your customer knows where to find you
- Have links that navigate the audience to your social channels
- The website must be equipped with customer testimonials in the form of written or even video content
- Generate authentic backlinks to increase organic traffic
- The metrics of the website should be monitored, evaluated, and updated timely
- Get an SSL certificate for your website to ensure that it is secure
- Ensure that the customer support team encompasses a fluid approach, is highly responsive and actionable- act as 24-hours sales
Get the website designed by a professional web developer, even if it means investing money.
Consider Content Marketing and Search Engine Optimization:
B2B content marketing is a broad term that involves approaching the target audience with your expertise and brand awareness by leveraging content creation. It involves several B2B marketing techniques such as:
- Social media posts
- Video marketing
- Newsletters
- Cold e-mails
- Case studies, infographics, blog posts, e-books, whitepapers, and more
To build user-engaging content, here are the key points that every B2B digital marketing agency must look into:
- Understand and evaluate the purchase journey from a buyer's perspective, such as the tasks they need to perform or things they want
- Curate relevant content that essentially provides information, tools, and services that specifically target the buyers' needs that target these specific tasks
- Ensure the content is easy to understand and accessible to the buyers on preferred channels
Search Engine Optimization:
Content writing is intertwined with Search Engine Optimization- SEO. Any content you use must be highly optimized to help your brand and content rank on the top of search engines. The easier it is to find you online, the more traffic you will get.
To be found easily by your B2B audience, you have to ensure that your website appears on the first page of any search.
SEO is, however, complicated, so it would be better to get an SEO expert to help you with optimization. The main goal is to find target keywords that fit your site and the search engines. Moreover, the content must enable off-page SEO and on-page SEO.
It does not matter if your blog is extremely well-written with engaging content; if it does not have the right and effective content, your audience will never get a chance to read it, maybe. Therefore, optimization has to be incorporated at every content development stage along the B2B cycle.
Leverage Social Media Marketing Strategy:
Today, every other person has at least one social media account. Moreover, millennials (the Gen Z)- your potential customers know well to leverage the social channels; therefore, it is essential to target them with a likewise effective approach.
However, social media campaigns require expertise high creativity and are labor-intensive. This is why many digital marketers may skip it out of their digital B2B marketing strategy- which is a bad idea. With social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and many more on the surge, it would be best to leverage them.
The right digital marketing tactic can attain the largest qualified audience and build your business's digital presence on trending channels to generate authentic B2B leads and retain long-term client relationships.
After search marketing, social media marketing is the second most effective channel to implement your digital strategies. It aids better customer engagement and allows the B2B audience to put their thoughts forward by engaging in the social media posts for B2B businesses.
The best way to use social media is by creating highly creative, engaging, and well-optimized content. Furthermore, as a B2B digital marketing agency, you can leverage the digital content to lead the audience to your company's other social pages. However, it is essential to tailor the message smartly because the qualified audience for each social media platform is specific and different from the others.
You can use a wide range of accurate content to increase organic traffic to your social sites, including:
- B2B Industry tips and latest news
- Offer solutions to the customer's pain points
- Special announcements such as discounts, promo codes, seasonal sales, or launch of a new product or service
- Incorporate gleaming B2B partner or client testimonials- it helps the audience to trust you
- Add links that lead to white papers and case studies on your company's website
- In the social media posts, add links to your company's explainer videos or "how-to" guides to help the audience understand your business in a better way.
- Ask your clients to send them video testimonials, and with their permission, display them on your social channels- it will help your old client feel valued and bring in new clients (as videos seem more authentic and convincing)- a complete win-win
- Use features on social media channels like going "live" on Instagram or displaying photos and videos in Dropbox on LinkedIn for better results.
It is crucial that the content of a digital marketer should be free from any clickbait and conspicuous sales pitches. The posts should make the users curious enough to engage more in your content and check out your products and services.
Understand the Video Marketing Tactics:
Video marketing has gained immense popularity in the B2B sphere. It involves creating and sharing customer engaging video content (at times testimonials as well) to engage your B2B audience. Video marketing can be in the form of video podcasts, live streams on social media platforms, instructional or explainer videos, webcasts, and more.
Videos are an important part of content marketing. Therefore, it is important not to make them intense, too long, or hard to understand. Engaging, light-hearted, and fun content can boost your B2B setting in no time.
LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are the best social media sites for video marketing, as per the aforementioned study.
Here is how you can make money generating videos:
- Share your work and experience- Use the video content to give a virtual tour of your workspace to show the audience your work ethics alongside the product development stages. Do not be overt, be smart and make the audience curious yet make them trust your brand.
- Offer pain point solutions- The best B2B strategy is the one that offers solutions to the clients. Put up how-to videos, or offer one-on-one interviews or Q&A sessions to solve their product-related issues.
- Connect with the clients- Marketing is so much more than just generating sales and being rationale. Your marketing strategy should resonate with the clients' purchase demands and emotions. Use the video ads and content to connect with the B2B leads and consumers to make a bigger impact.
- Ensure High-quality graphics and sound- Nobody wants to watch a dull, boring video; gone are the days when people were hooked on the "black and white" pictures because that was the only option available. But, today, with excellent cameras, amazing editing software, and professionals ready to help you, ensure high-quality yet light-hearted video content.
- Keep the buyer's journey in consideration- The videos are for your clients to target their needs and navigate them to your brand. Therefore, avoid adding any unnecessary content. Just make the video content to-the-point
B2B companies use digital marketing agencies to create the following video content:
- Pre-roll and mid-roll video with YouTube ads
- How-to, instructional, and explainer videos
- Branded videos to display the business and video ads
- Blog videos
- Entertaining videos to grab viewer's attention
You have to be smart with your content and marketing strategy to capitalize on the digital opportunities.
E-mail Marketing Strategy:
Even though most of the traditional marketing methods are outdated, e-mail marketing remains a remarkably important part of digital campaigns- old id gold. E-mails, both newsletter, and cold e-mails, are a key component of market automation. It enables your exiting customer pool to stay aware of new products and services, upgrades, policy changes, and simply, a customized e-mail just makes them feel valued.
Here are a few ways in which you can leverage e-mail marketing in the best possible manner:
- Send your customers (old and new) monthly newsletters and blog newsletters just to ensure that they do not forget your post-purchase
- Send them notifications about your next webinar or live stream by posting a link to the platform you will conduct them on
- notifications about a launch of a new product, new branch, re-location
- "Thank-you" gestures after they visit your page, make a purchase, or leave a good reviews
- New e-book announcements
- Introduce your brand to your staff via e-mails
E-mails enable the company to assess the number of people who made the purchase or are interested in making purchases in the future. A person usually adds in their e-mail when they check out after purchase or when they want to stay updated about the brand.
PPC Campaigns:
Do you often see those Google Ads popping up while scrolling on the internet or playing online games? Yes, another effective digital marketing technique can generate revenues and B2B leads. Google Ads are the most effective PPC campaigns used by digital marketing agencies worldwide.
PPC or Pay-Per-Click is also a crucial element of internet marketing. It is the online advertising of your B2B brand. Search engine marketing content marketing is all a part of PPC. When a marketer or advertiser uses PPC, they have to pay a fee whenever a lead is generated- meaning whenever someone clicks on their ads.
As these ads bring the customers to the company's website.
Other than the discussed strategies, here are some other easy-to-use methods to incorporate in your digital marketing plan:
- Re-marketing (at-times you have to consider redefining your goals and that means bringing some changes in your strategies)
- Event marketing
- Affiliates
- Customer Reviews/ Testimonials
- B2B partnerships
Key Takeaway
You cannot escape the rapidly advancing tech-savvy and automation tool. The key to surviving in a highly competitive digital market is to learn to play by the digital rules!
Identify your audience and their behavior, assess their weak and strong points, define your goals, ensure that your goals align with market research and customer expectations, and craft the B2B digital marketing strategies accordingly.
Ensure that you track, test, modify and redefine your strategic plan from time to time. Because at the pace technology and millennials are moving, your B2B company can get lost in the pool of emerging marketing trends if you lag.
If you are looking for professional help, Osborne Digital Marketing is your place to go. We are experts in B2B digital marketing strategies.
