A robust B2B digital marketing strategy can and WILL drive growth in revenue, reputation, and resilience for your business. But you have to know what’s important and what isn’t. Otherwise, you’ll get overwhelmed by ALL the options available for marketing online. These are our best tips for helping you focus on what matters.
Understanding B2B Digital Marketing Strategies
Unlike B2C marketing, which focuses on reaching individual consumers who can often make an immediate decision, B2B marketing typically involves multiple decision makers, longer sales cycles, and higher price points. It requires building strong relationships with potential business clients, understanding their specific needs and pain points, and tailoring marketing strategies to address those concerns effectively.
Because B2B digital marketing involves targeting a specialized audience, it requires in-depth market research and the use of targeted messaging and content to engage and educate potential business customers. Sometimes, you need to influence multiple decision makers or a “buying committee” through your digital marketing if you want to drive conversions that result in revenue.
Learn about B2B digital marketing strategies from our own expert, Ramsey Sanchez in this episode of The Marketing Blender Show.
Steps in Creating a Your Digital Marketing Strategy
#1 Identifying Your Target Audience
The first step towards building a successful B2B digital marketing strategy is identifying your target audience. Understand their needs, pain points, and decision-making processes. This knowledge forms the foundation of your digital marketing efforts. Go deeper than demographics and even firmographics. The psychographics of your audience is where you will find the levers that will move marketing forward. Even the most logical business decision has emotion at its core. From a digital perspective, you can research commonly searched problems or pain points to understand how to position your marketing and advertising.
#2 Setting Measurable Goals
What do you aim to achieve with your B2B digital marketing strategies? Whether it’s boosting brand awareness, generating leads, or improving conversion rates, setting clear and measurable goals is crucial. This allows you to aim your marketing budget and resources and solve the right problem. If no one knows about your brand, awareness is the top priority. If plenty of people visit your website, but you aren’t getting leads, then conversion should be the focus.
#3 Choosing the Right Digital Marketing Channels
Not all digital marketing channels yield the same results. Select the ones that your target audience frequently uses. These could include LinkedIn, email marketing, content marketing, or SEO. Maybe you are targeting busy CEOs. They often listen to podcasts or YouTube videos. You cannot afford to be everywhere. Focus on going where your buyers go. If you aren’t sure where this is, it’s time to start interviewing your existing and potential customers to find out.
#4 Creating Engaging Content
Content is king in digital marketing. Create engaging, relevant, and value-packed content that resonates with your audience. This can help position your business as a thought leader in your industry. Every touch point matters, so put the same attention into writing great ad copy as you would into a blog or a social media post. Today, it’s popular to use AI to generate content. We find it is OK to use for helping create outlines, dig up research, and give you a starting point. However, you MUST add your own unique viewpoint and expertise. Remember that the goal is to help your audience make progress toward their goals. Everything you put in front of them with your B2B digital marketing content should aim at serving them.
#5 Implementing SEO Strategies
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a vital part of any B2B digital marketing strategy. It helps improve your website’s visibility on search engines, thereby increasing traffic and potential leads. It’s often ideal if you can focus your organic and paid keyword strategy on commercial or “bottom of the funnel” keywords that indicate your target audience is about to make a purchase decision. However, these are often the most expensive to bid on. This means you may need to look farther up in the funnel for how you can engage your audience while they are still learning about their problem. That’s a great way to help them start trusting YOU to be the one who helps them solve it.
Bear in mind that organic SEO is usually a long-term strategy that helps fill top of funnel (awareness and nurture). Paid is often targeted at direct lead generation. Set your expectations around timelines and outcomes accordingly.
Go here for tips on creating a winning digital marketing plan.
How to Start Tracking Your Digital Marketing Efforts
Every digital marketing tool has its own reporting and analytics that you will eventually learn to use, but where do you actually start? Always begin with Google Analytics and get your tracking set up for your website. If your web development or hosting company set this up for you, they should help you get access. That way, you get more insight into your user base, the people that are finding you on your website or on Google or Bing. You might need some coaching to figure out what a user is, how to use a behavior map where you can track how users go from one page to the next. That’s OK. It’s worth the time to learn. Being able to see and interpret this data will help you optimize the digital journey.
For more advanced businesses, the path forward is setting up a CRM such as Sharpspring or HubSpot. There are many CRMs out there that help with that attribution and tracking. They can also help you with everything from managing email outreach and social to tracking lead flow and viewing your entire marketing/sales pipeline. You should also connect your ads to your CRM so these tools can communicate with each other and drive automated optimization. Your CRM reporting tools are gold for helping you make informed decisions.
Your pipeline does not start the first time you have a conversation with a sales rep. It starts when these prospective buyers start researching you. So if you can’t answer how many people are visiting your website and how long are they staying on your website and what are the most important pages, you are missing out on a huge opportunity. If you layer in more advanced tracking, how are they finding your website, what keywords, what pathways are leading them, you are really establishing pipeline management.
But you shouldn’t just look at the data in the system. Have real conversations with your team. If leads are coming in, Sales and Marketing NEED to talk. Were those good leads? Is the sales team being accountable and working the leads? What was the outcome? How can this insight be used to improve marketing?
5 Additional Elements of a Successful B2B Digital Marketing Strategy
In the world of B2B digital marketing, several key elements contribute to a successful strategy. These elements play a significant role in attracting and engaging potential clients and driving business growth. Let’s explore some of these crucial components:
- Strong Brand Identity: Developing a strong brand identity helps differentiate your business and builds recognition, trust, and loyalty among clients. From a digital marketing perspective, you want to surround your prospective buyers with your brand wherever they go online. Familiarity engenders trust and primes them to buy from you.
- Multi-channel Approach: Utilizing multiple channels such as paid advertising, organic SEO, social media, and email helps you build a strong ecosystem with your B2B digital marketing.
- Lead Generation and Nurturing: Implementing effective lead generation strategies and nurturing those leads through targeted campaigns are crucial for converting prospects into customers. B2B companies that fail to follow up consistently with the leads in their pipeline are missing out on most of the revenue potential they have paid good marketing dollars to generate.
- Personalization: Customizing marketing messages based on individual preferences and behaviors enhances customer experience and fosters stronger connections. This can mean creating targeted campaigns for different audiences, segmenting your email list, or even using automation tools to create a curated website experience.
- Data-driven Insights: Leveraging analytics and data-driven insights enables informed decision-making and optimization of marketing campaigns for better results. With your B2B digital marketing, identify the metrics that actually matter for each tactic. For example, impressions actually are important for brand awareness in B2B. But if you aren’t also getting conversion actions like form fills, you are likely missing a puzzle piece in the journey from awareness to consideration.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
- Failing to track outcomes appropriately
- Pivoting too slowly in the face of data insights
- Paying attention to ALL the data instead of figuring out what really matters
- Forgetting to continuously optimize the digital funnel
- Not following up to nurture leads
- Ignoring what the competition is doing
- Using the wrong tools and tactics to reach your specific audience
- Not being mobile friendly
Many companies are also failing to leverage all the different kinds of B2B marketing assets (paid, owned, earned and shared). Here’s where to go to learn about the 4 types of B2B digital marketing assets.
The Future of Digital Marketing for B2B Companies
Emerging trends like AI, machine learning, and voice search are shaping the future of B2B digital marketing. Staying ahead of these trends can give your business a competitive edge. A well-planned B2B digital marketing strategy can help your business reach its goals, build strong relationships, and stay ahead in the competitive digital landscape. Always remember to keep your customers at the heart of all your marketing efforts. By implementing our tips for creating a B2B digital marketing strategy, you will have a head start on achieving your marketing goals and driving your business forward.
Want to have Blender run your digital marketing to maximize your ROI? Talk with us today.
