Shifting your operations online is one thing, but leveraging this opportunity to increase revenue, another.
Today’s B2B buyers are self-educating, preferring to gather and analyze information before reaching out to a specific brand.
This means that marketers have very little influence on the buyer’s decision.
Or does it?
Marketers who understand prospects’ behavior, challenges, and needs can provide helpful information that subtly guides these prospects to engage and buy from them.
Do you want to expand your business? We share five fundamental B2B digital marketing strategies to grow your business.
1. Search Engine Optimization
SEO is a fundamental strategy that revolves around creating content that ranks highly on search results pages.
B2B SEO focuses on keywords B2B buyers search for in connection to their work.
The idea is to capitalize (through research) on your knowledge of the keywords your target audience uses and incorporate them in your content.
Doing so helps push your content up the results pages. With increased visibility, your site attracts more engagements that you can nurture to convert.
Here are SEO best practices to consider:
- Collect and analyze data to understand your target audience’s pain points. Let this inform the content you create to ensure it speaks to their needs.
- Construct quality landing pages that capture keywords that searchers use. It will help initiate relationships with leads.
- Target relevant topics and create content around them. Let your content answer searchers’ queries (user intent) rather than just ranking for keywords.
- Ensure your website and content (email content included) are optimized for mobile device use. Think about page loading times, site structure, font size, multimedia content, and conversion optimization.
- Consider producing content that tackles question-based queries. Creating content such as how-to-guides, FAQs, and support-related articles that contain longer-tail keywords will help put you in front of audiences.
- High-quality publications, websites, and influencers can provide valuable coverage. Consider generating links from them to help improve your reputation among search engines and customers.
2. Use Virtual Events
Virtual events are an essential B2B digital marketing strategy for connecting with audiences and building communities.
Their attractiveness lies in their overall lower overhead costs and ability to target audiences, whether you’re looking at masses or specific users.
Running a virtual event requires careful planning to make it successful.
Think about what a successful campaign should achieve.
Is it the number of attendees? Engagement during the event? Ability to collect contact information for lead generation or post-event shares?
You’ll also need to identify your target audience, the content that will appeal to them, and through what means.
Do they prefer how-to videos, round-table discussions, or webinars?
The next part of planning involves getting the word out.
Minimize low attendance by promoting your event through various channels including social media, email marketing, and by creating specific landing pages.
What platform should you use?
If you’re looking for quick solutions that don’t require a lot of investment, then social media platforms are the way to go.
Most audiences are familiar with Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube which makes them easy to use.
The downside is that audiences can only interact with you through comments.
Platforms such as Zoom and Google Meet are good for small gatherings and offer better levels of interaction.
You can share your screen or have real-time chats as the event is ongoing.
There are top-tier platforms for businesses looking for live streaming, ticketing, and registration, live chat, polling, virtual networking, and analytic reports.
They include EventCube, Hopin, Airmeet, Accelevents, and Intrado.
3. Incorporate Marketing Automation
As your business grows, maintaining one-on-one relationships with prospects and clients becomes challenging.
How do you build and manage relationships with prospects without them slipping through the cracks? By automating some processes.
Marketing automation eliminates repetitive manual tasks that bog down marketing teams while providing timely assistance to your leads.
It also streamlines your online marketing channels and measures programs and campaigns for operational efficiency and revenue generation.
Marketing automation best practices include:
- Defining your buyer persona: ask yourself, “who is your buyer? What are their goals? What fuels their buying behavior? Answering these questions will help you design emails and offers that speak directly to them.
- Integrate your marketing automation strategy with your CRM. It will provide marketers updated and relevant information that they can use to penetrate the marketing.
- Map your buyer journey. Every stage in the buying process has its own set of needs and problems. Understanding this journey allows you to create relevant content (blogs, how-to videos, ebooks, webinars) to help to move them forward.
- Score your leads. Not all prospects who enter the pipeline are ready or willing to buy. Scoring your leads allows you to identify and rank them based on engagement and profile.
- Analyze data. Tracking the prospect as they move from being leads to paying customers allows you to identify consumer behavior. It also assesses the efficiencies and weaknesses of your sales and marketing processes.
4. Cold Calling
Cold calling remains a fundamental strategy for growing your business if leveraged correctly.
People are averse to being bombarded with information about things they probably don’t need by a person they don’t know.
However, they will listen to you, if you know what you’re talking about and can demonstrate measurable value.
Here are some cold calling tips to consider:
- Understand what you’re selling. It will help you have meaningful conversations, answer questions correctly.
- Look up your prospect’s size, needs, challenges, and where possible, competitors. It will help you know how well your solutions will meet their needs.
- Let the first call be about learning and not selling. Your prospect will most likely have multiple contacts with your company before they buy. Learn as much as you can on your first call so you can provide useful information to nudge the prospect to take the next step.
- Find a schedule that works. Look up past activity records to see when prospects who have converted answered calls. Focus on those days and hours.
- Don’t end the call without agreeing on the next step. Guide them towards what to do next while letting the prospect feel like they are the ones deciding.
What if they say no?
While “nos” can dampen your spirits, it’s important to remember that no one closes all of their prospects.
If you can’t shake off the feeling, try reading testimonials from customers who appreciate working with your company.
5. Study and Analyze Data
Monitoring analytics helps businesses know how their strategies are performing and what improvement actions are needed to increase sales revenue.
Other than improving marketing performance and maximizing ROI, here are other reasons why businesses should study and analyze their data:
- Provides better insights into your processes and conversions so you can create your own ‘best practices.’
- Enhances customer life cycles.
- Allows you to make predictions for future marketing campaigns.
- Attributes marketing efforts to the company’s overall growth target.
- Helps marketing teams get the buy-in they need from leadership for their budgets and programs.
There are several data analysis tools on the market including:
Exponea: focuses on AI-driven personalization and the provision of real-time updates of the customer’s journey right from acquisition to retention. Exponea uses machine learning algorithms to scrutinize a customer’s past and predicted actions to launch specialized campaigns.
Qlik: this end-to-end data management tool allows users to turn raw data into readable insights to transform a business’s operations.
Sisense: this highly customizable tool uses AI deep learning networks for increased accuracy and anomaly detection.
Oktopost: is a social media tool that tracks lead generation over social platforms attributing them to specific posts, platforms, or campaigns. It can also provide data-focused information about your brand.
Shield: With most B2B marketers running LinkedIn accounts, this tool enables them to monitor their account and content performance. It can help you understand audience demographics, label content pieces that resonate with your audience.