Have your marketing activities been producing fewer and fewer leads and conversions lately? Or has this inflow never really taken off? Boost your B2B digital marketing with these 10 tips.
This, of course, is a clue in....
As a B2B marketer, you know that the requirements, wants and needs of your target audience are the foundation. Yet we still often encounter enough companies who pitch their business without having any idea what the profile of their target audience is.
So the first step to boost your B2B digital marketing should be a survey of your target audience. Understand their online behavior, what communities, groups and social media do they turn to? Mix yourself into this and find out how they talk, what they share and discuss.
To create a buyers persona, you need to answer at least these three questions:
With the answers to these questions, you already have some idea of how and who to target.
In a marketing strategy, it is important to understand the buying cycle, also known as the customer journey, of your target audience. Fortunately, mapping your target audience's digital buying cycle and decision factors is not that complicated.
Fill in the buying cycle for your target audience. What path do they go through? Remember, at each stage you need to optimize the customer journey and help the customer so they can make the purchase decision.
Content quickly helps increase the likelihood of conversions and persuade customers.
Sample purchase cycle template.
Learn more about how to create a complete customer journey out.
Content marketing is the most effective strategy today to achieve consistent results. Yet most B2B marketers feel they are missing too many opportunities in this area. In the B2B world, a buying cycle is often longer because it includes higher value products and services. Therefore, more extensive research is done before deciding to make the purchase.
Improve your content marketing using these tips:
If you regularly post blogs on your own website, you increase the chances of lead generation and can gradually bring potential customers to a purchase. Of course, the quality of your blogs is then important. Fill your blog with a variety of high-quality content: images, videos, links to other interesting blogs, etc. Make sure your blog contains the best and most relevant content for your target audience. This should match what they are looking for and their needs.
Many B2B companies do not pay much attention to their own blog. We recommend doing just that.
Optimize your blog with:
Extra Tip: Also look around to see how other companies are blogging in your industry.
Tip #5. Use email marketing
We believe that e-mail marketing is indispensable in B2B digital marketing. But then you need to use it in the right way. That means creating and personalizing valuable emails. Otherwise, people might judge the emails as irritating and spam. And this is not good for your domain performance.
Also, make sure you don't send haphazard emails. Then you will have a low success rate anyway. You won't reach the audience interested in your content. Use the data you have on your target audience to personalize your emails. By using target group segmentation you can make the emails relevant per target group. To not spend too much time on this, you can automate certain actions and segmentations with Marketing Automation software.
Optimize your emails by:
Tip #6. Use social media
For B2B marketers, social media is ideal for very targeted outreach to a specific audience. However, it is important to first research which social media suits your company. For example, research on which platforms your target audience is present. This can be different for each target group. For example, some are better reached on Facebook and others on LinkedIn.
You can generate both organic and paid traffic on these channels. Test multiple options to find out what will generate the desired results for your business.
Read more about the 5 benefits of online advertising for B2B organizations.
This was mentioned a bit in the previous tip: online advertising. First start with a low budget to test what this will do for your business. For example, promote your blogs, e-books or white papers on social media. By advertising, you will reach a large audience faster than organically. You can always specify a maximum budget so you never go over it and have sky-high costs.
You can also advertise on Google or Bing.
If you use multiple forms of marketing, make sure they are all consistent with each other. An inconsistent brand experience will most likely lead to fewer quality leads and cause people to trust you less or not take you seriously.
To avoid this, it is important to connect all teams. For example: the advertising team, marketing team and content team. This way, these teams can consult with each other and it is clear to everyone how and what is being communicated.
With inbound marketing, marketers try to "earn" the attention of the target audience rather than push it. This is where content is used as a strategic approach. In an inbound marketing campaign, content helps collect data from prospects, get these leads (automatically) into marketing automation where they are converted into customers through workflows.
In this blog, read more about how to create an inbound marketing campaign in 8 steps.
Personal branding in B2B digital marketing can be very valuable. After all, people trust people faster than companies. Tangibility and humanization of marketing is important. It makes your company credible.
Therefore, many companies are also focusing more on Human-2-Human marketing. Where emphasis is placed on relevant and personal customer contact.
When professionals and consultants within your organization use personal branding, you can reach a larger audience and promote your company as an expert.
In the B2B world, providing services and products is key. When you add personal branding, the value of these services and products will increase significantly. This is because people are more likely to believe in something when the person with the executive role, such as the consultants have a high status.
For good personal branding, it's important to see yourself as a brand. Map out your skills, areas of expertise and positioning and set your own personal brand goals. In the online world, at least use professional images for that and make sure you are present where your target audience is.
Online, content is your voice. When you present yourself as an expert, it is important that you choose your content carefully. Make sure the content is valuable to your audience and they like it so much that they read it and want to share it.
B2B marketing is a pretty "boring" market. Video can be a nice addition then. Research has shown that B2B video marketing on a landing page can increase your conversion rate by up to 80%. Another study by Adobe 2013 video conversion Playbook, found that conversions with video content can increase as much as 90%. Video marketing is also becoming increasingly popular in B2B marketing.
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