Does it sometimes seem to you like your marketing team is just pouring water into a woven basket and hoping that the next marketing Campaign will fill for the other lost marketing outings?
When you are lost in the complexities of digital marketing, the best solution is a defined B2B digital marketing strategy.
A strategy helps to define a business, gives it a set of values, and gives it purpose. It helps marketers understand what success looks like.
It provides a roadmap for the business towards the destination and identifies useful stopping points along the way.
A well-documented strategy focus on creating high-quality documentation that helps a business achieve its business strategy.
However, not many businesses have defined marketing strategies. Many just mistake marketing goals for marketing strategies. “We want to be the number one in the industry” is one of those goals mistaken for strategy.
Now a goal does not tell you what you are going to do; all it does is tell you what you hope the outcome will be. So while you need a strategy to achieve a goal, you don’t need a goal to gain a strategy.
Now that you understand that creating marketing strategies before defining your marketing objectives is putting the cart before the horse, let’s get deeper into the discussion.
Elements required for a B2B Digital Marketing Strategy
#1. Website
Having a website will put your business in a position where it can engage with and sell to prospects around the clock, plus being online will increase your business’ exposure and help it to generate new leads.
Without a website, people may even question your legitimacy as a business. So having a website allows you to make a great first impression and give people comfort that you’re a real business.
80% of buyers look at the website when making a purchase decision. Your website should be easy to navigate, mobile responsive, and contain relevant content.
#2. Content marketing
B2B Content marketing allows B2B companies to show they care about the same things as their customers. Create personalized content for your customers.
Creating content that is unique, relevant, and customized for the target audience is a great way to connect the emotions of your prospects to your business.
B2B marketers can use content personalization to help improve campaigns, increase conversion rates, and grow engagement from within target accounts.
According to an IBM Digital Experience Survey, 56% of marketers believe that personalized content promotes higher engagement rates.
#3. Social media
Many B2B professionals rate social media so highly among the effective marketing channels because the platform can do the following
#1. Help a business connect with potential and existing clients
#2. It’s an established way to distribute content
#3. It’s a way to project brand identity and voice
#4. It can be used for client support
#5. And It improves SEO
In one breath, social media boost brands` reputation; increases their sales; earns trust; increases
market share; retains customers, and increases customer loyalty
#4. Optimizing search engines for greater discoverability
Most B2B brands often think that SEO and SEM (search engine marketing) is less relevant in the B2B space than it is elsewhere.
As such, they rely on things like word of mouth, a direct sales force conducting cold calls, conferences, and other traditional networking events.
However, search engine marketing and SEO are just as important in the B2B environment for lead generation as it is everywhere else.
And this is because while B2B companies are actively looking out for new customers, customers are also looking for service providers and they do search for these providers mostly in search engines.
So B2B businesses need to be found when customers search engines for solutions.
Why More B2B Researchers are turning to Search Engines
B2B SEO services are important because you need to make it easier for potential customers to find you. B2B SEO statistics show that the vast majority of businesses are using the internet, and specifically search engines when looking for products and services.
Today more than half of the B2B researchers working today are millennials, a generational shift that is resulting in a change in the way that businesses find brands and products.
Today, the growing population of younger researchers is far more likely to turn to digital channels such as search engines and business blogs to conduct their research than did the older generation.
#5. Branding strategy
Your Brand Strategy sums up why your business exists beyond making money. It defines what it is that makes your brand what it is, what sets it apart from the competition, and how you want your customers to perceive it.
A brand strategy should capture the problems you are trying to solve in a way that will instantly resonate with those who have suffered them.
So that by the time it hits shelves those who have such problems should not go looking for you to explain what you have on the shelves.
A good brand strategy should understand its audience. Understand them in a way that they may not even understand themselves.
It should be able to get under the hood of what makes them tick; what motivates them, and what turns them off.
How to Execute a B2B Digital Marketing Strategy
#1. Know Your Target Audience
Knowing your audience allows your business to focus marketing efforts on the groups that are most likely to buy from you. That way, you are generating business leads in an efficient, affordable manner.
Identifying and defining a target audience is crucial as it is impossible to reach everyone at once.
Identifying your audience saves you the high cost of sending your marketing messages to a scattered market.
Tips to Help Know Your Target Audience
#1. Understand what your product or service is: Ask yourself how your product will benefit your potential customers. What is the value addition in your product and what other products are similar to your product?
#2. Create Buyer Personas: Personas provide valuable insights that you can use to convey your message to the right audience at the right time.
They also enable you to perform market research, targeted advertising, usability testing, and keyword research more efficiently.
You can use the data you have gathered from market research to build this persona.
#3. Study Your Competition: In the world of marketing, studying and analyzing your competitor`s SWOT gives you an edge to benefit from.
For example, in your study, if you find out that certain customers have been left unsatisfied by your competitor, you will take the opportunity to turn these unhappy customers into happy customers.
#4. Do a target market evaluation: Target market analyses help businesses establish strategies for effective marketing and sales techniques.
A company’s target market is its core customer base or the demographics of customers most likely to buy its product or service.
#2. Find Out Their Pain Points
Discovering customer pain points impact both your sales and marketing strategy. The sales team identifies the pain points to tailor their pitch and present the products as the right solution.
And marketers want to understand these pain points so that they can advertise their solutions effectively in an appealing way.
Conducting pain point analysis is an essential stage in improving the experience of different types of customers.
Ways to Figure Out Consumer Pain Points
#1. Apply Social Listening to identify pain points: track what customers are saying about different brands, products, and services on social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook.
This can help you get access to information about your target audience’s opinions, views, and pain points.
#2. Set up Live Chat: By talking to your online customers, you can identify the pain points and work towards offering them better service in the future.
Ask them questions to understand their expectations so that you can develop a strategy to address their concerns.
#3. Research your prospect’s social profiles: people share their problems through their social media platforms and discuss various possible methods to overcome them.
You will often find your competitors or market influencers engaging in these threads, and you can learn their approach to presenting their products/solutions as well.
#3. Understand the B2b Buyer’s Journey
Understanding your B2B buyer journey is key to understanding the moments that matter for your customers.
Your buyer`s journey should be seen as an initial stepping stone for potential customers to start their ongoing sales journey with you, your B2B buyer journey is the make-or-break-it sales approach to potential customers.
The buyer`s journey shapes a customer’s path through to the purchase process. So understanding buyer behavior during this important journey can greatly improve your chances of getting them to reach the bottom of your sales funnel.
B2B buyer journey stages
The B2B buyer’s journey is often divided into three parts: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. All three stages require an understanding of buying behavior particular to your customer segmentation and target personas.
#1. Awareness: The buyer realizes they have an issue that needs to be resolved. This awareness is driven by your marketing team members with support from your sales and customer success teams. Make sure to leave your potential buyer with a good impression at this stage.
#2. Consideration: At this stage, the buyer identifies a problem and begins researching options to solve it. Step in and show your buyer how you can help resolve their pain points in a way that builds confidence in the quality and competitiveness of your offering.
#3. Decision: If you made a remarkable impression on your buyer and were able to convince them that you can resolve their pain points, then be sure their decision is going to favor you.
Even at this last but very important stage, you are still much involved in it; make great use of this last chance to draw your potential buyer into the net.
Let your sales team push product demos, testimonials, and reviews into the faces of these prospects to help them make the final decision.
#4. Develop A Measurable Strategy
Measuring your objectives helps you determine if you are making progress or backsliding in your marketing journey. It helps keep you on track.
For example, if your measurable strategy can be to work on your business for 1 hour each day and the goal is to land your first sale within 2 weeks.
Now if you applied that strategy, you can easily tell in 2 weeks if or not your marketing campaign recorded success. A measurable strategy will provide you with insights indicating whether to adjust or sustain your approaches.
Conclusion
A well-defined B2B digital marketing strategy allows you to make smarter marketing decisions. It makes perfect sense because right at the start of the marketing process, you have made a mental picture of the route to take the marketing process through.
This mental picture will help you identify the challenges through the process and also help you figure out ways to tackle such challenges.
Strategizing for a successful marketing process will be a rigorous and time-consuming endeavor; however, don’t skip this very important part of your marketing process even if you feel like doing so.
A little patience, especially in the beginning, can go a long way in the field of marketing.
In this article, we have identified the key elements for a successful B2B digital marketing strategy and how to execute a B2B Digital Marketing Strategy.
You should use this as a guide as you plan your next B2B digital marketing campaign.
