Today, just 60% of business owners realize that digital marketing works in a B2B scenario. There are still around 40% of businesses who think digital marketing as something that works for B2C brands only, thus leaving their focus on traditional practices like direct emails, phone calls, doorstep visit, trade shows, etc.
What one needs to understand is that businesses today search the web before making any purchasing decisions. As a result, any B2B business owner should ensure that they have an effective B2B digital marketing strategy in place.
Following are 10 steps that will ensure your business to be found, seen and heard online:
Step 1: Website
Your website is your digital business face. People will make a judgment about your business on the basis of how well and professional your website is. A good website gives an impression of a good company and a poorly organized website with slow loading time gives the impression that the business is small and unprofessional.
What you should work on now –
- Use a Word Press framework and ensure you have a good content management system.
- Install Google Analytics to track visitors and their locations.
What’s not worth doing –
- Do not make too many pages at the moment. Ensure you have professional looking basic website pages such as homepage, about page, your product/services offering page and contact page. Word press framework gives you a flexibility of adding more pages at any stage.
- Though a professional appearance is important but does not overinvest. Do not let a developer take you into a custom site. Your website should have the flexibility of word press to add plugins that will enhance your website as per your future requirements.
To make a positive first impression of your company, it’s important to have a good website with interactive content, engaging customer experience, and easy navigation.
Step 2: Define your Positioning:
What do you want people to remember you as an expert in? The way you will describe your expertise and the problems you help to resolve will define the kind of clients that will be attracted to your business. Expert positioning is the foundation for digital marketing success. Getting a return is dependent on your positioning to a large extent. Your expert positioning is a critical piece of your digital marketing strategy. Thought leadership or inbound marketing is only as good as your ability to match your content with what you will be selling.
What you should work on now-
- Describe problems from a client’s perspective
- Ponder over how your clients describe your expertise.
- Ask for third-party validation.
What’s not worth doing –
- Small businesses usually spread their expertise too thin. Make sure people remember you as their go-to expert in fields aligned to the products/services you want to sell.
Step 3: Know your Audience and activate your existing contacts:
Have a clear understanding of your target audience, their interests, and concerns. Activate your existing contacts and work towards adding value every time you connect with them. Your existing contact list people are already familiar with you at some level and they are the easiest prospects to engage. Once these people are engaged, they will serve as your brand advocates in sharing your content and broadening your reach.
How to engage? The starting point could be by providing value to them in terms of a curate thought leadership newsletter. In this way apart from reinforcing your expert positioning, you are helping your prospects to read what is really worth reading. Newsletters are one of the easiest ways of hitting the inbox of your contacts on a weekly basis.
Don’t underestimate on the number of calls you will receive just because you’ve popped up in their inbox again.
What you should work on now –
- Work on a mailing list of your current contacts. Make sure to use LinkedIn, get marketing permission and identify contacts for which you might not have email addresses.
- Sign up for a marketing leading Mail platform and use it to manage your weekly email distribution.
- Select 3-5 valuable content articles per week that you know professionals in your space will find useful.
What’s not worth doing –
- Do not spam your contacts right away with ‘special offers’. Focus on sharing valuable content. Remember not to exceed sales content ratio by 4:1
Step 4: Email Marketing and Capturing Lead:
“Email addresses are by far the most important asset of B2B marketing”
Start capturing leads with an email sign up form and pop up which is a quick and easy way to capture email addresses. But remember, the aim here is not to force the visitors to sign up; it’s just to ensure that every visitor is aware of your newsletter and the benefits of receiving it once they subscribe to it.
What you should work on now –
- Tell a brief about your expertise, value proposition and why people should sign up to your newsletter.
- Save great pieces of feedback about your newsletter and use them as testimonials
- With a word press site, it is simple to install and activate an email sign up form and pop up.
- Ensure to be clear on what benefits people will get on a weekly basis by including your pitch in both signup form and pop-up
- Include CTA (call to action), such as “Click here”, “Subscribe now” etc.
- Once a user signs in, write a Thank you note that tells them about some of the great and useful content they’ll be receiving.
What’s not worth doing –
- Use a pop-up that remembers your visitors and it reappears once every 10-15 days. Remember, we want to give a nudge, rather than an aggressive push every time they enter the site.
Step 5: Content Creation as per your expert positioning:
Creating content is time-consuming and takes real effort. But it does create your credibility with the people you have never met or interacted with before.
Once your basics of B2B digital marketing are set right (mailing list, positioning, sign-ups, etc), it’s time to focus on the content of your expert positioning. Work on pieces that put your core opinion on your professional front. Example, Why you? What is that you believe that your competitors don’t? These are the pieces which you’ll link back to time and again during your journey.
What you should work on now –
- Keep your opinions conversational and interesting. Write in the first person tone.
- Make your ideas distinct and clear. It’s okay not to worry about any theme and keywords at this stage.
- Make your content visually readable. Make it scan-friendly for a reader.
What’s not worth doing –
- Don’t sound too professional. It’s okay not to have a perfect piece the first time. What matters is clarity. You can always come and tweak things later.
- Do not include multiple opinions in a single piece. Set aside one opinion (usually less than 500 words) per piece.
Continue reading to Part 2 of the series to uncover other aspects of Digital Marketing for B2B
10 Steps to brilliant B2B digital marketing – Part II
Connect us, If you are looking for a quick growth consultation for your B2B Digital Marketing strategy
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