Growing up in the 90s, marketing was completely different. Businesses then utilized broadcast and print as the most valuable channels to attract their target audience to their brand. In those days, an effective marketing campaign produced clever commercials and eye-catching advertisements.
While traditional channels still speak to audiences, a strong digital presence is essential for modern businesses. Instead of investing in entertaining commercials, many businesses need to know how to leverage SEO to connect with new customers. For many B2B companies in marketing today, email replaces mailouts, and digital advertising takes precedence over print.
With all these changes, it can be challenging to keep up! Whether you’re a seasoned business professional or diving into digital marketing with a new brand, you can stay ahead of the curve with some essential marketing strategies. Today, we’ll cover what you need to know about digital marketing for B2B companies and how to get started.
What Is B2B Marketing?
Digital marketing, also known as online marketing, includes any marketing using channels on the internet. Depending on your target audience, specific marketing strategies keep you at the top of your game.
B2B (business-to-business) marketing refers to businesses that sell to other businesses instead of individual consumers (business-to-consumer or B2C marketing). As your B2B business goals differ from B2C, so will your marketing approach.
A few well-known B2B companies include Zoom, HubSpot, Cisco, Docusign, and Adobe. These companies craft their marketing strategy, content, products, and services primarily toward other businesses using key digital marketing channels like an SEO-optimized website, content marketing, and pay-per-click advertising.
Take a look at this example from Docusign:
Here, Docusign highlights solutions to fit the specific needs of a business or industry and suggests that its product is for a broad range of clients. The language focuses on the benefits to businesses while the image includes a clear call to action with options to “Contact Sales,” “Buy Now,” and “Try for Free,” which are all relevant to B2B decision-makers.
Like Docusign, B2B marketing strategies aim to familiarize other businesses with your brand, name, and value, leading to higher conversion rates. You’ll want a stellar online presence because new research says that B2B buyers complete up to 90% of the purchasing process online before they contact a company.
Understanding the B2B Buyer Persona
The key to marketing for every company is understanding its target audience and planning a digital marketing strategy around its buyer persona. Since B2B companies market to businesses, create your strategy and goals with their pain points in mind.
Understanding the B2B buyer persona means knowing “who” is behind the business you’re selling to. It’s about creating a clear picture of the individuals involved in the purchase decision, their motivations, and what they need to make informed choices.
How Is Selling to Businesses (B2B) Different?
Your buyer persona has specific needs, razor-focused goals, motivation, and a longer buyer’s journey.
- Decisions take longer. More people, such as executives and managers, are involved, and they research heavily before buying.
- Build trust. Since the sales process is longer and includes proposals and negotiations, you must earn their trust early.
- Logic is key. Focus on how your product helps the buyer’s business, not emotions.
Jonathan Franchell, CEO of Ironpaper, gives us this advice: “A frequent mistake B2B organizations make is educating the buyer on their own company, product, or service. The buyer isn’t ready for that; they are just beginning to understand their problem.”
Understanding the B2B Buyer Persona
As a B2B company, you can meet potential clients every step of the way! Digital marketers call this the buyer’s journey. It involves three stages: recognizing the problem (awareness), researching your options (consideration), and picking the best fit (decision).
An effective digital marketing strategy takes the buyer on a journey that starts with “Oh no! We have a problem!” and ends with “Yes, this company can fix it!”
5 Digital Marketing Strategies for B2B Companies
If your B2B buyer is on a journey, we want to give you a customized road map to guide them to a successful end. Let’s map out a digital marketing strategy for your B2B company.
1. Design an Optimized B2B Website
To build a robust digital marketing campaign, begin with a compelling website. It’s your digital front door, and it’s usually the first impression your customers will have about your brand.
Here are a few tips about designing a website to attract new customers:
- It should be fast, visually appealing, and easy to navigate.
- Keep your website copy simple, and use your blog to tell your brand’s story.
- Your website should be optimized for mobile devices and have a fluid user experience (UX).
- Include effective calls-to-action (CTAs).
2. SEO and B2B Content Marketing
If you’re confident in your website design but still aren’t generating leads, it might lack key SEO elements. Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial to reaching the right customer. By optimizing your website with relevant keywords and phrases, you can ensure that when potential customers actively search for your products or services, they see them.
One study shows that a business representative does 12 searches online before engaging with a brand’s website. A solid SEO strategy is crucial for your B2B business because it significantly improves online visibility and attracts your target market.
Learn more about the role of SEO and Content Marketing:
On-page SEO refers to optimizing individual pages on a webpage to make it more relevant, user-friendly, and easily understandable by search engines. Some key elements of on-page SEO include:
- Relevant keywords. Do your research to find keywords that your buyer persona searches for.
- Optimized title tags, meta descriptions, headers, and images.
- Use a URL structure that’s clean and includes relevant keywords.
- Internal linking within the web page’s content improves navigation and helps search engines understand the website’s structure.
Technical SEO refers to optimizing the aspects of a website that help search engines better understand and rank the website. It involves implementing various strategies to ensure search engines can crawl, index, and understand the website’s content.
Technical SEO optimizes canonical tags, robots.txt, page speed, sitemaps, and more. These optimizations improve organic search visibility and user experience.
B2B Content Marketing
B2B buyers are looking for solutions. Many B2B representatives review three to five pieces of content before interacting with a sales representative. Your content marketing strategy is a vital piece of the puzzle to getting you in front of your ideal customer.
- Focus on providing solutions and answering questions for your target audience.
- Capture the attention of B2B researchers who aren’t ready to make a purchase.
- Provide high-quality content that naturally moves B2B buyers through every step of their journey–such as blog posts, articles, case studies, and videos.
Remember, B2B content marketing is different from B2C. Clearly communicate your expertise rather than relying on the emotional sell, and aim your content at solving companies’ overarching problems.
3. B2B Digital Advertising
Digital advertising involves placing company ads in online locations such as search engine results pages (SERPs) and social media networks. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a great way to drive targeted traffic to your website quickly. Popular platforms for PPC advertising are Google Ads and Facebook Ads.
By creating ads tailored to the keywords B2B companies are searching for, you can ensure that the right people see your ads. Because PPC campaigns require careful planning and monitoring to be successful, it’s helpful to partner with an expert.
4. Nurture Leads with B2B Email Campaigns
Email marketing is a powerful tool for B2B companies. It allows you to nurture leads and keep in touch with them regularly.
Email campaigns allow B2B companies to target specific segments of their audience based on factors such as industry, job title, or location. Segmentation allows your message to reach the right people and increases the chances of generating leads or conversions.
A few benefits of email campaigns for B2B companies:
- Email campaigns are cost-effective. Companies can send messages to many recipients at a fraction of the cost.
- Consistent emails increase brand awareness. Targeted emails from B2B companies remind prospects and companies about their brand.
- Email marketing builds relationships. Companies build trust and nurture relationships by sending relevant content.
- Email marketing provides measurable results. Great campaigns show results with clear numbers – how many people opened emails, clicked on links, and took action.
5. B2B Social Media Engagement
Social media platforms can be an effective channel for B2B companies seeking to connect with their target audience. LinkedIn and YouTube are excellent platforms for businesses to influence other businesses and build relationships.
Social media is all about connections. Businesses should be active and consistent with social media posts. Share content that resonates with your target audience regularly. Always be authentic and personalize your interactions on social media.
The following LinkedIn post by Slack, a B2B company, is engaging and well-received with its followers:
Whether you are new to marketing or have been around since the 1990s, you’ll notice one consistent trend: marketing changes keep us on our toes! The good news? You can adapt, too, and the B2B strategies we covered are your best tools. Don’t be afraid to experiment and explore new digital marketing channels!
Remember, we’re all in this together. If you get stuck or have questions, contact us! We can step in and drive your marketing efforts or simply come alongside and coach you to success.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on September 28, 2023, and has been updated with fresh content.