Digital Marketing Strategy for B2B Companies – Basic Steps to Get Started

So, if your prospective clients are going digital, then you need to prioritize your digital marketing strategy in order to stay on top of their minds. Here’s the thing, though: It’s likely that your competitors realize this, as well — so you need to ensure that your strategy outperforms theirs. Consider this a primer on the most important steps to take, digital marketing tools to utilize, and what you should prioritize.

What is B2B Digital Marketing?

Let’s get the basics out of the way. All marketing consists of strategies and techniques to reach an audience to sell products and services. Ideally, that effort will nurture loyalty with existing customers, reach new markets, and enhance the company’s profile as a thought leader.

One key difference when businesses buy from other businesses is that your buyers aren’t necessarily just looking for products. They’re also interested in solutions to solve challenges — often complex ones. As a result, there’s a longer sales cycle as they look to see how you’ll address their specific pain points and meet their needs.

Potential buyers are already coming to you with knowledge and expectations, so you need to provide them with even more information.

Your ultimate goal is to get your sales team to talk to someone like a purchasing manager to provide them with that information. The way you get to that point is to sell prospective clients on your company’s value via digital channels such as websites, ads, videos, blog posts, and email.

How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy?

A core digital marketing strategy starts with a process of discovery in which you identify your audience and determine the exact value of what you can offer. From there, you’ll need to hone in on the buyer’s journey to understand where, when, and how to reach them best. You’ll then need to plan out how to utilize the most appropriate marketing channels and how you’ll get things done. Let’s take a closer look at these important steps.

Identify your value via your strengths and competitive advantages

Start by looking at the big picture; what problems are you solving, and how are you solving them in ways that will benefit your buyers? Make sure to communicate with every member of your team, from research and production to sales and marketing, to determine what you’re offering beyond a product or service. Doing so not only improves your sales pitch, it’s a step in developing a long-lasting and trusting partnership with your customers.

Be sure to spend time researching your competitors to better understand their strengths and weaknesses. This includes not just their products and services but also their digital marketing strategy, such as their SEO performance and how they’re using techniques like paid advertising. Ask questions like:

• What marketing strategies do they use?
• Which segments of the market do they target?
• How do they position themselves in the market?

Identify your target audience

B2B industrial buyers are usually looking for specific, often niche products, so you’ll need to understand all the steps of the buyer’s journey in order to target them effectively. While the length and complexity of a buyer’s journey vary greatly from industry to industry, we find that HubSpot succinctly encapsulates much of it through its three stages:

• The Awareness Stage: The buyer realizes they have a problem and looks for a solution. It is here where they become aware of your product/service.
• The Consideration Stage: The buyer considers options on how to address their problem, which includes learning more about your product or service. This is where you can fully demonstrate the value of your product/service and company.
• The Decision Stage: The buyer weighs their options and decides on which provider to use. This is where you can make the case against your competitors and convert a lead into a client.

At every stage, the more targeted your marketing, the more effective it will be — so personalizing your outreach is essential. Thankfully, that can be one of the greatest strengths of digital marketing when it’s informed by insights like buyer personas.  Speaking of which…

Prepare buyer personas based on your targeted groups

How can you personalize content for every possible buyer? Make it easier on yourself by creating buyer personas, which are fictionalized representations of your ideal customer based on market research and actual data. Buyer personas allow you to identify which key customers or customer segments you want to target, what their priorities and preferences are, and how to refine your marketing campaigns to reach them.

Choose the most optimal marketing channels

The content that you develop has to reach your audience, so your marketing strategy should be designed for the channels they’re most likely to frequent. Do you know if they’re visiting your website, and if so, which pages see the most traffic? Which social platforms does your audience gravitate toward? Research and data are key for targeting your audience. Otherwise, you’re just throwing your content out into the void.

Prepare a budget

Lest we forget, you have to know how much you’re willing to spend for all of this. The final stage of planning your digital marketing strategy is to determine how much you’re willing to budget on a marketing plan, from research and analysis to paid efforts and platform subscriptions. What you prioritize will determine which goals you’ll focus on, what resources you have access to, and how long your digital marketing efforts will go before you re-evaluate.

In building a B2B marketing strategy, it is important to continuously improve and make ongoing changes based on the analysis of results.

Channels to Consider for Your B2B Marketing

Once you’ve hammered out these fine details of your strategy, it’s time to implement it. You can’t do everything (remember, we just talked about the budget), so your best bet is to prioritize the channels where you’ll get the largest engagement. That will vary from industry to industry and from audience to audience, so there’s no single approach we can recommend. However, in our opinion, it’s important to consider a combination of each of the following channels:

Content Marketing + SEO

Content marketing refers to the development and creation of content that attracts interest, generates brand awareness, builds traffic, and generates qualified leads. This content can come in any number of forms, including blog posts, eBooks, white papers, case studies, infographics, videos, testimonials, how-to guides, and more. Making sure that your content is visible to your audience requires a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy so that it ranks highly on search engine results pages (SERPs). Without an SEO strategy in place, prospective customers looking to purchase your products will have a harder time finding you.

Google Ads + Remarketing

Paying to get your content in front of your customers has always been effective. In digital marketing, there are three types of paid online advertisements to consider:

• Search ads. These are the ads you see when you type keywords into a search engine and appear at the top of the SERP. Your audience will see a small “Ad” icon next to it.
• Remarketing ads. These are ads that “follow” a user around after they visit your website to re-engage them. They can appear while the user is browsing news media sites or social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
• Prospecting ads. While remarketing ads target prospects who have visited your website, prospecting ads target potential customers who have not. Choose your target audience, and the prospecting ad will find them.

Email Marketing

Email is still a highly effective way to reach your intended audience, and the use of email marketing software will assist you in planning, automating, and monitoring the success of your email marketing campaigns. You can reach your audience through the use of two specific email marketing strategies:

• Email segmentation. These are email campaigns that are segmented based on the target audience to highlight specific products or promotions to encourage customers to take action. Instead of blasting out the same email to your entire mailing listing, a segmented campaign will send out different emails to different mailing lists, with each one customized to speak to the interests of a particular buyer persona.
• Lead nurture campaigns. Also known as drip campaigns, lead nurture campaigns (LNCs) are triggered when a prospect takes a specific action, such as filling out a form to download an asset or watch a webinar. After they submit the form, they’re enrolled into an email workflow that will send out several follow-up emails that cover similar topics, with each encouraging them to take additional action to contact your sales team.

Social Media Marketing

You’re likely already familiar with most of the major social media platforms sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Depending on your industry and your targeted audience, you may also look to consider platforms like Instagram, YouTube, or even Tiktok. There are three ways you can utilize these channels:

• Organic social media marketing. This is when you create and post your own content on your account and then ask your own followers to like and share with their contacts.
• Paid social media marketing. Just like with search results, sometimes paid advertisement is more effective. Paid marketing to boost social media posts will ensure that more of your targeted audience sees your content.
• Influencer marketing. Influencers are professionals or personalities that have large followings within your targeted market. Working directly with an influencer can quickly spread your promotional messages within a short time frame.

By incorporating the right mix of these channels into your B2B digital marketing strategy, you’ll get the message of your value out to new prospects and ultimately increase sales — that is, if you use a sales enablement strategy or data-driven approach. Part of your marketing strategy needs to account for collecting and analyzing data on your prospects, including demographics, interests, geography, the buyer journey stage, and so on. This not only ensures that all of your content, from your organic blogs and website pages to search ads and social media posts, is reaching your targeted audience, but it also gives you the confidence of consumer engagement while encouraging prospective buyers to take action.

Useful Tips for B2B Digital Marketing Managers

In our opinion, the best way to successfully execute a digital marketing strategy is with the right tools and technology. It is digital marketing, after all. Here are a few of our tips for which tools to prioritize:

• A mobile-friendly browsing experience is table stakes for digital marketing. You should also template the experience for different user types, creating an intuitive browsing experience for each of your different audience segments. Look at utilizing a content marketing system (CMS) like WordPress to design and build websites either using pre-made themes or custom designs.
• If you’re going to take a data-driven approach to your marketing strategy, then you need to use a customer relationship management (CRM) system to gather and analyze customer data. Popular platforms such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce, and HubSpot will help you to improve your customer service, sales, and marketing efforts.
• There are a lot of moving parts here, so be sure to streamline repetitive tasks and effectively market across multiple channels at the same time with a marketing automation platform. You’ll want to look into using a software system like HubSpot, Marketo, or Pardot.

Ultimately, you need a three-step approach for successful digital marketing:

1. Develop high-quality content — You need informative and engaging content to capture your prospective customers’ attention and establish your company’s authority as a thought leader in your industry. The content should be actionable, educational, or thought-provoking — or ideally, some combination of the three.
2. Have a strategy to relay content to your audience — Your marketing strategy should deliver information where your audience is most likely to see it. Incorporate a mix of organic SEO strategies and paid techniques to make sure your content reaches its audience.
3. Analyze and test your approach — Data, analytics, and testing will help you truly understand what’s working and what’s not. Use KPIs and other metrics to regularly re-evaluate your digital marketing strategy and see how well it’s performing. You will need tools like Google Analytics, heat mapping software, and website call tracking to collect accurate data on all your efforts, from your website and email campaigns to social media accounts.

Summary

As we mentioned at the start, this is just a high-level overview of how to create and implement a B2B marketing strategy — we’re just scratching the surface of the different resources, data, and considerations in play. Plus, as Google continually updates its search algorithms, effective SEO strategies are guaranteed to change over time.  A true digital marketing strategy isn’t something that you can set and forget, it has to be continually reviewed and revised as your business continues to grow.

Learn how you can improve your marketing strategy through dedicated software solutions.

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