The COVID-19 pandemic has tremendously changed how B2B buyers and sellers purchase and prospect. Traditional ways of advertising, conferences, trade shows, magazines, and newspapers become less effective. Both B2B buyers and sellers are quickly adopting digital channels.
According to a Mckinsey research, “B2B decision-makers globally say that online and remote selling is as effective as in-person engagement, or even more so…” (1)
The trend of go digital for B2B is here to stay. Are you struggling and wondering how to market your B2B business online? If you’re wondering what steps you should be focusing on to take full advantage of online marketing and generate B2B leads online, you are in the right place as I’m about to share with you Noah Digital’s roadmap to successfully market your B2B business online.
Step 1: Create Your Overall B2B Digital Marketing Strategy Gameplan
Creating an actionable B2B digital marketing strategy game plan is always the first step you should take. It begins with understanding your audience and how to find and connect with them online. Most likely, these will include the individuals who make the purchase decisions. If you take steps to understand your target audience’s needs, interests, and pain points and how you can help them solve their problems and achieve their goals, you will do an effective job of connecting with them online.
Your next step will include studying your competitors. Fortunately, Google makes this part easy. Look at their websites for what they are currently promoting. How are they communicating with their potential customers? What strategies are they using to convert prospects into customers? Are they using promotions, sales, scarcity, and other marketing tactics? What are they writing about on social media or saying through their website or YouTube videos? You never want to copy competitor information, but instead, be inspired by all the things your top competitors are doing well and look for ways you can MODEL similar practices through your own website and landing pages.
Next, be sure to add detailed action steps from each of our marketing strategies below into your overall B2B digital marketing action plan!
Step 2: Build And/Or Optimize Your B2B Website
Your business likely has a website, but it could be time for an update. Your website will not only showcase your products and services but also generate leads and sales for you. A credible B2B website will help you boost your brand image and build trust in your industry.
WordPress platform is recommended to build a lead-generation B2B website. According to data from W3Techs, WordPress is currently being used by 43.2% of all websites on the internet in 2022. It means that two out of every five websites use WordPress.
Your website should definitely take advantage of all tools that will help you sell. This includes adding opt-in forms to collect email addresses, creating funnels to keep visitors moving through to the products and services they should be buying, landing pages to help potential customers zone in on your best recommendation for them, and live chat features to quickly answer questions and more.
You should also be tracking your website data by using the analytics tools such as Google Analytics, which will help you understand what is and what is not working well in terms of your marketing and content.
Step 3: Grow Organic Website Traffic With A B2B SEO Strategy
Once you’ve launched your website, you will need to implement your B2B SEO strategy to generate traffic to your website by getting indexed well by Google. You may also want to consider SEO strategies for search engines such as Bing and Yahoo; however, we recommend these only after you’ve first focused your efforts on Google – especially concentrating on ranking for local SEO.
Here are a few SEO best practices that will help you move up the Google ranks.
- Do keyword research to find your best long tail, localized, and semantic keywords that will help you rank quickly online.
- Create website content that incorporates your keyword research, in addition to any trends and questions people are asking in relation to those keywords.
- Be sure to use your keywords on page titles, meta descriptions, image alt tags, and headings, but be careful not to overdo one keyword. You should then sprinkle related keywords throughout the page.
- Build out your Google My Business/Google Maps page and complete all sections in full
- Build QUALITY backlinks from credible websites and use a combination of citations (to get discovered locally), related industry incoming links, and links from social media (by either creating posts that lead back to your website or creating content for sites such Slideshare or YouTube).
- Monitor the technical SEO side of your website to fix broken links and any other technical issues.
- SEO also involves dozens of factors related to the user experience on your website. This can include optimizing website loading speed, mobile optimization, and the flow of your website that keeps users on your pages and moving through the material.
So, to effectively implement your B2B SEO strategy and achieve higher rankings on Google, consider partnering with a specialized SEO company in Markham, like Noah Digital. Our expertise in local SEO and technical optimizations can help drive organic website traffic and boost your online presence, ensuring your business stands out in the digital landscape.
Step 4: Drive Instant Targeted Traffic With B2B PPC Campaigns
It can take a few weeks/months to see results from your SEO efforts, so for immediate leads and traffic, paid ads are your best bet. Did you know that 61% of B2B marketers use paid ads to share their content online? (2) That’s because paid ads can offer fantastic ROIs (returns on investment).
Deciding on where to advertise; however, can be confusing. Depending on your industry, there are different platforms to choose from. For Examples, Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn, etc. Once you’ve selected the platform you want to start with, you need to decide which type of campaign is right for you. There are many types of campaigns across platforms – search, display, dynamic, shopping, app, and many more. Search campaigns will get you targeted traffic. If you pick the keywords with the correct search intent, you will start to see sales and leads flowing in immediately. Display campaigns are a great way to boost your brand’s visibility while getting targeted traffic.
There are various B2B Google Ads strategies that businesses can use. The first step is understanding your audience and what keywords they are searching for. From there, you can create ads that target those keywords.
Some B2B businesses make the mistake of thinking that they need to sell their products or services in their ads.
Here is an example of a Google Search ad:
Step 5: B2B Email Marketing
Sending email newsletters regularly to nurture your subscribers is a top practice for most B2B businesses. In fact, 81% of B2B content marketers say it’s their most used form of content marketing (3).
Email marketing is a great tool and its power lies in the opportunity it creates to grow a relationship with your subscribers. That’s why balancing a strategic line between tip-filled, helpful emails, and promotion-style emails is a true art and one worth testing until you get your open and click rates high.
There are a huge variety of email marketing platforms where you can get started for free or at a low cost. Generally, the more subscribers you have, the more you can expect to pay. Costs are also dependent on special features. For example, you will definitely want to eventually explore email providers offering AI-powered email tools. The AI function can help you send more powerful and tailored emails such as by forwarding different emails to different subscribers based on specific subscriber actions taken. This can be a very strong way to get the right message in front of the right buyer at the precise right time!
Step 6: B2B Content Marketing
Creating content not only helps you to rank better on Google, but also shares helpful information with your prospects, suppliers, and customers, who in turn will hopefully re-share it for you (a fantastic SEO signal).
We all know the rule about showing up in front of prospects at least 7 times, which is when they typically make a buying decision. So creating helpful content (that shows off your expertise and industry authority) is an optimal, non-sales-y way to keep in front of them in a non-threatening manner.
The great thing about content is that you have a variety to choose from such as whitepapers, ebooks, videos, slides, infographics, blog posts and so on. Each offers an excellent vehicle for attracting quality leads and establishing you as a leader in your industry.
For tips on how to write copy that drives traffic to your website, check out some key SEO copywriting tips.
Step 7: B2B Social Media Marketing
You are likely already using social media as part of your marketing plan. Posting regularly works well to keep in front of your peers and prospects, but putting a bit of money behind important posts may also work well. For example, according to a study by the Content Marketing Institute, 83% of marketers are using social media ads or promoted posts as a content marketing tactic (4).
Your posts should contain a mixture of helpful tips for your ideal audience, but also occasionally add in information about your products, testimonials, stats, etc. because B2B executives use social media as a top source when making their purchase decision.
There are many social platforms to choose from. If you are not sure where you should be spending your time, LinkedIn is one platform that is a must for B2B marketing. In fact, according to a study done by EveryOneSocial, “97% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for content marketing, and it ranks #1 among all social networks for content distribution.” (5) Also, LinkedIn is a powerful tool for sourcing leads. In fact, “B2B marketers, (who) report that 80% of their social media leads come from LinkedIn” (6).
LinkedIn is also an ideal place to build brand recognition, connect with your audience, form meaningful connections, and share relevant product or service information.
If you are interested in leveraging LinkedIn, make content marketing on LinkedIn a priority, amplify your messages through employee advocacy, and reach your target audience through LinkedIn posts that are designed to get interaction.
Social media marketing is an integral part of your overall B2B marketing strategy plan; however, we do caution you to not be too spread out. Test the platforms, use tools to see where your prospects are most connecting with you online, and then do 1-2 very well vs. spending too much time on all the main ones.
You Are Now Ready To Execute Your Digital Marketing Plan!
There you have it! The roadmap to market your B2B online successfully. It might not happen overnight, but stick with what you just learned and in time, you can definitely expect to see more traffic, more leads and more sales.
The B2B market is very competitive, but following Noah Digital’s proven roadmap, will set you up for a very lucrative future.
Do you need help getting started with your marketing strategy plan? Book a FREE 30-minute consultation with one of our digital marketing experts today!
- McKinsey & Company (2020). THESE EIGHT CHARTS SHOW HOW COVID-19 HAS CHANGED B2B SALES FOREVER. Retrieved from here.
- Thrive My Way. (2022). 120+ POWERFUL B2B MARKETING STATS AND TRENDS 2022. Retrieved from here.
- Hubspot. (2022). THE ULTIMATE LIST OF EMAIL MARKETING STATS FOR 2022. Retrieved from here.
- Hootsuite. (2022). HOW TO BUILD A BETTER B2B SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGY. Retrieved from here.
- EveryOneSocial. (2021). THE 6 BEST B2B SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS TO DRIVE RESULTS. Retrieved from here.
- Kinsta. (2022). MIND-BLOWING LINKEDIN STATISTICS AND FACTS (2022). Retrieved from here.