If you’re selling products or services to other companies, there’s no doubt that B2B digital marketing should be part of your promotion strategy.
While completely different from consumer searches, a large portion of B2B purchases begin online. It’s estimated that 61% of all B2B transactions begin online. So, it makes sense that Google, LinkedIn, and similar online channels have become the best way to reach other businesses.
With the above in mind, creating a successful online B2B marketing strategy is not a simple task. There are many channels you need to leverage and these need to work in harmony to produce the best results.
At Fannit, we’ve developed dozens of successful digital marketing B2B strategies for companies across many industries, so we understand the nuances between these campaigns and conventional B2C content.
In this article, we’ll share the definition of digital marketing for B2B and its importance within this type of company. We’ll also discuss the best digital marketing B2B channels and the trends that will shape the future of this space. Finally, we’ll provide a few practical tips to help you build a great strategy for your B2B company.
What is B2B Digital Marketing?
Business-to-business or B2B digital marketing is the practice of promoting your company through online channels. The idea is to use a combination of platforms to publish quality content, attract more customers to your landing pages, and generate more conversions. These can come in the form of leads, or depending on your industry, sales.
There are many engaging platforms you can use to attract new customers to your website. However, many businesses attempt to promote their services across popular channels without considering whether these fit into their B2B digital marketing strategy.
The best way to acquire more customers is to create a tailored digital marketing B2B plan tailored to your business requirements. Then, you’ll be able to identify the best combination of tools that help you address B2B pain points and influence your potential customers’ purchase decisions.
Importance of B2B Digital Marketing Services
While using digital marketing for B2B business promotion can help you build long-term relationships, it’s important to note that this strategy requires a significant amount of work.
Moreover, your B2B digital marketing strategy should be carefully crafted, implemented, and optimized. This can put a significant amount of pressure on your internal team, eventually affecting your digital presence and reducing the number of potential customers that see your content.
Rather than managing your B2B digital marketing strategy internally, you can work with an experienced agency that has experience creating engaging content for other businesses, like Fannit. Our team has an extensive understanding of the most effective digital marketing channels for B2B promotion, so contact us today to learn how we can help you attract more business customers.
Difference Between B2B Marketing and B2C Marketing
Before going over the best channels to implement in your digital marketing plan for your B2B business, it’s important to understand the difference between this type of strategy and B2C advertising.
As you can imagine, average consumers and business decision-makers look for different elements when they enter a landing page. Therefore, your content should be adapted to the type of prospective customers you want to attract and their collective buyer’s journey.
Business-to-consumer or B2C is the most common form of digital marketing and it consists of promoting services and products directly to consumers. B2C marketing strategies also include steps like competitor analysis and the creation of video content.
Yet, B2B is fundamentally different from B2C because the former requires businesses to craft a different type of engaging content, perform a distinct form of competitive analysis, and adapt other parts of their digital strategies to be successful.
Online B2B Marketing Strategies
Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s go over the best channels to include in the digital marketing strategy for your B2B business.
Remember, there is no exact formula to finding the best digital marketing tactics for your business. You need to adapt your strategy to your buyer’s journey, implement the right digital marketing tools, and optimize your content to attract prospective customers consistently.
As an alternative, remember that there are many digital marketing agencies that can help you achieve your online marketing goals. With that said, you should choose a digital marketing partner that’s reliable, knowledgeable, and experienced in helping B2B companies build an effective strategy.
Here are six digital marketing channels and strategies you should include in your plan.
1. Direct Site Lead Generation
One thing that B2C and B2B digital marketing have in common is the need for a great website. This is because visitors will see your site as a direct reflection of your services or products. If your site is slow, doesn’t have enough content, or is otherwise underwhelming, visitors will quickly turn to other businesses.
Rather than seeing your site as an obstacle, you should focus on building the best possible page. Search engines like fast, clean, and well-structured websites that contain helping materials. This means that your site should be technically sound and that your content marketing strategy needs to focus on generating engaging posts.
2. Search Engine Optimization
In addition to focusing on content marketing and your website as a whole, you should focus on driving low-cost, high-engagement traffic from Google and other search engines. This is possible through search engine optimization, or SEO.
In this context, SEO is a B2B digital marketing strategy that focuses on placing your pages among the top results in search engine rankings whenever there’s a relevant search. In other words, SEO allows you to drive interested visitors to your site without having to pay for each individual.
With that said, creating a solid SEO strategy takes a huge amount of time and effort. You need to implement tools like Google Analytics to track your results and optimize your content in order to get the most from your B2B marketing efforts.
Not only this, but unlike paid search campaigns, SEO produces gradual results. So, it’s best to include SEO as a part of a wholesome B2B digital marketing strategy in order to meet your business needs right away.
3. Social Media Marketing
By now, most companies know that social media channels are a great way to reach individual consumers. But, social media has also proven to be a great tool to engage B2B audiences. So, it’s important to include these social platforms in your marketing efforts.
All networks are different, so you need to identify the social media platforms that give you access to your B2B target market of preference.
Out of all social media platforms, LinkedIn is the network that’s most suitable for B2B campaigns. That said, it’s also important to identify additional social online marketing alternatives which can potentially help you attract more prospective clients.
4. Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-per-click or PPC campaigns consist of paid adverts that can be placed throughout the web. While there are many paid ad networks, Google Ads is the biggest and most reliable alternative for B2B companies, along with LinkedIn marketing solutions.
When crafted properly, PPC ads can help you generate leads and grow sales immediately. This makes PPC marketing a powerful tool to sell products to other businesses and address their pain points with relevant, commercial content right away.
5. Partnership Marketing
In some instances, it’s difficult to convince a B2B customer about the quality of a product or service if the message is coming directly from the provider. Partner marketing is a great option because it can help influence a prospect’s purchase decision without additional variables impacting the end result.
Partnership marketing works the same way as affiliate marketing. In simple terms, you need to create a commission or performance-based reward system and find partners to help you generate leads. Although it sounds simple, finding a reliable partner that can send quality traffic to your landing pages can be difficult, especially in B2B industries.
Digital marketing agencies are a great alternative because they can manage the different relationships that allow you to reach your target market without disruption.
6. Audience Retargeting
Audience retargeting is an analytics-driven strategy that has been used to attract individual consumers for more than a decade and it can also be applied to B2B marketing strategies.
This marketing strategy can help you identify the prospects that were interested in your materials, but did not convert. This information allows you to build targeted PPC campaigns, and social media platforms, as well as leverage other content distribution methods to help convert these prospects.
Then, you send these individuals to a landing page that contains content created exclusively for retargeted clients.
Practical B2B Digital Marketing Ideas
As with other forms of online promotion, B2B digital marketing should be adapted to your unique business needs. That said, there are many strategies you may be able to replicate successfully, as long as you adjust them to fit your B2B marketing goals.
A real-life example of this is identifying your competitor’s strengths and implementing similar strategies into your plan. For instance, if you notice that a leading competitor that’s similar to your business gets a huge amount of traffic from influencer marketing, this may be an effective way to reach your target audience.
In addition to this, some techniques you can leverage include:
Create a Business Newsletter
Business newsletters are a great way to keep your target audience informed about your new content. As with other email marketing strategies, you need to grow your list of subscribers and segment them into different cohorts. But, as long as you set up this content distribution system properly, you’ll gradually create a consistent source of leads.
Conduct Non-Promotional Research and Publish Industry Whitepapers
As part of your content marketing strategy, you should create industry-related whitepapers that don’t focus on your product or service. Instead, you should conduct a study or research that your target audience will find helpful and create a valuable resource.
Then, you can ask prospects for their email address in exchange for the whitepaper, which can include a small section about the advantages of your product in the context of the study.
Identify Key B2B Key Performance Indicators
Identifying the right social media marketing channels and other tools is a great start. But, you should also determine which key performance indicators or KPIs are the most valuable to your B2B digital marketing strategies.
KPIs are the metrics that help you define the success of your campaigns. It’s important to identify the right KPIs because they prevent you from measuring your success in vanity metrics.
Vanity metrics are superficial statistics that don’t give you real insights into the performance of your digital marketing strategies. So, having the right set of KPIs is the only way to ensure the success of your content marketing and all other areas of your advertising plan.
B2B Digital Marketing Trends 2022
If past tendencies are to continue, B2B decision makers will continue making purchases online. That said, keeping up with the latest B2B digital marketing trends can help you make adjustments and adapt before the competition.
Here’s our take on the latest online B2B marketing trends:
- B2B social media platforms like LinkedIn will continue to rise in 2022 and beyond
- Case studies, whitepapers, and other research-based content is preferred by B2B prospects
- B2B decision makers will prioritize partners that share virtual reality content to showcase their solutions
Benefits of B2B Digital Marketing
Here are some of the biggest benefits of digital marketing in B2B companies:
- Online platforms are more affordable than traditional advertising
- Digital content can be updated quickly and at minimal or no cost
- Emails and other digital resources can be tracked and measured
Conclusion
B2B marketing campaigns can help you establish great relationships with other businesses. But, building brand equity through online channels in the B2B space is not always easy. We hope that the tips above help you create a better B2B marketing plan and increase the number of leads your business generates online.
Want to find out more about the benefits of partnering with digital marketing agencies? Get in touch with Fannit today and we’ll be glad to schedule a free evaluation of your business website today.
