Are you in the B2B industry?
Are you looking to promote your new product or service?
With 41% of B2B businesses choosing to conduct their marketing in house, it’s important that your team has a clear B2B marketing strategy to work from.
Effective marketing can be hard to get right, but having a clear strategy in place will certainly help your chances of increasing lead generation and improving the overall performance of your business.
Your audience is the biggest influence when creating a marketing strategy right for your business. With most B2B consumers making a logical purchasing decision, it’s crucial that your marketing efforts resonate with their values and deliver to their expectations.
Below you will learn the 5-step process that many businesses use to grow their sales exponentially.
1) Understand Your Customer Journey
A customer journey is the experience that the customer goes through when engaging with your business. This begins at the moment they become aware of your brand and continues through to their post-sales experience. Ultimtaely, businesses should be aiming to convert their customers into brand advocates.
All customers go through a set of steps and experiences before they make the decision to purchase your product or service. (See the diagram below!) The customers’ experience throughout this journey will influence whether they decide to use your brand, or a competitor.
Focus on improving your brand awareness in the initial stages of your customers journey, with a recognisable name, logo and colour scheme. Brand awareness helps to establish trust with potential customers. Having a strong brand presence will make it easier for you to portray a personality and tell your story.
At this stage of the customer journey – sometimes considered the ‘discovery stage’ – it is important that prospective leads can find your business easily. This means being active on social media and having a strong SEO strategy.
Next, remember that lead generation begins on your landing pages. In your B2B marketing strategy it is likely that your homepage or a specified landing page will be receiving the most visits. As such, it’s crucial that you capitalise on this to help increase conversion rates. Make sure that the page copy is optimised to drive conversions, including plenty of call-to-actions such as “Book now” or “Get a free quote today”. Including a pop-up for newsletter subscriptions is also a good way to get customer information that you can then use to market your products and / or services to.
2) Driving Traffic to Your Site
Driving traffic to your website should be an integral part of your B2B marketing strategy. Website traffic is important to businesses because the number of website visitors you have equals the number of potential leads that you have to work with. The number of website visitors you have increases the opportunities for your brand to share its story and convert leads to paying clients.
But you might be wondering, how can I drive more traffic to my site?
A good starting point to increase the visibility of your website is to focus on your SEO. On page SEO helps your website rank higher in search engines and therefore increases the number of organic website visitors. As well as publishing relevant content, on page SEO includes optimising various website elements such as headings, HTML tags and images.
You can also use paid marketing such as Google’s PPC (Google ads) to drive more traffic to your site. PPC, an abbreviation of pay-per-click, is a marketing strategy that requires businesses to pay a small fee every time one of their ads are clicked. Although organic marketing is desirable, it can take months to see results. With PPC, businesses are able to display their ads on the first page of Google – meaning you can reach a huge number of potential leads that are actively searching for your services.
Other ways of driving website traffic include social media marketing, where there are over 45 million users in the UK alone.
3) Quality Content
Creating quality content for your business is the best way to be seen as an authoritative figure in your industry, whilst building trust with potential customers. If you want to boost your credibility, your content must be educational and be useful to your readers. Use online forums to find out the most frequently asked questions about your industry and answer them in the form of blogs on your website. Not only will blogs massively increase your SEO ranking, they will also act as a source of information for potential leads.
Blog content is also perfect for sharing on social media too. If you write informative, quality content, you are more likely to get shares on social media and increase your reach.
4) Social Media for B2B Marketing
Ranking on popular search engines will give your customers the impression that you have authority in your niche and are regarded as one of the top players. Being amongst the top search results will show potential visitors that your website is a trusted and genuine source of information.
In contrast, many searches believe that the further down the ranking you are, the less trustworthy your website is.
Our fully equipped SEO strategy will help your small business attain a position in the search results for relevant keywords, indicating to consumers that your content is high quality.
5) Google Analytics
The internet is the largest source of search traffic by far, and this means that your competitors will already be investing in SEO. When you start a new business, you most likely won’t rank for your desired keywords because Google isn’t aware of your website.
If you want to compete in your industry, it’s crucial that you stay up to date with your search engine optimisation – helping you rank amongst your toughest competitors.
A successful SEO campaign can help you outrank your competitors and be seen as a more reputable source of information or product.
