A successful digital marketing strategy is essential for businesses looking to expand their customer base and increase their sales. This comprehensive guide to creating a digital marketing plan for B2B companies provides step-by-step strategies that can be tailored to any industry.

Ensuring you understand which online channels your buyer personas use is important to ensure you’re targeting them effectively. By tracking their online behavior, you’ll be able to refine and tailor message formats, timing of delivery, and content topics that will resonate with them. Additionally, understanding where your buyers are in the buying cycle helps you process these strategies much more holistically and can have a major impact on helping you achieve your lead generation goals.

Know Your Buyer Personas and Their Needs.

Knowing your customer is essential when crafting your digital marketing campaign strategy. Through buyer personas, you can define the audience you’re targeting and better understand their needs. These personas should include demographic information, interests, and online behavior to ensure you’re able to create content geared towards them. Additionally, including competitive research in your persona profiles provides powerful insights on how to differentiate your offerings from those of your competitors.

Digital marketing for B2B is challenging. It’s completely different from B2C marketing, and depending on the industry a B2B business is in, the strategy for using digital marketing channels can be dramatically different.

The other component that can make B2B marketing a challenge is a limitless expanse of channels to use for online marketing.

In this article, we will review the channels that make sense for B2B marketing and how to use these channels to improve the quality of the leads coming into your business.

Why Use One Channel Over Another

There is only one reason to use some digital marketing channels over other channels: performance. What channels are going to deliver the results that your company needs?

That means before you can choose channels that could be the best digital marketing channels for your company, you have to determine the goal of your marketing or ad campaign. These goals could range from increased brand visibility to a specific target audience to improved lead quality or announcing the release of a new product or service.

Once you’ve identified the goals you’re trying to achieve with your digital marketing efforts, it will be time to determine the appropriate channels to use.

There Is No One Channel Answer

With all of the noise out there, a multichannel strategy will help your company get your message in front of the right audience.

A multichannel marketing strategy creates a single focus and message across multiple channels such as social, search, website, email, and even direct mail. It’s important to note that B2B decision-makers are consumers too. That means that the activities they take as a consumer cross over into their business decision-making activities.

Because the B2B buyer’s journey is complicated and, more often than not, significantly drawn out, using the right mix of channels is at the core of a successful B2B marketing strategy.

Identifying the appropriate marketing channels for your company will begin with the following:

ICP: What is your ideal client profile (ICP)? What are the job titles of the people you want to talk to? Who within a company you sell to will have input on the buying decision, and what information will they need to decide in favor of your company?

Location: Where do the people within your ICP spend their time online? Do they frequent social media? Are they actively participating in trade shows? Is there a common theme that most people do in their personal lives?

Goals: What are you trying to accomplish with your online marketing? Will you be happy to increase your brand’s visibility, or are you looking to generate more sales leads?  wAnd, speaking of leads, do you want more leads, or do you want better leads?

The answers to these questions will build a profile of the best marketing channels for your company.

Best Digital Marketing Channels

It’s important to note that there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the best channel to use. Every company is different, and every ICP is different. That said, we’ve put together a list of digital marketing channels that make sense for most B2B companies.

Search Engines

Yes, SEO is still an important channel for virtually every business. SEO has been around for as long as the internet has been around. There are two problems with search marketing. The first problem is that because search marketing has been around for as long as it has, it tends to be overlooked.

The second and most critical problem with SEO is the use of old strategies. Google deploys a minimum of 200 algorithm changes a year. If you or your agency are still using old strategies for your SEO efforts, you’re never going to see the light of the first page. In fact, using old SEO strategies could be hurting your attempts at first-page visibility

Paid Placement (PPC)

One of the best B2B marketing strategy tactics is to get laser-focused on who you are targeting with your marketing messaging. Paid ads, regardless of platform (i.e., Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), allow you to get the right messaging in front of the right audience members.

Because SEO can take time for your optimization efforts to appear, PPC will allow you to quickly improve your search engine visibility for key phrases that are important to your company while you’re working on organic optimization for those identical key phrases.

Content Marketing

Online content is literally everything. When it comes to digital marketing, properly utilizing content can elevate your brand, differentiate your products and services from your competition, and encourage potential customers to become customers.

One of the best uses of content for B2B marketing is gated content. Creating white papers and eBooks that visitors to your website download by filling out a form with their name and email address.

When you’re developing your content, be sure to pay attention to:

Topics: Be sure that the topic you’re writing about interests the audience you’re attempting to attract. Not sure what your audience is interested in? Take a look at Answer The Public. This is a database of search insights on billions of topics. Just type in a topic (i.e., digital marketing), and you’ll get a list of the most common questions people search with.

Use Data: Data adds credibility to your content. Be sure to use qualified sources, add charts and graphs, and provide a link to your data source.

Email: Yes, email marketing is still a cornerstone of B2B marketing. According to a survey by Content Marketing Institute:

  • Email newsletters are being used by 81% of B2B marketers responding to the survey
  • Email newsletters are the highest performing for building brand awareness, securing leads, and nurturing leads.
  • Email engagement is the top (90%) content tracked to measure content performance.

If you’ve not gotten serious about email marketing or let your email marketing efforts diminish, it’s undoubtedly time to reinvigorate your efforts with this channel, as it is paying dividends for B2B companies across the spectrum of industries.

Distribution: You have to plan to distribute the content you’ve just spent hours developing. Don’t just publish that new blog post to your blog and think that your work is done. Look for other distribution avenues for that content. Send it to an industry association to use in their blog, email, or website. Post it to Medium. Use chunks of that content for multiple social media posts.

By maximizing the distribution of your content, you’ll effectively impact a greater pool of prospective sales leads and position your brand as a thought leader.

Conclusion

There is a lot more conversation that can be had about B2B marketing channels and strategy, but this is a quick overview of the basics. Managing multiple channels can come with struggles, but you will see positive results if you can manage them.  If you'd like to talk with us about your B2B marketing we can be reached here.