Digital marketing strategies allow businesses to establish their online presence, reach targeted audiences, acquire new leads and ultimately improve sales. With so many channels to focus on, how do you know where to start?
In this article, we have collected the essential marketing strategies that you can start investing in right now. Before we look at them, however, let’s take a step back and see why it is important to study a strategy before getting to work.
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Why is it important to have a marketing strategy?
Everything we do as a business to promote our services or products falls under the marketing sector. We can distinguish offline marketing from digital marketing, the latter includes channels such as the website, social media profiles, email campaigns, and PPC advertising.
Having a solid strategy for our digital marketing campaigns is essential if we want to achieve tangible results.
Digital marketing in B2B has several advantages, in addition to increase sales. Let’s see the main ones.
- Improve brand awareness: thanks to marketing campaigns we can develop a consistent tone of voice with our brand and make ourselves known. It is important, however, to act with full knowledge of the facts in order to get our message across to the right audience.
- Target the audience: especially in B2B, instead of aiming to cover a large audience, it is important to be able to focus on a much narrower and more precise target, precisely that segment of the market potentially interested in what we offer.
- Intercept needs: in the long decision-making process of potential customers, we must be able to reach them with the right content at the right time. Precisely for this reason, as we will see better later, a marketing strategy cannot fail to include an accurate study of the market and the decision-making process.
- Obtain measurable results: one of the advantages of digital marketing is the ability to set goals and track key metrics as we carry out our efforts.
7 Essential B2B Marketing Strategies
Now that we have seen the advantages of having a marketing strategy, let’s see where to start in practice. We have collected the marketing strategies that cannot be missing from your arsenal if you want to obtain more sales and greater profits in B2B.
Conduct market research
In the B2B field, market research should be the starting point for understanding our audience, their needs and consequently being able to better intercept the requests of potential customers.
Market research is essential because it allows us to define one (or more) buyer personas, that is, the profiles of our “ideal customer”. In the B2B field, however, this means going deeper and being able to answer more detailed questions, such as:
- Who are the decision makers?
- How are purchasing decisions made for this specific area?
- What factors have the greatest impact on the purchasing decision?
- How do customers discover our company?
These preliminary questions can be expanded to get an idea of the market. Later, with a business already up and running, you can also do research to understand how your company is perceived by customers (and in general):
- What do customers think about our communications?
- What makes customers return to us or remain loyal to the brand?
- How is our brand perceived?
- What sets us apart from competitors?
In addition to defining which aspects to explore, it is important to understand which methodology to use to effectively conduct market research. We have several methods available that can be combined with each other.
First, we have direct research, which includes:
- Individual Interviews: One-on-one interviews allow you to gather detailed information while also establishing a relationship of trust with the interviewees. The problem is that this type of research can be costly both in terms of money and time.
- Surveys: Surveys are the best method for doing quantitative research. A practical example would be using a survey to measure customer satisfaction.
On the other hand, we have indirect research, this category includes all the research that we can conduct starting from existing data. To give some practical examples, some sources could be:
- Industry reports and statistics;
- Online community analytics (such as social media groups, industry communities, or review sites);
- Databases or directories that collect company data.
This type of research is very useful to better understand the market in which we operate as well as acquire data and also be able to create contact lists.
Prepare a Competitor Analysis
Market research with direct or indirect methods helps us to precisely define the sector in which we operate, the decision makers and the profile of potential customers. Another very interesting analysis that we can do is, instead, to conduct a targeted analysis on our competitors. Let’s see some practical ideas to get started.
Identify competitors and segment them
When we talk about competitors, we are not actually talking about a single category, but we need to make some distinctions to better understand who all our competitors are.
- Direct or primary competitors: all companies that are in direct competition, therefore they sell products or services very similar to ours and that have the same target as us;
- Secondary competitors: this category includes companies that have a similar offer to ours, but a different target;
- Tertiary or indirect competitors: these are companies that, while not selling the same product, address the same niche audience. These cases include those products that are not the same as ours, but are an alternative solution to the same need.
Let’s take a practical example to better understand the difference between direct and indirect competitors. Taking into consideration a company that sells books, then an example of a direct competitor would be another bookstore in the same area, while an online platform for selling audiobooks can be considered an indirect competitor.
Analyze competitors
After having divided the competitors into different categories, we move on to the actual analysis. In this phase, if we want to focus only on the online presence, we can analyze the different channels on which our competitors are present:
- The website;
- Social media channels;
- Reviews on specialized sites.
In addition to studying the online image of our competitors, we must also acquire information on their sales process, it is useful, in fact, to understand:
- How does the sales process work?
- What channels do they use to promote their products? And to sell them?
- What are their results? (Annual revenue, number of customers, etc.)
Last but not least, it is also useful to study their marketing strategy to understand what they focus on. Here are some useful tips:
- Conduct an SEO analysis on your competitor’s site to reverse engineer their strategies.
- Tools: There are many tools like Similarweb that can give us information about traffic to other sites. Also with tools like Semrush we can find the most visited pages and the keywords for which our competitors are positioned.
- Study your competitors’ PPC campaigns.
- Tools: Facebook’s AD library and Google Ads library allow us to see competitors’ paid campaigns (current and past).
Reach customers through Social Media
Today it is essential to have a good presence on social media, but it is not so important to be present on all channels, but rather to be consistent. In B2B, the social network par excellence is undoubtedly LinkedIn, it is not surprising that this is the preferred channel for the launch of new products in 81% of cases, followed by:
- Twitter 71%;
- YouTube 54%;
- Facebook 54%.
Furthermore, LinkedIn is also the most used platform for lead generation, from LinkedIn’s own data it emerges that among social platforms 80% of leads come from LinkedIn, therefore the other platforms only cover the remaining 20%. (Source: Bant.io).
Establish a direct channel with email marketing
50% of marketers believe that email is the best marketing tool in terms of return on investment. (Source: LeadForensics).
Nowadays there are more and more channels that can be used for digital marketing, but emails remain one of the favorite systems for the enormous advantages they bring with them, including:
- The possibility of exploiting automations;
- A/B tests that help us test until we find the best formula;
- Personalization of communications based on customer segmentation.
Intercept needs with SEO
Most B2B buyers discover new products through search engines. In fact, searches are the most used channel by B2B buyers (66%), followed by marketplace searches (50%) and product catalogs (43%) (Source: Backlinko).
Since those who do a search tend to click on the first results, to intercept searches and therefore obtain organic traffic, you need to improve the positioning of your site. And this is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play, which allows us to implement strategies aimed at improving the ranking of our pages and thus obtain more clicks and more traffic.
Beyond SEO, Content Marketing
If we look beyond organic traffic, we can use content marketing to create content tailored to different channels.
This can mean both capturing search and encouraging potential customers to discover our content. For example, we can leverage our channels:
- Website (as seen for SEO);
- Social media accounts;
- Email list;
- YouTube channel.
To create a content marketing strategy, in addition to selecting the most suitable channel, we can also experiment with various types of content. Below you can see the most used in B2B.
It is also important to structure content based on the stage our potential customer is in at that moment. Let’s take as an example a funnel divided into:
- Top of Funnel (TOFU): the problem/need awareness stage;
- Middle of Funnel (MOFU): the evaluation stage;
- Bottom of Funnel (BOFU): the purchase stage.
It will be necessary to create content for each of these phases, but also taking into account the different competition (especially if we want to position ourselves on search engines) of the topics. In fact, according to data reported by Backlinko, in 67% of cases the content creation teams focus on the creation of TOFU content (where the competition is lower); in 27.9% on MOFU content and only in 4.7% on BOFU content.
Investing in ADS
PPC (pay per click) campaigns can be an excellent technique in our marketing strategy. Today, you can use Google ADS to be present on multiple channels with different types of campaigns. They range from search ads that are shown in the SERP, to display ads in the network of associated sites, videos, in-app ads and sponsored in the shopping section.
Furthermore, there are Meta ADS and LinkdIn ADS that allow us to create advertising campaigns directly on social media.
Let Visilay help you in digital marketing
Setting up a B2B marketing strategy allows us to reach potential customers right during their decision-making journey. With content marketing, SEO, social media and emails we can both intercept customers at the beginning of their journey (for example while they are researching a topic) and accompany them (for example with nurturing email campaigns).
The important thing, to start, is to understand which strategies to focus on before you can expand. If you are defining the first steps to take or want to expand on a new channel, at Visilay you can find a specialized team ready to work alongside you. We can assist you in running Google ADS and Linkedin campaigns, develop or improve your website or help you improve your SEO strategy.
