Studies indicate that there are 2.41 billion online shoppers as of 2024. That means a third of the world's population is now shopping online. The shift to e-commerce has necessitated the need for businesses to have a solid digital presence. 

Unlike in the past, when most companies used traditional means such as radio and TV, you now need to meet customers where they are. An excellent digital marketing strategy can be crucial to your business's development. Digital marketing can be categorized into two categories: B2B and B2C. This article will help you use B2B digital marketing to take your business to the next level.

What is Digital Marketing?

Also known as online marketing, digital marketing refers to all the measures and strategies you use to market your businesses, products, or services online. This could be done through various digital media such as search engines, social media, websites, and emails. You can also use text and multimedia messages to communicate with current and prospective customers. The goal is to reach your customers on the channels where they spend most of their time.

Since digital marketing has many possibilities, you can experiment and be creative with different marketing campaigns. An excellent digital marketer should know how digital marketing campaigns reach their overlapping goals. Depending on what you want to achieve, you can opt for a free or paid channel.

For instance, if you are trying to generate leads for your ebook, you can create an email list to send to your prospects. Once they download your ebook, you can send a follow-up email providing them with more information about your business. 

What is B2B Digital Marketing?

B2B digital marketing is any strategy you use to market your business to another organization. Unlike B2C, which sells directly to customers, your target customers are other organizations. When doing B2B, your strategy often focuses on online lead generation and guiding the leads to speak to a salesperson. Here are several ways that B2B differs from B2C:

• B2B often involves targeting different stakeholders in your marketing efforts. That’s unlike B2C, where there is only one party, the customer.
• The B2B sales cycle is usually longer because of the multiple parties and the complex purchase.
• The B2B sales strategy usually involves different parties, such as account managers, while customers in B2C usually buy directly.
• Motivators, such as financial and logical incentives, and metrics, such as ROI, usually drive purchase decisions in B2B transactions.

Benefits of B2B Digital Marketing

A B2B marketing campaign can have different goals, such as improving brand awareness,  promoting your products or services, and turning your audience into customers. That said, there are several benefits of B2B marketing. These are:

Precise Targeting

B2B offers an excellent opportunity to target customers who are more likely to convert based on their demographics, online activities, and firmographics. You can even find the users who are likely to visit your site. This is compared to traditional marketing, which targets a bigger audience, resulting in a higher cost and less precision.

Reach the Buyer’s Journey Stakeholders

Since B2B marketing has a more extended buyer’s journey, engaging your customers throughout the buying process is essential. Digital marketing enables businesses to reach their customers when seeking information online at the start of the buying journey. Marketers can then use other digital channels, like email marketing and online advertising, to move the buyer down the funnel while maintaining engagement.

Track and Adjust Results

B2B digital marketing makes it easy to measure the success of your campaigns. Businesses can use a wide range of tools to identify the strategies that provide the best results. The information obtained from these tools can be used to adjust the B2B strategy, improve marketing performance, and increase ROI.

Best B2B Digital Marketing Strategies

Here are the steps you can use in your B2B digital strategy to attract more customers and grow your business.

Understand the B2B Buyer Journey

To create a good B2B digital marketing strategy that will speak to prospects in every stage of the buying cycle, it's essential to understand the buyer’s journey. Most B2B products often have a higher price point, meaning the B2B sales cycle is usually longer than that of B2C.

That also means it will take you longer to nurture these leads. You should, therefore, use specific methods in each stage to drive the prospect to make a purchasing decision. Therefore, B2B digital marketing takes more than setting up Instagram ads and waiting for clicks. Instead, you should have a strategy targeting the various stages of the buying process. These are:

• Awareness stage. This is when a prospect becomes aware of their problem and starts looking for a solution.
• Consideration stage. This stage involves the prospect researching for a solution to their problem.
• Decision stage. This is the stage where the prospect is ready to make a buying decision.

Once you understand the customer's buying journey, you can create a buying map. This personalized version of the buying journey shows how you interact with the customer in each stage. This information lets you know the most effective marketing strategy, such as content creation.

Understand Brand Positioning

The next step in creating a B2B marketing strategy is understanding your brand’s positioning. Positioning aims to ensure that your B2B brand remains in the minds of your respective customers. It involves strategizing how to set your business apart from other companies through its unique identity. 

This helps enhance your business image and increase customer loyalty. Understanding your business positioning makes it easier to market your business or product. You also understand how to create a marketing message that resonates well with the target audience.

Understand the Target Audience

The next step should be understanding the businesses searching for your products and services. Your target audience is like a cheat code for your business. You can use it to create people's desired products, enhance your marketing message, and gain an advantage over your competitors. Understanding your target audience is the key to an effective digital marketing campaign. It isn't about knowing who they are but understanding their needs and positioning your product to meet them.

Here are some steps to help you understand your target audience:

• Understand the problem you are solving. When promoting your B2B product, listing the features won't work. Instead, focus on the benefits and how they will assist the target organization.
• Consider your happiest customers. You can analyze your existing customers, especially those who are happy with your products, to determine who benefits most from them. You can conduct surveys to determine what customers love most about your products. You can listen to about ten customers to look for shared attributes.
• Check shared attributes. Check how you have grouped the companies to determine if there are common characteristics. You can group them according to the industry revenue, company size, geography, and specific pain points and needs. Then, you can use these shared points to create an Ideal Customer Profile, which will guide your marketing strategies and ensure that they resonate with other similar prospects.
• Improve and support findings using data. Information on other current customers can be very helpful. You can use it to learn more about the people you sign up with as customers, whether they are in a joint industry, and whether your product resonates more with big B2B or startups. This information will help you determine who resonates well with your product.
• Focus more on customer lifetime value. By paying attention to your customer lifetime value, you can refine the customer data more. This will show you companies that have proven loyal over time so you can focus more on attracting such customers.
• Get additional customer data. You can check on places such as social media platforms, websites, and their marketing materials to get more data on your ideal customers.
• Create an ideal customer profile (ICP). Using your insights and data, create a detailed ICP to determine the common behaviors, attributes, and pain points. This profile will be used in your marketing strategy and to tailor your product to meet the needs of your most promising prospects.

You can use filmographic data to understand your target audience. This includes company size, region, industry, number of employees, revenue, etc. Remember that you will not be marketing to the target company but to the people working there. Therefore, you also need to collect data on their ages, genders, locations, behaviors, job titles, location beliefs, and habits. You can use this information to create customer personas to help you understand how they make buying decisions.

Create a User-friendly B2B Website

If prospects want to trust you more, you must create a well-designed, informative, and user-friendly website. Plan your site's content while considering your buyer’s persona, need, and pain points. Ensure that the site is mobile-friendly, easily navigable, and responsive.

Your prospective customers should find what they are searching for easily. If they want to take action, such as signing up for a newsletter or filling out a form, the site should make it easy for them to do so. You can make your CTAs visible and clickable, even for mobile devices. Ensure that the site loads fast to prevent visitors from bouncing off.

Use SEO for Discoverability

Many businesses suggest that their top lead generator is SEO. Therefore, you want to take advantage of it so your competitors do not leave you behind. Remember that there are lots of B2B that perform online searches when finding products and services, so you want them to discover your site on the search engines.

A successful B2B strategy should put your site before business personnel searching for your product or services. While B2B is about businesses buying from one another, the strategy remains the same as those of B2C. These strategies include:

• On page SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Content 
• Technical SEO

However, B2B SEO offers unique challenges regarding the audience being marketed to. As noted earlier, a B2B has a more complex sales funnel with longer and more parties. In B2B SEO, the focus is also more on highly specific audiences; therefore, you will likely target a keyword with a low search volume. That means you need to nail down your keyword. Your keyword research should enable you to find specific audiences to put down the sales funnel.

Another challenge you will likely face with B2B SEO is the lower conversion rate. Remember that search engines might interpret lower conversion rates as a result of a poor user experience, which can hurt your SEO. To succeed with B2B SEO, you should focus on attracting the right traffic interested in your products or services. Therefore, ensure that you remain specific, understand your audience, and show them how your product or service can solve their problem. This can help increase your conversion.

Here are several B2B SEO strategies to consider.

• Demonstrate your solution. Every customer wants to know if the product will provide the result. However, B2B businesses are even more strict in ensuring they get the right product. Therefore, when creating B2B content, you should focus more on showing your expertise.
• Understand your sales funnel. When doing B2B keyword research, you want to be sure that you understand how your unique sales funnel looks. To do that, speak to your sales team and pay special attention to average customer retention, lifetime value, average time to purchase, and why customers abandon their cart. Use your sales data to determine how customers find you online.
• Do keyword research around the customer persona. You want to know how customers are finding your business at every stage of the buying process. You can begin by entering the seed keyword, a broader phrase representing your business. You can enter the keyword in a tool like Ahref before filtering by the search intent.
• Optimize your landing pages. If you don't have one, you should create one before optimizing it for search engines. You can use the target keywords in the title tags, internal links, and meta descriptions.

Use Content Marketing to Provide Valuable Information

You must be an expert if you want success with your B2B digital marketing. To do that, you should create different forms of content, such as blog posts, informative videos, white papers, and case studies. This will help to increase your credibility among your B2B customers.

Remember that content creation is a vital part of SEO. Therefore, you need to begin by creating content that meets the needs of your buyer’s persona to welcome them to your site. You will then get an opportunity to turn them into customers. Again, as noted earlier, you must create content for every stage of the buying journey. This will enable them to discover your business from the research stage to when they are ready to buy the product.

When creating B2B content, you should ensure that it:

• Aligns with your marketing objectives.
• Reaches the target market with its core channels and formats.
• Is able to effectively track the marketing performance.

Use Email Marketing to Nurture Leads

Email marketing offers an excellent opportunity to reach your B2B prospective customers. Studies indicate that email marketing offers an amazing ROI of $44 for every dollar spent. If you have users who downloaded your ebook or signed up for a newsletter, you can use email marketing to nurture these leads. You can use the leads in your CRM to send personalized messages to customers. You can increase customer loyalty and satisfaction by creating custom content for each persona.

Here are some best practices when using email marketing to nurture B2B leads:

• Use a hook in the subject line. Your B2B email marketing subject line should be like a Netflix trailer. You only have a few seconds to hook the reader, so make it as interesting as possible.
• Only have one CTA. To avoid confusing your audience, ensure that you only have one CTA.
• Email segmentation. Since your subscribers will be at different levels of the buying journey, not all emails suit everyone in your email list. That is where email segmentation will help. When done well, it will help you better relate to your audience.
• Use responsive email designs. Remember that most people access their emails on mobile devices, so you should create mobile-responsive emails.

B2B email marketing requires a different approach than B2C email marketing. Since you will email other businesses, your approach needs to be more professional. A standard strategy B2B marketers leverage is the power of lead magnets, such as an ebook, presentation, checklist, white paper, etc. They create an irresistible offer that increases the chances of signups.

Use PPC Ads

Studies indicate that over 70% of customers in the B2B industry usually search for products or services on search engines. With a PPC campaign, you can easily reach these potential customers and turn them into valuable leads. B2B pay-per-click advertising enables you to show specific ads to a particular group of people to encourage them to visit your site.

You are only charged when someone clicks on your site. If you cannot rank for particular keywords using SEO, PPC makes it easy to rank for the exact keywords. In addition to search engines, you can run PPC campaigns on social media sites like Facebook. When running PPC ads, the most important thing is ensuring that your ad shows to the most relevant audience.

Use Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing on TikTok and other online platforms is essential to take your B2B campaign to the next level. This involves working with leading content creators to promote your brand on social media and other platforms. By leveraging their audience, you enable your brand to reach a bigger audience.

Influencers are considered authorities in their niche due to their deep knowledge in the field. This enables them to influence buyers to make a buying decision. An influencer's following can range from a few thousand to millions of followers. When finding a B2B influencer, the most important thing is to find one who is the best fit for your brand. They should have an engaged audience likely to turn into potential customers.

Unlike B2C influencer marketing, which targets a broader consumer base, B2B influencer marketing focuses on creating relationships with individuals who can influence business purchase decisions. Therefore, it would be a good idea to work with influencers who are industry experts.

Due to the longer sales cycle of B2B marketing, influencers must focus on building relationships, brand credibility, and thought leadership in their content strategy. They can create informative and educational content such as social media posts, interviews, and white papers, quickly increasing brand awareness among the target audience. The strategy should also focus on cross-promoting content, such as sharing blog posts on Instagram.

Increase Efficiency Using Automation

With the right automation tools, you can increase efficiency, analyze campaigns, and amenable personalization of your B2B digital strategy. You can use many tools to automate your B2B digital marketing. For instance, you can use CRM to streamline your marketing processes by collecting customer data to personalize email campaigns.

Run a Competitor Analysis

A competitive analysis can help you determine if your strategy is working. Therefore, you should scope out the marketing to see the businesses targeting the same audience as you are. Understand their approaches, whether website, social media, or influencer marketing. Consider also their product offerings and sales tactics.

You can easily understand their strengths and weaknesses by getting a general idea of the above. It will also provide an overview of the opportunities and threats. After understanding your competitor’s standing, it becomes easier to compete with them. For instance, if you find that none of your competitors are on TikTok, it may not be a good idea to focus a lot on TikTok marketing. Instead, you should test out before committing many resources to TikTok marketing. 

Conclusion

It can be challenging to do B2B digital marketing. This is because you will have much to juggle, from creative demand to deciding on effective channels and how to utilize your budget well. However, one of the critical factors you should consider should be your audience. If you understand your audience well, you can increase your chances of success. On top of that, you can use our detailed guide above to create an effective B2B digital marketing strategy for business development.

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