B2B Digital Marketing Strategies Your Business Needs Today

Digital marketing has been around for many years now, but only gained momentum after the pandemic. 

For some marketers, moving from traditional, proven strategies to transient digital tactics didn’t sit well with them.

And it shouldn’t, really. 

Because no one should invest their resources in a strategy, that’s all the hype today but ineffectual in a couple of months. 

Those are not the strategies we’re talking about here.

We’re referring to highly effective digital marketing strategies that bring businesses to the front line, generate leads, drive conversions, and boost revenues.

If you want to know more about the B2B digital marketing strategies your business needs today, read on.

1. Search Engine Marketing

In today’s market, it’s the customers who find the vendors.

B2B customers have become savvy investigators piecing together information about their preferred suppliers before reaching out.

Considering most of their research is done online, the best way to attract these customers is by increasing your visibility in search engine results.

So, how do you help potential customers find you?

• Start by defining your strategy. What are your goals – to generate leads, sales, improve awareness? Who is your target audience – what industries do you want to serve, what are their demographics? Who are your competitors? What keyword phrases do they focus on?
• Choose effective keywords. The best way to do this is by getting inside your customer’s heads. Look at the terms customers commonly use to refer to their needs and the solutions you provide. What terms refer to how your solutions work? 
• Optimize your website to improve its attractiveness to search engines. Add keywords to title tags, heading tags, and meta tags. Where practical, link between pages. 
• Consider adding paid search campaigns to your strategy. Paid searches like Google ads reach motivated audiences quicker, delivering faster results.

2. Email Marketing

Email marketing is a highly dependable channel for building awareness and trust, nurturing leads, and converting contacts into paying customers.

But before you crank up your machine and start churning out emails, careful planning must go into this strategy to maximize its effectiveness.

Some best practices include:

• Segment the businesses on your list into categories such as prospects, current customers, cart abandonment, and previous buyers. By identifying the stage they are at, you can tailor messages relevant to them.
• Nurture your leads. Provide informative and statistically correct content that delves into their problems and shows how you can solve them. Use video, graphics, or images to represent information in an interesting way and occasionally slide in limited time offers.
• Automate your emails. Sending individual emails to people on your list every time they take a particular action can be tedious and impractical. Invest in an automation tool that will handle the work more efficiently.
• Track the results. Analyze the metrics like open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, unsubscription, and spam complaints. Not only do they reveal the effectiveness of your campaigns, but you can use them to tweak weak areas. 

3. Cold Calling

Do you want to cut through the noise and reach your prospects directly? Cold calling is the way to go. 

This strategy jump-starts the initial touchpoint, allowing you to introduce your brand to prospects and interest them in your offerings. 

How do you go about it? 

• Build some familiarity. By familiarity we mean look up the business online. Find out what makes them tick, what their challenges are, and how effectively you can solve them. 
• Use a calling guide. Let’s leave “winging it” to the movies, or you may end up confusing yourself and everyone else. List down important points, useful statistics, questions for the prospects, common objections, and how to navigate them. 
• Come up with a captivating opening statement. Wrap a major pain point in a story involving a business similar to theirs and the difference your solutions made.
• Explain your reason for calling. Which shouldn’t be selling a product/service, rather selling the next step. The next step depends on your goals i.e. getting the prospect to agree to a meeting or staging a demo, etc.
• You’re bound to come across difficult prospects who try to shut you down or refuse to answer questions. Handle them with grace and know when to walk away. Not every prospect will be a good fit.

4. Social Media Marketing

From Fortune 500 companies to small businesses, brands have invaded the social presence with amazing results. 

They share content that builds audiences, flaunts their authority, and drives traffic and conversions.

The key thing is to find a balance between relevance and being a nag, which prevents people from enjoying time away from their high-pressure lives.

For that, you’ll need a strategy—one with practices that include:

• Determine what you want to achieve from social—whether it’s boosting awareness, client acquisition, or driving traffic. Setting specific and measurable KPIs allows you to know if your efforts are on track or need changing.
• Check out the competition. Look at the campaigns they are running, levels of success as well as ‘ignored’ opportunities that can differentiate you from them.
• Share original, well-researched content to increase credibility and brand authority. People can tell when you’re regurgitating information and that won’t do much for your reputation.
• Be consistent. It takes commitment to create content, post, and engage your audience regularly. Come up with an editorial to guide and control content publication. Also, set aside time in your day when you can initiate conversations or catch up with ongoing ones. 

5. Host Virtual Events

Virtual events are perfect for initiating and maintaining close relationships with relevant audiences. 

Done well, they can educate, inform, provide comparisons to help prospects make informed decisions, answer questions and help move leads down the funnel.

The opposite is also true, poor preparation leads to low attendance and engagement. So, how do you do it well?

• Choose the right content. Content draws audiences to your event, so be sure to cover topics that matter to them.
• Define the format you’ll use. From the single presenter format to two presenters, a panel of experts, or a Q&A session you’re spoilt for choice. You can also interview industry experts or do a product demo.
• It’s easy to disconnect from virtual events, so keep your audiences engaged by involving them in the presentation. You can use the time to conduct surveys, polls, or incorporate chat apps that permit audiences to ask questions in real-time.
• Promote the event. Get the event in your audiences’ faces through organic and paid means. Run ads, talk about on social channels, in blog posts, and email campaigns.
• Conduct post-mortem analysis when the curtains come down. Document what went well, areas that need improvement, number of attendees, registrants who didn’t attend, and engagement score. These metrics will provide insights you can use to streamline future events.