A successful B2B marketing strategy is the one that generates leads, and a marketing plan built around lead generation can transform any business within no time. Businesses today have adapted to the digital landscape, so are their marketing strategies. In order to stay ahead in the race, they have to keep evolving their tactics and add innovative methods continuously.
So how are you going about your B2B marketing strategy in 2018? Before developing a powerful B2B marketing campaign, it is crucial to understand that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. The success of your strategies depends heavily on your organization’s unique goals as well as your audience base.
In order for your marketing campaign to effectively reach your potential customers, you need creative ideas in the first place. In view of this, “content ideation” is getting more traction these days, which is very important for relevant content creation. You can get benefits from content marketing and growth services. Collecting brilliant idea is thus followed by defining your value proposition and marketing strategy.
Hence, for the success of your B2B business, your campaigns need to be entirely different from B2C.
Here is how you can build a powerful B2B marketing plan:
- A High Performance Website
To begin with, your website is like a gateway of your business to your target customers, which is why it becomes a key asset for you. An engaging website is crucial for your online presence, which is also an information-rich projection of your expertise. So whenever potential B2B clients make an online search regarding products or service that you are associated with, your company’s website must be visible to them. As more and more visitors reach your site, relevant educational content and carefully targeted offers can increase a greater level of engagement among them. Therefore, a high performance and responsive website should be your first priority.
As a matter of fact, search engines like Google reward well-designed websites with a better position in search results. Such a website has a better user experience, which in turn helps in more lead generation. A good performance website also loads quickly that is responsible for higher page rank. Furthermore, owing to its flexibility and robustness, WordPress is the most utilized software platform for creating websites, blogs, and e-commerce portals. So, it would be better to have a WordPress powered website that helps in making it more intuitive and user-friendly. Additionally, with the help of various plugins, you can make your WordPress faster and better.
- Use Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing has certainly evolved from a rising trend a few years back into a proven marketing strategy. In 2018, it is further going to get a dedicated spot in the digital marketing mix for the B2B business segment. According to a study, 81% of marketers who incorporated influencer marketing into their marketing plan termed it to be effective. Also, according to Neilson findings, 92% of consumers say that they trust recommendations from friends, family and well-known figures. This is way more than emails, ads, video messages, and blogs. Businesses are going to involve more in influencer marketing in order to engage the B2B community. Famous musicians and Hollywood celebrities are being approached by various marketers in order to promote products, services or events. The actor, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was approached as a keynote speaker in a Content Marketing World 2017 event.
Influencers can effectively extend your B2B messaging in order to reach out to more and more people. At an SAP’s company conference in 2016, influencers used Facebook’s live video chats so that people connect to the live stream and listen to the influencers. It is therefore important that influencers should belong to your niche in order to get the maximum impact. Just like B2C marketing segment, according to 2018 influencer marketing predictions, it is going to give your B2B the leverage to reach to new audiences who probably haven’t yet been touched. Hence, this could give you a head start in 2018. Finally, to rev up your strong marketing strategy, you need to develop your relationships with influencers for long-term partnerships.
- Incorporate Facebook Messenger Marketing
Facebook Messenger hits whopping 1.2 billion monthly users, making it a highly productive platform for the lead generation even in the B2B segment. Due to its increased popularity, FB Messenger allows businesses to directly message their contacts. It has become an effective channel to push advertising. A recent survey underscored the benefits of Facebook for B2B marketers. 90% of those surveyed said they got increased exposure, while 77% cited increased traffic as a plus.
The advantage of FB Messenger’s capability to drive demand for your B2B can be achieved by getting familiar with FB Messenger automation workflows. The next thing you need to do is create a Facebook Messenger bot using a visual bot building tool like ManyChat in order to nurture your leads. Here is what you need to do now:
- Start with Auto-Response: FB Messenger helps in adding bots to your business page, effectively allowing you to start conversation to your page visitors. After connecting your Facebook business page to your ManyChat account, go to the Automation menu to start creating a default reply.
- Set your call-to-action buttons and make sure your welcome message must be in line with your brand.
- Leverage your content to acquire a large audience base. Go to the Broadcasting Menu to start promoting your blog content.
- Get Feedback by adding a “User Input” field through your ManyChat account.
- Drive sales conversation
- Utilize A High-Powered E-Mail Marketing
E-mail marketing has always been a powerful online marketing channel with many marketers agreeing that it is core to their business for the lead generation. However, to tap the potential of B2B e-mail marketing for promoting your products or services, it is very crucial to strike a right cord. It is still the workhorse of B2B marketing, bringing in conversions and adding value across the customer lifecycle. One of the glaring trends in e-mail marketing today is marketing automation, which has successfully generated great results for many B2B businesses. Marketing automation includes optimizing your staff’s time as well as optimizing which B2B clients the sale’s team focuses their efforts on.
Using e-mail marketing tools, therefore, will enable you to automatically send highly targeted emails to leads that are personalized specifically to your B2B clients. According to a report, When Thompson Reuters upgraded to a marketing automation solution, their revenue increased by 172%. Thus, when you learn email marketing and its other aspects, you will be able to capture more data on users. So using these behavioral-triggers has enabled marketers to get a lot smarter with how they target users in the inbox.
- Include Mobile Marketing
Today, mobile has emerged as a key platform for using marketing strategies for B2B marketers. This important shift has taken place because B2B clients use their mobile devices (such as smartphone and tablets) as an extension of desktops/laptops. Since more and more traffic is coming from mobile devices; Google has been discussing the imminent transition to mobile-first index. It is important for B2B marketers that Google will begin to index and rank their sites based on the content of their mobile experience, rather than desktop experience. Hence you need to be sure that your content is mobile optimized, which in turn ensures a smooth process for users on all devices.
For many businesses, even if mobile app won’t be necessary, they should have mobile responsive sites. Failing to provide a seamless mobile experience to their B2B clients, businesses often experience a drop in their organic ranking. According to a Salesforce report, 68 percent companies have already integrated mobile marketing into their marketing strategies.
Final Thoughts
Strong B2B marketing strategies are those to which your audiences respond and start an engagement. In today’s hyper-competitive environment, developing and creating newer methods of B2B engagements is the top-notch priority for almost all businesses. The above-mentioned strategies will, therefore, help you seal the B2B deal.
