10 Digital Marketing Strategies for B2B Companies Ep. 598

Howdy, welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Matt Bertram. I'm going to be your SEO for today. The topic today, we're going to be talking about the 10 digital marketing strategies for B2B companies. We talk a lot about B2C, SEO can be used at every step of the funnel. Today we're going to go into the 10 digital marketing strategies for B2B companies. This is by Sell2Win team on Nutshell.com, which is a CRM. It actually was one of the top ranked blogs that was out there and that's why it's picked. They're not sponsoring this podcast in any way. I haven't checked out their software, but it looks interesting. Anyways, before we jump into it, I'm going to go into a quick review we got about six days ago. This is from Unique Signs. This is a guy by the name of Moses that I helped rebrand their actual brand, their company, and then we helped launch their website. Matt and his team at EWR were selected among several other companies to do digital rebranding of our sign shop. Our main focus was the new design for our website. Since day one, the experience has been incredible. They were very responsible. We have a deadline and we were able to deliver before the deadline. We are extremely happy with the results and I strongly recommend EWR. Thank you so much, Unique Signs, or it's going to be uni-signs.com, Moses over there. Really appreciate it. I think it's a great website. We should submit it for some awards. If any of you out there are looking to rebrand or know anybody that needs to rebuild their website or is looking to update their website or do some kind of SEO, please keep us in mind. Then a little bit of housekeeping. If you look behind me, if you're watching on YouTube, which we're going to start doing a little bit more of that, I have a bunch of books and I'm holding them up. One's called Search, Do You

Really Need SEO? The Enterprise Level Playbook to Grow Your Business with Search Engine Optimization. I just really lay out what is search optimization and kind of at a high level how to do it. There are so many different components. It a lot of times takes a village to accomplish it. Not everybody knows exactly what it is. Once you understand it, you kind of know, but it's just such a lot to process. It definitely took me a while as I moved from paid to SEO and then I fell in love with it. I have another book out there that just came out called No Like and Trust, a Podcast Marketing Guide for Small Business Owners. We are going to be talking about B2B and we do work with a lot of B2B companies, but also small business owners come to me a lot. A lot of books that I started with about five, six, seven years ago were about helping small business owners. How about personal branding? A lot of that's come to a head. I really believe that podcasting is one of the greatest ways to create premium content as well as syndicate and distribute it and come up with a strategy and a plan to do higher level PR and social media marketing. I would encourage you to check this book out. I actually, funny story, I wrote this book as part of writing a proposal to land a nonprofit. I just want to continue to share the knowledge that I learned. I think it's too valuable to not share it. This podcast in itself, for those of you long time listeners know, this podcast was really meant to be a distribution channel to our team members and our consultants way before podcasting was in vogue. It's a one to many broadcasting technology. I think it's fantastic. I love it. I've done probably three podcasts this week. If you have interest in being on this podcast, we are going to be starting a new community. Let's get on a call. I do have office

hours. Want to share something that's not common knowledge, that's something that I think would be valuable to the community. That's kind of the one caveat. If you have anything like that, you can teach me something new, happy to share that with everyone else. If it's kind of more of the same, just understand we're trying to bring new and different things to the marketplace. I'm going to somewhat like a speed read or cliff note this as best I can, but going back to the old format, hopefully you've been liking also a lot of the different interviews we've been doing. I have a lot more of them lined up, but I know a lot of people for a lot of years really liked the format of going through some high value articles. I want to do that for you. Hopefully people are getting some windshield time again after the COVID as well as I listen to a lot of podcasts at the gym and that sort of thing. So all right, let's just jump into it. Did you know that 56% of business to business organizations invest in digital marketing? Another way to say that is 43% of B2B businesses still operate on the old traditional models. Kind of interesting. I think there's a lot of opportunity. To stay out of the competition, B2B businesses, marketers like you should have some digital marketing tips and tricks up their sleeve. Before diving into the B2B digital marketing strategies you can use, however, it's important to understand that online marketing for B2B is, in addition to know the benefits of digital marketing strategies for B2B companies, you can get a green light from management and better execute your plans for the organization. I probably read something in there wrong, but you get the gist. All right, so the table of contents of what we're going to be talking about today is what is B2B digital marketing, what are the benefits of B2B digital marketing, eight digital marketing strategies for B2B companies, especially your business positioning, understand target audience, have

a user-friendly B2B site, help customers find you with search engine optimization, offer valuable information, insights, and content marketing, nurture your leads, strengthen your customer relationships with email marketing, connect with your customers through social media marketing, run PPC ads. If your budget allows, leverage the power of influencer marketing, use automation to enhance efficiency, let's team up to create B2B digital marketing strategies that drive growth. Okay, so this is a really good article. I'm going to try to go through it quickly. If it gets too long, we'll just break it into two parts. But as you can see, I really like the content and value that is going to be provided in the layout. All right, let's jump into it. What is B2B digital marketing? B2B digital marketing refers to online marketing strategies or taxes intended to promote a business to another organization. So B2B, business to business. If you're promoting products or services to another business instead of an individual customer online, you're most likely employing B2B digital marketing. Some channels for B2B digital marketing are, well, your company website, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, and PPC. All right, next section. How to differ? B2B digital marketing differs from B2C marketing. This is a big point. It is somewhat different. We have done some podcasts and on my other marketing and sales podcast, we talked a lot about B2B or creative, or sorry, account-based selling or creative account-based marketing. Okay, in the B2B space, your customers are other businesses. In the business to consumer sector, B2C, sorry, these individuals are making purchases for themselves rather than for their companies. B2B marketing and B2C marketing intersect in many ways, and many use the same channels, but it's important to know the differences that require a different approach for each. In B2B, there are often multiple stakeholders who you need to convince and convince through the marketing and sales channels. In B2B, there's typically just one decision maker, so multiple target personas. You need to create who are the multiple target personas that are helping

make the decision. Potentially it's a committee and you want to have a different strategy or campaign for each. B2B tends to involve longer sales cycles due to factors such as having multiple stakeholders and larger, more complex purchases. Also I believe that it takes longer to get to the buying decision and digital, because everybody's kind of figuring this stuff out and figuring vendors out online, the more you can put online, the faster you can expedite this and make those sales cycles so much shorter. So it's really, really important from a content marketing standpoint. All right. B2B sales process often involves salespeople's account managers, while B2B customers often just make the purchases directly themselves. B2B decision makers are more heavily influenced by motivators such as logic, financial incentives, as well as metrics like return on investment or ROI. I would tell you that logic and statistics and data are certainly talked about a lot from a B2B standpoint, but I believe that people are still people. They make emotional decisions and they remember stories. And as I was a direct salesperson and a phone salesperson, a cold calling, it was always about connecting with the individual and telling stories and they typically make the emotional decision. And I was doing all B2B sales. Okay. What is the benefits of B2B digital marketing? B2B digital marketing enables you to increase brand awareness, communicate your value or your product or service, and ultimately convert more of your audience into customers. Some of the more specific benefits of B2B include precision targeting or precise targeting. You can precisely target individuals who are likely to convert based on their demographics, firmographics, interesting, and online activity. You can even identify and target individuals who visit your website. This contrast with traditional digital marketing, which often targets a broad audience leading to less precision and higher costs. I would also say even traditional marketing, okay, and a lot of B2B marketing is done this way, does not have that data component where you can get really, really specific and you can geo target

and you can target the demographics and you can see and read the data. I believe there's a digital transformation going on in a lot of industries as it relates to marketing, especially I work heavily in the oil and gas space as well as others. But man, there are industries that are still operating heavily on traditional marketing and we're seeing that budget be digitized. And I have some graphs that I can share, but it just shows the spend rate on certain traditional platforms such as print, billboards, radio, that sort of thing are heavily declining, whereas there's the increase in digital spend. Okay. You can reach customer stakeholders through the buyer customer's journey or buyer's journey. So we talked about target persona. Now we're talking about buyer's journey. What are the steps? What are the decisions? What are the obstacles? What are the objections that someone's happening to buy? Trying to figure that out and mapping that out online is really important. B2B marketing involves a longer buyer's journey and it's important to engage with potential customers throughout the buying process. With digital marketing, you can reach buyers at the very start of their journey and when they're typically searching for information online. You can use other digital marketing channels such as online advertising and email marketing to move them through the funnel and keep them engaged. You can measure your results and adjust as you go. With digital marketing tactics, measuring campaign success and results is easy. There are many digital marketing tools available to help you or enable you to identify the strategies that are driving the best results for your B2B business. As you measure your success for your campaigns, you can use the information to gather and adjust your strategies, improve your marketing and performance in ROI. I would tell you that is the absolute power. Typically when you're running some print ads or billboard ads or something like that, unless it's like a digital billboard, you can't change once you decide on the messaging and you can't pivot as you go. You

can't redistribute where your spending is going. I think the agility that digital marketing gives you is just absolutely so powerful. Ten digital marketing strategies for B2B companies. Now that you know what B2B digital marketing is and why it's important, let's go through ten digital marketing strategies that you can use to acquire new customers and help grow revenue. Specify your business position. A critical first step in executing other B2B strategies is understanding your brand positioning. Positioning is a strategy of finding a unique spot in your B2B brand in the mind of your customers. Simply put, it's setting your business apart from anyone else so that people can easily remember your unique identity because there's so much noise in the marketplace. As a result, your business will have to have an improved image and enjoy increased loyalty among customers. We all know the position of branding and positioning, something that costs, I don't know, a couple dollars to make a widget. If you put a brand around it, you can increase the value of that by a hundred X if you sell it. So we know this is important. Understanding positioning helps you market your business or products more effectively. You can also help craft marketing messages that resonate with your target audience. Understand your target audience. Identify your target customers, your businesses that are looking for your product or services. If you have a customer relationship management tool or software like a CRM, like Nutshell, who's putting this blog together, that houses your client database, use this information to create and segment buyer personas. This is super important. You want to segment it out because then you can do really cool things in your CRM with tags and whatnot. You can do lead scoring, you can do targeted campaigns. It's just really cleaning and sorting your data in a way that's useful, that your marketing team, as well as maybe some account-based selling strategies, you can leverage. Again, if you don't have good data in your CRM, it's really hard to execute some of these things.

Your buyer's persona will guide your B2B sales marketing strategies and campaigns. These personas inform you of the pain points that your customer has and how they result from the solutions that you're offering. Have a user-friendly B2B site. This is absolutely critical. I think a lot of people are seeing that they need to be updating their website. If you have a B2B website that's a couple of years old, it doesn't represent your current brand, it's time to update it. Think of EWR. Think of me. Please reach out. All right. Leave a good impression to your customers by having a well-designed, informative website. Plan your site content, taking into consideration your buyer's journeys, need, and pain points. We do also, again, I'm plugging here, I don't mean to be, but we offer a workshop to help you figure this out. A lot of businesses don't have this, or they're flying by the seat of their pants, or they're actually without market reach search, think their customers are somebody who's actually not their customers, or maybe their business has changed over time. So it's really, really important to reestablish that. To earn the trust of prospects, make sure your B2B site is easy to navigate, responsive, and mobile-friendly. Make it easy for site customers to take important actions on your website, like downloading your case files, or your, sorry, case studies. Case studies are super important, portfolio is super important, signing up for your newsletter or filling out a form. You want to get people to raise their hand that are fully committed or ready to talk to somebody yet, but you want to know that their potential buyers are in the market, and then you can help maybe get them over the line through other marketing channels. Are your calls to actions visible and clickable on a mobile site? Mind your site loads speed to your customers so they don't bounce. So having a fast site, super important, core web vitals, super important. Also bigger buttons, maybe if you're building a website and you're a web developer,

think about buttons about 25% bigger. That's kind of my rule of thumb. Easily clickable on mobile, almost all the traffic's on mobile. That's what Google looks at. So design mobile first. Help your customers find you with search engine optimization. Oh my gosh, search engine optimization. Do you know that 33% of B2B businesses say that SEO is their top lead generator? Let me read that again. Did you know that 33% of companies say that SEO is their top lead generator? Use this effective online marketing tactic for B2B businesses so you don't get left behind by your competition. Most B2B companies conduct online searches before making a purchase offline. So it makes sense for you to invest in SEO. With a good SEO strategy, your website pages rank in highly relevant search results. The impact, more prospects can find your website, learn about your products and services, and turn into business customers. I can tell you multiple, multiple, multiple B2B businesses tell me when their SEO is working properly that the quality of the leads far exceed what you get in pay-per-click. I think pay-per-click does have its place, but typically it's for people that are in a hurry or are looking for emergency services typically. Also the percentage of overlap of people that click on ads versus click on SEO are very different. I think the number that I last looked at, so it's a couple of years old, was about 80 something percent of people want to skip ads and that's why Google makes the ads look like organic results. They kind of try to blend them together. People want legit organic search results and that is typically where the good leads come from through SEO. Offer valuable information and insights with content marketing and other B2B marketing strategies that you can employ as content marketing. I think content marketing and SEO go hand in hand. Useful content like blogs, white papers, case studies, and informative videos improve your credibility among B2B customers, increasing their chances of shortlisting your business. That's the goal. You want

to be on the list. You want to be one of the choices whenever they're looking at making a selection. And that's what digital marketing does for you, whereas otherwise they might not even know of your business. Content marketing also complements SEO efforts. Create the content for your buyer's journey. Make personas maybe looking for as they land on your website, give you a chance to eventually convert them into customers. Do you want to make sure your brand is visible among B2B shoppers throughout the customer journey? Create content at every step or every stage of the customer journey so that they can discover your business for when their initial research stage up to when they're ready to purchase product or service. Sorry. All right. Nurture your leads and strengthen customer relationships with email marketing. An excellent way to reach B2B customers, email marketing touts a return on investment of $44 for every dollar spent. Wow. That blows my mind. $44 for every dollar spent. Use email marketing to nurture your leads who signed up for a newsletter, download a white paper, put to good use the contacts in your CRM by sending personalized emails to your customers to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty segments. Whoa, sorry. Customer satisfaction and loyalty. Segment your customers and share useful content to each persona segment is what I meant to say. All right. Social media marketing, SMM. Did you know that 75% of B2B buyers use social media before making a purchase? Create a social media page for your business on your platform and use B2B that B2B customers use. Typically it would be, let's say LinkedIn. I can tell you, I know businesses in almost every industry that have a dedicated social media strategy and generate incredible business by building that community. It is a lot more engagement, a lot more work, but it absolutely is powerful. You can use your social media pages to promote your website and repurpose content as short videos and shareable infographics. Another B2B marketing strategy you can employ on social media is paid ads.

You can target your existing customer segments and lookalikes of existing customers, like lookalike audiences is what they're talking about, to expand customers and expand your reach. I can tell you, don't think social media marketing is all organic. You can make some organic stuff, but it's only going to show to, if people are following your page, less than 10%. Think about it. All the algorithms are meant to design to sell ads, and so you have all the machine learning that's working for you. If you're spending money on ads, if you're operating free on the platform, you're not benefiting the platform in any way, so they're going to downgrade the visibility of your content. So if you do want to be spending some money on these platforms and putting money behind some of these posts on social media, can absolutely do that. Also, even on some of the video first platforms, you can run static ads too, so you don't have to dance. So just know that you can get your ad shown in the middle of videos that people are watching that have an interest in what you're doing, and it can be a static ad. You just need to design what messaging you want to say. You want to design that targeting, and then you run the ad. And that leads into run, pay-per-click PPC ads if your budget allows. Investing in PPC also allows you to promote your content and brand on your target audience and search social media and other advertising channels. In addition to gathering first party data through PPC lead generation, because Google or analytics doesn't really show you that, you've got to get that on the paid side. When running PPC campaigns, make sure you're showing relevant ads to the right target personas. I would also say SEO and PPC go hand in hand. PPC helps inform the algorithm of your content if you're not ranked high in SEO, so it helps benefit your SEO campaigns. I really think PPC is a great tool to use, but you shouldn't have

one arm over here or one team over here doing PPC and one team over here doing SEO, just like I believe that sales and marketing should work together. And I like the development of CROs and organizations. I think the same way within your marketing structure, your marketing silos, or even using the same agency for both is really, really helpful. Sometimes you have kind of, quote unquote, too many cooks in the kitchen or too many people doing too many different teams, and it makes your marketing less effective unless there's constant communication. But if you have multiple teams and you're having multiple interagency meetings, that gets expensive too. I've done both. I just believe that having one person or one team that might have multiple skill sets or verticals that they operate in, or they can all cohesively communicate and they don't have a lot of silos even internally, that's really helpful. If you do have multiple campaigns going on, you really need to make sure that there's a way for them to communicate. That's what I see in most businesses or enterprises. A lot of people just aren't talking together and they're all operating independently. All right. Leverage the power of influencer marketing. Again, you're layering these things, I think, right? So as you move forward or develop your marketing, you're starting to layer these things. I think having a high-performing website and then adding SEO, adding organic social, adding paid social, adding PPC, and the order of PPC and maybe paid social, or when you want to use a paid budget might vary. There is a progression, in my opinion, and I do believe that a high-converting website and SEO should be really the foundation, and then email automation, email marketing is just so, so powerful. Those are the things I would focus on. You don't have to do everything out of the gate first. Just get focused on making incremental improvements and add another block or another tactic to what you're doing. Build on it one step at a time. Too many times you

try to do too many things all at once and you don't do anything effectively, and also when you have so many different variables, it's sometimes hard to measure what's producing what. It's better to start to layer these strategies and get that incremental improvement. All right. Leverage influencer marketing. So influencer marketing is PR. It starts to get really fun when you start to be able to run some of these campaigns or multifaceted campaigns. Involve leading content creators to promote your brand, product or service on social media and other online channels. For example, if your business sells automation software for accounting, you might work with influencers who might make content about tech or accounting. These influencers might create or review or how-to videos of using your software or mention it in an Instagram post or LinkedIn post about their favorite tools. Influencer audiences can range from millions of followers to less than 10,000. So typically like 10,000 is that limit. So there's telltale signs of people that have just, sorry, I'm kind of starting to lose my voice. I don't know. You want to find 10,000 followers that are just used to do influencer marketing. You want to find a true influencer and you want to really look at the amount of engagement of their followers, not the number of their followers. What's more important than audience side is finding an influencer for a fit your brand that has an engaged audience that likely to include to potential customers, right? So it's kind of like product placement is where things are going. And I know even with, for example, my kids, they hate interruption marketing. They hate ads. They don't understand it. They want everything on demand, but I can tell you product placement where in the shows that they're watching on say YouTube, they want to buy all that stuff. So it's just a different kind of approach of even how a younger generation is developing, but also a lot of the people that are searching for B2B or that are on these committees or are

stakeholders are kind of coming up in a digital world and they don't like that interruption marketing as much. I think that that pendulum is starting to swing the other way as well. Use automation to enhance efficiency. So this goes back to email automation, other emerging B2B strategies, using automation to improve efficiency, enable personalization and analyze campaigns. There are many tools available that help you integrate automation into your marketing strategy. I would say this is kind of like email marketing 2.0. It's like setting triggers. When a lead scoring hits a certain thing or you categorize a certain thing, it starts to put them on a drip where they start to see different things. Whether it be ads, whether it be drip emails, there's a lot of really, really cool stuff you can do. For example, going back to the article, for example, a CRM can help you streamline your marketing process by automatically pulling customer data, sending emails and more. All right. So it says, let's team up. So this is actually an influencer article that was branded, right? But I think that this is a great article that outlines kind of some of the use cases for it. Hopefully you felt the same way. If this was valuable to you, if you like this format, please let me know. If you don't like the interviews that I'm doing or even the topics, let me know what you would like to see. Happy to do that. I would ask everybody to, if you like this, please just leave me a review or share this on the platform or like it that you're on. All that engagement sends some positive signals to the algorithm and helps me. If you want to go that extra step, I'm really trying to do some reputation management and get some more reviews on Trustpilot. So trustpilot.com forward slash review forward slash our old brand name, they won't let me change it. Ewebresults.com. So EWR is short for Ewebresults. We've been around 23 years. We're a full service integrated digital marketing agency.

If you need any help with website design, paid media, SEO, etc, content marketing, we're great at all that. We're doing a lot more PR, crisis management, all that sort of stuff. If you have a message or a story that you want to get out there, we have podcasting services. We have storytelling services. I think it's somewhat of a unique offering. Please come check us out at EWRdigital.com. Thank you so much for listening. If you want to grow your B2B business with the largest, most powerful marketing tool on the internet, Google or the internet, I guess, please check out our website, set up a free consultation. There's a big green button in the upper right-hand corner and until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now.