Marketing isn’t just fluff.
It’s about getting your brand in front of the right audience, getting them to your B2B website, communicating effectively with them, and getting website visitors to convert.
B2B marketing, when done strategically, can be a significant contributor to driving revenue for your business. In this post, we take a look at 7 B2B marketing strategies you can leverage to grow your business and generate more leads.
1. Create a Consistent, Strong Brand
Your B2B brand is how you represent your products and services and how you deliver value to your target market. Creating a strong, easily recognizable brand is essential to setting the foundation for your overall marketing strategy. Ensuring that brand is consistent across all your marketing, sales, and customer service efforts is absolutely crucial for creating a cohesive customer experience.
Start by taking a close look at your firm’s brand. How does it position your company? Your products or services? Your place in the industry?
How is your brand perceived by your target market? By your existing customers? By your employees and partners?
A consistent, compelling brand shows your target audience that you are organized, cohesive, and diligent in how you service your clients or make your products. A fractured or inconsistent brand tells the world that you don’t know what you are doing and they may not be able to trust your products or services.
2. Craft a Compelling Digital Presence
Regardless of the products or services you sell, potential customers are searching online for your products or services. Even if your company has “always gotten leads from referrals” or “always found customers at events,” you need to have a compelling digital presence. If an existing client refers a prospect to you, do you want them to be able to see what types of products and services you offer? While you may meet a load of prospects at an industry event, how will they be able to share information internally without a B2B website to visit?
A compelling digital presence for B2B companies starts with a professional, polished B2B website. At the minimum, you must have a website to appear credible and trustworthy. Without a website, prospects may assume that your company is brand new (and likely not credible) or that your company isn’t real or is a scam.
3. Engage and Connect on Social Media
Social media isn’t just for tweens, teens, and politicians. Gen X, Millenials, and Gen Z expect brands to not only have a presence on social media but to be engaging on social media. Social media is a great opportunity to lean into your brand and listen to what matters to your target audience.
While there are opportunities to advertise on social media, a strong B2B social strategy is centered on engaging and connecting with existing clients, prospects, employees, partners, industry leaders, creators, and even competitors. While social media is a good one-to-many channel, it’s a great way to hear what prospects are saying, find out what bothers them or challenges they are facing, and find out what is working for them.
Additionally, social media is a way to connect with your target market. If you produce helpful content and build strong connections (not just sales pitches), you can create and nurture relationships with prospects and clients.
4. Build Helpful Content Designed to Educate
Creating helpful content (aka content marketing) is a fantastic way to grow your brand. It enables you to educate your current clients and prospects about the products and services you sell. Notice I didn’t say “your products and services.” This is intentional. Truly educational content is designed to provide value to the end-user, whether that’s a prospect, current client, employee, or partner.
It’s true that content can be leveraged to drive leads, like ebooks and white papers, but the best content gives away information that your target market needs to do their job better. They shouldn’t be thinking, this is a sales piece as they are engaging with your content. They should be thinking, wow, this is helpful information that I can apply to my job/life/management/budgeting/etc.
5. Create and Share Insightful Thought Leadership
Thought leadership content doesn’t always need to be game-changing, but it can be. True thought leadership shares new perspectives, insights, innovative strategies, new approaches, and different ways of thinking. Thought leadership is not just a reiteration of what everyone else is saying.
When you create and share new insights from the leaders and innovators at your company, you are showing your target audience and those in your industry, that you get it. You really understand the challenges or pain points. And not only do you understand, but you have new approaches to these problems or challenges. Thought leadership content not only builds trust and provides insights, it establishes you and your company as a go-to resource in the industry.
6. Nurture Leads/Contacts with an Email Newsletter
Growing your business isn’t only about getting new leads in the door, it’s also about nurturing the existing audience you do have. An excellent B2B marketing strategy for lead nurturing (and client retention) is sending regular email newsletters full of helpful content. The content included in these newsletters should be predominantly educational, although it’s fine to also include a call-to-action (CTA). When it comes to the B2B sales process, it takes more than 6 touch points before a prospect gets in touch with a sales rep and it can take anywhere from 3 months to a year or more to nurture a prospect to the point where they are ready to buy or start the negotiations.
7. Build a PPC Campaign on Top of Your SEO Strategy
For B2B firms, a pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign is a great companion strategy to a cohesive B2B marketing and SEO strategy. For many companies, launching and getting ranked for SEO keywords takes time, about 6 months to a year from launching an SEO campaign. In order to ramp up visibility, brand awareness, and lead generation in the interim, a PPC campaign for search is essential.
The reason we say a PPC campaign, like through Google Ads or Microsoft Ads, is a companion piece is that many online searches are savvy about ads and purposely won’t click on them. Instead, they will see the ad and then scroll down the page to see what is appearing organically. If your brand is focusing on organic marketing strategies and paid search engine marketing strategies, you build a comprehensive presence online to attract the most amount of website visitors.
Lean on B2B Marketing to Grow Your Business
These B2B marketing strategies aren’t theoretical. We’ve seen them in action for our agency, for our clients, their competitors, and our partners – and they work to drive more business, convert more leads, and bring in revenue.
When done strategically and thoughtfully, B2B marketing often becomes a crucial component in lead generation and growing your business.
