If you sell products and services to other businesses, and you’re not doing B2B digital marketing, then you risk falling behind your competitors.

Gone are the days when traditional marketing was effective.

In today’s digital world where customers spend most of their time online, if you don’t have a digital marketing strategy in place then you are missing out on a lot of huge opportunities.

In fact, you’re giving your competitors the edge over you.

According to a Sagefrog Marketing Mix report, 37% of B2B companies say digital marketing is their top area of marketing spend.

Areas B2B companies are spending more budgets on

Image via Sagefrog

To stay ahead of the competition, business-to-business brands like yours should implement powerful marketing tactics and use the right B2B marketing tools.

In this blog post, you will learn what B2B digital marketing is, why you should use it, and the best digital marketing tactics you can leverage to grow your business.

Let’s get started.

You May Also Like:

What is B2B Digital Marketing?

B2B digital marketing encompasses all the marketing efforts and technologies utilized online by B2B companies to sell their products and services to other businesses.

Why Should You Use B2B Digital Marketing?

When done right, digital marketing can help B2B companies improve their digital presence, raise brand awareness and web traffic, generate and convert more leads, and ultimately grow sales.

Here are the top benefits of online marketing for B2B companies:

Digital Marketing is More Cost-Effective Than Traditional Marketing

If you plan to launch PPC campaigns, prescheduled emails, or retargeting ads you’re likely going to spend much less than when you use traditional advertising.  That’s because your campaigns would be more targeted.

More Business Opportunities

By exposing your business across various marketing channels, you can help potential customers find you and learn more about your products and services.

Besides, even if you are looking to gather potential leads using B2B digital marketing, you can nurture those leads down the funnel and convert them into customers.

Gain Insightful Data

Through digital marketing campaigns, you get to interact with B2B buyers.

In the process, you gain valuable insights that show you what influences your prospective customers when making purchases. You can use these insights to improve your campaign’s effectiveness.

B2B Digital Marketing Helps You Focus on Your Ideal Customers

The first step of any digital marketing strategy is to identify the target market.

This means having to identify exactly who’s going to buy your products or services. Additionally, you’d have to identify the people responsible for each of those companies who’d be making the purchase decisions. From your campaigns, you can refine the ideal customer persona further.

You Can Measure the Success of Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Unlike traditional marketing, there are many metrics you can use to measure the success of your B2B digital marketing campaigns and strategies.

The metrics include:

  • Marketing qualified leads
  • Sales qualified leads
  • Web traffic
  • Cost per acquisition
  • Monthly recurring revenue
  • Cost per lead
  • ROI

B2B Digital Marketing Can Help Generate High ROI

This is probably one of the greatest benefits of using B2B digital marketing.

As mentioned above, digital marketing is less costly than traditional marketing.
Besides, by using various marketing channels, you get to understand who your target audience is.

This helps you avoid wasting time, money, and resources targeting the wrong audience, thus leading to a better ROI.

You May Also Like:

7 B2B Digital Marketing Strategies for Maximum Revenue and Growth

Let’s now take a look at the best digital marketing strategies that you can use to drive your revenue growth.

1. Invest in a Good Website

Investing in a beautiful website should be the number one priority for your B2B digital marketing strategy.

But why?

Your website is your B2B company’s digital storefront. In other words, your website is the first point of interaction and engagement between your business and other companies.

According to a 2021 Demand Gen B2B Buyers survey report, 36% of respondents say a vendor’s website is the first resource that informs them about a solution they are looking for.

Resources that inform buyers about the products and services they are looking

Image via Demand Gen

Typically, a website is the easiest and most effective strategy for presenting your business’s products and services to prospective customers.

A good example of a B2B website is Shepper:

Still not convinced?

Here are several reasons why you should create a website for your B2B company:

  • It improves the visibility of your company
  • Enables you to share valuable content
  • It’s a low-cost advertising medium

Here are tips to design a good website for your B2B company:

  • Know your target audience and make your website relevant to them.
  • Make your website mobile responsive.
  • Make it easy for visitors to navigate around your website.
  • Improve your page load speeds.
  • Include a clear call to action.
  • Make your website visually appealing.
  • Add the latest testimonials and a company logo.
  • Keep your website updated with fresh and engaging content regularly.
  • Add links to your social media profiles.

2. Use SEO

Search engine optimization is fundamental for your B2B digital marketing success.

As Google is currently the top search engine, getting your website to the top of search rankings for keywords used by your target businesses is a great idea for your B2B business growth.

Figure this:

Google accounts for 91.97% of all global traffic:

Image via StatCounter

A survey report by Databox shows that SEO generates more sales than PPC for 70% of B2B brands:

databox

Image via Databox

What do these statistics mean?

B2B SEO can be a powerful customer acquisition tool for your B2B company.

Canva is one of the real life examples of a B2B brand that uses SEO to its advantage.

Currently, the online graphic design platform ranks in the #1 position on Google for search times like “brochure”, “YouTube banner”, and “template”:

Image via Canva

Once you determine your individual consumers and create content that ranks higher in search engines, you will see great success with B2B SEO.

Here are useful tips to launch a winning SEO strategy for your B2B business:

  • Research keywords relevant to your individual consumers. We recommend focusing on long-tail keywords as they can help you rank with ease and bring you targeted traffic
  • Create buyer personas
  • Create SEO-optimized landing pages
  • Create definitive guides
  • Optimize for mobile
  • Have a FAQ page on your website
  • Create high-quality and relevant content about B2B-related topics
  • Get your website’s on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO right
  • Promote your content

You May Also Like:

3. Use Social Media Marketing

Social media might not be the first or second in your list of B2B digital marketing tactics.

But here’s the thing—even though you are marketing to companies, those companies have individuals who are social media users and they are decision makers too.

So, B2B social media marketing can be one of the effective digital marketing channels for building your brand connections and finding your audience. Social media is also a great place for doing influencer marketing.

Figure this:

Social media is the preferred channel for 33% of customers to learn about products or companies.

Image via Sprout Social

The idea behind social media marketing for your B2B business is to attract an audience to your posts, get them interested in finding out more about your business, and then driving them to your website.

But which platform should you use?

96% of B2B marketers who use LinkedIn to distribute content say it’s one of their top-performing social media platforms:

Image via Content Marketing Institute

You can also use other social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, depending on where your target market is.

Here are practical tips to guide your B2B digital marketing strategy:

  • Set social media marketing goals for your business
  • Keep tabs on your competition
  • Pay attention to your target businesses
  • Research content your audience wants to see
  • Pick the right social media platforms
  • Try influencer marketing using social media
  • Stay active by posting informative content regularly and interacting with your audience
  • Use LinkedIn paid ads
  • Use social media analytics to measure your B2B digital marketing efforts

4. Use B2B Content Marketing

Once you’ve created your company website, the next thing is to create a blog on it and start doing content marketing. This can play a major role in boosting your SEO and also establishing you as an authority figure in your industry.

Essentially, B2B content marketing entails using a set of strategies aimed at creating and distributing content to:

  • Raise brand awareness
  • Engage other businesses
  • Lead generation
  • Boost sales

We must mention that B2B content marketing differs from B2C because of the difference in the buyer’s journey and decision-making process.

The B2C sales cycle is informed by customers’ pain points and benefits relevant to more generic customer needs across various demographics.

On the other hand, B2B buying decisions are based on pain points and considerations relevant to each specific prospect and their related decision-makers as a group.

So, typically, B2B sales cycles are longer and more complex because their buyers don’t make quick or impulsive purchase decisions.

Here is a typical B2B buyer’s journey as depicted by Gartner:

Image via Gartner

Thus, to target B2B buyers with content, you need to utilize a wide range of content formats.

This is so that you can demonstrate your expertise in your industry to inform, inspire, and engage your prospective buyers while helping them solve their pain points.

HubSpot is a good example of a B2B brand that uses this strategy effectively. The HubSpot blog is updated with different content assets ranging from blogs, newsletters, videos, podcasts, etc.

Image via HubSpot

The top five preferred content assets by B2B marketers are:

  • Blog posts
  • Infographics
  • Gated content
  • Videos
  • Podcasts

Here are practical B2B content marketing practices that work:

  • Create content targeted for all stages of the funnel
  • Produce multi-layered content
  • Personalize your strategy
  • Repurpose your content
  • Employ marketing storytelling
  • Optimize your content for SEO
  • Fix thin content
  • Pick the right distribution channel

5. Launch Retargeting Campaigns to Generate Leads

As mentioned earlier, a typical B2B sales cycle is longer than that of B2C businesses. Thus, you will have to engage and re-engage a prospect before they become a lead.

This is especially true given that B2B decision-makers are always conscious about every decision they make and will not immediately make a decision for a solution they just heard about. It’s also because B2B purchases are usually costly.

B2B sales to new customers can take months to close and it may take anywhere between 6 and 8 interactions to convert them.

What does this mean?

As a B2B marketer, you need to be proactive with your marketing efforts to ensure that your brand always remains at the top of your audience’s mind.

This is where retargeting ads can become useful. Also known as remarketing, B2B retargeting helps you run a specific ad campaign that targets the people who have visited your website.

These types of campaigns can help you move prospects down the sales funnel towards conversion.

Here are useful B2B retargeting strategies to help you get those leads:

  • Create funnel stages to segment your website visitors.
  • Develop unique and targeted landing pages specific to user experience.
  • Customize and test different ads.
  • Create supporting B2B sales content.
  • Create specific ads for retargeting.
  • Use cross-channel and email-based retargeting.
  • Extend a valuable offer.
  • Measure the performance of your retargeting campaigns continuously.
  • Examine the results using Google Analytics and adapt.

You May Also Like:

6. Use B2B Partnerships/Co-Marketing

You can also use B2B business partnerships to build a network to reach new prospective buyers and boost brand awareness.

Of course, partnerships with businesses with similar interests take time to form, but they can yield great results for both partners.

As a rule, before getting into partnerships with other businesses, you must determine what you want to get out of the partnership and how to form the collaboration. It’s also necessary to check if the other partner is relevant to your business or not.

Here are ways to partner with other B2B brands:

  • Run partnership sales and marketing events.
  • Collaborate to create webinars and lead-generation content.
  • Start a referral program.

7. Leverage B2B Email Marketing

Last but not least, you can use email marketing for your B2B digital marketing strategy.

Email is a great tool for driving interest in your products and services, generating leads, and boosting conversions.

Consider this—email is listed among the top ten channels B2B decision makers use during their decision journeys.

Image via McKinsey & Company

What does this imply?

Email is the ideal channel to start building and nurturing relationships with prospects.

Besides B2B email marketing can stir engagement, thus driving more leads and conversions which could ultimately lead to greater revenue for your business.

Here are useful B2B email marketing strategies to use:

  • Use a comprehensive email marketing tool.
  • Build an email list and trim it regularly to reduce email bounce.
  • Segment your email lists for better targeting.
  • Send drip emails.
  • Nurture your leads with autoresponders.
  • Track results and re-engage prospects.

You May Also Like:

FAQs

Q1. What is B2B digital marketing?

A. Simply put, B2B digital marketing is a form of marketing where a business sells its products and services to other businesses.

Q2. Which platform is best for B2B marketing?

A. LinkedIn is by far the top-performing B2B digital marketing platform trusted by brands of all kinds.

Q3. How do I start B2B digital marketing?

A. To launch a winning B2B digital marketing strategy, follow these simple strategies:

  • Invest in a good website
  • Use SEO
  • Leverage social media marketing
  • Use B2B content marketing
  • Launch retargeting campaigns to generate leads
  • Use B2B partnerships/co-marketing
  • Leverage email marketing

Q4. Why is B2B digital marketing important?

A. Using B2B digital marketing, you can build brand awareness, generate and nurture leads, optimize your marketing spending, and grow your sales and ultimately, your business.

Q5. What do B2B digital marketing agencies do?

A. Digital marketing agencies work with a savvy marketing team providing a wide range of digital marketing services to help businesses attract customers, generate more sales, and grow their businesses.

Conclusion

By 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between businesses and buyers will happen in digital channels.

What does this mean?

If you’re not doing B2B digital marketing, then you need to start now to avoid missing out on a lot of business opportunities in the future.

Follow the strategies outlined in this in-depth guide to stay ahead of the competition, and win huge business opportunities.

And if you’re still not sure where to begin, use our professional digital marketing services.