KOCHI: In the B2B world, digital marketing is a whole different ball game. The tried and trusted methods used for consumer marketing usually don’t work in B2B marketing.
There’s notoriously less traffic volume, downloads and inbound leads - well, that is, for most B2B companies.Here is a break-down of digital tactics, tips, learning and best practices.
Addressable Market
The success of digital marketing strategy relies heavily on your ability to identify the right buyer profiles, their needs, and how to ‘speak’ to them.
The how, when and why are important. You’ve got to connect with your prospects on the platforms they read, at the right time, and add value through educational content.
Multi-point campaign
Digital marketing is a combination of art and science implemented through multi channel efforts. Successful campaigns can’t happen without the other. Embrace social media, data science and content marketing.
Get website right
Creating an SEO powered website is a good start. Optimize your website to match what your prospect (and Google) is searching for.
Adopt a simplified and minimal website, cleverly keep a clean look while still providing ample information. This can be achieved through less text and more infographics and videos. To promote the website, publish weekly thought-leadership blogs.
Email campaigns
Ask anyone the secret to an effective B2B digital strategy. 80% of them will tell you the golden nugget is email campaigns. Identify buyer profiles with purchase probability by applying AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Machine Learning.
Implement accounts-based email campaigns with contextual messaging. Combine email-marketing strategy with persona and intent driven campaigns.
Apply social data
There’s a wealth of behavioural data that exists within social media platforms. To leverage behaviour and intent data, create a program that listens for keywords or hash-tags from your prospect’s social media activity and monitors real-time social media activities on any lead in your target prospects database.
On Twitter, you can identify potential buyers based on your tweets and following relations. On LinkedIn, you may find best-fit buyers by looking at their job titles, companies, group affiliations, the influencers they follow, and the articles they share and comment on.
On Quora and several relevant user group sites, you may look at which users are asking questions related to a relevant topic category. Invest in videos
To colour your campaigns, invest in informational and short videos. The content themes include product demos, use-cases, and social impact. Promote organically via LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
Release a new explanatory video every quarter.Each video should be less than 90 seconds duration, can be created with an average of $500 investment.To get more traction to the website, blogs and social channels, paid exposure is also required.
This include:
LinkedIn Campaigns - Promote content through targeted ad campaigns to ideal buyer profiles. Allocate smaller budget to start with - $100+ / day and track results. Google Ads - Identify popular search keywords using Google Trends and design campaigns. Allocate smaller budget to start with - $100+ / day and track results.
Key tips
B2B start-ups can be global from day-1 through digital marketing
Embrace educational content & leverage social platforms/data
Avoid push broadcasting campaigns, instead engage in contextual messaging
High traffic of likes, shares, downloads, views are feel good factors - measurable results in sales leads, pipeline creation, customer wins, revenue, profitability and repeated business is your success card for digital marketing
(The author is Varun Chandran CEO, Corporate360)