A survey by McKinsey & Company showed that buyers didn’t stop to consider the industry sector when researching digital purchases. They just did.
The digital marketing space presents plenty of opportunities for businesses irrespective of their industry to boost sales margins.
With more income coming in, the business thrives and everyone goes home happy (hopefully ha!)
If you have sales and marketing KPIs staring you down, here are some B2B digital marketing strategies to help you hit your goals.
1. Digital Advertising
Yup! We can run, but we can never get away from advertising—in this case, digital advertising.
But here's why digital advertising works.
B2B audiences are active online with 89 percent of them researching the net for solutions. Out of this number, around 71 percent start with a generic search. They are not looking for brands, just a solution for their problems.
This means they are open solutions, and you can target them with ads that showcase your awesome solutions.
With paid advertising working differently for different target audiences, we'll highlight four options that are worth considering.
You can choose one or several depending on your marketing budget:
-
Pay Per Click Ads. Here, you write an ad and bid on search terms your target audience uses. Any time a person enters the keyword on a search, your ad shows up in the results.
-
Display Ads. Advertisers create images, texts, and video ads that are displayed on a variety of websites including blogs, news sites, YouTube, and even Gmail.
-
LinkedIn Marketing. LinkedIn is a hub for business professionals and decision-makers, making it a worthwhile platform to advertise in. The platform offers several ad formats, including Sponsored Content, Sponsored Messaging, and Text ads. These formats allow you to zero in on specific audiences and showcase your stuff.
-
Facebook Marketing. LinkedIn may have professionals, but Facebook has the numbers. With 2.89 million users, you have access to a massive user base that includes professionals. Facebook offers the Audience Network feature to ensure your ad campaigns reach target audiences more effectively.
2. Cold Calling
Through cold calling, you have the opportunities to introduce your brands and solutions to prospects that may benefit from them.
The best part about this strategy is that feedback is instantaneous. The prospect is either interested in going to the next stage, needs more time to think, or flat out doesn't want to engage.
Even though all the calls won't yield positive results, those who aren't ready to buy now will have you in mind when the right time comes.
Here are ways to maximize this tactic:
Know what you're selling. You can only be a good advocate if you know your stuff inside out. Understand different use cases to help you pick out opportunities faster and respond to questions confidently.
Identify your ideal customer and zero in on businesses that experience challenges your solutions can fix. By removing bad fits from your list, you're effectively minimizing the "nos" you're likely to hear.
Jot down intelligent questions you can ask your prospect. Actively listen to their responses and seek clarity rather than make assumptions. You may pick up opportunities where your solutions may add value.
Identify the right time to make cold calls. Look at historical data to see the hours that yielded successful calls and work around these times. As a guideline, 9-11 am and 1-3 pm are good hours for cold calling.
Measure success rate by looking at the number of calls you make in a day and the responses they garner.
Do prospects hang up at the beginning or show disinterest midway?
You may need to review your pitch to make things more interesting and relevant to your listeners?
3. CRM & Marketing Automation
Unhappy customers leave in a heartbeat—in search of more positive experiences from your competition.
Chances are, they will tell others about their experience, effectively putting a damper on any referral business you were hoping to get.
Creating an enriching customer experience touches different aspects of your business including the sales process, human interactions, payments, and the actual solutions you offer.
Our focus is on automating systems to increase operational efficiency. CRM and marketing software streamline, automate, and measure workflows.
They effectively handle the mundane but oh-so-important tasks that bog down sales, marketing, and customer care teams or slip through the cracks.
Here are some benefits of automating your processes:
Improving team alignment. With sales and marketing teams butting heads as they work on their goals, marketing automation can streamline processes, improve the quality of leads, and point out inefficiencies in marketing campaigns.
Enabling you to define your customer's journey and refining your marketing strategy so you can acquire, qualify and work on leads to convert them.
Tracking data that provides a better understanding of prospects’ behavior when they interact with your website. When you know where prospects are in the sales funnel, you can send more personalized messages.
Following up new leads depending on the actions they have taken like, completing a form to order, or downloading content, etc.
4. Email Marketing
With more than 4 billion email users globally, the digital world is awash with email correspondence. Actually, around 306 billion emails were exchanged daily in 2020—you probably received a couple of them.
What does this mean for businesses?
You have the opportunity to reach prospective customers locally and globally with your solutions through email marketing. Well, you and millions of other B2B sellers.
Here are effective ways of ensuring your email marketing campaigns reach your intended audience for action:
- Segment audiences based on interests, actions taken, purchases made, etc, to ensure you speak them relevantly.
- After segmenting comes personalization. Craft personalized emails that make your customer feel as though the message was written specifically for them. It increases receptiveness and engagement.
- Automate emails. From welcome emails to email drip campaigns, and cart abandonment outreaches, automating the communication process improves efficiency.
- Schedule emails. Identify days and hours when your target audiences are more likely to open emails to improve open rates.
- Adapt your email marketing template for mobile device use. People check their email on the go, if your emails are unresponsive on mobile devices, they will probably be deleted.
- Make the copy visually attractive. Break up walls of text with an image or short video and keep paragraphs short.
- Include calls-to-action. Let people know exactly what you want them to do now that they have read your email.
- Remember to make follow-ups. Share tips, cross-sells and upsells, recommendations, and happy customer reviews. It helps strengthen your credibility and foster customer retention.
5. Influencer Marketing
If there's one thing B2B marketers don't want to hear, it's that up to 96 percent of B2B buyers steer clear of sales messages.
How are you supposed to market to buyers if they don't want to hear a sales message?
Well, they might avoid your messages but they are listening to someone. Someone like an influencer.
B2B influencers are people your prospects listen to, follow and trust to provide them with insights and perspectives in the buying cycle. These influencers have built stellar reputations based on their expertise and experience.
They can be industry analysts, industrial body experts, or even customers.
Here are tips to help you identify and work with a B2B influencer:
- Don't go for any influencer, rather one who your audiences are already listening to. Since the audiences already resonate with the influencer, they will be more open to what the influencer says about your solutions.
- Come up with influencer dossiers to check against potential influencers. The dossier should cover the influencer's social channels, topic covered, best-performing relevant content, engagement ratios, and any red flags.
- Make time to educate the influencer about your brand, culture, values, products, and ideal customers. The more the influencer knows about you, the more convincing stories they will craft.
- Focus on co-creation. Tap into your influencer's wisdom and ideas about creating interesting content, customer engagement, and event promotions.