Is your B2B company using the power of digital marketing to its fullest potential? If your digital marketing strategy is half-baked and your efforts to implement are superficial, you may be doing more harm than good. Digital marketing tools help you accomplish your marketing goals, so using them effectively is critical. It’s imperative that you optimize the value of your B2B digital marketing campaign to gain ROI, build your business, and capture your target audience.
In 2022, it’s likely that your company already has a good digital marketing plan in place, but good isn’t good enough. While adjusting your company’s digital marketing campaign objectives can be daunting, we encourage B2B companies to be steadfast in their innovation to accelerate the success of your digital marketing campaigns.
In today’s marketplace, it goes unsaid that everybody wants and needs an unstoppable digital marketing strategy. Here are our easy-to-implement ‘C’s’ for digital marketing campaign success.
Our 8 C’s for B2B Digital Marketing Success
- Content
- Channels
- Change Management
- Communities
- Credentials
- Create Urgency
- Calculate
- Consider Rules
1. 📝 Content
Especially in 2022, content precedes all else. In fact, “78% of those who believe their content marketing was very successful in 2021 had a documented content marketing strategy.”1
Have you ever heard the saying, ‘content is king’? Bill Gates shared this nugget of wisdom in a 1996 essay by that exact title. Despite this essay being nearly three decades old, its overall sentiment has only grown truer. So, what does this mean for you and your company?
If you’re leveraging digital marketing, chances are you’re familiar with search engine marketing, social media marketing, and potentially video marketing. You may also be developing blogs for SEO and creating compelling content assets to promote via SEM, video marketing, and social media.
Digital marketing is a moving target that we’re all chasing in an everlasting, communal, marketplace race. It requires lots of pivoting, research, and flexibility. Content without a clear direction has the potential to become irrelevant, expensive noise. Here are some considerations for creating relevant content for your B2B digital marketing campaigns:
- Who/what are you? Get clear about your company’s position in the marketplace and how you describe and portray yourself to customers. Having a consistent and compelling company overview description can make the difference between a prospective customer clicking on your offer or jumping off the page.
- Who are you talking to? Having defined buyer personas is effectively your compass for creating content that speaks to and resonates with your target audience. When your prospective customers feel like you understand them and can meet their needs, they’ll be that much more likely to gravitate towards your offering.
- What are you saying? The unfortunate truth is that a half-baked CTA will not get the clicks or bring in revenue. CTAs (calls to action) should be worth acting on and make people think.
- What makes your audience care? What about your company or offer is special? What are you doing to appeal to prospective customers in personal ways? Offering personalized digital content is a popular way to grab your audience’s interest and attention.
- Where are you and where are you going? Making sure your content shows up in the right places and doesn’t get lost in the shuffle depends on utilizing the right channels, which we’ll discuss next. Once you’ve established a presence on the appropriate channels, measure how your digital marketing content is performing. Set short-term and long-term goals for outperforming previous campaigns or efforts.
2. 🎯 Channels
Once you have your content vision solidified, you’ll want to figure out where your prospective customers are and how to best reach them. Online marketing is only as effective as the strategies you use. Prior to executing any tactics, hold a comprehensive strategy session.
SEM, which includes pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, might be the right tactic for you if you have a proper budget. If you’re seeking a quick marketing boost, SEO may not be the way to go since it’s a long-term investment. To determine which channels best suit your business, map out yearly, quarterly, and monthly lead-generation goals.
Leveraging your reach means diversifying your approach and establishing your company’s presence on every relevant channel possible for your specific target demographic. Having a strong presence on fewer platforms that make sense for your company is a better strategy than being scattered across the web about with inconsistent efforts. Go where your demographic is and make the content worth their time. Research best social media and email practices for use of captions, hashtags, emojis, and in which timeframe works best for your target audience.
3. ⏰ Change Management
What is your company doing to evolve alongside the constant changes within your industry? Practicing the art of change management is vital to success across all marketing channels, whether online or off. The difference between the changing dynamics of digital and traditional marketing, however, is that online marketing advances at a rapid pace, making the ability to stay on top of trends challenging.
Making time to learn new tactics is not a luxury that most in-house B2B marketing departments have. As a result, companies often choose to engage with a modern marketing agency when it comes to digital. Agencies have digital marketing specialists who are constantly educating themselves on the industry’s most recent and relevant technology. Not only do digital specialists understand the ins and outs, but they also frequently test new tools for validity and ROI to make sure your efforts are going to good use.
4. 💼 Communities
Look to your buyer personas to determine which channels you should target in building online communities that will encourage interaction with your brand. Think about what social platforms are relevant to your industry and then interact with prospective customers in need of your services.
Engage with these audiences on company pages, LinkedIn groups, and through InMail messaging. Consider other marketing efforts such as Twitter chats and podcasts to grow closer with your community and stir discussion about relevant topics that interest them.
Additionally, responding to Google reviews is not only a great customer relationship management technique, but it can also push you upward on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
5. 🥇 Credentials
Credentials are gold when it comes to positioning your company’s expertise and thought leaders. Having a digital CV or curriculum vitae that lists your areas of specialization, accomplishments, and even big names in your portfolio can sway customers from choosing the competition.
Whether you’re using SEO, SEM, social media, or video to reach your target audience, it’s important to boost content credibility by attributing authors to each piece and linking to their online profiles. Build trust and authority within your community by putting a face to the content you publish. Link to team members’ LinkedIn profiles, professional Twitter pages, or other articles and pieces that they’ve created.
The common denominator of all key opinion leaders (KOLs) out there is that they all have some combination of experience or credentials for their expertise. Anyone can become a thought leader in their industry. Yes, you need to have a well-informed frame of reference, but it isn’t necessary to have completed Malcolm Gladwell’s ten-thousand hours to know what you’re talking about. Here are some suggestions for strengthening your credentials:
- Engage more actively on LinkedIn or other professional communities relevant to your industry
- Network in person or via virtual attendance with other industry professionals at events
- Educate yourself further by:
- Taking online courses or attending webinars to earn relevant certifications
- Reading related case studies
- Consuming content made by industry professionals, for industry professionals
If you’re committed to continually educating yourself on current trends and sparking relevant, well-informed conversation from reliable resources, you’ll be there before you know it. When you start gaining traction, it may be advantageous to build yourself and your company a media kit. This way you’ll be well prepared for when media professionals start reaching out to you.
6. 🔔 Create Urgency
Digital marketing moves faster than traditional marketing tactics and can provide immediate gratification. Keeping this in mind, digital marketing is not a strategy that you can set and forget.
Viewers of an online advertisement can use click-to-call buttons or instantly access samples of your work. Your call-to-click buttons need to be welcoming, easy, and most importantly, drive customer action. These are some general sentiments that will drive action:
- Our business has the solutions to your pain points—in fact, we specialize in them
- Using our business for your company will make your life easier
- If you act sooner, we’re extremely certain that you’ll be more satisfied
- We understand your needs; here are several examples of why we’re the best
- We’re a pleasure to work with; here’s a lengthy list of clients we currently serve
- We’ve cultivated long and successful business relationships with our customers
- It’s easy to get in touch with us; here’s our contact information
And, once a lead converts via an online form or reaches out to inquire about a product or service, it’s important to promptly follow up via email, phone, or even in some cases via industry-standard social media while the lead is ripe with interest.
7. 📊 Calculate
Take advantage of tracking your measurables. One of the most beautiful things about online marketing is its ability to be tracked via stats. It can be difficult to prove the success rate of awareness-driven marketing tactics such as public relations and social media, but that’s not the case with digital. For tactics such as SEO and SEM, marketing professionals can look to tools like Google Analytics. These tools show you how to measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaign on a daily basis, to ensure that you’re meeting your digital campaign objectives.
When your marketing agency communicates these measurables, work with them to start developing a proper cadence for forecasting how sales leads will pan out and providing feedback. This will not only allow you to inform your entire team on optimizing the best strategies for marketing/sales programs, but it also increases knowledge of what unsuccessful or outdated practices need to be weeded out through natural trial and error.1
8. 🚫 Consider Rules
For PPC advertising on Google, there are a number of rules, which can vary by industry, that marketers must follow to ensure compliance. For example, if we look at Google’s Advertising Policy for healthcare companies, the search engine actually restricts the promotion of healthcare-related content such as online and offline pharmacies, pregnancy and fertility products and services, medical services and procedures, clinical trial recruitment, and sexual enhancement treatments. Compliance considerations also extend to the design of advertisements themselves. LinkedIn and other platforms that offer paid advertising will also have content restrictions and guidelines you should abide by.
Stay conscious of expectations by regulatory bodies for ads and what is expected of you to be a responsible marketer. This is a good business practice that keeps your company in good standing and maintains your integrity.
Take the Lead with Sagefrog
Sagefrog helps B2B companies develop unstoppable digital marketing campaigns. Get in touch to see how we can help.
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