A Note From Turnkey Mate
83% of B2B companies use email newsletters as part of their content marketing program, and 40% of B2B marketers say these newsletters are most critical to their content marketing success. -Hubspot
"I'd rather be an optimist and a fool than a pessimist and right." - Albert Einstein
How Do You Succeed In B2B Marketing?
In 2021, succeeding in B2B marketing requires a mix of email marketing, content marketing, blog posts, social media campaigns, and search engine optimization. One of the most important factors that determine the success of a B2B campaign, however, is your audience.
Generating leads and converting these leads into customers requires niche content that is targeted at your buyer persona. Ultimately, if you create marketing content for everyone, your marketing efforts reach no one. You will convert more leads with your B2B marketing if you focus on targeting a narrow audience of interested buyers who are willing to engage with your marketing content.
B2B marketing is different from traditional customer-based marketing and it takes more than a couple of social media marketing campaigns to generate leads and create new business. It requires a focused marketing strategy with landing pages that are optimized for the businesses you want to work with.
Here is a list of our top B2B marketing tips to ensure that your B2B marketing content does not fall on deaf ears.
Define Your Target Audience And Niche
Our first tip is to define your audience and niche. Specifying the demographics and preferences of your audience will influence every B2B marketing decision that follows. If you advertise to everyone, you advertise to no one. Once you have found your niche, target your specified audience directly, and make sure you don’t waste resources on content that falls upon people who simply aren’t interested.
B2B Marketing Tips For Identifying Your Target Audience
Naturally, defining your audience is easier said than done. Here are some handy hacks B2B marketers use for identifying the audience you want to reach.
Take a Problem-based Approach When Targeting Your Audience
Think about what kinds of people will benefit from the product or service you are offering. Write a list of the features of what you are offering and highlight the benefits of each feature. Draw up an image of the type of person who will be attracted to these benefits. If your product is designed to make bookkeeping quick and easy, the busy working professional looking to save time is your target. Marketing decisions become more results-focused once you have a specific audience in mind.
Understand Your Current Customer Base
The best place to learn about your audience is from your current customer base. Identify similarities between the people who are already purchasing your product or service. Search for patterns between the businesses that have responded to your marketing efforts so far. Do they all have certain characteristics in common? Using data from your current customer base is a great way to gauge what your archetypical audience looks like.
Build Variations of Your Selling Persona
Visualizing your target persona is valuable when identifying your target audience. Creating an accurate target persona will aid your strategic decision-making moving forward. Note that you do not have to create just one persona. Most businesses have several persona variations and will segment their marketing according to these groups.
Create Your Website
If you haven’t got a website, your content marketing efforts are unlikely to succeed in the long-run. Supposedly, more than 80% of buyers will visit a website before they make a purchase. If you don’t have a place to send your potential customers to get more information, the majority of your potential customers will not even consider making a purchase. Make sure you have a proper landing page set up or most of your marketing efforts will be wasted.
Optimize Your Online Presence
It’s all very well having a website with great information but if nobody lands on your site, lead generation via your content cannot and will not happen. If you want people to find you through a search engine, your content needs to be optimized. SEO strategy is dependent on multiple factors, both on and off your site. Building backlinks, keyword inclusion, and site speed are all key factors that contribute to the discoverability of your blog content and web content.
Focus On Mobile Optimization And User Experience
User experience is a major factor when it comes to how Google ranks web content. More than half of global web traffic comes from mobile devices and yet many sites are not properly optimized from mobile. If users have a hard time navigating your site, they are likely to click off your site. This negatively impacts your bounce rate which in turn affects your rankings.
What’s more, even if your users do not click off your page, frustrated users are more challenging to convert into customers. Horizontal scrolling and small dropdown menus are detrimental to a mobile user’s experience. Frustrated customers usually aren’t inclined to make a purchase.
Tips For Making Your Website Mobile-Friendly
If your website requires a lot of work, it is probably best to hire a web developer to make your site mobile-friendly. If you are looking to make improvements internally, here are some tips that Google suggests for improving user experience on mobile devices:
- Visit Google’s guide to mobile-friendly sites for a comprehensive guide on how to make your site mobile-friendly.
- Take Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to see how much work needs to be done to optimize your site for mobile viewing. This will show you how Googlebot views the pages when determining search results.
- Use Webmaster Tools to generate a Mobile Usability Report. This identifies issues with your website when it is viewed on a mobile device.
If you are looking for quick solutions, the best place to start is making sure that your website fits on any mobile device screen size. If you are looking to fully optimize your website for mobile, consider making an app where users can easily navigate your site content.
Launch PPC Campaigns
Our next tip is directed at B2B companies looking to increase their ROI from paid ads. Launching pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns will help you get your content in front of the right people via search engines and social media.
When running a PPC campaign, don’t just advertise your services. Raise awareness of your brand by marketing your social media pages, blog, or brand philosophy.
To maximize the ROI of your campaigns, incorporate your buyer persona data and boost content that is target at them. A person who has never heard of you or your brand will not be searching for your exact product. They are more likely to be searching for the product feature they are looking for to solve their business-related problems. These are the categories you should be targeting as this is what your potential customers are searching for.
Personalize The Buyers Experience
You can yield better results from your B2B marketing efforts by personalizing your buyer’s experience. According to Accenture, 50% of B2B buyers identified personalization being a key feature among suppliers they would consider working with.
There are several ways to utilize personalization when marketing to business people. For example, social media platforms allow you to engage in personal conversations with your customers. When people engage with B2B companies on social media, they expect a quick, non-automated response.
Email marketing is also a great way to send out personalized campaigns. You can learn more about email marketing in B2B campaigns in the next section.
Use B2B Email Marketing
Even in the age of social media, email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to convert leads into customers. In fact, 93% of B2B marketers use email. If you’re not one of them, this could be why your content marketing efforts are not yielding the results you want.
Email marketing is an excellent tool for sharing your brand’s content and demonstrating the value of your offer. If you can use email marketing to clarify how your product or service can help B2B customers save time and increase their profits, you are onto a winner.
B2B Email Marketing Tips
Most B2B companies are subscribed to multiple newsletters and so if you want your email marketing content to yield results, it’s essential that you make every email count. Here are our top tips for effective email marketing.
Write Enticing Subject Lines
Your subject line should entice recipients to open the email. Create email subject lines that create a feeling of intrigue, FOMO, or curiosity. If people aren’t hooked on your subject lines, they won’t read your content or follow through to your landing pages. If your subject line is poor, the marketing content within your email cannot and will not succeed.
Write a Clear Call To Action
Each email should have just one call-to-action (CTA). Your email should contain one clear message that directs recipients towards one clear CTA.
Utilize Email List Segmentation
Your email list will contain all kinds of audiences. Instead of sending the same newsletter out to everyone, segment your email list so that you can send personal emails that demonstrate an understanding of your audience.
Use B2B Content Marketing
When it comes to B2B marketing, there are multiple routes you can go down. In-person events and trade shows are great ways to network but in the digital age of content marketing, newsletters, blog content, and social media are highly effective too.
By creating different kinds of content targeted at segmented audiences, you can better engage your audience and convert your leads into paying customers. When you create informative blog content, you attract new B2B customers who will be more than happy to subscribe to your email list in exchange for whitepaper or a useful PDF.
Instead of solely focusing on ads and trade shows, invest in content marketing to reach new people, generate leads, and join the B2B marketers who are seeing success with their content marketing strategy.
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