How to Get Started With B2B Digital Marketing

(This is a guest post created by guest author Adam Steele)

B2B — or business-to-business — marketing involves trying to catch the eye of and build connections with other business owners and their employees. This is different from B2C marketing, which involves businesses trying to sell their products or services to consumers.

In this article, we’re going to outline how you can get started with B2B marketing. Let’s begin!

1. Clearly define your target audience

The first step in creating any marketing plan should involve clearly defining your target audience. When it comes to defining your B2B audience, you need to think about two things in particular:

• What types of businesses do you want to appeal to in your marketing?
• Which people at these companies doyou want to reach in order to get the best results?

Think about what types of businesses have the problems your products or services have been designed to solve. These are the companies you’ll want to turn into customers. Just remember that businesses are generally run by very busy people so, to catch your ideal audience’s eye and convince them to spend money with you, you’re going to have to spend a lot of time and energy convincing them to invest in what you’re offering.

Next, you have to determine which people at these specific businesses you need to target to secure a sale. What teams do your products or services help the most? You need to go after the decision-makers in these departments, as they’ll be able to make the push for a budget increase for your products or services.

It can be helpful to develop buyer personas that represent your target businesses and individuals. According to research gathered by Cintell, organizations that use buyer personas see a 10-25% increase in marketing-influenced revenue, as well as a 3x increase in sales!

There are four main components of a B2B buyer persona:

• Demographic information, including industry and company size
• Decision drivers, such as their business goals
• Challenges and fears, including the obstacles and difficulties they have to overcome as a business
• Their role in the purchase decision (think about the individual people you’re targeting at the business)

Once you have this information, you’ll be able to target the best possible businesses and people to make more sales.

2. Ensure your website provides a great first impression

Even the best digital marketing strategies won’t achieve the results you want to if your website isn’t up to scratch. If it gives a bad impression, it won’t matter how great your marketing is, as visitors will be unlikely to make a purchase. Before diving into your marketing strategy, you need to ensure that your website is going to give the best possible impression of your business when people land on it.

To start, make sure the design of your website is sleek, professional, and intuitive. Be sure that your homepage isn’t too busy — it should include the most important information without being too crowded. You should also design your website so it attracts the eye to important information. This will encourage visitors to take the next step. Plus, you need to ensure that your product, category, and service pages provide all of the necessary information someone might be looking for before they decide to make a purchase with your business.

Next, it can be helpful to have a blog or knowledge base (find knowledge base software here) where you can provide helpful information. You can provide content that your customers are looking for, answer their questions, and help educate them about your business, products, or services.

Be sure to include design elements, like high-quality images and social proof, on your website, as well. High-quality images can help engage your visitors and give you an opportunity to show off your team, demonstrate how your products or services work, and make your website more fun to look at. Then, when adding social proof, think about how you can prove you’re great at what you do! Awards, star ratings, reviews, and testimonials can all show that you’re great at what you do and build trust with your customers.

If you have a great-looking website, you’ll build trust with your visitors and make it more likely that they’ll contact your business. If your website is poorly designed or confusing, you risk someone coming to your website and quickly leaving, even if your off-site marketing is top tier.

3. Identify which social media platforms you should be using

Social media can be a very effective marketing tool for your B2B businesses, but you need to choose your platforms carefully for the best results! Don’t spread your team out too thin by using every platform you can think of — instead, use one or two platforms that you know your team can handle effectively.

Because LinkedIn is a network for business professionals, it’s likely a good bet for your B2B company. If you can only handle one platform, definitely invest in LinkedIn to market your business — if you can handle two, determine where your target audience spends their time between Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Wherever you’re getting the most engagement should be where you’re investing your time and energy.

To use your social media effectively, you need to be regularly posting and monitoring your performance. Try to post 3-4 times a week at a minimum to ensure that you’re staying at the top of your followers’ minds and aren’t losing visibility on your chosen platforms. If you’re having trouble staying active, consider using a bulk scheduling tool to help ensure a consistent output.

Additionally, social media analytics tools can help you determine details like the best times of day to post and what kinds of content performs the best. Check out this article from SocialPilot that outlines the best social media analytics tools for businesses if you’re having trouble making a decision about what analytics tool you should use!

4. Start creating content your ideal clients need

Content marketing is one of the most powerful tools for attracting new clients. So, as previously mentioned, your B2B business should have a blog or knowledge hub where they publish helpful information that will provide genuine value to their ideal clients. Use your blog to promote new products or services, answer questions about your industry, show off how your services work, introduce readers to the team, and more.

If you don’t have time or resources to keep the blog updated on your own, consider using a professional blog writing service. There are companies that can conduct keyword research and write high-quality articles for you.

When coming up with ideas for B2B content, think about what people come to your business for over anyone else. What topics are you considered an expert in? What are your unique selling propositions? Do people have questions about your products or services before they spend money with you? Address all of these elements in your content to create great blog posts.

Now, let’s take a look at a few examples of companies that do a good job of creating B2B content for inspiration.

Roadside Dental Marketing, a digital marketing group specializing in marketing for dentists, publishes B2B content across their blog. This particular article on local SEO for dentists does several things well. The article is thorough, discussing what SEO is, why local SEO is so important for dental practices, how dentists can improve theirs, and more. The article has a lot to teach to any dentist looking to up their online business’s visibility, making it a great piece of digital marketing content!

Think about what questions your target audience has. Answering these is a great way to help them out and convince them to take advantage of your services and expertise!

VidYard, a software company that helps businesses analyze their digital marketing performance, does something similar across their blog. One particular article outlines why the reader should be using video for virtual selling and implements several B2B marketing techniques well.

In their article, they outline a variety of different statistics that show how popular this sales tactic is becoming. It’s helpful for other businesses who are looking to get started in video selling and provides a variety of original sources, allowing the reader to collect more information on the topic. As Vidyard is a platform that sells video tools for virtual selling, by outlining the benefits of this strategy in an article, they’ll attract people who are interested in this tactic and convince them to use their services.

To promote your business, think about how you can educate your target audience and give them a reason to invest in your services. Content like this can make the reader feel like they’re missing out if they don’t take advantage of what you’re offering, making it more likely that they’ll spend money with your business.

Focus on improving your online visibility with SEO

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a vital area of marketing that you need to invest in when trying to reach your target audience. It involves a number of different techniques you can use to ensure that your website appears higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) that are relevant to your business.

Every SEO strategy should have three elements: content, technical SEO, and link building. Let’s break them down.

Content

SEO content is designed to help you rank on the SERPs for targeted keywords. Keywords are words and phrases that your target audience is already typing into search engines. To find these, you’ll need to start by conducting keyword research.

Head to a tool like Google Keyword Planner with a list of words or phrases related to your business. Plug them into the planner and Google will give you keywords that people are searching for based on their competitiveness, or how hard they are to rank for, and their average monthly search volumes. When choosing which keywords to target, try to find a balance between these metrics. Look for keywords that aren’t super competitive, but have a high monthly search volume.

Target these keywords when creating content! You can answer questions in your content in informational articles or create videos based on different keywords that people are searching for in order to draw people to your website, for instance.

Try to include your primary keyword in the first 100-150 words of an article to ensure Google pays attention to it — from there, weave the rest of your keywords naturally into your titles, headers, and throughout your body copy. Doing this will help you rank highly on the SERPs for these keywords, increasing your visibility with your target audience.

Technical SEO

Getting your technical SEO right can help give Google a better understanding of your website and how it’s structured, helping you to rank higher on the SERPs!

When looking to improve your technical SEO, here are a few different things you should do:

• Ensure you have a fast loading speed (try to keep it under two seconds)
• Create a mobile-friendly website
• Get rid of duplicate content and dead links
• Reduce your image file size
• Register your website with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools

Taking these steps will help to improve the overall quality of your website and ensure that your website visitors have a better experience when visiting, incentivizing Google to rank you higher on the SERPs. Additionally, doing things like registering your website with Google Search Console and removing dead links will give the search engine a better idea of the structure of your website, improving their ability to rank you for the right keywords.

Link building

Link building is the process of getting other publishers to link back to your site. When this happens, Google will take it as a vote of confidence in your authority and give you a boost on the SERPs. To secure backlinks, you need to create content that people will want to link back to! Conducting original research, writing expert-level guides, and showing off your business knowledge will all help you to attract links.

Need some link building help? Check out the link building services offered by Loganix. We can help build authoritative links from other websites, secure guest posts, and more.

Summary

In this article, we outlined how to get started with B2B digital marketing.  We discussed developing buyer personas, creating content, and more. When you report your business-to-business (B2B) marketing data with Google Analytics, you can see how your marketing efforts are affecting website visitor behavior and business outcomes, best practice is to use a Google analytics report template.

Author bio & headshot:

Adam Steele is the COO at Loganix, an SEO fulfillment partner for agencies and marketers. We build easy-to-use SEO services that help businesses scale. If you liked this article, please check out our SEO guides and templates on the Loganix blog.