Better Together: An Integrated Approach to B2B Success
Posted on July 16, 2019
Today, the buyers are in control. About 94% of B2B buyers research products and services online at some point during the buying process. And even more, over 70% of these B2B buyers use three or more channels while researching. The B2B buyers no longer learn about products and services through just one channel. Because of this, it is now more important than ever to practice an integrated marketing approach for your B2B strategy.
For the purpose of today’s webinar, we want to give you a bit of background information on the fictional company we created for this presentation. MAE Mixers is a B2B company that sells commercial baking mixers out of South Carolina. Currently, their marketing efforts include a brand new website, attending various tradeshows and a little email marketing. They have some goals to generate leads, build brand awareness and figure out how to measure success.
So one of the main things we’ll be talking about for MAE Mixers is how they’ll be using multiple channels to promote a new product line (the MAE Flour 3000.) We will get into their challenges and strategy.
One of their biggest challenges is how to connect all of their strategies together.
Goals:
- Want to recapture tradeshow attendance
- Gain RFQ submissions from their new landing page
- Use display advertising to drive traffic
- Want to create relevant content that engages and converts
- Utilize SEO/PPC to generate traffic to the website
- Re-engage users who filled out an RFQ and never converted
Search Engine Marketing
One of the best places to start is with search engine marketing. We started by searching for “commercial mixers” to see what the SERP will come back with. Included will be Google shopping ads, Google search ads, organic listings, and rich snippets.
SEO: Target Keywords
For our landing page, we want to make sure we’re targeting the right people through keywords. Think like the client and what they may be searching for. Once you have a list of solid keywords and targeting, make sure they are included in every part of the landing page. A few things to make sure of are to have very clear call to actions, make sure your images are high quality, have alt-tags and you’re creating a great user experience. Keep in mind that your main website should also include additional resources and product details. It should be thorough and include technical SEO.
SEO: Measuring Success
Obviously, if you’ve done any research with digital marketing, you want to make sure your organic traffic is coming in.
- Organic Traffic – anything search engines list that isn’t a paid option.
- Organic Conversions – how many people are converting
- Overall Website Behavior – bounces, what they do after they arrive at their website, etc.
- Measure Keyword Ranking – go back in time and keep track of how they are ranking.
SEO: Challenges
- Takes time – you could make changes to your content today and you may not see changes until months later so remember to be patient
- Search engine algorithms are always changing – you cannot predict how Google will change things, so be prepared for that
- Knowing what your audience searches for
- Writing keyword-rich content
PPC: Strategy
These are paid, and there are some options that you can run to show up.
- Brand
- General Terms
- Features – searching for a solution, you want to make sure your products are showing up at the top of Google
Display Remarketing Campaign
This is a great way to stay top of mind for your potential customers. You are able to remarket to anyone who has visited the website or even as targeted as anyone who has visited an exact product page. In-marketing audiences are people who have searched for your target keywords.
But how does it know?!
- You’ve visited the same websites on desktop and mobile
- Account logins (Facebook, email, etc.)
- Common behavior on both devices
PPC: Measuring Success
- Paid Search traffic
- Display Ads traffic
- Paid Conversions
- Track cost/conversion (if you’re able to calculate what you’re willing to pay for a lead, this might be one of your best options)
PPC: Challenges
As with other strategies, there are challenges associated with PPC. Below are just a few:
- Controlling your budget
- Knowing what a lead is worth
- Pay to Play
- Understand clicks don’t always mean sales
Overall, PPC can be very valuable if your company has a budget.
Content Promotion
Content strategy can be a bit of a challenge for people, and they tend to put it into a box thinking it’s really just blogs… but it’s actually so much more than that and is so highly integrated into other aspects of your marketing efforts. So we’ll be talking a little bit more about content including social ads, organic social presence, landing pages, blogs of course and event emails are considered content as well. Content is a major player during each of the stages of the buyers’ journey. One of the biggest challenges you will see is that it does take a lot of time and you won’t see results overnight and it’s very relational in the interaction between the user and your website or whatever piece of material they are looking at.
Awareness
- Promote content, put money behind it to generate new targeted traffic. We are going to focus specifically on LinkedIn because of the great targeting options.
- Fuel consideration stage by posting to current followers.
Consideration
- Think about blog topics and some of the longer keywords & phrases you can use to start those content pieces.
- Set up ads on LinkedIn to try and help create traffic to your website. By showing your expertise through blog posts gives you a lot of credibility and can instill trust.
- Try to create a robust knowledge center with various types of content – articles, blogs, videos, tutorials, etc.
Content Promotion: Measuring Success
It can be a little bit challenging to know what your goals are and what you’re trying to do with content. Sometimes people tend to say, okay content marketing is posting a blog and that’s it. If you don’t do any additional promotion or anything to back it up you’re only doing part of the work. Success is really measured by the end goal and what you’re trying to do with that specific piece of content.
Content Promotions: Challenges
- Creating the strategy
- Unrealistic expectations
- Measuring ROI
- Coming up with fresh ideas
- Not having the resources
Email Marketing
Email is a great way to nurture your customers and potential customers once they are in the funnel already. It’s a great way to generate awareness and leads from multiple points on the website. You can also segment your lists by interest and topic which is great because you’re delivering content that they actually want to know about. For example, if you have a list of tradeshow attendants, they will likely get different messages than those who signed up for your newsletter.
Measuring success with email takes a little bit of work because you have to look at the numbers. How many people are subscribed, are people unsubscribing? Look at the number of clicks and forms being filled out. One other thing to make sure of is that you should make sure you have a Google Analytics goal set up for newsletter sign-ups.
Email – Challenges
- Nuances between marketing platforms
- Integrating your email marketing to your website
- Deliverability (spam)
- Overcoming low open and click-through rates
Social Media Marketing (Specifically LinkedIn)
Currently, there are 610 million professionals using the LinkedIn platform and it’s becoming the most important content publishing platform for B2B digital marketing.
Linkedin Organic:
Cons
- Users are less often on the platform than other social media platforms
- Streams are often filled with “spammy” posts, specifically in-mail features. So it can be hard to get your posts noticed
- The platform isn’t really suitable for direct selling, which contradicts the professional culture feel.
Pros
- LinkedIn is the highest-rated platform right now for B2B success and effectiveness
- The user base is older and more professional than other social media networks.
- You can gain direct contact with potential leads through messaging and inMail features
- LinkedIn is the only social media platform that is currently prioritizing long-form content.
Linkedin Paid:
Cons
- Compared to other social media platforms, LinkedIn tends to be more expensive
- Using the InMail feature may prompt users to commonly mark your ads as spam
Pros
- Your ads can target more defined audiences by the use of LinkedIn’s demographics
- There is a large variety of sophisticated ad types that you can post on the platform
- InMail advertising allows you to send ads directly to your connections through email
- Retargeting audiences can be implemented to target post visitors
Sharing social content gives you a great opportunity to share a more personal side to your business. It gives you the chance to interact with your followers, clients base and can really show people that there is a person and team behind the website.
Thank you for viewing our presentation and we know it included a lot of content so if you have any follow-up questions at all, please reach out. Another option is that we are offering a free Digital Marketing Audit which will give you some insight on how you’re stacking up against the competition.
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