4 Best Practices in B2B Digital Marketing

B2B digital marketing faces unique challenges. For one, the B2B buying lifecycle is often slow since a purchase decision typically requires buy-in from many other business decision makers.

Better achieve success, no matter the pace of the purchaser’s journey, by employing creativity, skill, and these top strategies.

B2B Digital Marketing Practice 1: Research Your Target Buyer

Questions marketers need to ask in researching the target prospect include:

• What are the demographics, psychographics, and typical behaviors of the target buyer?
• Why will they care about the product or service offered?
• What motivates and influences their choices?
• Where do they get information?
• Who do they trust?

With these questions answered, craft a buyer’s persona for each segment of your target audience. Develop different content to reflect the various needs and traits of the segmented buyers.

This essential step can help the marketer better address the prospect where they are in the buyer’s journey. With 74% of online consumers saying they get frustrated when the content that appears has nothing to do with their needs or interests, it’s clear that customized content can make a positive difference on customer experience.

Related reading: Build Better Buyer Personas

B2B Digital Marketing Practice 2: Focus on Key Metrics

Being online opens the door to a great range of analytical data the marketer can mine for insights. Determine what core metrics make sense for your particular B2B digital marketing goals. Common metrics include: visits (traffic), number of pages per visit, conversions, bounce rate, leads or inquiries, time on site, top pages and referrers. Yet visits from a web referrer will not help you determine buyer interest as effectively as might reviewing conversions based on a gated content offer related to that product.

B2B Digital Marketing Practice 3: Strategically Scale

Growth driven design starts with a launch pad website, which is carefully planned around the top 20 percent of items that will have the highest impact and value for site users.

Unlike a legacy website — which is built once, gathers dust for a year or two, then sees a redesign — a growth-driven website is a work-in-progress. This work is driven by data.

Once the site is launched, the marketing team tracks how visitors are attracted to the site. Additionally, they watch how visitors interact with the page. Then, the marketer studies web analytics carefully to uncover gaps, weaknesses, and opportunities.

Instead of investing extensive time and labor developing one set-and-sit website, this iterative approach can increase adaptability and better utilize resources.

B2B Digital Marketing Practice 4: Optimize Your PPC Ads

With careful planning and optimization, online pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be a powerful driver of timely leads. Plus, digital advertising is very scalable and can be more immediate and timely, and, as a result, a good way to test run new ideas.

Just don’t create display online ads and forget about them. Paid search is extremely competitive. Pay close attention to search impression share, click-through rate, and quality score to analyze the efficacy of an ad. If it’s not working, don’t keep paying for that online advertising.

#5 - Be mobile-friendly. Search is still important.

The audience is online, B2B marketing needs to focus across all digital channels. A mobile responsive site design will greatly increase user experience and improve the likelihood of the prospect searching further into the site. Pay attention to website page load speeds and make it easy for visitors to quickly scan the digital marketing content — on any size of device.

Related reading: The Importance of a Mobile Responsive Website

Digital marketing should be results-driven, focused on optimizing conversions and lead generation while nurturing sales. With a range of inbound marketing content avenues, B2B digital marketing will yield better results when it is highly iterative and designed to always achieve measurable results.

Sources:
Chaffey, D. (2016, April 26). Display advertising clickthrough rates. https://www.smartinsights.com/internet-advertising/internet-advertising-analytics/display-advertising-clickthrough-rates/