4 Best Practices in B2B Digital Marketing

B2B marketing has evolved greatly with innovations in analytics, publishing tools, understanding of web user behavior, and lead tracking tools.

B2B marketing has significantly evolved with innovations in analytics, publishing tools, understanding of web user behavior, and lead tracking tools.

The B2B buying cycle is longer than that of B2C, in part because it is a group buying decision. Knowing the unique challenges of B2B marketing, marketers can better achieve success employing creativity, skill, and these top strategies.

The B2B buying cycle is longer than that of B2C, in part because it is a group buying decision. Knowing the unique challenges of B2B marketing, marketers can better achieve success employing creativity, skill, and these top strategies.

#1 Know your buyer

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

• What are the demographics, purchasing roles, needs, pain points, and typical behaviors of the target buyer?
• Why is the value they see from the product or service?
• What could trigger a buying decision?
• Where do they research companies?

With these questions answered, craft an ideal customer profile. Develop different content to reflect the various needs and traits of the segmented buyers.

This essential step can help the team better address the prospect in the buyer's journey. Improve retention and build customer happiness by exploring the entire lifecycle and improving the customer experience.

Related reading: Better Buyer Personas

#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. Likely, your goal is growing sales, which means landing page conversion rates and qualified leads will matter the most. Don't get caught up in vanity metrics that don't matter; focus on what leads are actually doing.

Related reading: B2B lead generation statistics

#3 Scale carefully

Scaling B2B digital marketing efforts too quickly can be a waste of money. Growth-driven design endorses starting, for example, a minimally viable website. Then track how visitors are attracted and interact with the page to determine the next pages to add. Study web analytics carefully to uncover gaps, weaknesses, and opportunities. Instead of investing extensive time and labor developing one set-and-sit website, increase adaptability and utilize resources with an iterative approach.

With ads, take a similar approach. Test continuously and iterate on successes.

#4 Optimize ads

Some B2B marketing teams struggle to manage ad campaigns. While building paid and referral channels, focus on organic search, which can be a powerful driver of timely leads with careful planning and optimization. Plus, digital advertising is very scalable and can be more immediate and convenient and, as a result, an excellent way to test-run new ideas.

Just don't create online display ads and leave them running. Let the SEO keyword and analytic data gathered decide the marketing team's next steps. Research that is useful for organic efforts can also be used to guide paid efforts.

#5 Be mobile-friendly

The audience is online, so the B2B marketer should meet them there. Google now prioritizes mobile-optimized websites, so a mobile responsive site design will significantly increase user experience and improve the prospect's likelihood of actually finding your website. Pay attention to load speeds and make it easy for visitors to quickly scan the digital marketing content — on any size of the device. For example, email marketing efforts are viewed ever-increasingly on mobile devices. According to Smart Insights, "57% of users are "multi-screening," accessing websites on both their desktop and mobile devices."

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 highly iterative and designed to achieve measurable results.

Sources:

Chaffey, D. Display advertising clickthrough rates.