Build B2B brand awareness online, forget shortcuts

B2B marketers need to grapple with a variety of channels, devices and options when building a B2B marketing strategy for their organization. The emergence of new touchpoints and channels has only increased the complexity of a marketer's task. Marketers strive to simplify this task, but the wrong answer is the short-cut...

Too many webmasters try to buy links, steal emails or push product pitches in a spammy manner out through social networks. Our advice: Do not be tempted to shortcut or skip the essentials in marketing. Stick to quality... Produce quality content, and build quality relationships. Put the relationship before the sale, and think longterm.

The danger of spammy shortcuts

Many B2B marketers focus heavily on link-building. Often there is temptation to buy links from farms, which is highly discouraged from SEO experts. Businesses are inundated with emails from spammers hocking link-building services or thousands of Twitter followers. These methods are often dangerous, especially with the advent of Penguin 2.0, which seeks to punish spammers and blackhat tactics.

Bad B2B web marketing practices

• Buying follow links 
• Link exchanges
• Link farms
• Sending spam emails
• Overusing autoresponders
• Providing fake or incomplete contact information
• Pushing only product or sales promotions through social media
• Buying social follows, Likes or friends

Short-list of best-practices for web marketing

•  Create high-quality content
• Optimize your content based on user activity & response
• Focus on engagement with your content and touchpoints
• Participate in online communities (don't just push messages there)
• Converse with your followers or produce content that interests them
• Get feedback
• Build high-quality links from trusted, related and reputable sources whether they be blogs, Google Plus accounts or websites

By employing SEO-best practices (and web marketing best-practices), marketers will spare themselves a lot of wasted effort, pain and loss.  By following best practices, marketers will find the following successes:

• Growth in organic search rankings
• Not having to worry about penalties
• Traffic that drives conversions and brand awareness
• Trust
• Thought-leadership within an industry
• Higher organic conversion rates
• Long-term and short-term growth in both traffic and conversions
• Worry-free nights