Most of the Businesses looking for business leads are still following the old approaches and are moving on a very slow phase or they give it up to the competition.
It’s time to make use of all the channels that can help a business to grow quick and strong!
The internet usage and the internet profiles for the people and business have grown significantly from almost negligible to almost every business and the person having their profile on one or the other platforms, and this implies there is a huge opportunity to reach and grab the attention of all kinds of audiences and achieve business success.
The B2B digital marketing strategies are a big unexplored channel by many businesses and they all have assumptions that digital marketing cannot help, or would help only to a minimal extent.
How far it’s true? Does business for B2B leads rely only on business development managers?
There are businesses that generate all of their leads/sales only through digital marketing. This doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be relying on offline business development or business alliances, it just implies there is a potential and all the channels have to be used wisely to grow on a faster phase and digital marketing stands at priority and its a must with internet growth year on year.
In the last decade, the internet usage stats are as follows, this clearly indicates a shift of Off-line to on-line and a great opportunity for businesses building an online presence.
This article completely discusses B2B Digital marketing strategies!
The digital marketing strategy in acquiring the business leads has multiple stages, and each of it needs to be done in the right way so that generating B2B leads becomes quite a simple task.
The stages are applicable for both B2B and B2C digital marketing strategies,
The core of the marketing- Thumb rule
Understanding the audiences
Research and identify the target audiences, mostly the decision-makers for B2B or the advisers of the decision-makers.
Admins, procurement teams, HR teams, and management
Understanding their pain points
Basically the product/services advantages/benefits or the problems it can solve. For sure a product/service can be related to solving several problems and the same becomes a content (matter) to reach the already finalized target audiences in stage one.
In the case of B2C finding the audiences is quite easy as most of them would proactively use a specific platform or search engine to find the service provider or product seller and hence B2C marketing and selling are easy as compared to B2B marketing.
Channel to reach the target audiences
When the target audiences are identified, and approach is identified, it all just needs the right medium/channel which can ensure reaching the messaging to the right person.
In offline approach an appointment had to be taken and had to be met in person or any other approach such as newspaper printing, Magazine ads, pamphlets distribution, hoardings etc can be used, but then due to shifting from offline to online medium usage across geographies, it has literally forced all the businesses for the need of digital marketing . Coming to online marketing there are multiple options and opportunities to reach the targeted audiences and we are going to discuss that in detail in this article. Refer to the next section of the article.
Pitching the product/service or messaging
This is the final and most important stage that decides the fate of your business, one should be able to pitch/explain the product/service in the right way and this can be done both offline and online.
If your digital marketer cannot understand any of the below 4 stages you cannot expect the B2B digital marketing strategy working for you.
The best and the most adopted B2B Digital marketing strategies are explained in detail,
Prerequisite:
A Must
Have a beautiful and professional website with the right messaging or selling strategy on the web pages and profiles across the internet on all platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google business, relevant directories, Wikipedia, and more.
Have a unique and different experience for B2B audiences and B2C audiences, as the audience mindset, the messaging, expectations, and interest varies widely and hence you may need to have different landing pages for both kinds of audiences.
“Make sure that each of this landing page has a selling strategy!” so that you are able to sell when you build visibility to your content through digital marketing efforts.
Good to have and must if relayed on Social Media channel for lead generation:
Social profiles, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter etc, whichever you think it’s most needed for your business category. Also, make sure that your profiles are up to date.
Maybe most needed if you are picking social media as the marketing channel to reach your audiences.
Social media especially LinkedIn helps a lot in reaching the right B2B audiences. Hence social media profile is a must.
Story Telling:
No one appreciates your promotional content except the one badly in need and there are no options it’s except you, but in the current era the competition is high and hence your audiences have “n” number of options to look for someone for a reason or who can attract them through great stories.
What are these stories,
Storytelling is all about educating your user about you, your business, your product or service, your credibility or value, or helping them in understanding the importance of addressing their problems or benefits of services/products that they are looking for in very impactful or interesting way that can really motivate them to approach you for their needs.
Storytelling mainly focuses on addressing their pain points and along with leaving a piece of information about your product/service which doesn’t sound promotional, but then would have very impactfully left a message/info about your product/service and which also instills confidence and comfort for user to proactively approach you for their needs/services.
A great storyteller sounds genuine, speaks crisp and solves a problem.
Here is an attempt and I must have received at least 5-10 leads and a good number of connection requests.
Achieved at least 10 leads requesting for training.
I have very few connections around 1600 connections as of today 29th August 2019, and less than 1600 when I posted the below content.
I have written it as a story with the title, “stupidity at peaks”, followed by more than 1200 characters of text.
I have published a presentation that explains the Digital marketing channels, mainly built for business owners. (Simple to understand)
post, that reach is small but the outcome is very good.
Case Studies:
Note that the following Digital marketing strategies for the B2B works following the 4 stages discussed in the first section of this article. The below section is going to be a discussion about the different channels and their outcome in the order mentioned.
Email marketing:
Email marketing is one of the traditional approaches and has been most widely used across the globe to generate B2B leads. Email marketing is a proven digital marketing channel for B2B lead generation, but then due to the GDPR laws imposed in recent years it has narrowed down the reach and potential of email marketing channels.
But then still can be relied on it to nourish the already subscribed audiences in order to convert them to the customers.
Email marketing is quite a simple process:
Stage 1:
Finding the email id’s of all the relevant audiences
Stage 2:
Messaging- Articulating your product and the user pain points in such a way your product/service becomes a solution to them
Stage 3:
Find an appropriate application, tool/platform to make sure your message/information about your product/service gets delivered to them.
Use any email application if you are sending it in small quantities, and in case if you have to send it to too many may have to use bulk mailer, MailChimp, etc.
Stage 4: Based on responses you receive you may have to respond to the audiences accordingly. For the non-respondents, step 3 has to be repeated with different messaging.
While sending repeated emails just make sure the best practices are followed.
Social Media Marketing:
The growing & widely used medium for B2B leads.
Email marketing is diminishing due to the software/servers limitations and GDPR laws and this has literally given a significant opportunity to the social media channels, such as,
Linkedin
Facebook
Twitter
Youtube
Pinterest
Instagram
Snapchat
Quora and many more.
Each of these social media channels has turned out to be a powerful platform for B2B lead generation for many businesses, and the technical experts/marketers should know how to use them effectively in order to reap maximum.
Social Media Steps for B2B leads
As per the stages discussed in the earlier section (Thumb role/core of the marketing) of this article find the audiences
Understand their pain points
Plan content that solves their problem or attract them
Use a social media platform, target the right audience, launch your campaigns with the help of an expert and serve your content planned in step 3.
Running social media campaigns is easy, but then the thought process is difficult and for that, you may need the digital marketers and business owners to be working together.
Content Marketing:
Selling the products/services through the story, through information, through the tool, or something that your target audience consumes other than the direct product/service.
There won’t be a direct promotion or pitch, but then eventually the audience would turn out to be your customers.
Content Marketing pro’s
Less expensive
Lifetime lead generation
The trust factor is high
Conversion rates are high
Branding
E.G:
https://kandra.pro/blog/conversion-rate-optimization/ This particular article gets me leads where many business owners approach me in optimizing their website for conversion rate. The article portrays the knowledge/capabilities, which instills a lot of confidence in business owners on me and they get in touch.
Develop a handbook/Guide, a powerpoint, or an infographic on the basis of your target audience and you will be able to reach the right audience through your content and also will be able to leave an impactful impression.
Share all the content developed through social media and e-mail marketing and you will be able to achieve your objective. Without content, Social media and Email would have not helped much, it’s all interrelated/correlated.
SEO/Search Engine Optimization:
AS per the thumb rule discussed at the start of this article identify the audiences and their pain points, what exactly are they searching for and developed a content accordingly/related to it and optimize it for search engines, so that you achieve your objective when content can peak about your product/service.
Below is an example of how search engine optimization helps to generate the leads.
E.G The content is developed and been optimized for search engines, in the above image you can notice the website kandra.pro is ranking for a keyword “full-stack digital marketing consultant”, likewise the keywords/terms used by your B2B audience have to be identified, content to be built and optimized.
SEM/Google Adwords/Paid Marketing:
If you think your product/service is been searched by corporates and if you think it’s difficult to rank on Google organically or you want to capture the market as much possible go for search ads.
E.G: The keyword onsite training provider is a business lead, where corporates prefer some trainer/training company to provide inhouse training for a few tens/hundreds of professionals, and springpeople have done a Google ad to acquire such B2B leads.
Display Marketing:
If you have enough clarity on the demographics of your audience or the places they consume the content on the internet or both you can rely on display marketing for lead generation.
E.G:, I know my audiences are business owners/HR’s/Admins/Procurement teams, and if I think they are spending time on specific category of portals “x”, then I would prefer to show the ads on those portals pitching for service/product so that the one in need of it or interested would approach. This is one of the best lead generation model and works well for B2B.
Video Marketing:
Develop amazing videos that can instill confidence in your target audience for the products/services they are interested in and make sure your content reaches them through one of the marketing approaches discussed above. The video content can do miracles in generating the leads for you on huge scale.
Conclusion:
More or less the strategies for B2B and B2C would remain the same except for the change in audience groups, once audience groups are decided the marketing activities are planned accordingly. B2B lead generation through digital marketing is no so simple as most of the marketers fail to sell.
Manjunath Chowdary
Digital Marketing Expert, consultant, Mentor and
Director of KandraDigital Marketing
Solutions Pvt Ltd.
Kandra Digital
