Build A Better B2B Marketing Strategy

Content Marketing Series Part 1

If you’ve ever sat down to create an online B2B Marketing strategy, you’ve likely realized that at times it can be tough to wrap your arms and mind around what it is you should be doing and why you should be doing it. Over the next couple of weeks we’re going to dive into some of the “how to’s” that will help you establish, meet and exceed your online B2B marketing goals.

But, before we can do that we have to first determine what your goals are. For our discussion and moving forward we’re going to define three goals that you want your online marketing to achieve.

The Three Top Online B2B Marketing Goals

Drive More Visitors to Your Website
Capture More Leads from Your Website
Close More Sales from Your Website
Each of these goals builds on the prior goal as we move from capturing attention to capturing dollars.
Online B2B Marketing Tactics

As we take a more in-depth look at each of these goals we’ll cover some of the following topics:

To drive more leads to our website we’re going to look at the three primary inbound methods which include blog writing, social media publishing and email marketing. We’ll look at keyword research, which should be the foundation for your online marketing, and how that carries over to your website through on-page optimization. Content is extremely important in driving traffic so we’ll discuss how to re-purpose content, and how to use social media to expand the reach of your content.
Once you have more traffic coming to your site you need to capture more of these visitors as leads. To improve your lead capture efforts we’re going to look at what a conversion process looks like. We’ll cover how to capture leads from blogs, social posts and email. And finally how do we get more leads from our existing and new traffic using conversion optimization.
The final goal is to close more sales. Once you’ve captured the leads its time to start developing them and moving your leads through the conversion funnel. We’ll star with a discussion of the different life cycle stages in the buying process. Then we’ll take a look at a lead nurture work flow, cover how to score leads, and then walk through how you up-sell or cross-sell.
The online B2B marketing strategy that we’re going to be pulling together with these posts is based on the concept of inbound marketing. Inbound marketing, in case you’re not 100% sure what that means, is defined by wikipedia as “marketing activities that bring visitors in, rather than marketers having to go out to get prospects’ attention. Inbound marketing earns the attention of customers, makes the company easy to be found, and draws customers to the website by producing interesting content.”

Inbound Marketing Verses Outbound Marketing

A good example of a outbound marketing tactic is a TV commercial. You are kicked back enjoying your favorite television show and a commercial comes on and interrupts you to catch your attention. Inbound marketing on the other hand draws in interested visitors using content. For example you write a post that helps your prospects identify and resolve a key issue. When they search online for information about the topic they see a link to your blog post and choose to click over and read it.

Which do you think is likely to be more effective …interruption or attraction.

Each of the topics above will be covered in its own blog post. As we release new articles we’ll link to them from this blog post. You can also subscribe to our blog so that as soon as we release a new article you will be notified.

Before getting into the details with the next post, let’s take a look at some statistics about Inbound Marketing that show how effective it is as a marketing vehicle.

Inbound marketing costs 62% less than traditional outbound marketing. (Hubspot)
Inbound marketing drives 54% more leads than outbound marketing. (Hubspot)
B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads than companies that don’t blog. (Hubspot)
80% of decision-makers prefer to get company information in a series of article s instead of in an advertisement. (Content Marketing Institute)
These are only a few of the numerous stats available that show the value of implementing a content marketing strategy for a B2B company. Thanks for reading and we hope you enjoy the upcoming series.

Be sure to subscribe to our blog updates to be notified each time a new article in this series is published.

Check Out the Articles in This Series That Have Been Published

Article 1: Build A Better B2B Marketing Strategy

Article 2: Creating Your Comprehensive B2B Marketing Strategy

Article 3: Create Business to Business Buyer Personas

Article 4: The Ultimate Guide to Keyword Research

Article 5: The Stages of the Buyers Journey

Have questions or need help with your online marketing? Call us at 678-951-9506 or contact us.