Ten years ago, social media marketing and content marketing were much less developed than they are now. Ten years ago, few people had heard the word “influencer,” let alone knew what it meant.
Marketing is now a more sophisticated business than it was in the past. We have more data about consumers, so we can see the buyer’s journey from start to finish more clearly. This makes it easier to create effective marketing campaigns that are targeted to the right audience, and to track how well the campaign is doing after it has been launched.
B2B marketing has changed a lot in a short amount of time. This has been beneficial for businesses that spend money on digital marketing campaigns. With a little bit of strategic thinking and imagination, marketers can go far.
What is B2B inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing involves creating content that is high-quality, compelling, and relevant to potential customers. By doing this, you can reach customers before they are at the purchasing stage of the buyer’s journey.
The goal of B2B inbound marketing is to create brand awareness through content that is relevant to the needs and interests of potential customers. This fosters positive sentiment towards your brand, making consumers more likely to favour it. This content- which could take any number of forms, including blogging, infographics, white papers, or case studies- gives prospective customers something interesting and insightful to engage with.
If you want to encourage customers to keep moving through the sales funnel, you need to use calls to action (CTAs) strategically. By having a combination of CTAs and relevant content, you can encourage customers to learn more about what you’re offering, especially important decision makers.
Inbound marketing is a great way for businesses to engage with their customers. In today’s climate, customer engagement is especially crucial to attracting new customers. By providing customers with quality content—including landing pages, email newsletters, webinars, and thought leadership pieces—businesses can build a loyal and engaged customer base.
7 Steps to Build a Winning B2B Inbound Marketing Strategy
Inbound marketing is essential for B2B brands because it helps them to create content that is relevant to their target audience. By creating content that is targeted at the right audience, B2B brands can more effectively reach their target market and generate more leads. Additionally, inbound marketing can help to build brand awareness and reputation. Let’s break down the steps you need to take to create a lean, mean inbound marketing machine:
1) Learn who your dream customers are
The key to a successful online business is to determine who your target customers are and what they want to learn and consume online. Knowing this will help you to know how and where to reach them.
If you need some ideas to kick off your research, below are a few ways to base your strategy on customer facts, not assumptions:
- Talk to your existing customers to unearth their struggles, goals, needs, likes, and dislikes.
- Check in with customers to see how they consume and apply your content to gain knowledge on subjects that resonate with them, help them solve their problems, and achieve goals.
- Instead of superficial personas, create buyer personas rooted in the “Jobs to be Done” (JTBD) framework. This theory focuses on the tasks consumers buy products for rather than the product itself. To build a well-rounded persona, combine appealing product features with the JTBD tasks.
- Conduct consumer trend analysis on Google Analytics to find the topics your consumers are most interested in right now.
- Launch industry surveys and focus groups to discover upcoming customer trends, problems, and developing interests.
2) Create high-quality content
To be successful with inbound marketing, it is important to publish content that helps your target customers solve their most pressing problems. Be sure to answer questions clearly and provide concrete, actionable steps to help them overcome their struggle.
Once you’ve resolved these customer pain points in your content, your next objectives should be to:
Introduce your products
Your offers should be well explained, with clear calls to action and subtle references to your brand. Make sure shoppers feel reassured by addressing their objections and concerns directly.
If you are having difficulty getting your customers to pay attention, you could create content that outlines how to write headlines that capture their target customers’ attention.
Sales and marketing tips could help your customers close more leads. Your cold emailing software could take the manual labor out of attracting new business.
Use this chance to demonstrate your products or services and underscore their advantages to persuade customers that you are the optimal answer to their issue.
Blog consistently
If you want to be successful in inbound marketing, you should make blogging a priority. An active blog is essential for building trust with potential customers, and your efforts will become more and more effective as time goes on, resulting in more leads and sales.
You should set up a publishing schedule that you can stick to. It will be most effective if you hire a freelance B2B writer or content marketing agency to create your content, so that you can always meet your production goals.
Be unique in your content creation
If you’re discussing topics that have been talked about before, try using a different format, introducing new data, or adding your own personal touch to it.
3) Invest in multiple content formats
You can make your content more engaging for your target audience by repurposing it into different formats. For example, if you find out from your research on customer personas that your customers prefer infographics, quick sheets, and checklists, you can turn your most popular blog posts into these types of content.
In 2021, the most popular content type for marketing activities was video. A survey conducted by Wyzowl found that 88% of respondents reported that they were more likely to purchase a product after watching a video.
A recent survey showed that people spend approximately 19 hours every week watching TV or using other forms of media. You could use this time to promote your business.
You can reach more customers and generate more conversions by combining content types. Creating an engaging video from a popular post or creating a video library on key topics in your niche are both great ways to get started with video content.
4) Sharpen your SEO
You can make your B2B inbound marketing strategy more effective by targeting specific keywords. Long-tail keywords may not get as much traffic, but they are more relevant to your target customers.
There are tools like Google Adwords, SEM Rush, and Moz which can be used to discover the best keywords for your brand. You can monitor the performance of your content and adjust the keywords accordingly.
To further improve your SEO, consider choosing keywords with low to medium competition and taking your domain authority into account when selecting keywords. As your brand becomes more established online, you can target more competitive keywords.
When editing your content, make it easy for search engine crawlers to find, understand, and index. You can do this by using on-page SEO optimization tactics like H1, H2, and H3, and a table of contents. Also, use internal linking.
A winning B2B inbound marketing strategy requires more than just a great website. Some techniques you can deploy include:
- Guest posting
- Backlink exchanges
- Podcast interviewing
5) Connect your content and marketing channels
It is important to connect your content to different marketing channels to get the best distribution for your B2B inbound marketing strategy.
This approach will help your target customer find more of your content after they’ve been exposed to your brand.
For example, your ideal customer could discover your brand through a search engine query, read a blog post, register for a webinar, then sign up for a demo. To begin merging your content with distribution channels, complete the following steps:
- Create pillar content pieces. These are your most valuable, in-depth pieces on key topics and top-performing keywords. Pillar pieces provide a solid base to expand your content and create assets for each buyer journey stage.
- Amplify content on multiple social media platforms with paid and organic marketing. For example, if your target customers spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, you could publish blogs and social posts regularly and launch Sponsored Messaging and Sponsored Content ads.
- Link every content asset to an optimized landing page that ushers visitors into the next stage in their buyer’s journey. This could look like a page to download an awareness stage eBook or a consideration stage case study.
- Encourage likes, shares, and engagement. Also, incentivize brand advocacy and share user-generated content like reviews and testimonials to increase customer trust and confidence in your brand.
- Add relevant CTAs to every content asset with links to landing pages (three to four for long-form written content).
- Work with partners, such as co-marketing partners and influencers, to share out key content pieces on their channels as well.
6) Engage on social media platforms
There are real people with unique thoughts and opinions on the topics you cover and the content you share behind the screens.
It is important to invest time in getting to know your audience so that you can determine which channels to use to reach them. Social media is a great way to build a community and keep your target customers engaged. By doing this, you will be able to nurture them and eventually convert them into leads.
Some ways you can interact consistently with your audience are to:
- Run polls
- Ask questions
- Host Q&As
- Collaborate with influencers
- Post engaging content
- Hold competitions
- Collaborate with complementary brands in giveaways
There are a few social media KPIs that you can track depending on what your brand’s goals are. Once you have determined which KPIs to track, make sure to monitor them regularly. Doing this will help ensure that your engagement efforts are fruitful, as well as help you determine where you need to put more or less effort. For example, if a startup’s goal is to increase brand awareness, they might want to track KPIs like reach, engagement, and leads generated.
7) Set and track realistic content KPIs relevant to your goals
It is important that you identify and set realistic key performance indicators (KPIs) to understand what efforts are performing well and identify areas for improvement in your B2B inbound marketing strategy. A KPI’s relevancy will depend on your company’s goals and beliefs. As a starting point though, some critical KPIs to track include:
- Users
- Pageviews
- Pages per session
- Average session duration
- Bounce rate
- % New sessions
- Conversion rate
- Referral sources
- Community engagement
- Individual page performance
- Purchases
- Average order value
Use more than one analytics tool to track your results. Google Analytics is a good start, but you should also use paid tools like Heap and Kissmetrics.
9 tips and tricks to support your B2B inbound marketing strategy
Nine tips and tricks to successfully implement an inbound marketing strategy are as follows:
1. Blogs
Blogs are necessary to increase traffic to your website as part of your inbound marketing strategy. Write at least one blog per week that is well-organized, well-written, and provides new information. It can take up to 18 months to see results from your blogs in terms of increased traffic.
2. Video content
Video content has become increasingly popular in recent years, and so it plays a big role in inbound marketing strategy. This content can come in many different forms, such as product demos and video blogs to customer testimonials. However, it’s important to make sure the presentation is done well, as audiences can be unforgiving. Your videos should look professional.
3. Email marketing
Email marketing is important for inbound marketing. Keep customers engaged with regular updates and targeted content.
4. Lead nurturing workflows
Digital marketing tools can help businesses automate their lead nurturing workflows. For example, a buyer who visits your pricing page can be added to a workflow and given content that is relevant to the various stages of the buyer funnel.
5. Advanced content creation
Advanced content is a type of content that covers a specific topic in-depth. It can come in the form of a whitepaper, case study, how-to guide, ebook, etc. This type of content is valuable because it can generate new leads and move existing leads further along the sales funnel.
A useful way to demonstrate your business expertise and talent to potential customers is to produce around one piece of advanced content per month.
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