The marketing landscape is forever changing. Today, B2B marketers have countless digital marketing tactics available to execute their strategies. While some may not be applicable or appropriate for your business model or brand, several “core” tactics are at the heart of effective B2B marketing campaigns. 

It’s more important now than ever for professional service businesses to stay up to date and consider all the options. Today’s competitive environment demands being nimble and adapting quickly. 

Covering a range of marketing channels will expand your reach, brand awareness and influence. However, making sure those channels are integrated to offer the seamless customer experience your buyer wants will result in a strategy that drives business results.

The Power of Inbound Marketing

The concept of inbound marketing is simple. By using individual tactics, such as content and social media, you draw customers into your business’ sphere of influence and provide them with an exploratory journey that creates connection with your brand. 

Executing this well is a whole different story. Delivering an excellent customer experience is key. 

One way of articulating your goal might be to take your customers from the “Top of the Funnel” (i.e. awareness, informational queries, general questions) to the “Bottom of the Funnel” (i.e. a qualified lead who is ready to buy a specific product or service). However, a successful inbound strategy aims to create more than buyers. 

By focusing on creating content that is a service and an experience, your buyers become brand evangelists who multiply both your reach and brand value. 

We’re going to walk you through some of the most effective inbound marketing tactics available for B2B today and show you how you can begin to implement these tactics into your own business for massive results. 

Designing an Engaging Customer Experience

It’s essential for your team to be strategic in their execution. 

Identifying your marketing plan early and setting targets for your key performance indicators (KPIs) will help your business stay on top of the data and monitor your progress.

Your team will need to  decide on the marketing tactics they are going to pursue within a defined period and with a defined budget. In a fast paced environment, it’s easy to be thrown off course or intrigued by the newest, shiniest toy.

Pick your priorities so you don’t draw your resources too thin. You need to ensure that your marketing efforts work as a whole. Combining multiple marketing strategies and breaking down silos between them allows the customer journey to flow naturally from investigation to an eventual purchase.

Content Marketing

One of the most effective long-term inbound marketing techniques is content marketing. It is also a fantastic lead generation strategy and way to nurture relationships with customers.

Used to bring new prospects and customers into your business through organic search traffic, content builds authority, trust, and educates your customer. Content is far more than just blog posts, white papers, and case studies. It encompasses everything from video marketing and digital events, to your knowledgebase and product descriptions.

Creating high-quality content means marketing to the whole individual across the whole customer journey. Using the full range of types of b2b content marketing formats available, you can speak to all personality types. You can also answer your prospects’ most important questions, address their needs and ambitions, help them make sense of their world, and being mindful of their concerns.

Make it a priority to create content that engages your audience – inject a little personality and don’t be boring! This means creating content that educates, entertains, and provides a service to your audience.

By following an SEO-focused content creation process, you can ensure you’re using your resources to create content that your target audience is actively searching for. Consistently aiming for quality and creating authoritative, comprehensive work will help your content to rank with search engines like Google. 

Once you’re appearing high enough on the search engine rankings for your selected search terms, you’ll begin to see an increase in traffic to your website. From here, your content needs to encourage people to engage. Every page of your site should provide a clear call to action, inviting people to sign up for your email list, book an exploratory call, or obtain a quote.

Content Marketing with Video

If you haven’t already explored video as part of your content marketing strategy, now is the time. Video is huge.

While a video marketing strategy isn’t easy to execute, it can create a solid foundation for your business and reach a segment of your target market that you wouldn’t have been able to reach otherwise.

If your business is open to pursuing video as a marketing channel and has the resources to execute a video marketing strategy, YouTube is an excellent place to find leads and prospective customers. Data shows that nearly half of all internet users globally watch YouTube on a monthly basis. Best of all, many Google search results contain YouTube videos, making it an excellent source of organic traffic. 

Additionally, using video on social media is an effective way to engage your audience and provide them with an exciting and accessible way to view and absorb your content.

Content Marketing with Digital Events

Depending on your resources and how your customers interact with businesses in your industry, hosting an online event can be a great way to create connection with both prospective and existing customers.

When people attend a webinar or other digital event you host, they can follow your call to action at the end of the webinar to work with your company. Event attendees will also provide you with contact information as part of the registration process, allowing you to follow up with them afterwards.

Conference live streams, digital experiences, panel discussions, and AMAs (ask-me-anything) on social media have been growing in popularity. Hybrid events, in particular, featuring a combination of in-person and online sessions, are becoming increasingly popular.

Providing the ability to register for on-demand access after the broadcast of the live event extends the life of  your event and improves your ROI.

Incorporating Digital PR

Most customers and clients require several “touches” to get to know your business before they convert. The more your brand is visible, the more opportunities prospective buyers have to interact and engage with your company.

Building a solid PR campaign around your business and being seen across a broad range of media outlets - such as websites, podcasts, events, or influencers’ platforms - will get your name out there and allow more people to learn about your offer. 

This can be accomplished by collaborating with brands that have similar communities and audiences to your own. Work on creating partnerships with these complementary brands as well as industry influencers. 

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a great way to build brand awareness, engage prospects with your business, and bring prospective customers into your business’s pipeline. Millions of people rely on social media as a major source of news and information, making it an important part of a complete marketing strategy.

Sharing the latest information on your business, your achievements, and any recently-posted articles on social media is an excellent way to stay top of mind with your buyers.

There’s been a general “consumerisation” of B2B marketing over the past few years. Business buyers and leaders are often millennials and, increasingly, Gen-Z. Appealing to them means dropping the stuffy, formal, “business” persona. 

Creative, more personal approaches can often bear more fruit, and social media is the ideal channel for this more informal approach. You might choose to experiment with cultivating a B2B marketing presence on less business focused sites such as Pinterest and TikTok. However, even LinkedIn is getting in on the act, so see how you can loosen your tie online to bring in additional revenue.

It’s worth bearing in mind that to be self-reliant, brands need to build a bridge from social media platforms to their own, driving potential customers from the social media ecosystem into their own pipelines.  

You can use social media to create a sense of community around your offering, and encourage users into direct engagement with the brand. Just don’t be fooled into thinking that social media engagement is the be all and end all. Just as website visitors are not tangible leads, neither are likes and follows.

Paid Search & Social Advertising

Paid advertising is one of the fastest ways to promote your business and see the effects of your marketing straight away. While your organic strategies are building up, your business can begin to generate awareness and sales through paid advertising on search engines and social media sites. 

With an organic search strategy and SEO, your business it may take several months to begin to see traction, depending on the current authority of your website in the eyes of search engines. This is in contrast with paid advertising, where you’ll start getting customers immediately following the approval of your campaign. Once your ads have been approved (typically 24-48 hours on most platforms), they’ll immediately begin serving to your desired audience.

The primary channels for online advertising include:

• Search advertising - Text ads that show up within the organic search results, such as those on Google and Bing.

• Display advertising - Image or video ads that show on websites relevant to your niche, commonly appearing in the header, footer, content body, and sidebar.

• Social media advertising - Social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and TikTok provide advertisers with the opportunity to show ads to their users. They provide a vast amount of targeting options and data, allowing you to keep a very close eye on your campaigns and adjust as required.

In addition to providing a short cut in the early days, the data derived from paid online advertising is a valuable form of market research. Use PPC insights as a complementary source of data to enhance your organic efforts.

Retargeting and Remarketing

Retargeting campaigns, also known as “remarketing”, allows you to re-engage with people who have already interacted with your business. 

For example, you can create custom audiences on a number of advertising platforms that consists solely of individuals who have visited your website in the last 30-days. You can then create an advertising campaign directed solely at those who are on your remarketing list. 

Email Marketing

Email rounds out your marketing strategy. Sending a simple email has been a powerful marketing tool for years. Most people use their email every day to respond to personal questions, discuss work-related topics, and browse the latest from the media and publications they follow.

High-quality leads are the lifeblood of any B2B business. By building a bridge from other inbound sources to your own platform, email marketing is what gives you the opportunity to nurture prospects and turn casual relationships into customer relationships. 

You should also use email to keep the lines of communication open and develop your experiences for clients post-sale, especially your most valuable buyers. It’s not only a great way to get “clients for life”, but it turns buyers into people who actively promote your business to others. 

Luckily, frequent and relevant communications can be easily achieved using sophisticated automation tools. You can segment your customers and communicate with them based on their areas of interest and interactions with your business. Scheduled campaigns and automated workflows can be triggered to deliver content at precisely the right moment. Dynamic email can also be used to create an extra layer of personalisation. 

Marketing Automation

Automating certain aspects of your business and using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning allows you integrate your marketing tactics and co-ordinate the entire customer journey. It also allows you to implement personalisation and interactive marketing with your clients at scale.

Although this is not an exhaustive list, you can use marketing automation for:

• Connecting your marketing channels to your CRM, creating a 360 degree view of your leads.

• Automatic lead nurturing and re-engagement campaigns.

• Customer education and onboarding.

• Re-engagement campaigns.

• List management and buyer personas, including tagging or segmenting your best clients.

• Automatic lead scoring systems based on interactions with your company online.

• Instant text messages and follow up notifications for your team.

• Phone calls and appointments between your sales team and prospects.

• Calendar management and appointment booking.

• Analytics, marketing attribution, report creation and pipeline management.

By tracking customer interactions and using automation throughout, you can deliver the right content to the right person at the right time and create an engaging digital customer experience.

Account-Based Marketing

An account based marketing (ABM) approach uses all of these techniques to engage with your most important and high-value customers. The power of personalised marketing cannot be overlooked. Your prospective clients want to know that they’re important to you. They also want to see the benefits of your product or service and exactly how it’ll help them improve their own lives. 

ABM strategies start with your sales and marketing teams working together to select a list of priority targets. You then create and deliver campaigns designed talk to those specific targets’ pain points. Marketing automation allows you to track the effectiveness of your efforts and, when they are ready for personal outreach, your sales team can reach out to take things further.

Bringing It All Together

As you can see, there are a lot of moving parts to a  well rounded inbound marketing strategy. If you would like to have a conversation about how to break down your marketing silos and create a strategy that is more than the sum of its parts, we’d love to talk.