The great philosopher Yogi Berra famously said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” Too many B2B’s are not taking full advantage of digital marketing because they don’t know where they are going or the tools they can use to get there. However, most B2B companies want a plan to connect the dots between their corporate objectives and the role that digital marketing will play to achieve them. The truth is most marketing leaders aren’t confident their B2B digital marketing strategy is going to get them where they need to go.
Building a Successful B2B Digital Marketing Strategy
It is difficult to create a plan from scratch that hits the right audience at the right time with the right message. Some of the challenges B2B marketers face today are:
- Too many options to choose makes picking the right marketing mix more challenging and risky for scarce marketing investment.
- Buyers are often anonymous through most of the decision process and are leery of reaching out to a company or sales rep for answers. They would rather research on their own.
- Diluted or unclear messaging can confuse buyers about your offer and so they pass it up.
Due to these challenges, B2Bs often ignore digital altogether or they try a single tactic like pay per click (PPC) and hope for the best. By taking a step back and thinking about the prospective buyer and their needs during the sales process, B2B’s can build a B2B Digital Marketing Strategy that will work.
Do you have the right process in place to hit your company goals?
If you do have a process, are you confident it’s working? Scheduling a complimentary discovery meeting with Vende. We have helped hundreds of companies develop successful digital marketing plans and can take a look at what you are doing today and come up with some suggestions and ideas for improvement.
Once you develop a clear path that helps the buyer get what they need to make an informed decision, you should see increased lead conversion.
Keys to a successful B2B digital marketing strategy
All good plans start with understanding the desired outcome, the “where are you trying to go.” While it’s critical to understand the desired outcome, the outcome is actually out of your control. The process is all you really control. This is why having a documented process is so critical. When the results aren’t there, you must focus on what needs to change in the process. This could be the message, the offer, the audience, or the channel/tactic.
All good B2B digital marketing strategies must include:
- An understanding of where you are trying to go (desired outcome), including leading and lagging key performance indicators (KPIs)
- Identifying your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP); those companies you can serve the best
- Understanding all the individual roles involved in the buying process (decision makers, influencers, knowledge workers, etc.)
- Identifying what prospective buyers really need/want
- Developing clear messaging around these needs/wants
- Developing and publishing content that speaks to the buyer and answers their questions
- Offering resources (eBook/guide, demo, webinar, etc.) to aid the buyer in overcoming their challenge or to get them closer to what they want
- Providing a clear process for obtaining these resources
- Delivering the right traffic to the best places within your website
- Developing a plan to nurture marketing qualified leads and to pass on sales qualified leads
- Using data and analytics to monitor and measure results based upon KPIs
Vende has developed a B2B marketing process that delivers predictable outcomes
Our process identifies the key dials within the framework that can be adjusted over time. We have developed, battle-tested, and refined this process over 20+ years. Hundreds of companies have used this process to hit their goals and win for their companies.
If you will follow the steps of our process, your website will start working for you. You’ll be able to build a full pipeline of marketing qualified leads we call “future buyers,” and when ready, pass along sales qualified leads (now buyers) to the sales team.
Our process is based on three principles:
Be There – Your company needs to understand your targeted prospects and where they like to hang out online. You need to show up in these places in a big way. Examples include sites like LinkedIn, Google, Business sites, etc.
Be Useful – Being there isn’t enough because your brand, and more importantly, your people engage with prospective buyers online, and you MUST be useful to them. You are not there to sell, you are there to help. Examples include providing resources like blog articles, curated articles, ebooks/guides, videos, webinars, etc.
Be accountable – Developing a process that includes a buyer journey with KPIs allow you to be accountable to the process. This enables you to take the emotions out of the equation, manage by exception, take educated guesses, and tweak/tune as needed.
With a good understanding of these three principles, you are now in a position to implement our B2B Demand Generation Framework.
4 Pillars to Success Using the Vende B2B Digital Marketing Process & Demand Generation Framework
The Vende B2B Lead Funnel Framework has 4 steps, Planning, Activating Audience, Establishing Authority, and Nurturing Relationships.
Planning – The critical first step that so many B2B companies overlook. Planning establishes the guardrails that are necessary to move a b2b digital marketing strategy forward.
Activate Audience – You must hang out where your ICP congregates and learns about ways to solve their business problems or achieve their objectives. This includes Search Engines (SEO/PPC), Social (organic & paid), and leveraging your employees (especially sales) online presence.
Establish Authority – Businesses won’t buy from you until they believe that you establish authority and empathy by showing that you are qualified to solve their problem and you care about solving their problem. The best place to accomplish this is on your website and blog.
Nurture Relationships – You can’t control when a buyer is ready to buy. You can only control that when they are ready to buy they think of you first. This is why nurturing relationships is so critical.
With these 4 Pillars flushed out and documented, you’ll be in a position to win for your business. However, developing a plan is just part of an overall process. Driving for results requires continual executing, measuring, refining and updating the plan for optimized performance. This is one of the main ways Vende helps clients win online. We develop the plan and then we refine and optimize the plan over time using our iterative optimization process.
Grab a copy of our B2B Lead Funnel Framework Workbook
We’ve baked all of our knowledge of the fundamentals of digital marketing into this 68 page Playbook. We’ll show you the same framework we use to generate qualified leads month after month for our full-service clients.
Yogi Berra was right
Successful companies succeed in digital because they take time to figure out where they are trying to go and how digital is going to get them there. Unsuccessful companies either do nothing or throw a lot of spaghetti against the wall and hope something will stick.
Spend time working through our 8 Steps to Success to take full advantage of digital marketing. Once you do, you’ll be able to build a full pipeline of “future buyers,” and pass along more “now buyers” to your sales team than ever before.
Can We Help?
To get your creative juices flowing, consider scheduling a complimentary initial consultation/discovery meeting with us. We can explore your current state and give you some ideas to consider. This will help jump-start the development of a successful digital marketing strategy that will produce positive results for your business.
