Are you ready for 2020? Do you know how you’re going to hit your targets? Do you even know what targets to shoot for? Don’t worry; Vende is here to help. We are Keeping it 2020 (link to 2020 blog) all year long to help marketers hit their goals with helpful content, useful tips, fresh ideas, and effective “How-Tos.” We believe one of the first pieces to put in place is your Digital B2B Marketing Strategy. To develop a solid plan, you need to think through each of the following key steps starting with the foundation and then working through each pillar.
Ultimate Guide to Developing a Successful Digital B2B Marketing Strategy
We believe one of the first pieces to put in place is your Digital B2B Marketing Strategy. To develop a solid plan, you need to think through each of the following key steps starting with the foundation and then working through each pillar.
Foundational Elements to your B2B Digital Strategy
- Where are you GROWing – At Vende, we call this the WoW; Why do you exist? And Where are you growing? Every good digital marketing plan needs to start with the answer to these questions.
- Who are our Customers? – You can’t be everything to everybody. It is important to understand the types of customers you are best able to serve and then build personas around them.
- What does winning look like – Without effective Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), you will never be able to tune and optimize your efforts. Identify the easy to measure (pass/fail) leading and lagging metrics that drive the business forward.
5 Key Pillars of your B2B Digital Strategy:
- Content – The critical first step is to determine the content your prospects want/need from you and to maximize its impact through pre-purposing, recycling, and repurposing.
- Social – To reach buyers on mobile and on the platforms where they spend most of their time online, you need to be in social in a big way in 2020. For most B2B, that means LinkedIn, but not just your company presence on LinkedIn, but also leveraging your sales teams’ presence with social selling.
- Search – The best channel for bottom-of-the-funnel buyers is still B2B Search Engine Optimization. However, Google has made some big changes in their search results that are impacting how visitors get to your site. It’s important that you leverage new strategies to stay relevant.
- Online Advertising – Online Advertising is an absolute best-buy for B2Bs right now. Targeting buyers on sites like LinkedIn is effective and affordable, but you have to have the right mix of tactics and focus on 3 key strategies of the buying process to get great results.
- Nurturing – 85% of the leads produced on B2B websites are NOT sales-ready. Having a good pre-, during-, and post-conversion nurturing strategy is critical to stay top-of-mind, while aiding the buyer, and not clogging your sales pipeline with prospects who are not ready.
Overcoming the Top 3 Challenges for B2Bs Marketers in 2020
What are your big hurdles in 2020? We have found that most B2B marketers and sales teams are struggling with these big 3 challenges:
Challenge #1:
According to Gartner, 85% of the buyer journey is happening without a salesperson in the room. With ubiquitous access to information, buyers today prefer to go on a self-guided journey through the buying process.
Takeaway: Overcome this challenge by producing more sales and marketing content to aid and educate the buyer and promote the content in social channels where they spend the majority of their time. This enables you to be a part of the conversation while they are self-educating.
Challenge #2:
Another major challenge is producing a steady flow of B2B leads and opportunities. Now that the buyer has more control than ever, and the seller isn’t the primary source of knowledge to help make an informed buying decision, B2B demand generation has become more challenging than ever.
Takeaway: This challenge is actually an opportunity in disguise. While it has become more difficult to generate B2B leads using traditional methods like cold calling and email marketing, there are huge opportunities for businesses willing to pivot and adopt new strategies like social selling, content marketing, and social advertising. However, it requires a Digital Strategy to ensure these new tactics are working in concert.
Challenge #3:
Inefficient sales processes are bogging down the seller’s ability to actually sell. According to Hubspot, sellers today are only spending, on average, 34% of their time selling. They spend the majority of their time on tasks like writing emails, attending meetings, and producing their own sales collateral.
Takeaway: Leveraging an integrated marketing automation and CRM system to automate repetitive processes and provide a library of sales and marketing collateral, is by far the best way to overcome this challenge. When well-written emails, brochures, case studies, etc. are at the fingertips of your sales team and they have the visibility to see which prospects are active and “hot,” sellers can make much better use of their time and focus on buyers who are ready to engage.
What do Buyers Expect From You Online?
Today’s B2B Buyer is looking for a frictionless and personalized experience. They want useful information that will aid in the buying process in modalities that work for them (blog, video, audio). They want easy access to your sales team, but they don’t want to be hounded by them. Digital Marketing plus Social Selling is the key to giving the buyer what they want when they want it.
To be successful in 2020, build your B2B Digital Marketing plan from the outside in and focus on how you can best serve the customer regardless of where they are in the process.
