B2B buyer behavior has changed, and that means your marketing needs to change along with it. Digital marketing allows you to get in front of your customer and get them to take the next step with you. Make sure you understand what’s working now in digital marketing, so you know what tactics you need to deploy in 2021. Find out how social selling, video marketing, and LinkedIn advertising should all be part of your digital marketing strategy.
Social Selling
The sad truth is that buyers don’t always buy the best solutions. While we would like to think they do, what they actually buy are solutions that they can understand from people that they like. This is precisely why sales and marketing need to work together better, because while getting a prospect to understand your solution is marketing’s job, people buy from people they like, and that’s a sales function.
If your business is going to be successful in 2021, it’s imperative for your sales and marketing teams to work together. At the heart of social selling is getting your sales reps to engage with your prospects digitally, everywhere from social media channels to video conferencing tools. Marketing teams need to prepare the sales teams to be successful.
One-to-Many
Marketing’s job is to talk about thought processes: the problems you solve, what to change, why to change, and how to change. When we talk to customers, we’re trying to communicate the problems that we can solve and how we would recommend they go about solving problems.
One-to-One
Sales’ job is to start a conversation: building relationships, unique challenges, what’s possible, and gaining consensus. When a sales rep talks to a customer, their job is really to build relationships. They are looking to understand how to apply what your business does to a specific environment.
Help set up your sales team for success with these tips for social selling:
- Update LinkedIn profiles
- Connect with MQLs
- Share your content
- Engage
Video Marketing
People would rather watch the Internet than read the Internet. That means when you’re working video into your strategy for 2021, you’re creating media in a format that people actually want to consume.
Things have shifted because of the pandemic, and video, in particular, is something that has changed. Events that used to be in person are now happening virtually, such as webinars. But there’s some good news out of that, something you can use. Once you have something in video format, you can leverage that content in a lot of different ways. For example, a webcast shouldn’t only be viewed the one time that it is live. That video can be put on your website, and it can also be repurposed into other content, such as blog posts.
Another reason to incorporate video marketing into your digital marketing strategy is for the search benefits. SEO is important for B2B businesses, and YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. That means without having video, you can’t even get onto the second most important search engine.
Video marketing statistics:
- 59% of B2B executives prefer video over text.
- Putting video on your social media channels and on your website will get you 1200% more engagement than just text.
- You can get an 80% boost to conversion rates when you have video on a landing page.
How can you use video marketing to engage buyers?
- Blog to videos
- Lives/Webcasts/Webinars
- Personalized sales videos
- ABM videos
Don’t Forget About LinkedIn
LinkedIn has become a major player when it comes to B2B digital marketing. What is it that sets LinkedIn apart?
- Professional data
- Business context
- Advertising products
- Targeting
Unlike other social media platforms, users go to LinkedIn specifically for business purposes. LinkedIn has become, by far, the number one business context website in the world. For comparison, monthly visitors:
- Wall Street Journal – 30 million
- Forbes – 63 million
- LinkedIn – 400 million
There are over 740 million people on LinkedIn right now, and it just keeps growing. Because users maintain their own personal profiles, there is incredible first-person data available, and LinkedIn is able to use that information for targeting. That also makes it a great source for you to get targeted awareness and to generate leads for your business.
Here are just a couple of ways you can use LinkedIn in your 2021 digital marketing strategy:
Native lead generation capability – LinkedIn allows you to generate a lead natively without having to send somebody to a landing page on your website where they have to fill out the form. This produces incredible conversion rates.
LinkedIn Events – You can easily set up an event on LinkedIn. Once your event is created, you can do a search inside of LinkedIn, looking for people that you think would benefit from the event, and you can send out invitations through LinkedIn. We did this for a recent webinar event and experienced a 35% conversion rate, and the whole process cost zero dollars.
If you want to know more about how to use LinkedIn for your B2B marketing efforts, don’t miss our Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn B2B Marketing.
Digital is the Future of B2B Marketing
Digital marketing leads to more awareness, more leads, and more success. If you’re going to be successful in 2021, you need to be utilizing a strategic digital marketing strategy. If you’ve been frustrated with your digital marketing performance, Vende Digital can help. Schedule a complimentary Discovery Meeting and we’ll provide you with fresh ideas and actionable insights to get your marketing back on track.
What’s Working Now in Digital Marketing: Key Takeaways
- B2B buyer behavior has changed, and your marketing needs to change along with it.
- Understand what’s working now in digital marketing, so you know what tactics you need to deploy in 2021.
- Social selling, video marketing, and LinkedIn advertising should all be part of your strategy.
- Digital marketing leads to more awareness, more leads, and more success.
