These days, digitalization is a part of who we are. It has managed to leave an indelible impact on anything and everything, including the way businesses market their products and services. As per marketing research undertaken recently, online marketing has incurred the highest expenditure by a majority of B2B companies since the pandemic years. With the prevailing cutthroat competition, it has become more than important to keep shedding the spotlight on your company. So, B2B companies' rising competition and "hard-to-keep-up" marketing trends necessitate market presence enhancement. But how? Let’s find out in detail.
Understanding B2B Marketing
Abbreviation for “business-to-business”, B2B is a type of business model which involves selling of products and services to companies and not just consumers. However, as compared to B2C marketing, this sort of marketing is difficult to perform since the chain of command is longer here and the sales cycle is longer. It all boils down to one thing: making other brands well-acquainted with your brand via marketing tactics such as SEO to generate lucrative leads. Today, there are multiple B2B channels that are bound to connect a brand to its target audience. The major ones include:
B2B Email Marketing
A tried-and-tested method, it enables businesses to reach out to other businesses via compelling emails. It is noteworthy that the B2B clientele base is hungry for positive ROI and logic. In such a scenario, an email can serve as a powerful vehicle to brand your business. Make sure that the email designs show up correctly on mobile as well as PCs. This forces a user to have a glance at the email rather than simply dumping it into the trash folder.
B2B Digital Marketing
This type of B2B marketing involves paid ad campaigns, search engine optimization and an appealing landing page for your products and services. With a proficient digital marketing strategy, brands can render products and services based on location and market based on the personal data collected.
B2B Content Marketing
As mentioned above, a B2B clientele base focuses on expertise and logic. So, what better marketing tool can fulfil this requirement than content marketing? It is worthy of your attention that a proper content marketing strategy can add valuable information, not just PR content, to the platter served to your B2B potential clients. This kind of B2B marketing offers companies the opportunity to showcase the buyer’s journey in the most transparent manner possible. Diverse facets of content, such as webinars, e-books, video content, etc., should be tested to see what format successfully attracts the target audience in huge numbers.
B2B Social Media Marketing
A hard-to-digest fact: C-suite executives and B2B companies do shop on virtual platforms. And social media tends to play a vital role in this. Nothing can be as effective as social media in exhibiting the initial phases of a buyer’s journey. A B2B company can seamlessly lay the foundation of its brand via an online personality and can humanize its business by leveraging the true potential of social media. While social media accounts might not result in frequent conversions, you never know when your follower base might convert to customers. One of the best ways to do this is to exhibit your company’s work culture. It showcases not only what you are selling but also what’s going on behind the curtain.
Online presence can prove instrumental in practicing these types effectively. It can help you secure a competitive advantage over your competitors. But is that it? Not really.
The Role of Increased Online Visibility in B2B Marketing
Having a distinguished online presence will help a B2B company in:
Attracting Potential Buyers
By elevating your position on the digital ladder, you can attract potential buyers. As more and more customers land on your website, you will have more chances of converting them. Additionally, you will be able to walk a potential buyer through your products or services in a more effective manner. With buyers converting and frequenting your website, your business will be able to mint exorbitant revenues.
Generating More Organic Traffic.
Believe it or not, an amplified digital presence can help you get one of the top Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rankings. This can not only earmark your brand or business as reliable and worthwhile but it will also help you generate more organic traffic. This, in turn, will drive in more clients.
Analyzing SEO Campaigns.
Any and every B2B company that is investing in an SEO marketing campaign wishes to see results. You must know that key performance indicators (KPIs) help in tracking these campaigns. One such KPI is search engine visibility. Enhanced visibility will culminate in more organic search traffic, the right keyword targeting, and broadened audience outreach. On the other hand, a decrease in website visibility might be a sign that you need to revamp your SEO campaign.
Now, let’s delve into some of the practical B2B marketing solutions that can help you manifest an elevated online presence in the digital landscape.
6 Practical Solutions to Strengthen Your Online Presence in the B2B Marketing World
Here are a handful of tried-and-tested solutions that can help a B2B company optimize its online presence:
- Have An Appealing Website.
Simply having a webpage listing your product and services is not enough. As per numerous marketing surveys, it has been found that for half of all B2B companies, websites are a crucial deciding factor. If it is not in alignment with their expectations, then they are likely to never visit it again. Moreover, as mentioned above, B2B sales cycles are usually longer than B2C cycles. This is because of the involvement of a lot of key players, such as decision-makers and buyers, to name a few. Websites are one of the most powerful and straightforward tools to broadcast information related to the products and services rendered by your B2B company. Henceforth, it is recommended that you have a customer-centric and engaging website. Keep in mind the following aspects while designing a website or even during a major revamp:
- Make Your Website Fast: It is imperative to have a website that loads quickly. You have several options: you can use an innovative content delivery network (CDN), switch partners or hosting plans, or compress your images.
- Have a Secure Website: Given the tremendous rise in cyberattacks, it has become necessary to have a website that is secure. Make sure that it is built on a trusted platform, features an SSL certificate, and comes equipped with all the requisite security badges. If cost is a concern, affordable SSL options are available on the market. Simply conduct a search to find them.
- Has a Cross-Device Display: Today, half of the world is connected via mobile phones. If your website has a wonderful desktop interface and a poor mobile interface, then you may end up missing the mammoth mobile user base. Thus, it is recommended to have a cross-device responsive website to foster a seamless browsing experience.
- Optimize it for search engines: Make sure to incorporate long-tailed keywords and relevant meta titles and descriptions in your webpage’s content. This will help in improving its visibility across SERPs.
- Have a branding style: In the sea of B2B companies, it is difficult to stand out. But with a structured branding style, you can establish a brand identity. With a set range of hex code colours or font styles, you can foster instantaneous brand recognition.
So, the next time you are working on your website, incorporate these to elevate your online presence.
- Optimize Your Search Engine.
While we will all agree that a B2B website needs to be informative as well as engaging, above all, it should be discoverable. According to a Google survey, a whopping 71% of B2B companies start their research from that URL box! Therefore, it's crucial to increase your discoverability if you want to attract the right kind of customers. And this is where SEO comes into the picture. With technical, off-page and on-page SEO tactics, you can make your website rank higher. But all you need to oversee is the strategic implementation of these techniques. From image alt-text to external linking, all these can be leveraged to their full potential to give you great visibility.
- Stick To One CTA Per Email.
For all those B2B companies that have been sending personalized e-mails to their potential clients and for those who are thinking of venturing into automated e-mail marketing, it is worth your attention that there should be only one call-to-action (CTA) per e-mail. In this manner, you allow your audience to stay clear and not get perplexed about “what next?”. You can send blog newsletters, blog post announcements, monthly newsletters, notifications about new product offerings, and company culture sneak peeks to your existing or would-be clients. This can bring you tons more website visits than multiple CTAs could ever have.
- Create Quality Content.
While content is the king, quality is its crown. And without a crown, a king is not a king. Quality content marketing can help nurture the company-customer relationship and bestow on your customers a valid reason to pay frequent visits to your website. Evidently, it is important to post or circulate content that is relevant in the eyes of your target audience and persuasive in nature. As per a survey, it has been reported that 62% of B2B customers decided to make purchases because they were influenced by the digital content they consumed. This may include articles, blogs, case studies, eBooks, guides, infographics, video marketing, webinars, and white papers. No matter what type of content you serve your audience with, it should be novel, engaging and, most of all, solve an existing life problem. Always remember that quality content is your magnet for more website visits and conversions.
- Keep Your Social Media Handles Updated And Identical.
One of the ways to get visible online is to trigger a sense of familiarity amongst your customers. This can be easily done by creating updated and identical social media profiles on different social media platforms. A company’s Facebook page with no profile picture or Instagram handle with a missing bio can foster untrustworthiness. In the same vein, imagine seeing a company’s page whose Facebook profile picture or tagline differs from that on Instagram. You are more likely to never visit these pages again, right? So, it is imperative to keep all your social media handles updated and identical.
- Run PPC Campaigns.
To round out their online presence, a B2B company can indulge in PPC or pay-per-click, advertising. This allows frequent renditions of your content to new audiences via search engines and advertising platforms. To fetch the highest number of potential customers, simply pay to target relevant product or service categories. Apart from the products and services offered, you can exhibit your brand’s personality, make an announcement for an upcoming blog, or even display your brand’s tagline. It is suggested that you boost content that your target audience can relate to.
The Bottom Line
B2B marketing isn’t just about increasing conversions. But it is also about the values and trust that your brand or business brings to the table, which can be best conveyed when you are visible on the global digital landscape. Your marketing tactic should clearly communicate how your brand or business can be instrumental for theirs and there you go!
