In the world of B2B marketing, there are several key tactics that every marketer needs in their 2023 digital marketing strategy. Whether you’re a marketer in manufacturing, healthcare, technology, logistics, or another B2B industry where the sales cycle is competitive and long, it’s essential to have a strong digital presence to gain new leads, make sales, and grow your business.
This Handbook: B2B Marketing Using Google & Paid Social goes into great detail, covering crucial need-to-knows about beginning your digital marketing strategy, and then dives further into SEO, SEM, Google Ads, and paid social. The sooner you get organized and develop a clear digital marketing strategy, the sooner you’ll start to see the rewards of all your time, effort, and money.
In this blog, we’re looking at three marketing tactics to include in your digital marketing strategy that will help get your company’s name in front of the right eyes, at the right time, to drive results.
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The resources you invest in SEO add up over time, ensuring ROI. As time passes and you continue to produce content, gain more links, and rank for more competitive keywords, you generate more organic traffic to your website. The main goal of SEO is to get your site as close as possible to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). Often, the top spots are held by industry giants with huge websites and arsenals of content, but it’s entirely possible to position yourself right behind them, and sometimes even overtake them!
Quick Tips for an Effective SEO Strategy
- Keep your content relevant and up to date to encourage link building
The more quality content you produce and the more interaction people have with your site, the more Google and other search engines will promote your pages and increase your ranking. - Always optimize your site and existing content based on user data
Analyze all the data you can gather about your site, the people who use it, and how they interact with your content to inform the ongoing optimization decisions you make. - Make life easy for yourself: start by tackling low-hanging-fruit keywords
Include low-hanging-fruit keywords in your content to generate more traffic. These could be new processes, terms, or simply a preferred way of wording something that others may not be using.
2. Paid Social
At its core, paid social is a common digital marketing strategy involving paying platforms, like Facebook or LinkedIn, to promote your content and brand. Seems simple enough if you have the money to invest, but there’s a lot more to it.
Anyone can pay to have their name front and center somewhere on the internet, but it’s your marketing team’s job to choose the channels that have the right audience for your product or service. Once the right channels are chosen, the challenge is creating unique content that attracts and engages readers, addresses needs, answers questions, and in general, offers clear solutions to real problems.
One of the best ways to plan a paid social strategy is to develop and understand your buyer personas. Buyer personas are detailed profiles of your hypothetical ideal clients. Effectively executed buyer personas can inform all aspects of your campaign, including the channels you choose to focus on, the type of content you should be producing, and the way you communicate.
Beyond personas, your paid social media marketing strategy should have clear, easily measurable goals. These goals should inform your overall strategy. Define your key performance indicators (KPIs), which are metrics used to measure the performance of a campaign. With the right KPIs, your digital marketing team can track your campaign in real time and adjust as necessary.
Not all social media platforms are appropriate for all organizations, so do your research and engage with those that are most popular with your audience.
Tips for Choosing the Best Paid Social Channel
- LinkedIn is focused on professionals and businesses. In the B2B landscape, LinkedIn is a fantastic platform for prospecting, establishing thought leadership, and even recruiting.
- Facebook is a mix of both personal and business users. It has a wealth of robust advertising features to help you target ads and generate strong leads.
- Twitter makes it easy to communicate directly with your audience in quick bursts. It’s great for sharing photos, links, and quick updates on services or features you want to advertise.
- Instagram is a more casual platform that’s focused on image posts and company culture. It promotes fast and direct communication with your audience, similar to Twitter.
Familiarize yourself with the pros and cons of each channel’s advertising capabilities, be selective, and keep your buyer personas in mind. A shotgun approach, or simply chasing whatever is new and hot will likely end up only wasting money and resources.
3. Google Ads
Most of the time, B2B customers do their own research to find products and services with the scale and features that suit their unique needs. If you’re targeting B2B buyers, your website needs to show up on search results. For many businesses, the only way to immediately show up on the first page of a search is by advertising with Google.
B2B advertising on Google is challenging, however. The highly competitive nature of paid search with a limited portfolio of keywords drives up cost per clicks. It’s difficult to attribute the true impact of paid search to your bottom line because B2B products and services tend to have a long sales cycle. These challenges can be troublesome for digital marketers. Luckily there are effective strategies to avoid waste and generate high-quality leads from paid ads.
Helpful Tips for Creating Paid Digital Ads
- Set up a relevant landing page so those who click your ad can take the next step.
- Carefully analyze your keyword options and be selective with your choices.
- Communicate with your sales team to help inform the discovery process.
- Ensure your keywords make sense for your buyers, both at the start and end of your funnel.
- If you’re building a keyword list from scratch, create a customer persona – a semi-fictional representation of your ideal client – as a clear guide on who you’re speaking to.
Get Started Today
Over time, new digital tools and techniques will be introduced, new social platforms will be built, and best practices will change and evolve. Ensure your marketing team stays up to date so that you don’t fall behind the curve. By making the most of current SEO, paid social, and Google Ads opportunities, you’ll be positioning yourself as a true leader in your industry.
To dive deeper into B2B marketing and how to make the most of SEO, paid social, and Google, download our free handbook below.
