Best Digital Marketing Strategies for B2B Business

Business-to-business (B2B), also called B-to-B, is a form of transaction between businesses, such as one involving a manufacturer and wholesaler, or a wholesaler and a retailer. Business-to-business refers to a business conducted between companies, rather than between a company and an individual consumer. Business-to-business stand in contrast to business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-government (B2G) transactions.

Digitisation has fundamentally changed the marketing and sales strategies of B2C (business-to-consumer)companies. Offline advertising spaces such as print ads are becoming increasingly unpopular. In the online world, on the other hand, the customer is made aware of the provider’s current offers through dynamic banners or search engine ads (SEA).

In today’s fast-changing era, it is very important to adapt to the marketing needs and expectations of your audience. Digital marketing is a tool to expand your business per market and customer requirements. This blog explains to you in detail the best digital marketing strategies for B2B businesses-

1- Create a relevant and responsive website:

Nowadays whenever anyone learns about any business the first thing they do is search them online. Websites add credibility to your business. Merely making a website is not enough in today's era. The website needs to be responsive and interact in every sense. Your website must speak for itself and it should create a user-friendly atmosphere in order to retain visitors. Nowadays people spend more time on mobile phones than laptops hence your website must be all platform friendly whether android, IOS, windows etc. The more platform-friendly websites you make the more traffic it will generate. 

In order to make your website responsive, an Artificial Intelligence induced chat box should be there so that visitors' initial doubts can get clarified at the first stage only. Some more useful tips for a relevant website for your company 

1. Give the option of requesting a quote and calling back
2. Add links to your social media handles in order to increase the visibility
3. Keep your website regularly updated and monitored
4. To increase credibility feature testimonials and clients review
5. Add option of customer ratings

Regular audit of content is very important especially in the case of a B2B business website because lots of stakeholders are involved in B2B business. It is important to realize that strategies which are followed in B2C business are not all applicable in B2B business hence one must have a clear strategy to increase business when it comes to B2B because when a B2B company researches a product or service, it can be a long process. It requires lots of patience and perseverance to run a B2B business but with the right amount of hard work, smartness and direction your company can become a brand in itself with time.

2. Efficient content marketing with search engine optimization

Content is extremely important in today’s era. The CEO of lenskart said in a show that content is the future. Future belongs to those who know how to manage content strategically. Content marketing is itself a niche skill which needs to be used with proper tools. Search engine optimization(SEO) is a tool to make your content market suitable. There are several strategies involved in making your content SEO equipped such as:

• First, determine the keywords that need to be involved in the content.
• Length of the article.
• Target audience.
• Non-plagiarized otherwise googles analytics will dump your website at the lowest rank.
• Analyzing the existing article and doing a proper outline of it.

It is extremely important to optimize articles in a way in which Google ranks them at the top. This research and analysis is extremely important and will help you understand what kind of article Google thinks is better for such queries. Length of article is extremely important in SEO. Ideally, SEO-equipped articles must be at least 2100+ words otherwise SEO will not have a proper effect. If your goal is to Rank#1 on search, you need to take these extra steps to stand out hence analysing the top 10 results for your target keyword.

We talk a lot about the importance of SEO-optimized data but at the same time, it is also important to understand what is SEO?

SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization, which is the process of getting traffic from free, organic, editorial, or natural search results in search engines. It aims to improve your website’s position on search results pages.

Another marketing tactic to improve SEO is blogging. Your website should not restrict itself to internal author blogging but also guest blogging, influencer blogging and testimonials. This increases the credibility of the product/services and content of your website.

Reel creation is a new form of marketing strategy, it engages the audience in the fastest way. Video blogging and reels creation should get featured and other forms such as infographics, e-books, white papers, and case studies. Creating a blog, reels, and video will set you apart from your competitors and result in you becoming a leader in your industry domain.

3. Harnessing the potential of social media marketing.

Social media marketing has been defined as the utilization of social media technologies, channels, and software to create, communicate, deliver, and exchange offerings that have value for an organization’s stakeholders. Social selling entails the utilization of social media platforms for: 

1) understanding, 

2) connecting,

3) engaging influencers, prospects and existing customers at relevant customer purchasing journey touchpoints for building valuable business relationships.

Thus, organizations are starting to use social media to leverage relationships with customers during various sales and marketing processes 

According to Richard Branson-Social platforms are no longer add-ons to a business’s communication budget; they should be central to its marketing strategy and used in coordination with other marketing efforts

Hence, companies should use social platforms just as they use more traditional platforms to support their business.

In fact, 83% of B2B marketers use social media marketing, the second most popular channel after search engine marketing. When it comes to the platforms B2B businesses use there are some that help drive engagement better than others. As you can see from the data below, LinkedIn comes out on top to engage B2B audiences followed by Twitter and Facebook. 

Social media marketing also helps B2B companies reach and collaborate with their business partners. Facebook found that business executives were 74% more likely to be on their platform, and were 2 times more active on Facebook than other types of users.

Business users use social platforms as a way to coordinate activities, build social connections, engender trust, and other activities in support of strong, collaborative relationships.

According to this research into B2B Social media marketing by Omobono: In a survey of 115 marketing specialists in B2B roles, Omobono found that 79% rated social media as the most effective marketing channel, with 38% noting that if they had the extra budget for next year, they would spend it on social media.

Tips to use social media by B2B businesses:

• By offering content one can use social media successfully:
• Industry hacks and useful strategies
• Industry news
• Solutions
• Advertising about updates  to your products/services
• Client reviews and testimonials 
• Case studies and Whitepapers on your website
• Video testimonials
• Links to instructional videos made by your company

In social media marketing, one thing that needs to be kept in mind is that you should not over-pitch any of your sales. Your content informs and engages to spike curiosity and direct people to your services.

4. Optimizing online and offline marketing

Offline marketing is exactly what it says it is - any type of marketing that is not on the internet. These are also called traditional marketing techniques. They are the activities brands would carry out before the internet.By combining an online and offline marketing strategies financial institutions can expand their range and contrary to popular belief, this doesn’t necessarily mean disproportionate expenses.

Some useful tips for integrating offline and online marketing:

• Understand your Client- Analyzing themes and messages in a more specialized way via a socio demographic segmentation in order to better understand their interests, concerns, etc.Surveys via social media or in person via local branches by asking a series of questions you can get to know your existing customers’ interests and what potential customers want from their financial institutions.

• Prioritizing Goals- Establish a specific objective for each of the actions you intend to carry out and make sure you can measure their impact. Unless you can measure results, you will not be able to know how efficient the action is or what the channel does for your target audience. Not only will you need to have a specific goal for each action, but also a common goal for all of them to ensure cohesion.

• Optimum Marketing Strategy- It is beneficial for both online and offline because the target audience is the same.In order to ensure a message transitions smoothly between online and offline channels you can turn online interactions into offline actions and vice versa. Take advantage of the successes Achieved in one channel and use them in another one. Offline news is also an excellent source of content for online discussions. Y

• Keep It Simple and Be Creative- Ambiguity and confusion can definitely have an extremely negative effect on customers. Creativity is another major ingredient to captivating audiences. By personalizing their experience, institutions can make users identify with the company, feel it understands their wants and needs and feel cherished. A positive customer experience often leads them to put their trust in that institution.

5. PPC campaign 

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is an essential part of an effective digital marketing strategy for any business-to-business (B2B) company seeking to increase lead generation. PPC advertising allows businesses to showcase their products and services when users submit keyword-relevant queries to search engines like Google and Bing. These ads are displayed at the top of a search engine results page (SERP), and only cost the business money when a user clicks on their ad. The amount a company decides to bid on a keyword directly impacts where their ad will be located within a SERP. 

PPC advertising gives your companies the ability to bring in relevant, high-quality leads through organic search. Ads that are focused on the right keywords will match a user’s search intention and direct them to well-designed B2B website pages, where they can share their contact information to learn more about the product or service that got their interest. As PPC ads add more quality leads to the funnel, they could potentially turn into more sales.

• Using Data Analysis and tools

Data is critical, but how you use data depends on your role within the company. 

Once you contact someone in sales, they can help you figure out which product might suit your company’s needs. Once you start utilizing the tool, you can work with any size and type of data, whether it’s on-premises. 

Businesses need to remember the following principles:

• Clean and prepare data, to eliminate anomalies and customize analytics.
• Automate extraction to optimize capture processes.
• Clearly visualize data in a sophisticated analytics dashboard to uncover insights, trends, and bottlenecks as part of a process of continuous improvement.
• Create alerts to allow management to stay on top of fluctuations, milestones, or necessary actions.
• With these steps, organizations can create a fully optimized data handling process that provides them with a meaningful competitive advantage.