The Best B2B Marketing Strategies for 2024

one of our first B2B clients at exposure ninja I think typified some of the challenges of B2B marketing they said to us we don't need loads of visitors to our website we just need the right ones the decision makers in this case that was HR leaders they said our Target customers don't know we exist they don't even know that they've got a problem that we can solve and that's the challenge for a lot of B2B marketers how do we get our offering in front of the right people the decision makers and educate and persuade them that we are the right solution for that problem well the good news is for this client we helped them work through that we helped them grow from startup to scale up we made them a thought leader in their space we helped them coin a new industry term that put them in a market of one and we got them to a cash exit in 5 years and we did all of this using what I'm going to show you today content marketing broad term what does it actually mean well for me content marketing is sucking the knowledge experience and expertise out of the heads of the people in your business and spewing it on the internet in a way that gets the attention of your potential customers and makes them fall in love with you now here's why content marketing is so effective in B2B your customers have very specific pain points and needs and in B2B marketing it's really important that we demonstrate expertise and experience in those exact needs this builds massive amounts of trust with your audience they can see that you know what you're talking about and if you can help these Target customers in some small Way by giving them some advice that's going to build trust trust with them that you can help them in a big way later on and let's not forget content marketing can be really high leverage some of the work I'm going to show you in a minute is create once generate leads forever thought leadership is a particular content marketing strategy where you elevate the position of someone inside the business to make them an expert across the field you then use this expert positioning to get them coverage and give them a platform across industry Publications let me show you an example this is an example of the business I talked about earlier we worked with them from the start to make Stuart Hearn their founder and CEO a real thought leader in the space we promoted him to a whole bunch of Publications both specific to HR which is their industry and general business Publications to give him a platform to publish content on now of course the reason this works so well is firstly it gives Stuart massive credibility it introduces him to the audience of these Publications and gives us a chance to communicate the principles behind the business and share share his expertise in the field that their software operated from an SEO perspective it's amazing cuz we can publish content on all these websites linking back to the client site to increase its ranking one of the keys to thought leadership is making sure that you or someone in the business has a clear position which they can use as a way of introducing the product or service to the market once you've got that it's a case of reaching out to the Publications in your space finding the writers or editors that write about these topics and pitching them on ideas is that are the sort of thing the audience of their publication is going to be interested in reading about another flavor of content marketing that can be really effective is case studies now we talked about case studies before so I'm not going to go into loads of detail here but basically there are two flavors of case studies you have interesting case studies which tend to be built around stories and generating results and solving someone's pain and then you have the boring case studies these are the ones that go into excessive technical detail that talk endlessly about the customer or client and their spefic specific pain Point most of the time these aren't particularly transferable and they're very boring for people to read so don't write them if you're solving a problem for your target audience you can also publish educational content this is a pretty broad range of possible content types including things like webinars and ebooks and downloadable guides and blog posts and knowledge-based topics and maybe even courses now the reason educational content can be such a powerful digital marketing strategy for B2B businesses is that you're able to partially fix someone's problem right there in the content for example look at this guide that we wrote for one of our clients during the pandemic now this business sells office management software so software that helps people clock in and clock out of an office building now we noticed that working patterns after the pandemic had shifted and lots of companies were thinking about hybrid work policies this was a new problem for them they'd never had to solve this before so we identified that the sort of people searching for how to write a hybrid work policy were the perfect customers for this particular client they needed help solving this problem so we wrote them a really detailed guide showing them exactly how to do this of course we mentioned our clients software throughout so that if they needed a software solution to this they could find one but a piece of educational content like this can take the potential customer through a real journey they come onto the page thinking I've got this problem that I need solved they then read some expert content about exactly how to solve that with your product or service being positioned as the key Next Step they need to take and by doing this they can go from having never heard of you all the way through to being ready to purchase from you in just one piece of content another type of content that you might want to publish is interactive content now this covers all sorts of things like calculators and tools and software demos one great example is the accountancy partnership now here you can see they've got a range of different accountancy calculators on their site targeting their different types of customer for example they've got calculators for employees they've got holiday entitlement calculators designed for businesses who might become a client and they've got a calculator for soul Traders thinking of becoming a limited company so what they've done is really clever they've worked out their different Target customers and they've built a calculator for each of these now of course you don't just want to produce a calculator for people and hope they use it and ride off merrily into the sunset ideally you want this person to become an inquiry or a lead for your business so make sure on the pages that your calculator is hosted on you have plenty of good quality P to action driving people through to inquiry forms book a demo forms contact forms whatever the next step is for your business sometimes you might even want to gate the results of the calculator so you let them fill in all the information and then the final step before they get their results is that they have to give you their personal details so that you can follow up with them or put them in an email automation sequence now if you want a company that does everything B2B content marketing times 100 HubSpot is a great example they invest huge result resources in their content and it seems to be working really well for them on the resources section of their website you can see how many different types of content they are publishing they've got blogs ebooks and guides free courses certifications they've got their own methodology they host conferences they've got case studies they've got a range of different tools they've got a community and even a directory of HubSpot partners and how important is all of this non product and service related content to HubSpot if we have a a look on semrush we see that it drives approximately 84% of their total traffic with a value of about 105 million dollar a year the vast majority of the pages that are bringing organic traffic from Google on HubSpot aren't their product or service Pages it's this content marketing section either their blog posts their interactive tools like their email signature generator or their technical knowledge based we've done a full breakdown of HubSpot strategy it's wild we'll share a link to the video at the end and by the way if you'd like the team at exposure ninja to recommend a Content strategy for you then you can request a free website a marketing review from the team here at exposure ninja.com review Link in the description it's completely free okay personalization if you have a relatively small pool of potential customers it's that much more important to make sure you're tailoring your message specifically to them okay what does that mean well the simplest way to implement personalization is just to segment your audience Let's do an example exle let's say that you're a cyber security firm this firm I'm looking at their website now redcan now immediately I can see there are three potential audience segments for this website the first group are the people that we pity the most those who have an urgent need because they're in the middle of a cyber security issue then we've got people that want assessments and advisory so they're thinking about their cyber security it might not be urgent they sort of want help planning for the future and then we've got the group that are looking for what's called MDR manage detection and response these are the people who want somebody in the background working all the time to make sure that their organization is secure now if you think about it these are three very different audiences if you're running email marketing for example does it make sense to send the same message to each audience well let's say that you're in the middle of a Cyber attack and your data is being held to Ransom what sort of messages are you going to respond to well initially you're going to respond to anything which shows you that they can get this solved very quickly but once that immediate threat has passed you're probably probably going to respond best to case studies and stories about how this company can help you insulate yourself against future attacks if on the other hand you're in the market for assessment or advisory you might be much more interested in hearing thought leadership pieces about where future attacks may come from and how organizations can protect themselves against these so by segmenting your audience and your email list or your remarketing and retargeting list you can make sure you're delivering the sort of message to each audience which is at actually going to resonate say I'm in the middle of a hack and my data is being held to Ransom if I start seeing remarketing ads or I get emails about how this assessment can help me prevent future hacks that's not going to make me more likely to buy that's just going to be really annoying of course sometimes your audience is going to move between segments they might be in the middle of a hack today but next month they might be interested in assessments to help them build protection plans for the future and it's okay for your audience to move between segments you need to make sure that whatever automation you're using allows your customers to move between different lists for example by clicking on certain links visiting certain web pages to indicate they're now interested in something else and we've covered email Automation in more detail in other videos and podcasts so Link in the description to those all right let's talk about video think B2B marketing can't work in video form hello now we have a full video and podcast all about video marketing so again Link in the description to that but really the key to successful B2B video marketing is not to be boring yes your technical team might have the most knowledge about the topic but sometimes you just need a remotely entertaining talking head even if they don't understand a word of what they're saying and are just blindly reading a script written for them by a real expert who actually has more personality and is way cooler anyway H one of the keys to success will B2B video marketing whether you're publishing your video videos on YouTube or whether you're running webinars is to tie the topics back to things that your audience actually cares about make sure they can see the benefit in both the topic and the title of your video so I'm on the Gartner website here and you can see they're doing a medium job of this they've got webinar topics like optimize the hybrid work experience for government employees now that's okay but if we wanted to maybe make this more entertaining we might actually tie this back to something that the target audience has a KP on for example is this about improving employee satisfaction or employee retention or employee MPS score is it about reducing absence is it about improving productivity there's another webinar called impactful storytelling tell your unique cxo Story I mean I might be being basic but that just sounds like total fluff to me what's the outcome from this having said that even if your organization can only come up with really boring jargon heavy videos they're still going to be better than nothing nothing quite connects with people like seeing them on a video so having video as part of your marketing Arsenal is a pretty good idea even if you're fairly certain that your organization's going to fluff it and make it a bit boring let's talk about account-based marketing you know that dream client or right the one that you lie in bed thinking about but do they think about you do they even know your name do they even know that you exist well the count-based marketing you can laser focus your marketing efforts around these perfect clients let me show you one of my favorite examples of ABM when gumgum which is a company specializing in computer vision decided that it really wanted to win T-Mobile as a client they went full Sherlock Holmes on T-Mobile's CEO they found out that CEO John leer is a huge Batman fan so what did they do well they produced a Batman style comic called t- and guns this comic is no joke it is seriously long it's all custom design designed it's all custom written it's really well done they got physical copies printed and sent 100 to T-Mobile staff and their agencies all right you're desperate to find out what happened right well guess what well they actually got sued for copyright infringement and shut down but at least the design team had fun doing it only joking they got the client okay let's talk about B2B SEO which is one of my favorite B2B marketing strategies despite the deceptively small slice of this video and podcast that we're dedicating to it my top tips first up don't stress too much about search volume you want some search volume in the keywords that you're targeting sure but if you know that your potential customers are searching for a phrase but all the SEO tools show you that there's very little search volume for that phrase don't necessarily be put off if you've spoken to your customers you know that's what they're searching for just Target that phrase anyway it's also ridiculously important to understand Searcher intent for particular phrases I'm on Google searching for best CRM software and if I have a CRM software company I might be trying to get my homepage or my product page ranked for this term but if I have a look on Google I quickly see that all of the pages that are ranking for this term are information Pages they're review sites this is information comparing different options so I know if I'm going to rank for this term that's the sort of content I need to be producing as well lo and behold HubSpot who are the top ranking CRM company for this term that is exactly what they've done they've produced a piece of content which Compares all the different top CRM platforms guess who wins in their comparism but the point is they've understood the sort of content that Google wants to rank for that term and they've produced that they've given Google what it wants to rank link building is also fantastically important in B2B SEO now think back to the thought leadership content strategy we talked about right at the start that's going to be your friend when it comes to B2B link building my final very very quick tip for B2B SEO is keep doing it I really wanted to show you this incredible case study of a B2B company that we helped absolutely dominate for its key Search terms but about a year ago they stopped doing SEO they decided that they were doing well enough and that they didn't need to continue pushing anymore and I've just checked their rankings they've been overtaken by a whole bunch of competitors that have been continuing to grind whilst they've been asleep of course this makes me and them I assume very sad because they put a lot of budget time energy into getting that ranking they just didn't put any time budget or energy into maintaining that ranking so if something in SEO is working keep doing it don't take your foot off the gas all right influencers Tim B2B influencers are you sure yes I am 100% sure now over the last few years we've seen a lot of B2B in particular software companies take a quite B Toc approach to working with influencers let me talk you through an extreme example exhibit a figma figma is design software recently bought by Adobe and if you have a look at their social Pages you'll notice that most of the content appears to be user generated it's people showing demonstrations tutorials and walkthroughs but if you look closely you'll notice there's actually a pattern it tends to be the same people appearing over and over again and if you do a search for example on Tik Tok for figma designer Advocate you'll notice that figma has a bunch of these designer Advocates creating content about figma frequently interestingly this is actually a paid salaried role at figma these people's job is to create figma content both for their own channels but also to be used on figma's social Pages Adobe does a similar thing I'm looking at digital artist drew on Instagram and they list themselves as an adobe Community expert and Adobe Express Ambassador now the thing about B2B influencers and Advocates like this is that they don't necessarily have to have a huge following there are two directions that you can take with your B2B influenc marketing you can take the traditional influencer route which is basically to find someone with a large following and pay to get exposure to that following or you can take the more modern sort of designer Advocate route where you actually just pay someone who's good at making content even if they don't necessarily have a large following and that's what Adobe and figma do you'll notice that their designer Advocates or their ambassadors don't have a particularly large following but they're good at making content they're talented artists which means that when they produce this content for Adobe or figma and figma and Adobe share this on their main social Pages it gets a lot of respect and traction and you may have mentally dismissed this thinking that influencers just totally won't work for your industry but let me challenge you I bet that there are Publications or influences in your space which have a really good reach amongst your target audience next time you're talking to a potential customer ask them how do you keep up to date with what's going on in our industry I bet there'd be a publication or or even an individual that they follow to keep up to date with the latest news so it's just up to you to work out how you can build a relationship with that person to have them Market your business or your product or service to Their audience Okay so we've covered a whole bunch of different B2B digital marketing strategies and there are even more in the blog post which is linked in the description the question that you might have now is how do we prioritize all of this how do we put this together into a plan and then once we're implementing it how do we scale it well we can help you with this if you want just go to exposure ninja.com review and request a free website and marketing review from the team here at Ian if you're eligible we'll take a look at your website your digital marketing that you've done so far and your competitors and we'll help you map out a prioritized action plan that either you can follow alone or you can follow with your existing agency or if you want you can follow with us to help you get traction with your B2B audience so just go to exposure ninja.com review to request your free website and marketing review today I mentioned earlier that HubSpot was a fantastic example of B2B content marketing dialed up to 11 out of 10 you can watch the full breakdown of their digital marketing strategy in this video until next time see you soon

Channel: Exposure Ninja

Views: 27,377

Keywords: b2b marketing strategies, b2b marketing, b2b, business to business, digital marketing, b2b strategy, b2b lead generation strategies, marketing, what is b2b marketing, marketing b2b, b2b lead gen

Id: rz5jF12guyY

Length: 19min 12sec (1152 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 30 2023