Guide to B2B Digital Marketing: research, branding, SEO, social media, and analytics to drive traffic and convert leads globally.
Business-to-Business (B2B) Digital Marketing involves promoting a business’s products or services through online channels such as search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing, social media, and paid search to other businesses. Unlike Business-to-Consumer (B2C) marketing, which targets individual customers, B2B digital marketing focuses on engaging and converting companies as clients.
B2B digital marketing is important because it allows businesses to extend their reach globally. Businesses are able to target many potential customers on social media & online platforms, for example LinkedIn has over 1 billion users globally. Another key aspect to B2B digital marketing is that promotion efforts can be measured and optimized through analytics tracking. B2B digital marketing managers can see where traffic is coming from to a website, see if that traffic is converting into leads, & if those leads are converting into sales through Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.
In order to have a successful B2B digital marketing strategy, it’s crucial to have a deep understanding of your target audience, competitors, and the demand for your product or service. The research phase lays the foundation for all your marketing efforts and helps ensure that your strategies are well-targeted and effective.
Let’s say you’re planning to launch a web design service tailored specifically for the manufacturing industry. You might start by conducting an online search to identify existing competitors who are already serving this niche. For example, you could search for “web design services for manufacturers” or “B2B web design for industrial companies.”
Upon finding several competitors, you can perform a quick analysis of their websites, noting what they do well and where they fall short. Perhaps one competitor has a strong portfolio but lacks case studies that showcase the positive results they were able to provide for their clients. Another might have a visually appealing website but offers limited information about their process or team.
With these insights, you can craft a strategy that highlights your unique strengths. For example, you could emphasize your expertise in industry and provide detailed case studies that demonstrate how your service has driven tangible results for clients.
Additionally, tools like ChatGPT can assist in creating detailed personas for your target market. For instance, you might develop personas such as “Operations Manager at a Mid-Sized Manufacturing Firm” or “Marketing Director at an Industrial Equipment Company.” These personas can help you tailor your content and messaging to address the specific pain points and goals of your target audience.
While these initial research activities can be done quickly to get your strategy off the ground, it’s also important to plan for deeper research post-launch. Conducting in-person interviews, surveys, and creating customer journey maps will give you a more comprehensive understanding of your audience. This ongoing research will enable you to refine your strategy and continuously improve your digital marketing efforts over time.
After conducting thorough research, the next step in building a successful business is creating a strong brand identity. But you can’t effectively create a brand identity without a deep understanding of your target audience. Your brand identity is the visual and emotional representation of your company, embodying the corporate look and feel you want to convey to your audience and clearly communicating what your company stands for.
For example, if you’re developing a brand identity for a construction company that primarily caters to men, your design choices might reflect strength, durability, and reliability. This could involve creating a logo that incorporates bold, strong lines or construction-related symbols like hammers or buildings. The typography might be robust and straightforward, while the color palette could include darker, more masculine colors like deep blues or grays.
On the other hand, a brand identity for a makeup company that primarily caters to women would take a completely different approach. Here, the design might focus on elegance, beauty, and femininity. The logo could feature softer lines, perhaps with a floral or abstract element. The typography might be more delicate and stylish, and the color palette could include softer, more vibrant colors like pinks, pastels, or golds.
This is why understanding who you’re targeting is essential. The brand identity for a construction company would be entirely different from that of a makeup company. The research phase allows you to align your branding with the specific needs and preferences of your target audience.
Additionally, thorough research can inspire the most effective ideas for your logo. Understanding your audience’s values, expectations, and industry standards ensures that your brand identity not only resonates with them but also sets you apart from competitors.
Now that you have an established brand identity, designing your website or landing page becomes much easier. Effective web design relies heavily on using the right colors, typography, and overall style, which are all defined by your brand identity. While website builders like WordPress, Webflow, and Squarespace can simplify the process, many first-time entrepreneurs still struggle to create a professional-looking website or landing page. The key skill needed to succeed in this area is web design. I highly recommend taking a dedicated web design course or hiring a professional to help with this step.
Your website is where you will drive traffic, making it the most critical part of your funnel, as it’s where visitors are converted into highly qualified sales leads. If your website has poor conversion rates, it could be due to several factors:
Having a professional website is essential for your business. It not only helps convert visitors into leads but also enhances sales by conveying a sense of professionalism for your company.
Once your website or landing page is created, it’s crucial to set up analytics tracking before you start driving traffic. This can be accomplished using tools like Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. Google Analytics is a powerful tool that tracks various metrics over time, including the sources of your traffic, the devices visitors use to view your website, and your conversion rates.
Google Tag Manager, while more complex, serves as a centralized platform for managing third-party tracking tools with a single code implementation on your website. After installing Google Tag Manager, you can easily add and manage tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar, and Intercom through its dashboard. Although Google Tag Manager offers a wide range of functionalities, its primary use for this context is to streamline the implementation of tracking tools.
Having your analytics set up before driving traffic to your website is essential. For example, if you launch a paid LinkedIn campaign without analytics in place, you wouldn’t be able to track conversions or measure the amount of traffic generated. Without these insights, you wouldn’t be able to accurately measure or optimize your paid campaigns or overall digital marketing efforts.
SEO search engine optimization is the process of updating your website in order for it to rank high in search engine like Google.com. The main way to optimize a website for search engines is through content creation and blogging. Another way to optimize a website is through technical seo, which deals with the performance and semantic markup of the html for your website. There are a lot of tools out there to research what keywords people are searching for. You can use these tool to help create content. For example, if I find the “B2B web design” has a monthly search volume of 10k searches per month, I can create a blog post dedicated to that keyword. It’s important to note that keywords alone are not enough. The content also has to be valuable and helpful to users. There also other ranking factors to consider such a domain authority, which is how many other websites point to yours.
YouTube - YouTube is a viable way to demonstrate your expertise and grow your audience. With over billions of users on the platform watching videos, there is a good chance your target audience is on the platform as well. You can also complement your YouTube video strategy with your blog strategy. Whenever you post a blog, you can post a complimentary YouTube video to rank higher in the search engines. It’s important that you are creating content that is valuable and relevant to your target audience. For example, if you run a B2B Digital Marketing & Web Design Agency for industrial companies, videos related to how to generate leads from email marketing or landing page design tips that would help these companies is a way to provide value. Giving free advice to your target audience establishes trust, credibility, and loyalty with your target audience.
LinkedIn - LinkedIn is probably the most B2B friendly social media platform to advertise on. You can research the company you are trying to target as well as the people who work for the company. You can also create targeted posts to specific job positions. For example, If I wanted to promote a webinar for how to generate leads. I can use LinkedIn Paid advertising to target specific job positions of my target audience. I can choose marketing managers, business owners, etc of the specific industry that I serve to create a highly targeted paid campaign. LinkedIn is also viable to grow your audience organicall if you post and share content that is valuable on your business page.
Paid Search (AdWords) - If your target audience is searching for your product or service online, then pay-per-click (PPC) might be a viable online digital marketing channel for your business. Pay-per-click allows your business to pay for the Top Spot on Google’s and Bing Search engines. This is a fast short-cut instead of trying to rank for specific keyword organically. For example, if I want to pay for the top spot for the keyword “B2B Web Design” I can setup a campaign in Google AdWords. Whenever a user types in “B2B Web Design” in the search engine, my website and landing page will appear in the top spot. One important thing to note is that there are ranking factors for PPC click such as bid offer, keyword relevance of landing page, page performance, etc. We recommend using this approach in addition to trying to gain traffic organically. However keep in mind the costs of PPC can add up drastically. You should make sure that the product your service you are selling justifies the cost & has a positive Digital Return On Investment (ROI).
Email - This channel is dependent on how many visitors from your website convert into newsletter subscribers but is one of the most effective digital marketing channels. Email marketing allows you to directly engage in visitors who are highly interested in your product or service. It’s important to note that you should try and obtain email organically through your website. We have worked with companies in the past who have bought lead lists and implemented email campaigns of users who did not opt to receive them and had led their emails to go directly in spam folder. Avoid doing this and build you email list organically.
Doing cold outreach campaigns through email or LinkedIn is another viable way to obtain leads. Ensure you are keeping track of the leads you reach out to via a spreadsheet or CRM. Make each message personalized by researching the company, their potential pain points, and direct links to your website of useful or valuable content to them. Providing useful content or guides may create opportunities for future business with the company of the lead you are reaching out to. For example, If I wanted to gain leads for our B2B web design agency. I would research companies and do a quick audit of their existing website. I would send the audit to the relevant personnel of the company and send a personalized message with the audit attached as well as links to guides on how to generate leads and relvant case studies of how we helped similar companies. While this approach may be time consuming, this along with an inbound marketing strategy should help generate leads for your company.
Your combination of inbound and outbound marketing tactics and campaigns can be tracked and measured overtime. If you properly setup Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager you can see if you are driving traffic overtime, measure lead conversion rates, see which channels are performing better, etc. You can also determine how to optimize your funnel by measuring your results. For example, say you have low amount of website visitors but a high conversion rate you could shift your focus into driving more traffic to your website through SEO and PPC advertising. If you have a high amount of traffic but low conversion rate you check to see if you are driving the right visitors or re-evalute your website design to increase conversion rates.
For businesses getting started with B2B digital marketing it can feel overwhelming. We hope this guide will help you get started on the right path. There are also specific strategies you can incorporate into your B2B digital marketing efforts such as account-based marketing (ABM). At Metric Path we pride ourselves on being one of the leading B2B Digital Marketing Agencies for Metrology & Manufacturing companies. If you need assistance with research, brand identity, b2b web design, & digital marketing our agency will be able to help.
