B2B Marketing Blog

B2B Marketing Strategies, if you’re going to read one post, read this one

By |2023-04-05T11:44:20+00:00January 9th, 2017|

topicIcon B2B Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

b2b marketing strategies

Introduction

B2B and B2C marketing are worlds apart. As opposed to B2C, B2B sales cycles are typically long and complex, requiring multiple decision makers, aimed at narrow audiences of specific industries, have a high life time value (LTV) per customer, and are long lasting engagements.

Many bold and brave CMOs who tried to make the shift from traditional marketing to online, were disappointed by the results of their efforts, quickly crawling back under the traditional marketing rock. The assumption was that due to the B2B complex nature, online marketing methods are great for B2C but are irrelevant for B2B.  While some online methods are indeed irrelevant for B2B, some are actually the holy grail of B2B marketing. This post will layout traditional and online B2B marketing plan and help you decide which to pursue and which to forget.

 

First things first – know your audience

You probably already know your target market, but how much do you know about the people you’re trying to sell to? On the other end of the businesses you are trying to sell to, are actual human beings. What do the people within the businesses you are targeting have in common? Map out your buyer personas (fictional representations of your ideal customers) and make sure you are tailoring every bit of your marketing strategy to fit their needs and challenges.

Attend industry conferences and other networking events

Relationships are the name of the game in B2B sales. Attending networking events has been a winning B2B lead generating strategy since..well, forever. Some pro tips:

  • Make sure you have a clear brand story and that your messaging reflects your narrative.
  • Do your homework – prior to the event check the RSVP list and prepare conversation topics for people who you identify as relevant connections (don’t forget your business card).
  • Add the people who you meet on LinkedIn and send them a follow up email

Make sure to stay up-to-date on networking events in your target industry and strive to attend at least one event per quarter.

Television, newspapers and radio ads

Advertising on each of these traditional platforms is nothing more than “nice to have”. Relaying on them for anything other than branding purposes won’t get you very far. Brand awareness and authority is super important for B2B, but it’s 2017 – there are much better ways to build trust and generate relationships online. Generally speaking, be wary of any marketing strategy that’s not entirely measurable. If you have an old-fashioned board/ CEO, and you decide to choose your battles and find yourself forced to allocate some of your budget to these ATL mass market methods, try to make the most of them. Things to consider:

  • Make sure you aren’t advertising to “everyone”. Focus on your buyer personas, and tailor your messaging to them
  • set measurable goals to each campaign
  • try to measure the performance of each unique campaign using discount codes/coupons, campaign specific phone numbers and other metrics that will help you attribute performance
  • Try to only have one ATL campaign live at a time. That way you will be able to get an idea of the impact the campaign had, even on occasions where the performance isn’t measurable down to the cent.

If “politically” possible, unless your budget is limitless (don’t you wish) I recommend ditching these platforms and allocating your budget to best-practice measurable platforms.

Ready to Step up your marketing?

Cold outreach

The “good old” method of cold calling, cold emailing and PPC advertising with hardsales messages – please stop it. Cold outreach is marketer centric and interruptive, your low conversion rates aren’t a coincidence. You are trying to sell to people who are not ready to buy from you. Buyers go through a typical journey before making a purchasing decision, it’s called the buyer’s journey and I strongly recommend learning it and living by it.

In a nutshell, there are three stages to a buyer’s journey:

  1. Awareness
  2. Consideration
  3. Decision

When you’re trying to sell to people who don’t know who you are, don’t trust you, and don’t know why they should even consider buying from you, you’re wasting time and money. Cold outreach is as good as spam. Though it works to some extent, it’s short sighted and at the end of the day, you’re doing the opposite of relationship building. Instead of interrupting, focus on adding value and being there when and where your prospects need you. That way you’ll be creating long term valuable relationships and even turning your customers to ambassadors.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing is a holistic strategy. There are four stages to the Inbound methodology:

 

inbound marketing.png

 

1. Attract – turn strangers to visitors on your blog/website

2. Convert – turn visitors to leads

3. Close – turn the leads to customes

4. Delight – turn the customers to promoters

Inbound Marketing is best applied when combining content marketing and marketing automation. Let’s look into both:

1. Content marketing

Content marketing is a strategic approach focusing on communicating with your prospects without selling to them. It’s done by distributing valuable content, building trust, creating lasting relationships and turning them into customers when they’re ready.

Generating results using content marketing takes time but it’s worth the investment. Content marketing is about publishing the right content at the right place and the right time.

content_place_time

 

It’s customer focused and as such, it’s marketing that people actually like. It doesn’t interrupt them, it helps them. The way to go about it is to:

lead generation conversion path

 

35% of B2B marketers have a documented content strategy – that number is bound to grow as more and more businesses realize the long-term potential of adding value instead of interrupting.

2. Marketing automation

Marketing automation goes hand in hand with content marketing. Marketing automation softwares enable you to help your leads find their own path down the buyer’s journey leading to a purchase. The way to do it is to interact with your prospects and send them relevant content using:

  • workflows
  • email drips
  • lead scoring
  • smart content

The most popular marketing automation softwares out there are Hubspot, Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Act-on and Silverpop.

Note that implementing an Inbound Marketing strategy without marketing automation is a valid option. Start off by doing things manualy and perfect your strategy as you go.

Conclusion

B2B is about creating long lasting relationships with both prospective and current clients. By putting your customer in the center and ditching a marketer centric approach, you can dramatically improve your performance and help your company grow.  It’s worth spending time researching and understanding how to implement an entire Inbound Marketing strategy. It’s a long term investment and for most B2B business, a worthwhile one.

Ready to Step up your marketing?

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B2B branding – how to build authority and create brand awareness

By |2023-04-24T10:59:18+00:00January 8th, 2017|

topicIcon B2B Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

b2b branding - how to build authority header

Introduction to b2b branding

The biggest challenge when selling B2B online, is an authority issue. People want to trust a brand and see it as a professional one before deciding to buy from it. This post will walk you through how to build trust and create long lasting relationships with your prospects, in a way that will make selling to them natural.

Stop selling. Start adding value.

Who are your target customers? Create fictional representation of your ideal customers A.K.A buyer personas. Figure out what their main needs and challenges are and then consider how you help them. Instead of trying to sell to them, consider how you can add value to them and educate them. A PPC campaign that sends prospects to a hard sales landing page, inviting a prospect to fill out a form and connect with a sales person, is an almost sure way to fail. Why would they want to speak to a sales rep? they have no idea who you are. It’s too soon. Zoom out and-

Understand the buyer’s journey

The buyer’s journey is the active research process a potential buyer goes through leading up to a purchase. There are three stages to a typical buyer’s journey:

  1. Awareness
  2. Consideration
  3. Decision

Buyer's Journey

 

On the awareness stage, the prospect is experiencing and expressing symptoms of a problem and is researching in order to understand and give a name to their problem.

On the consideration stage, the prospect has clearly defined and given a name to their problem and is researching available ways to solve it.

On the decision stage the prospect has decided on a strategy to solve their problem and is now ready to make a purchase decision.

Simply put, if you’re trying to sell to a person who doesn’t yet understand their problem, or has not yet decided on a way to solve it, your chances of them choosing your solution are scarce. Alternatively, if you’re the one who helps them identify their problem and consider various solutions, they are way more likely to choose your solution, and to choose to buy it from you. The way to do that is to –

Create remarkable content

As part of their buyer’s journey, 47% of B2B buyers consume 3-5 pieces of content prior to engaging with a salesperson. Your prospects are researching about you before your sales people even know who they are. Make sure that your content is in-line with their journey. Create content that will help them learn from you. By adding value and educating, you’re building trust and positioning your brand as an expert in your field.

Content that focuses solely on sales is detached, self-centered, and does not put your prospect and their needs and stage of readiness in the center. It’s interruptive and will only result in frustration on your end. Start writing content that focuses on your prospect and considers their journey from their shoes. This will cause a shift in the way your business is perceived. It’s a sure way to establish trust.

Make sure that your content is optimized so that when prospects are searching for it, it will show up in search engine result pages. Follow the tips on this post to learn more.

How To Create An Effective Inbound Marketing Strategy Call to Action

 

Engage with your prospects

Research and find out where your buyer personas go for information.

  • Engage and share your content in places such as:
    • Industry specific Linkedin and Facebook groups
    • Q&A sit es such as Quora
    • Reddit, Tumbler, Medium etc.
  • Write guest posts on industry blogs.
  • Conduct webinars
  • Podcast

Sell to them when they are ready (not when you are).

Only once you’ve:

  • mapped out who your buyer personas are
  • tailored content for all stages of their buyer’s journey
  • made sure your content is visible and that your prospects are engaging with your content

Then and only then, is it time to offer your services. In other words, there’s no point in trying to collaborate with a stranger that you have not established a relationship with, and who does not yet trust you.

Conclusion

B2B sales and B2B branding and authority are inseparable. Investing in research, understanding your audience and then creating online content assets is a great way to position your business, build trust, establish relationships and help your target audience find you, trust you, and choose you. Prepare yourself for a long process, B2B purchase decision involve multiple decision makers and take time. Don’t convince yourself that digital marketing is irrelevant for B2B. That’s an excuse for business who aren’t willing to put in the effort and ripe the results. Don’t be lead, become a leader in your industry, add value, and position your business. And by the way, the leads that you generate offline via word of mouth, biz dev, conferences and networking events are also going to be researching about you, all the more reason for your online presence to be up to standard.

35% of B2B marketers have a documented content strategy, time to step up yours.

Good luck!

P.S. If you found this useful, and you’re curious to learn more and find out how to create a long lasting B2B marketing strategy, we invite you to download our How-To guide for creating an Inbound Marketing strategy

Schedule a FREE consultation

 

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B2B SEO – is it worth your time?

By |2023-04-24T11:00:28+00:00January 5th, 2017|

topicIcon B2B Marketing SEM

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

B2B SEO header

Introduction

Sooner or later, every CEO/CMO of a B2B Company ask themselves “should I even bother with this SEO crap? Is it really worth the time, efforts and budget allocation?”

I’ve heard many forms of this, dozens of times, from brilliant and successful people on many occasions. It’s always brought a big smile to my face. Not because I decried them, god forbid. But it proved to me how SEO has and still is perceived incorrectly by many business owners. Let me explain why B2B SEO is worth your time.

Before understanding why it’s important to invest in SEO, let’s quickly recap what exactly SEO is…

Search Engine Optimization is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s (Google for example) organic search results. “It is a methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine” – Webopedia
Since its early days, SEO has always had naysayers insisting that this marketing discipline is a passing fad, or that it’s dead. Well, not only has it survived this long, it’s actually thriving. With over 3.5 billion searches per day made on Google alone, it’s no wonder that the $65 billion worth industry is steadily growing, with no end in sight.

SEO meets B2B

B2B transactions are characteristically different from B2C transactions since decisions require collaboration and coordination between various entities in order to reach the final stage of the transaction. It’s no surprise at all that all B2B dealings turn out to be ongoing processes that involve a certain lapse of time between researching the product and placing the order.
Since the research done in B2B marketing is far more intensive than traditional product purchase research, it goes without saying that search engines play a dominant role in B2B purchases whereby they are extensively used during the (early and mid) research phase of the transaction.
Most B2B internet searches start with a generic term, which means your prospects are looking for a product or solution, not for your brand. It is important to understand what prospects and customers are searching for, and your company website must contain a steady stream of rich content that provide answers for your prospects problems.
To make sure your ideal customers find your site on top of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), you should first create buyer personas, which will help you identify the people you’re trying to reach and their commonly asked questions. Then tailor that content to their stage of the buyer’s journey.
In the past two years, the way people research and buy online went through some dramatic changes.
Business buyers rely on the internet during their research and selection process. But did you know that more and more of these decision-makers are using mobile devices? In fact, B2B mobile usage is intensifying throughout the entire buying cycle.
Nearly three-quarters of online buyers are now using mobile to search and shop. For B2B marketers, this means your prospects and your buyers are using mobile devices more frequently than ever, at the office, on meetings and outside of work hours, to make critical business decisions.
With Mobile devices being deeply personal devices, quite logically, Google’s investigative efforts in 2016 (And 2017) seem almost fully devoted to personalized, semantic and predictive search. With Google’s announcement of a mobile-first indexing in November 2016, providing a favorable mobile experience is absolutely required to continually engage prospects and drive leads and sales. Moreover –  voice search, machine and deep learning began to be used by default in every facet of Google Search. Thus, we should expect them to be used even more in 2017.

Ready to Step up your marketing?

 

SEO and Content marketing

“Content Marketing” was undoubtedly the key buzzword of 2016. With 29% of brands’ total marketing budget spent on content marketing alone, and 39% of which anticipate that budget will increase in 2017.
Assuming your business is part of those 80% of B2B companies that have a content marketing strategy, you already know the importance of content for lead generation, brand authority and dozens of other aspects for your company’s success.
Even-though most of the time they are treated separately, content marketing and SEO goes together like PB&J. “Yes, SEO and content marketing are distinguished from one another in several critical areas. And while they have points of differentiation, you still can’t separate the two entirely” – says Neil Patel on Kissmetrics
The only way to ensure your content marketing success is by applying SEO techniques in its implementation. SEO demands content, keywords, linkbacks and great onsite optimization – content marketing answers all of these requirements.
Thus, your SEO campaign will fail unless you integrate content marketing. Your content marketing campaign will fail unless you integrate SEO.

SEO and your business

Every business aims to grow revenue, lower marketing cost, and of course become more profitable.
SEO can help mapping the organization’s top-level goals by identifying searches your target audience perform and then ranking for them. Thus driving more quality traffic with organic search and by that reducing the company’s dependency on advertising and other more costly platforms.
Search Engine Optimization was and still is, a must-have marketing discipline for businesses of any type and size. As a manager or CEO, your challenge is about how best to intelligently integrate SEO into your marketing mix to reap rich rewards.
SEO plays an important role in this research and buying cycle. It’s like a prospect magnet, attracting potential buyers to your website through critical and relevant keywords and phrases ranked high in search engines where searchers are already looking for information about them.
It’s about being where your customers are, and directing them towards solutions you offer them.

Conclusion

Without SEO, the chances of prospects finding your website are as scarce as finding a needle in a haystack. Without fully understanding the intent behind your visitor’s search and their unique and individual needs, the chances of losing the prospect forever is high. Getting them both right means more visitors, and more sales

Hopefully, these compelling reasons have convinced you about the value and benefits of an integrated SEO strategy in growing your business. Good luck!

And If you find this useful, you’re invited to download our B2B Marketing Best Practices that Every CMO Must Know Ebook. Get your FREE copy now ==>

Schedule a FREE consultation

 

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What your B2B Website Should Include

By |2023-04-24T11:01:43+00:00December 27th, 2016|

topicIcon B2B Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

B2B Website Should Include header

Introduction to B2B Website

Your B2B website isn’t working. You invested time and money in an overpriced, shiny new website that you were 100% sure will get your phone ringing in no time.

Ask yourself – If you handed your site to a total stranger, would they be able to tell what your business does within 5 seconds?

If they couldn’t, then you’ve got a messaging problem.

What you should want from your website: More sales, More conversions, Higher quality leads, build trust. What your customer wants: Solution to their needs, Fast load and easy navigation. This post will walk you through the look and feel, content and SEO aspect you should consider and include in your B2B website.

Look and feel

Reflect value and keep your buyer personas in mind

B2B, much like B2C, is all about solving your visitor’s pain points. Be crystal clear about how your company is going to solve a buyer’s problem in every step of the marketing funnel.

When thinking about your homepage, make sure it touches your buyer persona‘s pain points right away. Even better, help your visitors to better define their problem and evaluate possible solutions.

Your site has to be able to efficiently introduce your buyers to the solution for their business needs and why your company is the best at providing it.

Keep your design minimal, yet bold, with your buyer’s feelings in mind

B2B marketing is actually H2H (human-to-human) marketing, and people are messy. Impulse, mood, rationalization and reason all affect your visitors buying decisions. Even under corporate hat. So make sure to create an uncluttered, easily navigable experience for your end-user. Pick a deliberate use of color, content and layout that best reflects your business’ added value over your competitors.

Remember –  B2B doesn’t mean boring. Make your site more engaging with big, bold visuals that bring your brand to life, but don’t overwhelm your visitors.

Think hard on how every section on your site keeps your different buyer personas engaged. If you can’t, maybe it shouldn’t be on your site.

Don’t be boring and over corporate

The best B2B websites show, they don’t tell. This is not an excuse to get lazy and use generic stock photos or videos. Luckily, there is a growing movement of designers and photographers that provide either a free or subscription service that looks much more genuine than the boring ones you’ll find on every regular sites. Some of the best stock footage websites are Pexels, Unsplash, ProVideoFactory.

Make sure your visitors are never overwhelmed or confused

Your homepage should be long enough to be clear, but short enough to keep their attention. Clarify:

  • who you are, what you do,
  • where you’re located (if you’re local)
  • your value proposition
  • what visitors should do next.

Make sure to evaluate the look and feel of every piece of content or page on your site, be it a service, about page or blog post.

Add value all throughout your website 

A face lift alone doesn’t cut it to get more leads. Content (whether it’s text, image or CTA) should be spot-on throughout the site, with nothing but high value offers. Your buyers time is short and priceless, so don’t waste any of it.

Ninety percent of B2B marketers use content to grow awareness, drive consideration, and generate sales. The trick is to include attention grabbing CTAs and to leverege your content to generate leads by asking for a visitors email address in exchange for accessing your great content. When doing so, make sure to consider the buyer’s journey.

Ready to Step up your marketing?

 

SEO aspects to consider

Just because B2B site goals are substantially more complex than those on the typical B2C site,  is no excuse for them to have bad usability. On the contrary – the more complex the scenario, the higher the need for supportive user interfaces.

Remember – B2B=H2H. Make your site is customer centric and optimize your page for user experience

Write for humans, not search engines.

It’s important to realize that Google is no longer trying to match the keywords you type into its search engine to the keywords of a web page. Instead, it’s trying to understand the intent behind the keywords you type so it can match that intent to relevant, high-quality content.

This means that you do not have to place your keywords word-for-word in the content anymore. Instead, write the content for the user. If you use related terms or synonyms, search engines like Google will still understand what your page’s overall goal is.

Optimize your images

Search engines cannot see images on websites, so it is important to give the image an alt text and relevant file name to ensure Google knows what the image is about.

Make sure to make image files you (or your web master) uploaded to your site as light as possible. There are a lot of easy tools and photo editing software you can do this with (Irfanview, jpegmini and more)

Testimonials:

“2017 may well be the year of testimonials and reviews in local SEO. As our industry continues to grow, we have studied surveys indicating that some 92% of consumers now read online reviews and that 68% of these cite positive reviews as a significant trust factor.” – MiriamEllis on Moz Blog

As opposed to some saying that “testimonials pages are useless”, well-crafted testimonials pages are, in fact, vitally useful in a variety of ways.

Client testimonials, reviews and case studies can impact your local rankings, win you in-SERP stars and boost your website overall trustworthiness and reputation in the eyes of Google. They validate your claims, and they help prospective buyers imagine use cases for their own businesses – and imagine themselves as clients.

Your site isn’t just a piece of code that shows your company logo, contact info and services, it needs to be part of your sales strategy

Blog!

“B2B marketers that use blogs receive 67% more leads than those that do not.” – Olivia Allen on Hubspot Blog sums it up great.

Business blogging is the lowest cost way to improve your site’s visibility by both users and search engines, and is one of 5 most trusted sources for accurate online information.

If that statistic alone isn’t enough to convince you that blogging can benefit your business, here’s another one –  companies who blog receive 97% more links to their website, which of course benefits your SERP ranking efforts.

By nature, blogs have a more personal touch to them, so naturally they’re a trusted source of information for you potential buyer.

Provide your visitors with insights and industry news, build authority and become a thought-leader in the progress.

Remember, B2B is about earning trust by solving your buyer’s pain points.

Conclusion

Especially when it comes to B2B, keep in mind that your buyers are busy. Don’t waste their time.

Take time to understand your core audience, identify their pain points and be crystal clear about how your company is going to solve the buyer’s problem in every step of the marketing funnel.

Keep it clear, light and customer centric. Your website isn’t about your company, it’s about how your buyer benefits from choosing to work with you.

If you find this useful, you’re invited to download our B2B Marketing Best Practices that Every CMO Must Know Ebook. Get your FREE copy now ==>

Schedule a FREE consultation

 

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6 Pro Ways to use Twitter for B2B Marketing

By |2023-04-24T11:02:40+00:00December 25th, 2016|

topicIcon B2B Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

6 Pro Ways to use Twitter for B2B Marketing

Introduction – 6 Pro Ways to use Twitter for B2B Marketing

As a marketer, you know the importance of channelling your marketing throughout different social media networks in order to lead people to your website and through your marketing funnel down the buyer’s journey.

When it comes to social networks, B2B businesses tend to focus on LinkedIn and overlook Twitter. Yet Twitter is one handy tool that needs to be taken into consideration for your B2B purposes.

Although Twitter is widely used for personal accounts, it can have enormous advantages when it comes to B2B marketing. FollowingTwitter’s latest update, you can now tweet longer messages, add useful content images and engage in richer conversations with your targeted audience and therefore build your brand and generate leads. Take advantage of it.

Twitter is an extremely powerful tool for every CMO in the B2B field, it offers a wide range of advantages, such as real-time communication with your customers, providing customer service, connecting with other businesses and industry leaders (and learning from them!), positioning your brand as an industry expert and strengthening your offsite SEO.

This post will teach you 6 pro ways to use Twitter for B2B.

1. Find and interact with the right people

As a business, as awesome as he may be, it wouldn’t be very helpful if you followed Shia LaBeouf.

For B2B marketing, the focus lies on interacting with your target audience.

There are around 300 Million+ Twitter accounts globally, and thousands, if not millions of people out there are actively tweeting and posting. As a marketer, it’s important be proactive and reach out to those people who potentially want the product or service your company offers.

So, who should you follow?

  • People and businesses in your industry, particularly those who are considered as leaders or experts in their fields.
  • Your competitors, peers and partners.
  • your own clients and prospects

The first steps are the hardest. But don’t forget, even Rome wasn’t built in one day. So be patient. If you want people to follow you back, it is of great importance that you engage with them. In any social platform communication is the key – and that applies to Twitter just as any. Tweet at your targeted audience, retweet their tweets and content, and you have a high chance of getting on their radar and for them to return the favour. It’s always worth a try, and you might be surprised who will follow you back at the end of the day.

2. Post during relevant hours

According to an analysis conducted by CoSchedule, the perfect time to schedule your tweets is during business hours. The best times to tweet are during lunch hours where prospects have spare time to check their social accounts. You can also schedule your tweets after 5 or 6 pm when people leave work and have time to check out their Twitter feed.

3. Don’t just tweet – post rich and engaging content

No one wants to hear what the weather’s outside your office – that’s boring. Understand your buyer personas and communicate in their language. Always keep in mind that even though you use Twitter as a B2B marketing channel, there’s always a human sitting behind the desk reading and writing tweets.

The most important aspect of (re-)tweeting of rich and engaging contents is that you know your target audience by heart. Look out for what they are tweeting, what they are looking for and what they need. Your targeted audience might be posting about their needs – be on the lookout.

Things to consider:

  • If your company offers eBooks, white papers, cheat sheets, etc., make sure to promote them on Twitter and always point out what your potential customers can gain from looking at your content.
  • Links to your website and/or your blog – links aren’t counted towards the restriction of the 140 characters
  • Links to interesting articles about your industry, business or anything that might interest your targeted audience
  • Visuals – a picture is worth a thousand words and that’s way more than 140 characters. Look how SAP made a semi dull tweet come to life with an image:

SAP twitter.png

 

Retweet and share content of the people you follow. That might not only make them follow you back, but it is an easy way to generate relevant content and keep your account alive.

4. Send personal messages

If you’ve researched well enough and found your target audience on Twitter, reach out to them by personal messages and engage in conversation. Don’t interrupt and don’t make it all about you. Always consider what might interest them and how you could help them out and add value.

5. #HashtagsAreYourBestFriend

The most common and most effective way to be seen by others is to use hashtags in your posts. Always make sure they are relevant and not just nonsense.

Twitter lists and organises their topics by using hashtags, so this is a great way of making your content stand out and making it easier for others to see it.

6. Last but not least – tweak your twitter profile

A standard, boring Twitter brand profile does not really encourage others trust you. So make sure you have a profile that people will find interesting and professional.

Always include:

  • Your bio: be clear on why your business is doing what it is doing, how your business can help others, and what your business offers. Pro tip: since Twitter bios are searchable, include relevant keywords.
  • Profile Picture: In most cases, the company logo is the perfect profile picture.
  • Location: Let your followers know where your business is located.
  • Link to your website: Always make it easy to find your website.

Conclusion

If you haven’t used Twitter as B2B marketing channel, it’s time to make use of it! Use this powerful tool to strengthen your brand.

Always make sure to create useful and engaging content. Make yourself stand out by using this microblogging service. Always keep in mind the great advantages Twitter has to offer. Twitter is another platform to communicate with your partners, clients and prospects. Focus on your overall content and lead generation strategies and repackage them for Twitter

Lastly, make your account easy to be found by placing a Twitter follow button on your website, email signature and blog.

Happy tweeting!

If you find this useful, you’re invited to download our B2B Marketing Best Practices that Every CMO Must Know Ebook. Get your FREE copy now ==>

Schedule a FREE consultation

 

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B2B Brand Storytelling

By |2023-04-05T11:47:52+00:00December 11th, 2016|

topicIcon B2B Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

B2B Brand Storytelling header

Introduction to B2B Brand Storytelling

In a world where your goal should be connecting and building long-lasting relationships with clients to be, it’s important to resonate with the people whose problems you solve with your product or service.

If you think emotions and human interactions are irrelevant to B2B brand storytelling, “because you are targeting businesses”, consider this a wakeup call:

B2B isn’t about businesses communicating with businesses. It’s about humans connecting with humans.

A brand story has the magical power of bringing your brand to life, providing it with context and granting your audience something to identify with.

This post will walk you through the elements of brand storytelling and finding your unique brand voice.

1. Find your “why”

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. Finding your “why” will help you lay the grounds for your brand’s story.

The guru on this matter is Simon Sinek. Marketers swear by his well-known “golden circle”:

Golden Circle

The idea is to understand:

  • WHY your business is doing what it is doing.
  • HOW your business helps and
  • WHAT your business offers.

The answers to your “why” and “how” should be led by emotions. Cold answers result in heartless messages. Try staying indifferent to Microsoft‘s “why”:

Microsoft's Why

 

Inspiring right? Consider motivation, passion, and what emotions your answers should evoke among your target audience. Which leads us to the next element:

2. Understand your audience

Your content isn’t for “everyone”, it’s important to figure out who your buyer personas are. Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal buyer. Figure out what your buyer persona’s goals and challenges are. What do they care about?

Ready to Step up your marketing?

 

3. Make sure your story includes a conflict

Once you understand your buyer personas, consider how you help them, what conflict are you solving? The conflict should correlate with your buyer persona’s problems, their needs, and their stage in the buyer’s journey.

Buyer_journey

 

Outline the problems your buyer personas have, with solutions that are relevant to their stage of the buyer’s journey. That will provide you with an understanding of the conflicts you can use in your content.

Remember this: if your story does not include a conflict, it’s not a story it’s a pitch!

4. Make sure your story includes a resolution

The purpose behind every stage of your story should be a resolution. Putting metaphors aside, your content should include a call to action that provides a solution relevant to the stage of the persona at hand.

5. Be authentic

“Tell the truth, but make it fascinating.” – David Ogilvy

People call BS quickly – don’t make promises you can’t keep and don’t make statements you can’t back up. This is a long term game, the idea is to build your brand’s authority and get your personas to come back for more value. This however does not mean that you need to be “more of the same”. A good storyteller will keep people on the edge of their seat. Make sure you aren’t writing technically, remember your “why” and let it lead the way.

6. Be clear and concise

Don’t get too in love with your own voice. There’s no need to say the same thing in five different ways. Remember that people are impatient. Review each sentence and ask yourself

  • does this contribute to the story?
  • Does it add value?
  • Is it interesting?

No? delete it.

Conclusion

All businesses have people behind them, all businesses have a soul. Brining your vision and passion to the front of your brand, is the key to generating human relationships that have the potential of evolving to long-term business co-operations. Learn your audience, tell your story, be authentic. There’s no better way to attract strangers, get them to identify with your vision and “join your tribe”.

Ready to Step up your marketing?

 

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How to create your 2018 B2B marketing plan [updated]

By |2023-04-05T11:47:03+00:00November 14th, 2016|

topicIcon B2B Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

B2B Marketing Plan header

Creating a Successful B2B marketing plan for 2018

2018 is around the corner. This post will walk you through a suggested layout of a B2B marketing plan, and the elements you should consider when proceeding to write your own.

Executive summary

Write a general overview of your B2B company background, current stage and the overall purpose of your marketing plan. This is the place to identify weak points in your conversion funnel that require curing.

For example:conversion funnel

 SMART Goals

In order for your marketing plan to be actionable, it’s important to set very clear goals.

In this section of your B2B plan, make sure you have a clear understanding of what you’d like to achieve this year. Simply defining “more traffic” or “more leads” is moot. Make sure your goals are:

S – specific

M – measurable

A – attainable

R – realistic

T – time bound

Competitor analysis

A review of the competitive landscape includes looking at what your competitors are and are not doing, as well as larger trends within your industry.

When reviewing your competitors, you’ll want to look at them strategically and tactically. Pick the competitors to review deliberately.

Who are the clear leaders?

Who are they targeting?

Can you reverse engineer any of their personas?

How do they differ from yours?

What are their key messages?

What needs, pains, or aspirations are they hitting?

Who’s struggling (learn from their mistakes) 1?

Who does your client consider to be your most direct competitors?

Are there any new players or outliers in terms of taking an approach outside the established market?

Target market

Identify your buyer personas. These are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers. It’s important to understand who you are trying to reach. What are their behavioral patterns? Their demographics? Their goals?

You can research and figure this out by:

Speaking with your sales and learning who your current best customers are and why

Researching the web (specifically websites such as Quora, blogs and industry forums)

Making educated guesses

Interviewing your current customers. Focus on:

  • Background
  • Demographics
  • Mannerisms
  • Primary goals at work
  • Primary challenges on their to success
  • What are their common objections

The buyer’s journey

“The buyer’s journey is the active research process a potential buyer goes through leading up to a purchase.”

There are three stages to the average buyer’s journey:

Buyer's Journey

 

(source: HubSpot)

Make sure you understand your average customer’s buyers journey. Each stage requires specific types of messaging, which helps guide your audience all the way down the marketing funnel. That way you will not make the mistake of trying to sell to your prospects when they’re not yet ready and don’t trust you.

USP

A strong positioning will set you apart from your competitors and help you attract the most relevant customers for your business.

Think strong and hard about the following questions:

  1. Why does your company exist?
  2. What inspires you at work?
  3. What’s the purpose of your work?
  4. What do you help solve?
  5. If your team were volunteers and not employees, what are they volunteering for?

Fill out this positioning statement:

We (provide this service/value/outcome) for (a specific type of company/industry/market) by (using a specific approach) because (why).

(source: HubSpot)

Make sure you understand your average customer’s buyers journey. Each stage requires specific types of messaging, which helps guide your audience all the way down the marketing funnel. That way you will not make the mistake of trying to sell to your prospects when they’re not yet ready and don’t trust you.

USP

A strong positioning will set you apart from your competitors and help you attract the most relevant customers for your business.

Think strong and hard about the following questions:

  1. Why does your company exist?
  2. What inspires you at work?
  3. What’s the purpose of your work?
  4. What do you help solve?
  5. If your team were volunteers and not employees, what are they volunteering for?

Fill out this positioning statement:

We (provide this service/value/outcome) for (a specific type of company/industry/market) by (using a specific approach) because (why).

New Call-to-action

 

Brand

How are you currently perceived in the marketplace? A brand story has the magical power of bringing your brand to life, providing it with context and granting your audience something to identify with. Turn you USP into a story people can relate to.

If you think emotions and human interactions are irrelevant to B2B, “because you are targeting businesses”, consider this a wakeup call:

B2B isn’t about businesses communicating with businesses. It’s about humans connecting with humans.

Website

How will your website help you achieve your smart goals this year? What needs to change in order for it to generate more growth? Consider the top, middle and bottom of the funnel.

Content marketing

35% of B2B marketers have a documented content strategy. Make sure you do too.

In a nutshell, content marketing is the art of communicating with your prospects without selling to them. This part of the plan should focus on the role content distribution will play in building trust, creating lasting relationships with prospects and turning them into customers when they’re ready.

Social media marketing

Social media is crucial for every business’s online success and sales generation. That includes B2B. This part of the plan should detail how you plan on creating and promoting content via social media, engage with prospects and drive more relevant traffic to your website.

Remember that building a solid social media presence doesn’t happen overnight and needs time and dedication to bring sustainable results. Craft your strategy, monitor social media activity and constant improve your approach to maximize the results of your investments.

Email marketing

With 91% of consumers checking their email daily (ExactTarget) and a marketing ROI of 4,300% (!!) (copyblogger), if you’ve given up on email marketing, Reevaluate your strategy for 2018.

This part of the plan should focus on how you are going to make the most of email marketing in order to improve your overall performance.

SEO

This section should map out how your SEO efforts will help you reach your organic search goals. Detail which keywords you’d like to target this year, and keep in mind an end goal of converting relevant visitors to leads.  This is also the place to detail new opportunities and the current status of your website’s health and back-links profile.

Measurement and KPIs

The issue a lot of B2B marketers have is the simple lack of analytic ability in its marketing team, e.g. they don’t have a clear definition of what metrics or parameters to document. This section should detail how you plan on measuring your efforts. Define clear definitions of ROI and what metrics to take into account.

Marketing Strategy and Tactics

Recap your overall plan and summarize the important actionable aspects of each section.

Conclusion

Your yearly marketing plan should be SMART goal oriented. Be sure to research your competition, understand your target market and buyers journey, and make sure you have a measurable roadmap planned ahead.

In order to properly plan your strategy, download our FREE yearly marketing planning template.

Get My FREE copy

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How to Position Your B2B Business and Set You Apart From Your Competition

By |2023-04-24T11:13:08+00:00November 5th, 2016|

topicIcon B2B Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

how to position your b2b agency header

Introduction

Creating a strong brand positioning is a challenge almost all businesses face. B2B companies have an extra difficult time positioning themselves among the most relevant clients for their business. This post will walk you through how to position your B2B business by defining your “why”, “who”, “what” and “how”. A strong positioning will set you apart from your competitors and help you attract the most relevant customers for your business.

Start with the “why”

"people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it" - simon sinek

 

Think strong and hard about the following questions:

  1. Why does your company exist?
  2. What inspires you at work?
  3. What’s the purpose of your work?
  4. What do you help solve?
  5. If your team were volunteers and not employees, what are they volunteering for?

Understand your ideal client “who”

Understanding who your target personas are is a critical step towards positioning you company and communicating in the language of your prospects. Yes, you’re a B2B business, but behind that B stands a human being. Human relationships are key to long term cooperations.

Reflect about the following questions:

  1. Who are your current best clients
  2. What is common about those clients
  3. What market segments and industries do you know best
  4. What clients do you like working with most
  5. What type of companies most need your help
  6. What are your clients pain points and challenges
  7. Is there a pattern among the clients of your clients?
  8. What clients don’t you want to work with?

Identify your core strengths – your “what”

It’s important to identify what your company is most competent at. A specialization helps on the path to positioning your company as experts.

Evaluate the following:

  1. How does what you do reflect what you know?
  2. What is your company best and most efficient at
  3. If you had to focus on only one product or service, what would it be?
  4. What is it that you do that provides the most value to your clients and makes you unique?
  5. What aren’t you?

Define your company culture – your “how”

Decisions + executions + values + work procedures =  your company’s culture.

Reflect upon the following:

  1. What are the standards that guide you when making decisions?
  2. Do you have service methods set in place?
  3. What wouldn’t you change about the way the company operates
  4. What would you never do?
  5. What do you stand for?
  6. Will you turn down a client who is not in line with your culture and value?

Final exercise

After identifying what you do well, why you’re doing it, who you are talking to, and how, fill out this positioning statement:

We (provide this service/value/outcome) for (a specific type of company/industry/market) by (using a specific approach) because (why).

Now make sure you are implementing your positioning on all aspects:

  • Set clear hiring standards and train your team on your company positioning
  • Define service delivery processes
  • Create a working environment that correlates with your company culture
  • Educate your team about the buyer personas you are targeting
  • Consider how your new positioning may help your ability to set premium pricing
  • Align your internal and external messaging to your new positioning

Final note

Taking time to define your company’s positioning, understanding your core audience and creating a clear culture, can work wonders to your business. Once you know exactly what your unique offer is and what sets you apart from your competition, you’ll be able to focus on strenghtning your positioning and getting your target audience to choose you want want to work with your business.

If you found this useful, and you’re curious to learn more and find out how to step up your marketing I invite you to download our How-To guide for creating an inbound marketing strategy.

Schedule a FREE consultation

 

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How to identify the right B2B leads for your business

By |2023-04-24T11:37:50+00:00August 12th, 2016|

topicIcon B2B Marketing Sales

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

 

 Introduction

It’s not uncommon for a business to get excited about a new lead and to spend time on what will eventually turn out to be a waste of time and resources. Identifying the right B2B leads at an early stage of your sales funnel can skyrocket your entire company’s performance.

On the one hand, it is crucial not to waste time on clearly irrelevant B2B prospects, and on the other, it’s important not to fall in this trap of ignoring them – some leads may appear irrelevant because they are being approached wrongly.

In this post, we’ll cover the core actions you should take in order to boost the performance of your sales in order to attract the right leads for your business.

Define your ideal buyer profile

Inbound sales are buyer-centric. Instead of using outdated methods such as pitching and cold calling, you can attract potential customers with great content and interact with your prospects with context and personalization.

Newsflash – no matter who you are, not “all companies” are your ideal buyers. If you haven’t already done so, it’s time to figure out who you are selling to and what their needs.

B2B Buyer Personas

Image source: RyanSetter.com

Here are some key elements to consider:

  • company verticals or industries
  • geographic locations
  • company size (no of employees, revenue, number of customers)
  • other attributes that describe your ideal buyer profile
  • buyer personas: who are the various roles involved in the buying decision at those companies

Monitor and be on the lookout for active buyers

  • be sure to respond in real time to social media for mentions of:
    • your company
    • your competitor’s company
    • keywords or hashtags aligned with your value proposition
  • Monitor press releases of relevant leads and prospects (i.e. earning results, change of offices, etc.)

Bonus pro tip: Be on the lookout for job offers published by your ideal customers. If those offers are relevant to your solution area, it could be worth suggesting that they reconsider their strategy and outsource some of their needs to you.

Leverage Linkedin

  • Join LinkedIn groups where your ideal buyers are active and engage in them
  • Use Linkedin search filters to search for the relevant attributes of your ideal buyer profiles
  • Be on the lookout for mutual contacts who can introduce you to prospects you identify (make sure to add the contact/ company to your CRM and make note to yourself re the mutual contact)

Ready to Step up your marketing?

 

Context and timing are crucial

Timing is key – configure your website so that you’re notified of inbound leads and they immediately appear in your CRM. Then make sure you do a bit of research on those leads, in order to not waste time on leads that do not match the profiles of your ideal buyers.

Needless to say, you shouldn’t ignore irrelevant leads – that would be unprofessional and impolite.  Simply keep your eyes on the target and remember that your time is limited so allocate it smartly discerning politeness from calculated efforts.

Once you have screened irrelevant leads, use the time you’ve saved to nurture relevant leads and to communicate with them in a productive and personalized way.

You can read more about how to nurture your leads in this post.

Conclusion

It’s easy to get carried away and focusing on the leads that are not a good fit for your business. As professionals, just because a business is taking an interest in working with you, does not mean that it’s a good idea to proceed. Be sure to know who your ideal buyer personas are and to focus your efforts on them. Long term win-win relationships will be what sets you apart from competitors who are unclear to themselves.

If you found this helpful, let’s pick up the pace, learn how to rectify your sales pipeline and grow your business in our FREE 14 B2B Marketing Best Practices that every CMO must know eBook!

Schedule a FREE consultation

 

 

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How to drive sales with Facebook for a B2B Business

By |2023-04-24T11:46:20+00:00May 26th, 2016|

topicIcon B2B Marketing Social Media Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

Facebook For a B2B Business header

Introduction – Facebook for a B2B Business

Facebook is known as one of the major ad networks available today. Since the social network is mainly for recreational and personal uses, B2B businesses tend to leave this channel low-touched or not touched at all. This of course is a terrible mistake since B2B buyers are also human and use Facebook just like any other user. The trick is too truly understand your buyer personas and to promote the content they want to read according to their stage in the buyer’s journey.

It is important to understand that this post demonstrates one example. Each business is unique and has different buyer personas and different buying cycles. What is right for one business will not always work for another. This post will hopefully get your brain juices flowing and inspire you to try and test different approaches until you find what works best for your business.

 

The challenge B2B Business need to deal with

Since the buying cycle of a B2B buyer compared to B2C buyer is longer and more complex – using Facebook as TOFU only channel is not recommended and will result in frustration and rough cash-flow for your business since it will generate costly low-quality (not sales ready) leads. Getting sales on the phone to call those leads and pitch will most likely result in disappointment.

Quality B2B Leads are hard to generate.B2B buyers are rarely ready to buy on the spot. The trick is to attract relevant potential prospects even when they are not ready to buy and to nurture them to the point that not only they are ready to buy, but they are specifically interested at buying from you.

Before proceeding with this post make sure that you understand what the buyer’s journey is, this it is crucial in order to understand the remains of this post and in order to actually generate sales using Facebook for a B2B Business.

Custom Audiences are you best friend

Facebooks custom audiences is one of their best advertising tool. The ability to use your own data (website, App, CRM, Facebook Engagement) to target specific users in their buying journey is a great opportunity to drive them down the funnel and nurture them to the point they are ready to buy from you.

Using the Custom Audiences wisely will reduce your advertising spend and increase your overall performance and ROI.

You can read my post on how to use Facebook Custom Audiences to get a more profound understanding of the tool.

Getting the leads flowing

Facebook has many types of campaign objectives. Choosing the objective that directly corresponds with your business goals is usually the best practice. While using Facebook to generate leads for a B2B business, sometime the effective method is a bit different. Of course your primary objective is to generate leads or sales, nevertheless, using Website Conversion at some stages would be wrong. The reason is that trying to cold sell to a B2B buyer will mostly result a failure – don’t try to sell in your ads until they are ready to buy.

Ready to Step up your marketing?

Use “Post Engagement” or “Website Clicks” campaigns in order to drive relevant traffic to your best performing blog posts. Choose the posts that pushes the right buttons on your potential B2B Buyer.
I’ll demonstrate this by giving a fictitious example that will lead us through the remaining of this post.

“AWD” (Awesome Web Developers) is a web development company that specializes in creating custom complex web applications to businesses.

One of their buyer personas is “Product Dave”. Dave  is a VP Product at a post round A startup company. While working on developing and understanding Dave’s persona AWD realize that one of Dave’s biggest challenges is to scale a web product.

Therefore, they write a blog post titled: “How to make your web product scalable”.

This would be a post I would try to promote at the awareness stage of the potential buyers.

In the post I would place Calls to Actions to a landing page that offers a premium content offer (an eBook for example). In order to download the content offer, prospects must provide their E-mail so that the offer can be emailed to them.

Remember – we are not trying to sell, so there is no point in asking for their phone number or any other credential in return for downloading the offer. Keep the form as short as possible in order to keep your conversion rates optimal.

Once they have submitted their request for the eBook they have in fact converted from total strangers to a contact that we can keep track of and engage with emails or remarketing (using Custom Audiences).

For users that had visited your relevant blog posts and haven’t yet converted – try using the Facebook Website Conversions campaign type and drive the already visited users directly to your content offer.

The following chart demonstrates the process

Stranger_To_Contact_facebook_funnel.jpg

Turning contacts into qualified leads

Now that we have relevant contacts, how can we turn them in to qualified leads and eventually to sales?

In order for a potential B2B Buyer to take you under consideration in the buying process he must first trust you. Downloading your eBook is a great beginning it’s only part of the process of building your trust and authority in their eyes.

Email marketing is a very effective tool to drive potential buyers down the sales funnel, but sometimes it’s not enough and could require external media assistance. This is where Facebook’s custom audiences come to the rescue.

Create segmented lists of users that are in the consideration stage – in the AWD example, users that downloaded the awareness stage eBook but hadn’t yet had taken any other actions (other eBooks, webinars, Consideration/decision blog posts, etc).

Target those lists using Facebooks Custom Audiences and use the Post Engagement/Website Clicks objective to direct the traffic to relevant consideration posts. This time your target audience is quite precise and you should expect high CTR’s and high engagement rates since those users have already downloaded an eBook from you and know you a bit better.

These blog posts should contain CTA’s to a landing page offering them a premium consideration content offer such as webinar or guide. This time in order to receive the premium content offer they should submit additional information about themselves. For example, ask them to submit their role in the company they work at and the URL of website of that company.

Once submitting their credentials these contacts become leads. You know their name, where they works and you have their company website address. This reflect higher intent and maturity – enough to call them a lead.

Notice we still didn’t ask the prospect for their phone number. The buyer’s journey is not over yet and the prospect is not ready to be sold to. Keep pushing the prospect down the buyer’s journey from consideration to the decision stage. Do this with additional blog posts, landing pages and premium offers. Each time, ask for more information about the prospect, Since they have already engaged with a lot of your content you can dig deeper and ask even harder questions that will help your sales team in the future to easily close the deal by being much more prepared for a personalized sales pitch.

Once you have accumulated enough data on the user, you can now call him a marketing qualified lead (MQL). This point varies between businesses and should be tested constantly.

The following is an illustration of the process

Contact_to_Qualified_lead_funnel.jpg

Turn qualified leads to sales

You now have a bunch of marketing qualified leads who are likely ready to be sold to.
Before you try to pitch them, run the cycle one more time – this time on Decision Stage blog posts. For example, a successful Case study of your company helping a company like theirs. In the blog posts,  include Calls To Action that direct them to a landing page offering a free consultation or demo. This time take their phone number only – the rest you already know by now.

 

Take all the data you have on the prospect and hand it over to sales. The data you have accumulated and the trust and authority you gained in the prospects eyes is very high and the likelihood of the MQL to turn into a sale is much higher than the conversion rates generated by a cold approach.

 

Conclusion –  Facebook for a B2B Business

Generating B2B sales using Facebook advertising isn’t easy, it takes time and optimization processes. But once you have all your gears set – the clock will tick and the sales will occur.

Executing this process without automation capabilities is rather difficult, I suggest to using some sort of marketing automation system so that the process will be easier and more effective. Nonetheless, the methodology remains the same and even without automation, I highly recommend ditching the cold calling approach and utilizing Facebook to create a relationship with your prospects, nurture leads, push them down the buyer’s journey and eventually turning them into customers.

If you’re curious to learn more, we invite you to download this FREE guide of 14 B2B marketing practices every CMO must know.

Schedule a FREE consultation

 

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