Compelling Digital Marketing Drills For B2B Organizations
Estimated Read Time: 8 minutes
Intended Audience: B2B Business Owners, Chief Marketing Officers, Business Strategists
Revised September 2023
Some B2B digital marketing trends never go out of style. Here are some tactics that you should utilize to see a greater impact and return on investment from your digital marketing efforts.
B2B Digital Marketing Trend #1: Don’t Undervalue Webinars, Videos & Virtual Events
The use of video calling skyrocketed as organizations around the world adapted to remote work and it doesn’t look like this digital marketing trend will be slowing down anytime soon.
The pandemic had a huge impact on the popularity growth of video conferencing, webinars and virtual events, but they were all on the rise long before ‘social distancing’ became part of our daily vocabulary.
The good news is that including webinars, videos and virtual events in your B2B digital marketing strategy can open up a number of opportunities for lead generation, improving the buyer journey, and expanding your brand reach.
Use Webinars and Virtual Events for Lead Generation
Producing high-quality webinars and virtual events that truly add value to attendees can take a lot of work, but we promise that it will pay off and the rewards will be worth the effort!
Not only do webinars position you as an authority and a thought leader, but they are also a great vehicle for generating high-quality leads. People that are willing to take the time out of their day to join your webinar are likely to be highly engaged and searching to add value to their organization within your area of expertise. With that being said, it’s definitely worth adding webinars and virtual events to your B2B digital marketing strategy.
Expand Your Reach with Co-Marketing
Now that you’ve added virtual events and webinars to your marketing must-haves, it’s time to consider how to elevate your reach. Collaborating with compatible organizations to your own can be a great way to elevate your webinars or virtual events by tapping into new, but relevant, audiences.
Plus, hosting a webinar in partnership with a complementary organization means you can add even more value to your audience by going above and beyond your specific area of expertise.
Improve The Buyer Journey With Videos
Videos are an amazing tool for getting all sorts of messages across to your audience in an engaging, easy-to-understand way. When used effectively, they can drastically improve the buyer journey by providing a much more detailed look at the product or service you are offering. In fact, according to Google 55% of people search for a product on Google, and then learn more by going to YouTube before they buy it.
Not only can videos help your audience better understand your products or services, but they can also have a huge impact on your SEO. Search engines love video and value it as high-quality pieces of content. In 2021, it’s estimated that over 80% of all web traffic will consist of video.
B2B Digital Marketing Trend #2: Be Authentic, Educational & Informative
Customers are inundated with messages every day, so being authentic and adding real educational value will help you cut through the noise and create a strong connection with your audience. Use your content to capture interest and establish your organization as a source of reliable information, and stay consistent with the value you provide to your audience.
The following content types are a great way to provide educational content and generate leads at the same time:
- Whitepapers – creating technical, in-depth whitepapers on a specific topic can enforce your organization as a thought leader in your area, establish trust among your audience, and solidify you as a go-to source of information.
- Guides – help your audience get up to speed with easy to follow ‘how-to’ guides.
- eBooks – easy to read and more general than whitepapers, eBooks are a great way to increase credibility and add value through educational content.
- Infographics – a great way to format content and information so it’s easy to read, educational and highly shareable.
- Blogging – consistent blogging can showcase thought leadership as well as drive traffic to your website.
B2B Digital Marketing Trend #3: Nurture Leads with Email Marketing Nurtures & Automation
If you haven’t already moved your email marketing to an automated platform, we should probably be catching you up on marketing in 2011 rather than now!
Transitioning to an email automation platform (our favourites are MailChimp and HubSpot) can be one of the most highly impactful marketing investments you can make, with substantial ROI for years to come. It will make staying in touch with your contacts easier than ever and allow you to keep them engaged with relevant and personalized content.
Email Nurture Flows
Use your email automation platform to take your contacts on a journey depending on their interest group. For example, if you gained a contact because they registered to join a webinar, you will know the subject area that they are interested in. Moving forward, you can nurture this contact with relevant information that adds value to them within this area and tie in your product or service offering in a way that’s relevant to their individual needs.
Automated Email Follow Up
Reach out to new contacts instantly with automated email follow-ups. Setting up auto-responders to download, sign up or other forms allow you to automatically reach out to new contacts with the information they need without delay. This will allow you to get a higher response from your audience, as when they complete a significant action like filling in a form they will likely expect a response or confirmation.
Consistent Email Communications
To get the most from your email list, it’s important to keep your contacts engaged and remain consistent over time. A great way to do this is by sending a monthly newsletter to your contacts to keep them updated on what is new & noteworthy with your organization, and to share any new resources that may be helpful to them. A monthly newsletter provides the opportunity for you to touch base with leads, showcase your business and keep your database up to date.
B2B Digital Marketing Trend #4: Reinvest in Search Engine Marketing for the Long-Term
When it comes to SEO, it is a common misconception that if you optimize your website once then it will last forever. The reality is interest changes, and so do keywords. For example, in the Microsoft space, “Office 365” rebranded to “Microsoft 365” or “Microsoft Dynamics NAV” is now “Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central”.
It’s important to keep checking back in on your keywords and your keyword strategy, as it’s not guaranteed that they will get more popular with time. This coming year, check back in on your SEO with the following crucial stages:
Revisit Your Website Keyword Strategy
Keywords are at the heart of website SEO, so it’s important to clearly define the keywords that have the most relevance and potential for your organization.
To build an effective keyword strategy, start by conducting thorough keyword research using tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Moz or Ahrefs. Use the keyword data gathered in this research stage to guide how you will use individual keywords and how you will track their impact going forward.
Conduct a Thorough SEO Audit
How is your current site performing in terms of SEO? The best way to check what is working and what isn’t is to complete a thorough SEO audit of your site. It’s important to look out for both big issues that may be holding your site back, as well as smaller, easy-to-fix problems that may present opportunities for quick wins.
An SEO audit should cover an analysis of current organic search traffic using Google Search Console and Google Analytics, a content audit and content gap analysis, as well as examining what content (whether that’s written copy, images, or videos) is optimized and what still needs to be.
Book an SEO Audit Today!
Not sure where to start with your website SEO? Don’t panic, Maven Collective Marketing’s expert team is here to help you!
Implement SEO Elements Across Your Site
Last but definitely not least, it’s time to fill in the gaps highlighted in your SEO audit. We recommend building a checklist for each page, article, or blog post, so you have a comprehensive list of all the elements that need optimizing. It can be time consuming, but ensuring that all your headings, images and copy are optimized for search will drastically improve how easy it is for potential customers to find you online.
B2B Digital Marketing Trend #5: Explore New SERP Opportunities
Search engine algorithm updates happen all the time which means there are constantly new opportunities to improve your ranking. Take advantage of rich snippets and structured data markup to take that coveted ‘position zero’ on search engine listings – the most sought after spot on the internet.
Schema Markup
Schema markup is a section of code that you put on your site in order to help search engines serve users with an informative response to best answer their questions. Essentially, schema markup provides search engine algorithms with context to inform what your data means rather than simply what it says.
Rich Snippet Categories
The majority of Google search results show a website’s title tag, meta description and URL. Rich snippets include these, but also adds more to it making your site more compelling and increasing CTR. Search engines like Google will pull this rich snippet data from Structured Markup (like Schema) in your website’s code.
Leveraging Google Search Console
B2B Digital Marketing Trend #6: Promote in the Right Channels Consistently
There are countless platforms you could use to market your organization, but it’s important to pinpoint the most important ones for you so you can stay focused on connecting with your audience in the right place at the right time. If you don’t you may find yourself spending an endless amount of time without any measurable results.
Here are the key channels we recommend focusing on:
Email Marketing
As mentioned earlier in this post, email can be a very personal way to reach your target audience. When planning your email strategy, think about how you can create a personalized experience for your contact list so that every communication is relevant to their individual interests and goals.
B2B Social Media
In our experience working with B2B companies, a lot of organizations struggle to get into a routine with social media marketing, or even ignore it completely. When used effectively, social media marketing can present a number of opportunities for your organization so make sure it is a key part of your B2B digital marketing strategy!
Paid Advertising (Google/Bing, LinkedIn, Podcasts)
Co-Marketing
Simply put, co-marketing is when two or more companies come together to promote an event or co-branded offer. By leveraging the relationship between your own organization and an aligned organization, you can experience the mutual benefits of expanding your brand awareness across a much larger, combined audience. This can deliver new leads and grow awareness of your product or service offering, with the added benefit of sharing the workload with another team!
Guest Blogging/Appearances
Guest blogging can present a number of benefits for your organization. You can establish yourself as a thought leader within your industry and expand your reach to a completely new audience. Plus, it can be a great way to build backlinks to your own site from high-authority, high-traffic sites in your field. When getting started, make sure you do your due diligence to ensure that the sites you are guest blogging to align with your brand, have a high domain authority, and are reputable within your field.
B2B Marketing Trends & Beyond
B2B digital marketing trends are ever-changing, but if you keep on top of them then you will be able to uncover countless opportunities to expand your reach and grow your business.
We hope these B2B digital marketing trends will help you keep your digital marketing strategy current through this next year, and beyond. But, if you need some extra help, our expert team is here to help.
Find out more about how Maven Collective Marketing can revolutionize your B2B digital marketing by getting in touch at maven@mavencollectivemarketing.com.
