Why Digital Marketing is Important for B2B Business
Regardless of how niche your B2B business’s product or service offering is, it is critical to leverage digital marketing services to grow your business in multiple ways, such as improved brand identity and overall digital presence, a significant jump in sales, streamlined customer retention, and more.
And since digital marketing is not a one-size-fits-all solution, you must have a B2B digital marketing plan that is specific to your business. In other words, all the areas of digital marketing, including SEO, SMO, paid advertising (aka performance marketing), content marketing, etc, must be aligned with your B2B business’s product and/or services.
What Value Can Your B2B Business Get From Digital Marketing?
With a well-informed B2B digital marketing strategy as your arsenal, your business can achieve primary goals, including cost-effective customer acquisition, streamlined sales, improved branding, as well as growth in other areas, such as customer retention, brand recall, public relations, and more. Here are more details about them:
1. Cost-effective Customer Acquisition
Acquiring new customers is usually more expensive for B2B businesses as compared to B2C businesses. Traditional B2B approaches to acquiring new customers, such as attending networking events and trade shows, running publicity campaigns, etc, involve high costs which can be unfeasible for small-sized B2B businesses, especially start-ups.
On the other hand, digital marketing makes it highly cost-effective for B2B start-ups and small to medium-sized B2B businesses to acquire and retain new customers. For example, bidding on highly niche keywords can help your B2B business acquire customers without spending much on PPC advertising.
Digital marketing for B2B businesses also makes it easy to acquire customers organically with approaches such as B2B marketplace listings, business directory listings, bookmarking, marketing in Q&A communities, and gaining organic rankings on the first page of search engine results pages (SERP).
2. Streamlined Sales
The sales enablement aspect of digital marketing is often overlooked but can be highly valuable, especially for small and medium-sized B2B businesses. A comprehensive B2B digital marketing plan involves optimization for the middle and bottom layers of the sales funnel and not just the top layer.
Therefore, prioritise sales enablement approaches, such as creating sales enablement collaterals, optimising content marketing for the customer journey in the middle and bottom sales funnel, etc. These approaches make it more seamless for the sales team to convert high-ticket B2B customers.
3. Improved Branding and Overall Positioning
It’s the branding and positioning that matters when it comes to making your B2B business known to your potential customers and other prospects. There are a lot of B2B digital marketing examples that highlight the importance of digital marketing and branding and positioning, such as IBM’s Smarter Planet campaign.
With digital marketing, your B2B business is not limited to print media when it comes to improving branding and positioning. Digital marketing opens a lot of ways to take your B2B business’s branding to the next level through search engine optimisation, social media marketing, branding ad campaigns, press releases, and more.
4. Optimising for Local Markets
If the target audience for your B2B business is local markets, then you can leverage digital marketing in strategic ways to position for local audiences that you can acquire in the most efficient and cost-effective ways possible. Digital marketing approaches, such as local search engine optimisation, the local region and demographic targeting in paid ad campaigns, etc help optimise for local target audiences.
5. Brand Recall and Customer Retention
There is a common misconception that brand recall is important only for B2C businesses. However, that is far from being true as brand recall is equally important for B2B businesses. If you want to grow your B2B business in a lean way without spending aggressively on customer acquisition, you can leverage digital marketing in several ways to build brand recall which, in turn, helps improve customer acquisition as well as retention.
As part of building a robust digital marketing strategy for your B2B business, focus on approaches that help improve brand recall, such as retargeting ad campaigns, omni-channel presence on social media platforms, and useful articles and online tools that your potential customers and prospects can save/bookmark, and more.
How To Create a B2B Digital Marketing Plan For Your Business?
The best place to start when it comes to creating a B2B digital marketing strategy for your business is to understand your needs and have proper clarity on the business goals you want to achieve. You can either go for a full-stack digital marketing approach which involves optimising in every area of digital marketing or have a specific digital marketing plan that focuses only on the areas where you want your B2B business to improve.
Regardless of the option you choose, it is crucial to ensure that the digital marketing plan aligns with the business goals you want to achieve.
1. Have Short-Term Goals and Digital Marketing Tactics for Them
Firstly, prioritise the short-term goals you want to achieve for your B2B business and focus on the areas of digital marketing that can help you achieve them. For example, if you want to gain quick visibility in communities where your potential customers are, you can run paid ad campaigns in those specific community platforms with ad campaign objectives such as branding, engagement, and/or lead generation. This way, almost 50% of your B2B digital marketing strategy can focus on achieving short-term goals.
Expert Insight: One efficient way to grow your business by achieving short-term goals, such as lead generation, is to convert the first few batches of the leads you generate through paid ad campaigns and use the generated revenue to fuel your overall digital marketing expenses. This way, all the digital marketing activities for your B2B business become a self-sustaining model.
2. Plan Long-Term Goals and Digital Marketing Tactics for Them
The rest 50% of the bandwidth you are left with can be focused on achieving long-term goals. With digital marketing tactics such as optimisation for leading search engines such as Google and Bing, consistent social media marketing, and omni-channel presence on community platforms, you can achieve a sustainable way to position your B2B business at the forefront of your niche market and make your business known to your prospects through and through.
Leverage B2B Digital Marketing Strategically with Shreem
With Shreem Business Solutions as your digital marketing partner, you can leverage digital marketing in the most strategic ways for your B2B business and achieve all your business goals in streamlined ways. Our digital marketing team has expertise in every digital marketing domain and can help you gain a significant competitive advantage. Contact our team for a free and no-obligation consultation.
