The 5 essentials of B2B digital marketing

But for this blog post I thought it was worth going back to the basics. My goal is to walk you through what I consider to be the core components of B2B digital marketing.

1. Strategy

i. Content Strategy

Creating content is no easy task but whatever your end goal, you need to start with a content marketing strategy. A good content strategy will set out how you intend to use various types of content, media and distribution channels so that they deliver your desired outcome.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, in 2018 63% of B2B marketers didn’t have a documented content strategy. This is surprising as a documented strategy not only avoids duplication and wasted resources, but will ensure that all stakeholders are aligned on objectives, responsibilities and accountability. In CMI’s latest B2B Content Marketing 2021 report, the figure improved slightly to 57%.

Understanding that a lead generation campaign requires a different content strategy than one focused on content amplification is why you should always start by identifying your commercial goals first and work backwards. Meanwhile, a competitive content analysis, also known as a content audit, can help you discover what your competitors are talking about (too much or too little), their tone and approach, as well as how and where they’re promoting their content.

With your content strategy in place, your next step should be an editorial calendar. Calendars are extremely useful to get you thinking ahead, staying on track and mapping out topics, dates, formats and channels.

Check out our previous post on a content strategy in 5 steps for a more in-depth look at this topic.

ii. Digital Strategy

Likewise, having a digital marketing strategy will help you meet your objectives through using online marketing techniques such as SEO, content and social media.

The strategy should start with an analysis of your current capabilities (a SWOT or SOSTAC analysis is ideal), setting out your goals and KPI’s. Next, using the SMART objective technique will help ensure you have clear, defined and measurable objectives. Then you need to think about how your value proposition, audience personas and content can all work together in relation to your strategic goals.

Personally, I find the digital capability framework an excellent starting point when planning a B2B digital marketing strategy:

Once you’ve gone through and applied the framework to your organisation, you might want to repeat the exercise again on a micro-level, applying the framework to the individual components such as: social media, content and measurement.

For a step-by-step guide to the digital capability framework, check out Target Internet, an online learning portal on digital marketing.

2. Measurement & Analytics:

Once you have put your strategy in place, you’ll need to know if it’s working. The only guaranteed way to measure success is to look at the numbers: good data will help you understand where you started, where you are, and where you’re heading.

For most content marketing and thought leadership campaigns, one of the primary objectives is to create ongoing engagement with your audience and have them come back when new content is published. A metric like “New vs. Returning Users” tracks if it’s a user’s first time on your website or if they’ve visited before. Alternatively, a lead generation campaign should focus on the number of leads generated and converted. This can be measured by tracking the number of contact forms completed, free trial registrations and of course revenue generated.

Below I’ve listed some metrics and what they track to get you started.

Once you have your data, then comes the fun part – the analytics. The real value of marketing analytics is uncovering what’s behind the numbers: how your content, SEO and even offline events contributed to that spike or drop in pageviews and click-through-rates. For example, are you getting an increasing number of hits from your Japan-based readers? If so, this could be an opportunity to produce more Japan focused content and grow that segment.

i. Tools

There is no shortage of tools out there. For instance, I googled “marketing analytics tools” and I got 398,000,000 search results. So, before you drown in the endless lists, reviews and free trials, here are my suggestions for some core tools that I have tried and tested, and should be your first port of call:

• • Web Analytics Tools: Full suite marketing analytics tools link to your website via a code, tracking metrics such as pageviews (a user visiting a page on a website), acquisition channels (where your visitors are coming from i.e. social media or organic traffic). Among the most popular tools are Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics.
  • Social Media Analytics Tools: If you’re using social media, such as YouTube, LinkedIn or Twitter you must always keep your eye on your engagement rates, and how different posts, content formats (video vs. text) perform. Luckily these tools are built into the platform and are generally easy to use. For the advanced user, tools such as Sprout Social, Buffer and Hootsuite can integrate all your social channels into one combined dashboard. If you’re looking to conduct a competitor analysis, and understand how you measure up against them, then RivalIQ is my recommended choice.

3. Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short, is the practice of optimizing your website for search platforms such as Google, Bing or Baidu to allow them to better understand your website and match it to the relevant online search queries. The goal of SEO is to generate more organic traffic to your website. Organic traffic is when a user finds your website as a result of an online search for a product or service that you offer, or a topic mentioned in your content. Among the benefits of organic traffic, is creating more awareness of your brand, your products or services. Ultimately, it can become a lead generation mechanism for potential clients.

With ever-changing algorithm updates — Google for example has 200+ ranking signals — it has become a complex and full-time job to optimise your pages and content for maximum results. However, the beauty of SEO is how it now requires a holistic approach rather than a check-list of to-dos. While there still are must-do optimization techniques, the emphasis is now on the quality of content and how useful, original and most importantly how well it satisfies the reader’s intent. The more your content fulfils the reader’s question and informational need, the more useful it is deemed by the search engine and the higher it will rank. For more ideas on how you can use keyword research, check out our case study and how we helped our client gain a better understanding of their target markets.

i. SEO Tools & Techniques

Some of the well-known techniques of SEO include a keyword strategy (keywords your target audience uses to search online), optimizing your website for speed and acquiring backlinks. A backlink, the digital equivalent of a literature citation, is when an external website links to one of your pages either as a reference or a resource. The more backlinks you acquire from a selection of high-ranking websites the more likely you’ll benefit from an SEO perspective.

There are various ways to approach keyword research, some of the most popular tools include Semrush and Ahrefs both with large keyword databases. You can supplement your research with Google Trends or Answer The Public to find out what topics and queries are trending and how people are searching for them.

Acquiring backlinks is longer-term process, that usually centres on outreach efforts to site owners: building a rapport, introducing your content and the value it brings to their site. Other techniques include getting links from online directories and resource pages. Backlinko, a popular digital marketing website has updated their definitive link-building guide, which is packed with ideas, data-backed insights and case studies.

It’s important to remember that if your content doesn’t provide any value, you are limiting your chances of getting backlinks. So, focus on your content!

4. Social Media

With everyone (even pets!) on social media, it needs to be part of any content strategy. The most important thing to understand is that different social media channels cater to different audiences. It may seem easier to create an account on every social media platform, however it’s much more effective to do some research into which one fits with your brand and objectives.

For example, B2B businesses in the finance industry will typically focus on a professional network like LinkedIn as that is where their audience expects to engage with industry news and content. While a technology business might want to opt for visual content, targeting a channel like YouTube that can provide them the space to discuss at length their product capabilities and features.

Popular B2B Social Media Channels:

1. 1. LinkedIn
   2. Twitter
   3. YouTube
   4. WeChat & Weibo (China focused)
   5. Medium

i. Social Media Strategy

Part of a successful social media strategy is understanding where your audience is, how they use the network and what you want to accomplish. Research and a social media audit can help you answer these questions. A social media strategy should be part of your content strategy.

ii. Social Media Policy

A well-defined and documented social media policy is critical for any B2B organisation, although often overlooked. The policy serves as an operational framework, governing behaviour, delegating responsibilities and outlining an escalation process in the case of social media emergencies. Hootsuite’s social media policy post, offer’s a handy explanation with real-life examples and a free template to get you started. Waiting for a social media crisis to happen to draw up a policy can cost you your business, as these businesses found out the hard way. Having one in place early on, will most likely minimize the risk of a crisis and if it does occur, you’ll know how to react and who to turn to for support.

iii. Social Listening & Media Monitoring

Social media listening and monitoring, is a technique employed by both B2C and B2B organisations. Tools such as BrandWatch and Mention allow you to create and track triggers for brand mentions, keywords or hashtags (or a mixture of all) on different social media channels, online forums, blogs and news sites etc. Tracking this information will make you better informed of how your audience perceives your business or service.

For B2B businesses, it can be a great resource to conduct market research on what their industry and customers are discussing, identifying perceptions, both positive and negative that can be used to inform a content marketing strategy. Although I must warn you, that you will need to spend a decent amount of time extracting these insights and the work will involve wading through spreadsheets! If you want to make full use of the latest machine-learning technology (and have the budget for it!) Synthesio and Infegy are worth checking out.

5. Paid and Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing is an online advertising technique that allows marketers to bid on selected keywords and have their website listed in the search results, when one or more keyword is part of a search queries. The example below shows paid ads for a search for “Hong Kong apartments to rent”.

For a B2B organization, search engine marketing (SEM), is best used for brand awareness and content reach amplification.

Brand awareness is all about creating familiarity and a visual connection, triggering an association with a product, a service or even certain values. Display network campaigns are usually a good fit for this purpose.

To help maximise your content’s exposure and online reach, you can launch a paid search campaign that targets keywords that are relevant to your content. Alternatively, you can opt for social media marketing, using promoted tweets on Twitter and on LinkedIn, that can help you target the right audience based on geography, industry and expertise.

Wrap Up

I hope you find this guide useful. There’s a lot to consider but if you do your research, have the courage to experiment and of course use data to guide your decisions you should soon find the right mix to suit your organization’s culture and goals. Good luck!