Top Four Strategies for B2B Marketing
B2B marketers face many challenges in today’s marketing scenario. With informed and aware buyers, there is pressure to perform competitively, generate leads, nurture them and ensure timely sales closure. Here are the top four marketing strategies that will work well for today’s B2B marketing scenario.
Content Marketing
A B2B website should be viewed as a store house of valuable content for the website visitor. It is important to regularly update corporate blogs and ensure there is a constant flow of keyword driven articles for SEO purposes. Companies need to create a content plan that helps establish the company as an industry thought leader and trendsetter in their industry segment.
Invest time, money and resources in producing high quality research reports, whitepapers, presentations, video-logs, webinars, info graphics etc. This kind of content serves a larger purpose than just providing brand visibility and improved search engine rankings. It helps to attract prospects and leads, and helps them understand and believe in product offerings as well.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing strategies must go beyond working on brand pages in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. Strategies must help in sharing the company expertise in expert groups and forums, participating in group discussions, thereby promoting the company offerings in a subtle or indirect way.
Social media marketing must be channel/platform specific, which includes online events, which help the brand interact with other brand followers and understand them better. These campaigns should be designed keeping in mind the tastes of members of each of these social networking platforms.
Since social media has completely changed the way a company interacts and connect with leads, multiple campaigns should not be run simultaneously lest it may confuse the social media leads. More importantly, it is imperative to nurture them in an interactive and personalized way.
Customer Relationship Management
Marketers and sales professionals are usually busy pursuing new leads and prospects. Often in this rush to meet targets, they forget to nurture and strengthen their existing relationships with their customers. Good customer relationship helps win excellent recommendations and referrals which produces better and more qualified leads, than those who marketers have to convert from scratch. Using CRM tools helps to identify up-sell opportunities and increased mindshare.
Marketing Automation
Investing in a marketing automation platform is something many B2B companies have done last year. However, it is important to ensure that marketing and sales teams use the platform effectively. With the kind of insights, analytics and automation of regular marketing activities a good marketing automation platform can provide, companies can expect a rise in throughput if their marketing and sales teams use it wisely.
Marketing automation solutions not only help in increasing the number of qualified leads discovered on the website (lead generation); it also helps the marketing and sales teams to set a common standard for qualifying leads. It also helps them in assisting a lead’s journey through the buying process in a more strategic, well thought-out and customized manner.
The above four strategies are bound to make B2B marketers successful in every way.
Read on - Lead management software, Lead nurturing