Everything you need to know about digital B2B marketing

Digital presence increasingly important for B2B marketers

These days, most purchasing journeys take place online, even for business-to-business transactions. This requires a strong digital presence parallel with the company's more traditional sales staff. With digital marketing for B2B companies, you can build your brand while reaching out to new potential customers and generating leads.

The B2B customer journey

The first step when starting to work with B2B marketing is to understand the customer journey. The customer journey is everything that happens from the customer's need or interest arising to the customer making a purchase. There are several different ways of looking at the customer journey, such as the classic AIDA model (Attention, Interest, Desire and Action) and the RACE model (Reach, Act, Convert and Engage). These stages can be broken down further depending on the industry, and most of the steps actually take place without direct contact between the selling company and the customer. This is where relevant content comes into play.

The B2B customer journey usually includes more decision makers than a classic B2C customer journey. More effort may be required to stimulate a need or interest, but above all it is important to make sure that the customer understands that your company is the best option for them. You also need to collect data about the target group so that both the algorithms and the marketers can achieve the best possible results.

Soft Conversions – collecting relevant data and strengthening your brand

Soft conversions are a way to collect data, strengthen your brand and learn more about your target group. When you collect data, you make it easier for the algorithms to reach the right people, and with the help of data on the target group, you can create remarketing or retargeting lists for different channels. Here are some examples of useful soft conversions:

1. White papers

A white paper is generally a longer, in-depth text on a topic relevant to your industry. Most often, the customer is invited to download the text in exchange for their email address, which can then be used, for example, for e-mail marketing. White papers should contain plenty of useful content, with detailed information on a topic clearly connected to your industry and work.

2. NEWSLETTERS – CLASSIC BUT EFFECTIVE

E-mailing is one of the most classic ways to collect soft conversions. If you choose to invest in newsletters, it is important that you have a clear strategy and produce qualitative and relevant content.

3. Webinars

A webinar is a great way to acquire soft conversions. Invite an external presenter to speak on an interesting topic or have your own experts talk about their area of expertise and how it can create value for other companies.

Finding B2B customers

One of the most important questions when it comes to marketing is "Who is the customer?". What is often forgotten in B2B marketing is that it is not actually another company that is the customer, but people who work at the company.

It is important to build an understanding of who the customer is and that it may also be two or more very different people. For example, a CFO at a company may have a completely different need than someone who works there with HR, but both may be interested in your product or service. You need to find different ways to communicate with the different relevant roles to arouse interest or create a need.

Channels for B2B – more than just LinkedIn

For B2B marketing, there are certain channels that may seem more obvious than others. LinkedIn is one example. But to be successful with B2B marketing, you need to have a broader approach than just LinkedIn. First and foremost, you also need to be seen on Google. You can do this by advertising, so that you appear at the top and bottom of the search results, or by SEO-optimising your website to have a good position in organic search results.

Common challenges for B2B companies are low awareness among customers and the fact that the industry you operate in or your product or service is not in great demand. This can result in low traffic volume to your website if you only appear in Google search results. It is therefore important to find alternative ways to raise awareness of your brand and create a need among your target group.

Since we market to employees and not companies per se, it is ideal to also be able to reach them on other types of platform where they are active. In addition to LinkedIn, there are other platforms for paid content that many private individuals use. For example, social media advertising is also good for B2B marketing, and advertising on Facebook and Instagram can be very effective. Display ads are also a good way to build your brand. With display advertising, either within Google's own network or programmatic purchases, you can reach your target group higher up in the purchase funnel on websites they visit.

Set goals for your business to business marketing

As with all marketing, it is vital to set goals. Since purchases will not come in with the same high frequency as for e-commerce, for example, where goals are related to ROAS or CoS, we need to look beyond these.

First and foremost, sales is the main goal of marketing, but in order to determine whether the people you have reached are actually relevant, secondary goals are particularly important in B2B marketing. One example of a secondary goal is qualified leads, i.e. leads that come in via your website that a salesperson then qualifies. By only measuring the total number of leads, there is no guarantee that they are the right kind of lead.

Clear goals, both primary and secondary, also enable us to measure how effective our marketing has been and give us useful input going forward – is the strategy working or do we need to change something?

It can be difficult to adopt a comprehensive marketing strategy, and the company may have little in the way of resources. If so, select a few nuggets that you think you will be able to implement well and you will soon be up and running on your digital journey.