Did you know that, according to Weidert’s pool, 79% of companies confirmed that vendor’s content significantly impacted their decision to start with B2B inbound marketing?
Similar numbers show up in more and more polls.
Companies that are aware of these trends invest heavily in developing a B2B inbound marketing strategy.
However, old habits die hard, and fewer people dare to start something new.
Today’s article will give you core steps to start and develop a successful B2B inbound marketing strategy.
Let’s get started.
What Is a B2B Inbound Marketing Strategy?
B2B inbound marketing strategy uses best practices to present your product to companies that might see it as a resource for their business development.
On the other hand, old marketing strategies involving radio jingles, billboards, TV commercials, and news portal banners give low returns on investment.
So that’s the reason why businesses are switching their focus.
With b2b inbound marketing, you are targeting a small group of decision-makers which sometimes you can even recognize by their name.
Building a brand name with tailor-made messages for just the right group of individuals generates a high conversion rate.
The statistic shows that inbound marketers double the average site conversion rate, from 6% - 12% in total.
When implementing a B2B inbound marketing strategy, it is crucial to understand that conversions are divided into stages following:
- Attract – build brand recognition and create conversations about products.
- Convert – present a solution to visitor's requirements
- Close – signing business as a customer.
- Satisfaction – develop cooperation to retain partners and make them your advertisers.
Satisfied customers are your best ambassadors and promoters.
Why Should You Focus On Inbound Marketing Strategies?
Content marketing is responsible for 3x as many leads as outbound marketing with 50% lower prices.
We can present differences between Outbound and Inbound strategies as the difference between catching fish with a fishing net and lure.
The outbound strategy has a broader reach but a higher price to set up. And with its generic messages, it has a lower conversion rate.
B2C (business-to-customer) marketing campaigns might benefit from the wider reach and have some results from generic messages.
B2B marketing requires a higher precision approach since businesses are looking for solutions that will meet their requirements and target partners that are experts in their field.
When your company establishes itself as an expert in the industry, leads tend to look to partner up without approaching them first.
Because of this, the inbound strategies have a higher return on investment with the storytelling methods, modified for businesses looking for products like yours.
And as a result, your sales, marketing, and developing teams can generate better results when they work with fewer quality leads.
All statistics and benefits look nice on paper, but how can you make them yours?
Further in the article, we will provide steps and advice, so let’s dive into it.
7 Best Methods To Build B2B Inbound Marketing Strategy
As promised, now we will talk about the best methods to build and advance your B2B inbound strategy.
Remember that the methods we discuss do not exclude each other, but you can combine them for greater effect.
1. Set Your Goals Before Planning
Clearly defined goals of marketing campaigns will help you create effective marketing plans.
“We want more sales” is a wage, and impossible to measure how effective your strategy is.
An example of a well-defined goal is:
🎯 Increasing the value of customer accounts by increasing the number of upsell opportunities for higher-end products from your portfolio.
With a clear goal in front of you, reverse engineering is easy, so you can develop plans to accomplish those goals with the least amount of resources.
Examples of end results for reverse engineering are:
- Spotting weak points in current marketing plans.
- Targeted conversion from prospect to ambassador of the brand.
- Defining time and resources needed to accomplish a goal based on previous experiences.
Strategy goals go hand in hand with KPIs (key performance indicators), because they help you measure the success rate of any business plan.
Since KPIs are data you gather in your campaign, you can use them to adjust your approach in the life cycle of your campaign..
2. Define Targeted Groups To Achieve Your Goals
Using targeted groups' characteristics is the foundation of creating good content and marketing campaigns in general.
Creating a buying person from a targeted group is a great start. However, when creating, try implementing as much information as possible for a more accurate representation.
Personal information like age, gender, family structure, income, cultural and geographical origin, etc. will give answers to some crucial questions like:
🎯 Pain points – What do your prospects see as the main obstacle in reaching THEIR goals in business?
🎯 Value proposition - What value do they attribute to your product and its impact on their organization?
🎯 Priorities - What are their main driving points in business and their life in general?
With a buying persona, you can convert prospects easily while adjusting your product offering and predicting responses to a certain degree.
3. Utilize SEO For Better Visibility
Search engine optimization (SEO) helps you adjust your content to gain a higher ranking in specific queries.
For example, the first recommended content takes 34% of organic traffic from Google.
Keep in mind that SEO works the same way on most search engines.
Here are the crucial key points to pay attention to when implementing SEO in your B2B inbound marketing strategy:
- Keyword research– Helps your content better correspond to how people search certain queries about the specific topic.
- Citations – Enable you to create several backlinks and boost the relevance of your content.
- Visuals – Images, videos, and GIFs improve search engine rankings of your content while still making it more relevant for visitors.
Boosting your SEO has high return value in times of financial downturns.
What’s more, structured data provides insight to search engines into what your content is about.
For example, SEO optimization helps search engines to recognize whether you are running a product site, FAQ page, or scientific paper.
4. Build High-End CRM
One of the greatest assets of B2B digital marketing is the capability to gather leads from online communities and web pages.
A good way to invite visitors to leave their contact data is by providing them with something of value.
For instance, a subscription to your newsletter is a great way for visitors to willingly provide you with their email or some other contact.
CRM tools like Hubspot will assist you in managing your leads and planning outreach. In addition, CRM can store and filter data for information used in building your virtual buyer.
5. Gather Testimonials
Satisfied customers are your largest loudspeaker across any platform or media.
Testimonials, for instance, are a powerful tool since they provide opinions by a peer user that likely has the same concerns as many of your targeted leads.
For instance, you can gather user feedback via scheduled email inquiry after purchase, or a customer’s action, like a request for an account upgrade, can trigger it.
The second option is to use one of the platforms like WP Social Ninja designated for this purpose.
6. Understand Who You Are Competing Against
After some time working in any industry you can easily point out your competition.
And, there is nothing shameful in checking your competitors' marketing plans.
You can check what is the marketing strategy of other companies in the industry by implementing applications like MozRank.
MozRank provides popularity rankings for selected URLs.
The main advantages of observing others’ campaigns are:
- Spotting trends that give results so you do not miss them.
- Using competitors' weak points as a segment to prompt your products more efficiently.
- Learn from their mistakes.
7. Develop High-Quality Content
Making sure potential customers visit your website is a step in the right direction.
Because of this, high-quality content for B2B inbound marketing strategy includes more than just search engine optimization.
But now you need to get them interested in your offering so that they recognize your product as the best option for their pain points.
Your marketing and sales teams should aim to present your product to target audiences by emphasizing its best features and benefits.
Environmental protection organizations, for instance, will value products made of natural materials and with low carbon emissions.
It is simple to navigate your content and highlight the product's features to match your targeted audience's search intent when you know what they anticipate getting from it.
Pro Tip: To create compelling content for your products you can utilize AI writing tools to write them for you.
This way, you can boost engagement, reduce writing time by 70% and, more importantly, increase your conversion opportunities.
With the TextCortex add-on, you can AI-generate any content form you need or tweak existing content using its advanced features such as summarizing, rewriting, changing the tone, expanding, etc.
The best part of implementing this tool is that it is easy to navigate and it is compatible with 30+ the most popular online platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Docs, Notion, Gmail, etc.
To start using the TextCortex add-on, simply highlight the test you want to modify and choose the designated option from the rewriting menu.
What’s more, access to rewriting features grants you access to 60+ different content formats that can generate your content in bulk by simply relying on given keywords.
All you need to do to access the creator suite is to click on the TextCortex logo that will appear in the bottom right corner and pick the category for the content type you need.
How to Become An Excellent B2B Marketing Strategist?
Were you able to get a better understanding of current B2B inbound marketing strategy methods?
We hope that if you start implementing some of the advice we provided, you’ll be able to recognize potential pitfalls in your strategy and adjust them to a well-thought-out plan.
However, all your marketing efforts can easily go in vain unless you develop a strong content strategy to boost your company's growth. You are one step away from providing content that literally sells your products on its own.
Besides, everything in marketing revolves around prospects and customers. So, why not leverage all the benefits from true-and-tested solutions such as TextCortex?
TextCortex enables you to:
✔️Rewrite your text to get coherent, clear, and readable content.
✔️Use the “Summarize” option to create shorter versions of original text like technical specifications.
✔️Expand your text to add information to the original text or use the “Autocomplete” feature to transform your features into a storytelling and compelling product description.
✔️Translate your content into 10+ languages to easily transition from the global market to local communities.
✔️ Shift between different narratives to invoke different emotions from your prospects.
✔️And finally, leverage our “Text-to-speech” option to create voice-overs and video content.
What Do You Need to Start Using TextCortex add-on?
✅ Drive to speed up your writing process.
✅ A will to build your knowledge about the latest AI capabilities.
✅ Setting and using the TextCortex add-on are free of charge.
✅ Simple sign-up without your credit card information.
Are you interested to see how TexCortex can help you and your organization?
Claim your 10 free daily creations to see how TextCortex can enhance your conversion opportunities and improve your writing for your marketing efforts.
More than 60 templates and 10 rewriting features are waiting for you to test them.
FAQ
How do Influencers Work in B2B?
Influencers in B2C marketing are still significant assets, but in B2B, many regulations related to their job or partnership prevent them from effectively representing a brand they are bound to.
Is B2B Inbound Marketing Dead?
Not even close. Still, a large majority of about 75% of companies see inbound marketing as a more effective promotion.
Content Marketing vs. Inbound Marketing?
Content and inbound marketing overlap, so we can compare them as they exclude each other. A more accurate statement would be that they complement each other.
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