Getting to grips with the latest trends in digital marketing can be a challenge for a B2B organization. Digital marketing ideas for B2B can be hard to come by too. The products and services that you offer are often more technical than the B2C companies, meaning it’s easier for marketing trends to miss you altogether. 

Image – free for commercial use

B2B doesn’t often adopt new methods of marketing, but this is starting to change. The biggest B2B-focused channels are starting to bring in new features, which means it’s time for B2B digital marketing to become part of your plans. 

Think About Your Audience

Whether you’re new to digital marketing or are an old hand, you need to consider who your audience is. You might have some knowledge of who visits your website but are those site visitors the ones who are turning into profitable, loyal customers? 

With digital marketing, it’s easy to get stuck on trying to get more visitors to your site. If you know your customer well, including what they search for online, you can turn visitors into customers whether you have ten or ten thousand site visitors. 

Start Using Video Marketing

A huge proportion of businesses use video as a marketing tool, so can you really afford to ignore it? 

In past years, video wasn’t an essential part of B2B marketing. However, now, video has become an essential part of the marketing mix for B2B organizations. 

Video shouldn’t be saved for only big-budget productions. Video can be very approachable for small businesses, thanks to the developments in camera and audio technology. Good quality video can be made on a phone, and the benefits are clear. 

Video marketing works to build deeper connections with your customers, produces content that is easily digestible, and enables for better brand positioning. 

Think of video as part of your content creation process. Write a blog article that you know is helpful for your audience, then use it as a script for an influential person from your company. 

Consider Going Live

LinkedIn is a good way to judge the B2B marketing landscape. In 2017, LinkedIn added native video, and in 2019, they began to trial live video. This shows us that going live should now in your marketing mix. 

The challenge of going live is to engage your audience enough to visit the site at the right time to consume your content. The live element could be enough to do that. 

The reason live video works for B2B brands is that personal selling is one of the most effective ways to generate more business. Generating content that feels more humans is a good way to heighten the connection between the creator and the viewer. 

Live video also increases the shareability of your content, helping it to naturally get in front of more people. Being relatable is important in building relationships with your target audience, which should give a better outcome when your brand builds on this relationship with high-quality products or services. Speaking to your audience is important. 

Look At The Data

Content is king is overplayed advice, partly due to the sheer volume of blogs now on the internet. Sometimes, there’s just no point in writing them. 

This is where analyzing data comes in handy. 

Analyze the different types of content you’ve created over a year and how effective each piece type was. 

This level of insight into what works for you is very valuable to your B2B marketing work. You can then double down on the most effective kinds of content, and cut out what is a waste of your time and effort.

Take A New Approach To Email Marketing

Email marketing is still one of the most effective techniques for B2B marketing there is. Email is the most effective channel for revenue generation for many organizations. 

There’s a lot of advice out there for effective email marketing, from the exact time to send emails to how to best use emojis in subject lines. 

Creative emails have become the norm, but some B2B marketers are finding that plain text emails are delivering more results than HTML designed emails. 

Plain text emails appear to be more personal and can encourage a higher response rate. For sales inquiries, cold outreach, and networking follow-ups should be sent as plain text. Customers and prospects want one-on-one communication. 

Plain text emails are worth testing as part of your B2B marketing strategy. 

Automate What You Can

Automated marketing sounds a lot more complicated than it really is. There are many automation tools out there, and some of the platforms you already use probably have the ability built in. 

Consider the best use for automation. For example, what happens when someone signs up for your newsletter and then doesn’t hear from you for six months? They forget about you. 

Instead, automate a series of emails that will welcome a new subscriber, and take them through some information about your products or services. This can result in instant engagement and sales. 

If you get it right, this takes the same effort as sending a weekly newsletter. 

Implement A Scoring System For Leads

Unless you can trace sales back to the original inquiry, it’s tough to prove how effective your marketing actually is. 

There are tools available to track how users behave on your website. You can use these to gather information on their journey to conversion, and can then associate a lead score. 

For example, if someone clicks through from your email newsletter, they will land on a product page, look around, maybe download something, and then request a call back from your sales team. This is a hot lead. 

Coming up with a set of parameters that result in hot leads can help when you next to report on your success. 

Digital marketing should not be overlooked by B2B organizations. Your marketing strategy should combine a number of methods, including digital, to reach the best leads and the best customer prospects. By diversifying your strategy like this you can reach more people.