25 Step-by-Step B2B Digital Marketing Strategies
The days of cold calling and in-person sales are over and it’s about time to embrace the realm of digital marketing. Digital marketing is playing a pivotal role in the success of any B2B organizations. Potential prospects treat search engines as their trusted platform to spot a business that meet their requirements. To narrow the gap between your business and prospect and to maintain a competitive edge, it’s a mandate for every business to get their website indexed at the top of search engine results.
Below is a list of 25 actionable B2B digital marketing strategies framed step by step to stimulate competent results.
List of categories discussed:
Search Engine Optimization
Content Marketing
Social Media Marketing
CRM & Marketing Automation
Predictive Analysis
Search Engine Optimization:
1. Spot your primary keywords
The elemental step to derive successful digital marketing strategy is identifying the right keywords for your business.
Go to Google Keyword Planner.
If you don’t have an adwords account, you have to create one.
Say, if you are a vendor selling dog shoes online, by searching through keyword planer, you get the below results.
From the screenshot cited above, you can understand that the keyword “dog shoes” is searched higher. You can also find other words “dog boots”, “dog booties” are also surpassing. Using only “Dog Shoes” as your primary keyword can cost you by losing traffic to your competitors, on the other two keywords. Best practice is to use all the three keywords in your webpage content.
Subsequently, you need to identify if your competitors are also targeting the same keyword. Sponsored ads in Google search result for the respective keyword tell you the answer.
2. Hunt for long tail keywords
Usage of long tail keywords comforts purchasing decisions invariably. Long tail keywords are very specific in nature and precisely explain the need of the buyer.
Ubersuggest, a keyword tool helps you to catalog all probable long tail keyword combinations from your primary keyword. Find below a sample screenshot from the tool.
3. Use Synonyms as keywords:
With a prevailing search revolution period, Intelligence of search engine algorithm has improved by leaps and pounds. Connecting entities is becoming simpler — When I search for “SEO agency”, websites optimized for the keyword “SEO service” are also showing up in the first page.
On the other hand, intentional optimization is penalized — If I intentionally distribute the keyword “SEO agency” all over my content for keyword density, I can expect a clear drop in search engine ranking in the near future.
Best practice is to calculate your website’s keyword density, not only based on primary keyword, but also including synonyms.
A tool called metaglossary.com can help you to trace huge number of synonym words for your primary keyword. Here is a sample screenshot.
4. Catalog supplementary keywords:
Want to find more keywords? Google autosuggest and “related searches” section facilitates to do so.
Simply write the keyword in search area and wait for suggestions. Minimum 5 long tail keywords blow in.
Then, simply scroll to the end of search results. Before pagination, you could see a “searches related to” section with some more keywords.
5. Know thy competitors:
Behind sorting out keywords, long tail ones, their synonyms, supplementary keywords, you need to watch out for your competitor keyword usage.
There’s an awesome tool for competitor spying namely SemRush. Insights, which you can get from this tool, are enormous. Here is a sample screenshot.
6. Analyzing competitor title tags:
Are your competitors ranking above you for the main keyword?
Or, though you rank higher, are you getting lesser clicks?
Let me answer these myself.
Are your competitors ranking above you for the main keyword?
- Naturally optimizing your website with more relevancy to the main keyword, unified with quality content, pulls you to the top
Though you rank higher, are you getting lesser clicks?
- Your title tag is not compelling. Users find competitor’s title more attractive than yours
- There’s a problem with your description
Find below a sample screenshot for more explanation.
7. Know your competitor’s target audience
Prior to get started with content writing, know your target audience. Accordingly, compose content satisfying all the essential requisite of your target audience, upon fulfilling industry demands. Presenting inappropriate content can bring you traffic, but not conversion.
How do you know your target audience?
Simple. Know where your competitors are targeting. Use the tool “Open site explorer” to view the backlinks of your competitor.
- Research from where your competitors are gaining backlinks.
- Track the targeted countries and regions
- Audit what kind of audience are those sites targeted to.
You get all that right.
8. Header tags speaks for you
Once you feel accomplished with keywords and target audience, start writing content. The first and foremost single piece of content you write is title, that tells the world, who you are and what you do.
Some best practices of title tags are,
- Title tag should be 50–60 characters long
- If you are a brand, include your brand name after the keyword. For e.g.: Dog Shoes — ABC
- Title tag with catchy words gains more traction. E.g.: Free, Best, Easy, Affordable, Simple and so on.
- Use trademark in title to stand unique, by distinguishing yourselves from “Google Adwords” ads, displayed along with the search results
- Don’t stuff keywords; pick up only the top two keywords. E.g.: In this case, “Dog Shoes, Boots/booties — ABC ”is the best one.
- If you are targeting a specific country, make sure to include that too. E.g.: Dog Shoes Australia, Boots/booties — ABC. If you want to include “buy” “online” keywords also, it can be rewritten as “Buy Dog Shoes Australia Online, Boots/Booties — ABC”.
9. Verify keyword density
Done with title? Let’s start with body of the content. In terms of search engine optimization, writing content is not just writing, its SEO copywriting that requires little more focused effort. It’s nothing but keywords and synonyms have to be distributed naturally throughout the content.
For example, let’s take up the website that is ranked no: 1 in Google for the keyword “SEO agency”.
As I marked above, the keyword “agency” is well optimized here. They didn’t stop here- it is also equally optimized for the keyword “Service” as well, as shown below.
Some of the best practices to be inherited while writing content are:
- Use your main keyword in header tag
- Make it bold & italic at least in one place
- Optimize content not only with keywords, but also with synonyms
- Don’t worry more about the keyword density, let the content looks more natural and useful to the users
- Optimize graphic elements as well — Images (file name & alt text) and videos (video name and description)
- Compress all your graphic elements, scripts and CSS to reduce your website loading time that is a major ranking signal.
10. Markup your business
When I say markup, it’s schema markup, a set of codes to be added inside the HTML of your webpage. Schema markup helps search engines to understand about your business — nature of your business/product and elements (images, videos, reviews, testimonials) available in your website.
Though this is not a proven ranking factor, this may clearly define your business to search engines. Possible benefits include improved clicks and click through rate. You can make use of this tool to create markup codes.
For e.g.: if you are a local business, here’s how your business show up in Google search results after implementing schema markup. At times, it won’t appear since there is no assurance provided by Google.
If you have webpage content in different languages in separate domains, you can make Google understand them and display the respective version accordingly, by adding relevant “href-lang” tags.
11. Check for Mobile compatibility:
Usage of mobile devices in purchasing is emerging as a huge trend these days. Mobile compatibility is considered as a major ranking factor among search engines. There are two ways through which you can make your website compatible to mobile devices.
- Responsive (Most recommended)
- Separate URL (Go for it, only if your visitors through desktop and mobile differ by their behavior and keywords searched.)
A tool called mobiready (in beta now) can help you identify all possible issues with your mobile website. Here is a screenshot from the tool.
Apart from this, Google does its job well by notifying you through Google Webmaster tools as below.
Content Marketing:
12. Analyze the content around you
Now that you have studied all the SEO factors, we are moving into content marketing strategies. Prior to start writing content, look at how competitive your topic is and comprehend how your competitor visualized it. Get prepared to answer the questions below before penning down your article or webpage content.
- How does your content stand unique?
- How are you going to attract your visitors?
- Does your content convert your visitors?
To help you better, here is a sample screenshot of Google result page for the search term “Content marketing tips”.
You can notice the usage of words “Actionable”, “Best”, “Habits” used in the title to capture visitors. You need to think unique and start fine-tuning title and content again and again, till perfection.
Dig more into each and every article; sort out the industry terms, keywords and key phrases; notice their way of addressing demands of target audience; call to action buttons and their placements. Poke more and more to grasp all potential takeaways.
Want to know which content is getting shared number of times; there is a splendid tool for that — buzzsumo.com. Here is a sample screenshot.
On analyzing the most buzzed content from Buzzsumo.com, you can understand the type of well-liked content around your industry; identify the sharing trend and get to know the finest social media platform for your industry.
13. Apprehend how the content is structured:
Writing content isn’t enough. Structuring the content with necessary elements is also required for better understanding.
- Always start your content with a problem of the hour
- Provide solution elaborately so that even a novice can understand
- Offer your readers insights and resources to clarify all their queries and to enlighten them.
Here are certain ideas that you can try out to enhance user experience in your website.
Here’s how wordstream.com interlinked one article with another to provide more detailed information to their visitors.
Embed relevant screenshots and videos inside the content to provide hands-on experience to your visitors
Being open to address any query or a comment (screenshot below) is a key element of an effective customer service. This behavior creates a bonding among your visitors and helps you in taking pro-active business decisions by understanding user queries.
If a comment is posted, no one can respond quicker than Neil Patel. This is an awesome way to engage and retain your visitors.
There’s an interesting way to increase your blog subscribers without popping the message on the face.
The related posts section for cross navigation.
14. Markup your content as well
Blogs can also be schema marked up for search engines. Use this tool to build schema markup for your blogs, with elements like author of the post and published date.
Above is an example of how schema markup behaves in action. Apart from URL, title and description, you can see published date displayed at the top, as a result of executing schema markup code.
You can also notice few site links at the bottom of the description. Those sitelinks are pulled up from the “table of contents” (screenshot below) inside the blog.
If you’re covering a huge number of topics, make sure to have a separate page to act as a glossary to obtain search engine benefits. Here’s a reference from inbound.org.
15. Present your content
The most important step in content marketing is the way you present your content to the users; the way, you narrate your story to the visitors. Here is a sample from Warby Parker.
People prefer and tend to share interactive content (sample attached below) more than the static one.
Some other notable best practices:
- Use bullet points instead of lengthy paragraphs
- Prefer pagination in every page of your blog than “previous”, “next” arrows
- Treat every page as your direct landing page and place proper “call to actions”
- Make sure to do “Spelling & grammar” check twice
- Reduce the number of pdf and ppt files and let them be displayed to the users in a web version (.html), since pdf and ppt are less likely to get indexed
- Convert your content in different formats — convert your blog into a presentation or a document or a video or as a podcast and make it available in all possible modes
16. Get notified whenever your competitor publish
Now that you know how to identify keywords, write quality authoritative content, it’s not advisable to stay stagnant with your own ideas, without identifying the trend. Always look out and get ready to embrace the change.
What if your industry is moving towards a new platform?
What if your competitors are shifting towards a different strategy?
Get notified of your industry update once it occur and track every single move of your competitors. Google alerts can charmingly do that for you once you created alert on “competitor’s name” or “industry name”.
Social media is the right place to know about a brand — every brand post all their website and blog updates in social media. Use the social media tracking tool socialmention.com to track every tweet of your competitor and their brand mentions. Socialmention.com is an awesome tool, which allows you to export all these details for future reference.
Without my favorite tool ifttt.com, this blog won’t get completed. Create recipes based on conditions and get notified as you desire.
The recipe, which I regularly trigger, is, whenever my competitor post an update on Twitter, notify me through email.
Social media marketing
17. Present your brand in social media
Social media acts as a platform where your customers appreciate your service or report issues on your business, expecting a prompt reply from your side. Following customers wherever they go and fixing up their issues on your business, constructs a strong emotional bonding between your brand and your customers.
Here’s how you can make a strong presence on social media and convert this powerful social media podium as your customer service portal.
Create a valid profile with a catchy description. Here is a sample.
Identify related industry hashtags to reach interested target audience of your choice. There is an awesome tool called http://hashtagify.me to explore all possible hashtags. Here is a sample screenshot.
Whenever your customer reports an issue about your business in social media, always be the first to respond. Customers experiencing even a small disappointment may cost you a lot, by losing them to your competitor.
18. Identify prospects in social media:
Besides pleasing your customers, social media also acts as a strong platform to detect tons of potential prospects for your business. Before making a purchasing decision, every potential prospect tends to compare and ask for recommendations with their friends and followers. You can make use of such opportunities to convert them towards your business.
Here is a sample recommendation raised by a potential prospect searching for a SEO agency.
You can find such prospects very easily by using few advanced search commands as below. Replace “SEO agency” with your industry name.
- “Recommend” “SEO agency”
- “Suggest” “SEO agency”
- “Looking for” “SEO agency”
- “Recommend” “SEO service”
- “Suggest” “SEO service”
And the combination goes on and on with all related keywords & synonyms.
Similarly, identify annoyed customers of your competitors. You can quickly post a reply providing them with a prompt resolution and then recommending your business. Find below a sample tweet by an angry customer.
You can find such customers by using following search commands.
- “BRAND NAME” “sucks”
- “BRAND NAME” “Shit”
- “BRAND NAME” “unhappy”
- “BRAND NAME” “bad”
Use all possible negative words you could think of, considering the mindset of an angry customer.
Apart from the above strategies, creating “Twitter List” can be quite an effective must-try marketing tactic. Identify active users of your competitors and add them to a twitter list. Monitor them closely to identify loopholes of your competitor service.
You can find active users of your competitor service using the tool twitonomy.com. Dig more on this tool for further advanced twitter analytics.
Social media is also full of analyst and influencers with thousands of followers. A tweet or a brand mention by them means a lot, since it reaches more number of prospects. Connecting with influencers and analysts is a very effectual B2b digital marketing strategy.
Here’s my favorite tool to identify influencers of any industry.
There are a lot of ways through which you can engage influencers.
- Request to review your product or service
- Interview and add their insights in your blog
- Ask them to write a sponsored blog for you
- Get re-publishing rights of their research papers
- Request them to do a Twitter live chat for you
- Make an influencer as your brand ambassador to mark your brand as industry thought leader
CRM & Marketing Automation:
19. Easy lead generation:
Leads are a long time treasure to retain your business productivity. Generate leads out of every marketing collateral you produce — Include a form to generate leads, whenever you publish a white paper, conduct a webinar, release an info graphic and so on.
Image from Placester.com
Do you know that you can generate leads from social media as well?
Yes, it’s possible in Twitter; leads can be generated through “Twitter lead generation cards”. To make it possible, all you have to do is to include a piece of code in your website. Generate code for your twitter lead generation card here.
Similar method can also be used in Google Plus to collect leads through Google forms.
Some of the best practices in lead generation are
- Add a catchy headline to the form
- State the benefits of downloading the resource (E.g.: white paper) in compelling manner
- Create a captivating call to action
- Tell them, what happens next after providing their lead (E.g.: On filling the form, white paper is sent to the email address provided)
- Segregate leads and provide them lead score based on their actions (E.g.: +1 score for downloading white paper, +5 score for downloading product document), to identify their behavior and interest towards your business
20. Automate Email Nurturing:
Nowadays, almost every business is performing effective lead generation processes, but only 20% among them has implemented good lead nurturing workflow.
Best practice is, nurturing should happen once the lead is submitted and added into database. Effective lead nurturing results in quick conversion and reduced sales cycle.
Before you nurture a lead, you need to ascertain the nature of the lead and categorize it. Here I have described a small sample flow with Rob.
- If Rob downloads a generic whitepaper, send him follow-up email linking to more generic resources
- Rob is very interested on such generic resources. He clicked on the second mail also and read them fully. Now send him a personalized mail asking “are you looking for “ — -“ product?” — mail to pitch in your product
- If Rob opened the third mail also and responded, you’ve got a valid prospect to proceed with.
Here’s an interesting info graphic, which covers a lead nurturing process from the start to close in 60 days.
From Visually.
Not-to-dos in email nurturing:
- No spammy mails without understanding interest of the lead.
- Don’t bombard users with tons of emails
- No visibility on “unsubscribe” option leads to frustration that may turn up as lack of brand trust
To get added information (job title, number of employees in their organization) about your user and to build lead database with appropriate user profile, you can make use of “progressive profiling” strategy. It’s nothing but, you can add new fields in lead generation forms to get additional information from leads every time they visits your website. I suggest going with marketo.com, since I have personally used it for my projects. Here is a screenshot from Marketo.
Predictive Analysis:
21. Leads to customers:
Metrics, Man. Without measuring them, there won’t be any continual improvement for your business.
When I say leads, its not just any other leads. You need to filter out valid leads and raw leads. Raw leads are the ones, which are not business emails, or the un-related, or not-so-interested ones. Valid leads are prospects that are interested in your business.
Leads to customers = Number of valid leads / Number of new customers
Leads to customers can be rephrased as valid leads to customers. By measuring this metric, you can answer the questions below.
- Does your marketing team is targeting the right audience?
- How effective is your sales team?
22. Cost / lead & cost / customer:
For every penny spent, you should have the record of the outcome. To take pro-active measures and to plan for a better roadmap, you need to understand whether your budget is spent the right way as you expect.
Cost / lead and cost / customer are crucial metrics that re-define your spending strategy. Here’s an info graphics, which describes the cost per lead of a real estate industry.
From Visually.
Cost/lead — Total spending / Number of valid leads
Cost / customer — Total spending / number of new customers
23. Spending to revenue
You need to periodically look out for, whether your spending budget justifies revenue gained. If you spend more, you should have acquired more customers, in turn revenue.
For e.g.: If you are spending more on Google adwords, keep experimenting with less/more spending. If there is no impact on revenue, though there is an increase/decrease in spending, it may certainly demand you to dig into more insights, re-check targeting options, deep dive into settings and so on.
Spending to revenue — Total spending / Total revenue
Spending to new revenue — Total spending / revenue from newly acquired customers for the specific period
24. Customer Retention Rate:
While acquiring customer is itself a strategically done job, retaining them involves more effort and continued communication.
Here’s a mail from ebuyer.com that felt very sorry for the un-returned customer along with an open invitation to visit their website again.
Customer retention rate = ((Number of customers at the end of the time period — Number of customer acquired over the same period)/Number of customers at the start of that same time period)*100
25. Churn Rate:
Churns are the number of lefts, customers who un-subscribed from your business. This is really a crucial metric, which defines the destiny of your business.
From Visually.
Above is an infographic that defines customer lifetime value calculated from the overall spending and churn rates.
Customer churn rate = ((customers at the beginning of the period — customers at the end of the period)/customers at the beginning of the period)*100
Revenue churn rate = (((Recurring revenue at the beginning of the period — recurring revenue at the end of the period) — Upgrade revenue from existing customers)/recurring revenue at the beginning of the period)*100
With this tip, I am putting a full stop to this article. If you have any suggestion/feedbacks/comments/appreciations/criticisms, feel free to use the comment form below. Strictly very minimal admin moderation ;-)