How to make Digital Marketing work for Business to Business (B2B) that is not boring?

“We are a B2B company, how will digital marketing benefit us?” -
This is a very common question we face most of the time.

What exactly is B2B marketing and how does it differ from B2C?

Let's understand the difference!

In the simplest terms, a B2B (business-to-business) company is one that sells their products or services to other businesses or organizations instead of direct customers. For instance, Hubspot provides CRM solutions to businesses and companies, instead of individuals.

A B2C company intends to fulfill the needs of individual customers, thereby solving their pain points. For example, Spotify provides music subscription services to individuals.

As the audience is completely different for B2B and B2C, the mode as well as tone of communication with the audience is vastly different for B2B & B2C but what is similar is that they both need communication. Hubspot defines marketing as any actions a company takes to attract an audience to the company's product or services through high-quality messaging. To deliver this high-quality messaging, communication is critical whether it is business to business or business to customers.

B2B communication is often considered to have a very serious and formal tone which is indeed true in many aspects. But, with the advent of social media and its ability to allow people to communicate everywhere, it is perfectly fine to adopt a less formal attitude sometimes. At the end of the day, the businesses you are dealing with are also people just like me and you! It is striking the balance between professional communication and humanizing the brand that makes the business relatable.

How do you humanize your B2B marketing?

Forbes recommends the below Top 3 tactics that we at Lambourn Digital have been following and guess what we have gained!

#1 Bringing your team on the forefront

We treat our employees as our customers and then they treat our customers even better. That’s  our formula for a thriving workplace, business and economy. Our clients do not work with a digital marketing agency but they get their own digital marketing team. Here’s a blog we put together introducing our amazing Guys & Gals who are behind the fantastic results, every email & call!

#2 Share success stories of clients

Neilsen reports 95% of people believing suggestions from friends and family more than any other form of advertising. To gain the trust of people so that they can spread the word further, sharing success stories of clients is a great way to show evidence of the work done for. We have started sharing our success stories to give our clients a clear picture of how we can help them grow their business.It not only helps us build trust but also humanize our brand.

#3 Creating personalized communication

Personalization is key to humanizing the brand and creating a more open communication whether it is emails, calls or social media messaging. Using a CRM like Hubspot CRM helps in creating a more comprehensive view of every customer or lead that helps in approaching them with a more personalized communication. Lambourn Digital is a HubSpot Partner Agency and we have been helping numerous B2B clients in different industries in managing their entire marketing communication.

If you are unsure, what is HubSpot or inbound marketing and how it can help you, Give this a read or check out this video.

Give us a shout if you have any queries and we are happy to talk you through.

Now, let's discuss the Top 5 strategies you can apply to make your B2B digital marketing to make it a killer one!

Before we dive in though, it is important to understand the B2B buyer’s journey as it is a little different than B2C.

Source:  HubSpot

B2B Email Marketing

93% of B2B marketers use email. B2C customers respond best to emotions and entertainment but B2B customers are curious to know how your business can help their business grow, basically they want to see logic and positive ROI in their email communications. Therefore, B2B email marketing needs to be focussed on facts that matter the most to businesses like money, time and resources. In fact, email generates $42 for every $1 spent, which is an unbelievable 4,200% ROI.

Sharing newsletters for branded content is also a great way to communicate with B2B customers. 83% of B2B companies use email newsletters as part of their content marketing strategy, and 40% of B2B marketers even reckon the critical importance of these newsletters to their content marketing success.

At Lambourn Digital, we help our clients share emails with attractive subject lines, single Call To Action (CTA) so that readers don’t get confused, use analytics to segment the customer database enabling relevant content sharing and ofcourse make them responsive for every device. 

Want to send emails that convert? Here are our tips!

B2B PPC Marketing

PPC offers a great way to capture leads quickly but PPC strategies for B2B are a little bit different as the audience size is generally smaller for B2B as compared to B2C. The keyword search volumes are sometimes lower in B2B than in B2C as it is a very niche targeting. The buyer in the B2B advertising could be one of many people from various departments of a business. Therefore the ad copies need more optimization. B2B customers also tend to do more comparisons and have a longer sales cycle. Detailed research, specificity at each level: campaign, ad group, keyword and ad copies, using social proof like sitelinks, credibility examples like years of experience or award winning and the continuous analysis, optimization and measurement are some of the tactics we use at Lambourn Digital to help our clients generate more conversions with lower Cost per click. 

How to make Google Ads work for your business? Read quick hacks here!

B2B Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

One of the major customer acquisition channels for B2B companies is SEO. A strong organic visibility on Google accelerates growth at all stages of the buyer's journey. SemRush summarizes unique challenges faced by B2B companies in their SEO strategy as low search volume keywords, complex sales funnels, low conversion rates and the necessity to reflect expertise through leadership. 

At Lambourn Digital, we work to improve the Organic presence of businesses by constantly updating the site, removing the technical errors from the site, fully On-Page optimizing the website and then Off Page optimization including gathering high domain authority backlinks. 

If you are unsure of any of the technical terms, don’t worry! We are here to break them down to you so that we not only work with you but you understand what we are doing! 

Its Us working With You Not For You!

B2B Social Media Marketing

83% of B2B marketers practice social advertising which is just second only to search engines. So, social media marketing for B2B is here to stay! If you are wondering as a business to business how is social media relevant to us? Customer nurturing to augment your industry influence, social media platforms have loads to offer B2B brands. However, it is a bit tricky especially if you have like a “boring” or technical product. Refining the brand’s voice, staying on top of trends, showcasing employee advocacy & focusing on B2B- friendly platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook & Youtube can help in creating brand awareness, educating audiences and building trust. 

Source: SproutSocial

B2B Content Marketing

Instead of interrupting customers with promotional materials, B2B content marketing must focus on creating valuable information that informs the consumers. Content marketing can only be successful if they are aligned with the specific stages of the buyer's journey. 

"A frequent mistake B2B organizations make is educating the buyer on their own company, product, or service. The buyer isn't ready for that; they are just beginning to understand their problem." - HubSpot 

80% of business decision makers prefer to get information from an article than an ad. The B2B buyer's journey is different from B2C, hence the content types for each stage also varies. HubSpot recommends the below content marketing strategies for each stage which we, at Lambourn Digital, follow for our clients. No two clients are the same for us and that’s probably what makes even our Mondays exciting as we get to brianstorm different strategies for each client. 

Source: HubSpot

Want to know how we can Build & Manage your

B2B's Digital Presence? Check out this Video

Enters Smarketing - The Sales & Marketing Alignment

By now, it is clear that even with B2B customers' engagement, the brand must look more personable and human irrespective of how technical your product or service might be. 

But, what about the Sales team working on the field. How does it collaborate with the marketing team? 

Have you heard of the term Smarketing? Mark Roberge of HubSpot refers to the alignment between your sales and marketing teams as Smarketing that is created through frequent and direct communication between the two.

How do we do Smarketing? Let's explain it with two of our biggest client examples:

We have a strong foothold in the electrical & electronics industry. With Demesne Electrical, we work closely with their sales team to ensure that our marketing efforts work in tandem with their internal & external sales people. We use HubSpot to create inbound marketing campaigns, such as blog posts and lead generating landing pages. These inbound tactics generate leads every month for the Demesne sales team, with every interaction with the prospect recorded in the HubSpot CRM.

Another client we work closely with is the great team at Peats.ie. Peats too have both an internal and external sales team , who service their customers nationwide. Peats have just recently launched a new website and are constantly updating it with new products and ranges from their leading suppliers such as Bose, Yamaha & Nextbase. They too know the importance of having a strong digital presence as well as feet on the ground!

Sales & marketing alignment (or Smarketing!) is crucial now for every business in all industries. The goal is to have measurable goals that both the sales and marketing team agrees to hit so there's mutual accountability. 

There are very few industries who can now say, 'our customers are not online, so we don't need to be online!'

'The question isn't if you can afford to take part in the digital revolution, but rather Can you afford not to?’

Get in touch with us if you want to discuss more on your switch or grow your B2B in the Digital Sphere.

We are your own Digital Marketing Team!