While many businesses may be focused primarily on getting leads, they often neglect to realize that their first area of focus should be on demand creation and capturing their ideal audience. There are four main building blocks of effective B2B marketing: demand creation and capture, lead acquisition, lead nurturing, and retention. Before you tackle the other three, this is the first step you should take when trying to improve your business.
According to a SiriusDecisions study, 74% of the buyer’s journey is complete before a buyer even reaches out to a salesperson. With this in mind, you should determine what you’re doing to influence those buyers when they’re not making contact with you yet.
Your marketing efforts should do everything they can to encourage buyers along the journey to becoming leads, meeting their needs throughout the process. Without proper facilitation, those prospective buyers aren’t likely to stick around.
Another thing to keep in mind is that 64% of business buyers conduct more than half of their research online prior to making a purchase, according to another study from Forrester Research. This means that B2B marketing efforts should always be present when buyers are conducting research for products or services. Ultimately, you should figure out what your company is doing to influence buyers, and be quick to implement it into your marketing efforts.
Converged media is used for driving awareness, leads and revenue. You can’t rely on a single channel to capture leads. Instead, you should take advantage of multiple outlets that can get you the most exposure and visitors for your website.
Converged media is comprised of several elements, including:
● SEO
● PPC
● Social Media
● Retargeting
● Traditional Marketing
A complete combination of these types of media can help drive more high-quality traffic to your website. Once those visitors are at your website, they become marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). Following this step, they become sales-qualified leads (SQLs) once they have contacted a salesperson, submitted a request form, signed up for an email newsletter, or performed another action to move them closer toward a sale.
You need to do everything in your power to convert those MQLs into SQLs.
There are five main stages of marketing, and each is just as important as the last in your strategy.
● Pre-Stage – Target using accurate buyer persona identification
● Stage I – Attract using SEO, PPC, and other reliable inbound strategies
● Stage II – Engage buyers using calls to action, social monitoring, live chat, or landing pages
● Stage III – Nurture with email campaigns, retargeting, or sales outreach
● Stage IV – Convert and track using conversion optimization
SEO has been and continues to be one of the best ways to attract qualified leads. The key to success in SEO is to provide all of the information people are looking for in every aspect of your industry.
People searching on Google are looking for answers to questions they have, but Google can’t assist them unless there’s content available to show them. Some people may not even know about a certain problem they have until they get more information based on their initial search.
If your company can provide people with answers along with services and products that they need, you should invest in content marketing.
Another crucial element for attraction apart from content marketing is social media and authority building. This entails taking advantage of digital PR, social and mobile marketing, in addition to social listening and monitoring.
Always monitor your efforts, listening for instances of brand mentions, industry updates and news, and the problems your services or products can help solve. It’s all about engaging in the right conversation.
Using each of these strategies can significantly help you increase demand and capture a relevant audience, subsequently resulting in them converting into leads.
This is simply the first building block of B2B marketing. If you want to learn more about how to develop the perfect B2B marketing strategy, download our eBook below.