Every year, more and more businesses worldwide use social media and search engines to find information and purchase products and services. For this reason, it’s more important than ever to have a strong inbound marketing strategy for B2B within your company.
In this article, we’ll be covering anything and everything you’ll ever need to know about B2B marketing strategies.
What is Inbound Marketing for B2B?
So what exactly is inbound marketing for B2B? To put it simply, inbound marketing is just another way to help potential clients find your business.
Typically, inbound marketing aims to make the buyer aware of your company’s existence long before they’re in the buying stage of the sales cycle.
What is the Difference Between Inbound and Outbound Marketing?
Now, how does inbound marketing differ from traditional outbound marketing?
Outbound Marketing
Outbound marketing is a more traditional method of marketing. Think about methods such as cold calling, radio/TV ads, and physical mail.
Outbound marketing employs strategies that push out advertisements to a non-targeted, mass audience (in other words, it’s disruptive marketing).
While traditional outbound marketing can still have its place for certain businesses, the method is getting less and less efficient as the world moves more online.
Inbound Marketing
On the flip side, inbound marketing puts more emphasis on targeting specific customers and making them aware of your company’s existence.
Typically, inbound marketing is much more specific than outbound marketing strategies. This leads to reduced expenses (TV spots and radio ads are expensive!), higher-quality traffic, and greater scalability.
What are 3 Types of Inbound Marketing?
Speaking of which, there are three major types of inbound marketing.
SEO & Blog Content
The first major type of inbound marketing for B2B is SEO.
SEO stands for “search engine optimization,” which is a method of writing not just for humans but for search engines as well (generally, this means writing for Google as it holds 92% of global search volume).
By focusing on specific keywords and phrases, you can influence Google and other search engines to show your content to specific users typing in those keywords.
Reasons to Do SEO Inbound Marketing
You’d want to use an SEO-based B2B inbound marketing strategy for two reasons.
The first reason is that it is cheap. Writing blog posts and putting them out there for search engines to discover is quick, easy, and typically very low-budget. After a post is written, it’ll slowly rank on Google search and bring in traffic and potential customers without any further financial investment.
Second, this method is easily scalable. This year, Google has seen an average of 8.5 billion daily searches. That’s a lot of potential clients and customers. Writing blog posts can open you up to a nearly infinite number of potential clients.
Social Media
Next up is social media. As we all know, social media grows more and more every year, adding millions of new users every month. Some of these users can be potential clients.
Many brands still aren’t taking full advantage of social media. In comparison, others like Nike and Wendy’s are doing it quite well. These brands build “personalities” that resonate with their customers.
Reasons to Do Social Media Inbound Marketing
Like SEO inbound marketing, social media inbound marketing can be specifically targeted to capture customers who may be interested in your brand.
As an example: you’re a solar company targeting manufacturing businesses. To find your audience, you’d use hashtags like #solarforbusiness or #solarfactory. This is just one example; there are plenty more possibilities for B2B marketing tactics on social media.
That said, it’s important to know which social media to use. For example, a small pottery shop may use Instagram, while a marketing firm would likely use LinkedIn.
PPC (Paid Ads)
Finally, the last B2B inbound marketing method is using paid advertisements. Specifically, targeted paid ads.
These days, using platforms such as Google Adwords or Facebook Ads, you can hyper-target your audience to capture the exact kind of customer that works for your business. These tools allow you to target by age, gender, interests, locations (down to individual streets!), and many more factors.
Reasons to Do PPC (Paid Ads)
The most obvious reason to do paid advertisements is how easy it is to hyper-target your potential clients. As stated earlier, modern ad tools let you niche down to extreme detail.
Second, paid ads are incredibly easy to scale up. If you’re seeing success in your ad campaign and want to capture more users, you can simply increase the budget without changing anything else.
What is an Inbound Marketing Strategy?
Now that we’ve gone over all the basics, how exactly do you build an inbound marketing strategy? Let’s look at the typical inbound marketing cycle.
First, we need to attract customers. This can be done in a variety of ways, such as blog posts targeting specific keywords or social media. In other words, we need to make them aware that our company exists and that we offer services that could help them.
Second, we need to convert customers and get them into the sales funnel. This can be done through methods such as email/form signups and fancy, eye-catching landing pages. We need to get the customer invested in our business.
Next, we start trying to close a deal. There’s no cut-and-dry science around this, but you can move them through the sales cycle with emails, meetings, deals, etc.
Finally, after we’ve secured the customer, we need to delight them. This is just a fancy way of saying that, in order to maintain our relationship with the customer, we need to follow up with them and continue nurturing them. The goal here is two-fold: we want the customer to continue working with us, and we also want them to say good things about us through word of mouth.
How Do You Attract a B2B Customer Through Inbound Marketing?
So how the heck do you attract your potential B2B customer for the first time? It may seem complex, but we can just use the 3 types of inbound marketing that we discussed before.
SEO/Blog Content
First up, start by producing detailed, well-written blog content. There’s no framework for exactly how this should be done, but there are some basic steps you can follow.
First, do some topic research and figure out what your potential customers are tying into search engines. Think about it, if you were in your target customer’s shoes, what keywords or phrases would you be looking up?
Second, write a detailed post targeting that keyword. Make sure to provide in-depth information while efficiently and quickly answering your customer’s search query.
Finally, make sure the article has some sort of “call-to-action” such as “contact us” or “have additional questions?”.
Social Media
According to recent research, B2B marketing agencies have found that B2B marketers who use social media generate, on average, almost twice as many leads as those who do not. So, it’s more important than ever to leverage social media.
First, figure out what social media platform your target customer uses. For example, if they’re in finance, they likely use LinkedIn. If you’re targeting local dog breeders, they’ll generally be on Instagram or Facebook.
Next, build your brand’s profile and start following and engaging with relevant users in your niche. Engaging, liking, and commenting on your potential client’s social media posts is a great way to show them that your company exists.
PPC (Paid Ads)
Finally, we can use paid advertisements to “speed up” the acquisition process. Once again, think about where your potential customers may be looking. Your local sandwich shop may be shopping for new kitchen equipment on Google, while the local skateboard store will be posting on TikTok.
Next, create ads through whatever platform you’ve decided to use. Think about the exact age range, gender, and interests of your clients. Make sure your ads are tailored as precisely as possible.
If you don’t see the results you’d like, experiment with your ad campaign budget and tweak the targeting as needed.
How to Form a B2B Content Marketing Strategy
So, with all this information, what is the correct B2B content marketing strategy for your business to follow?
For almost any business, you should try all 3 types of inbound marketing. Create some blog content, spread awareness on social media, and experiment with (hyper-targeted) paid advertisements.
What are Examples of Inbound Marketing for B2B?
To give you some inspiration, here are a few examples of highly successful B2B marketing campaigns/brands.
Autodesk (Drafting/Manufacturing)
One recent example comes from Autodesk, the company responsible for creating the widely used AutoCAD drafting software (among many others).
In the last couple of years, Autodesk has started posting content on its blog targeting the construction and infrastructure industries. These articles are often highly complex and heavily targeted.
Now, when a commercial building company searches for certain keywords, Autodesk will pop up in the search results, providing useful information while promoting its own software.
REI (Outdoors/Sporting Goods)
Another example comes from REI, the iconic outdoor goods company. In 2015, they closed their doors on the busiest shopping day of the year: Black Friday. The message from the company was to encourage people to get outside into nature instead of shopping.
While this was technically targeted toward consumers, it had a ripple effect in their B2B sphere as well. Manufacturers of outdoor goods that hadn’t considered REI before suddenly became interested, seeing how successful the company’s campaign had been.
Hootsuite (Internet Marketing)
Finally, one of the most successful B2B marketing strategies comes from Hootsuite. They’re a general internet marketing company, and they’ve produced thousands of articles, social media posts, and videos over the last couple of years.
For this reason, they’ve built a massive client base that now relies on their services to further their businesses.
Their strategy is simple but effective. They target the correct keywords and produce helpful content. Potential customers discover their content through search and then click through to the website. From there, Hootsuite converts them to paying users in various ways (sign-ups, tools, premium content, etc.).
Conclusion
As you can see, B2B inbound marketing strategy doesn’t need to be overly complicated.
While the strategy changes depending on your industry, the basic concept is simple: produce good content for SEO, leverage social media, and experiment with hyper-targeted paid ads.
With the right effort, patience, and hard work, B2B inbound marketing can take your business to the next level.
My Services
If you would like help creating an inbound marketing strategy for B2B or creating inbound marketing content, I can help. Contact me today to learn more about my B2B inbound strategy and content creation services.
What to Read Next
If you would like to learn more about how to improve your inbound marketing strategy further, I have a full post outlining the most important inbound marketing metrics you should be tracking. Click the link below to read the full post.
What Inbound Marketing Metrics Should You Be Tracking?
