B2B (business-to-business) content marketing can be challenging for many small- and medium-sized businesses. When crafting your marketing strategy, you'll have to juggle creative demands, target audience, budget limits, and channel decisions. Regardless of your industry, your B2B marketing content or strategy must be geared toward selling a product or service to another business or organization.
HubSpot is an excellent example of a company engaging in B2B marketing. Their customers are typically businesses and not individual consumers. This guide highlights how you can leverage HubSpot tools to enhance your B2B marketing efforts and increase sales.
How to Create B2B Marketing Strategies in HubSpot
You can implement various B2B marketing strategies to reach your specific business audience. But before we dive deeper, it's important to comprehend the B2B buyer's journey. Evaluate how each of these stages might affect your B2B marketing strategy and how you can implement them.
• Awareness Stage: The prospect is experiencing or expressing signs of an opportunity or problem.
• Consideration Stage: The prospect has now defined and identified the problem or opportunity.
• Decision Stage: The prospect has finally decided on the solution approach, method, or strategy.
Once you've understood where your prospective customer lies in the B2B buyer's journey, you can utilize the following strategies to lead them through to the finish line – closing a sale.
1: Customized B2B Emails
Nothing beats email marketing in terms of reaching business customers. In fact, 93% of B2B marketers use email. It's a great way to enhance engagement and turn subscribers into leads and, ultimately, customers.
Unlike B2C customers who respond well to entertainment and emotions, B2B customers seek logic and positive ROI. All they want to know is how your business can help their business grow. Therefore, your email marketing must always resonate with your business customers and address issues that matter to them, such as money, time, and resources.
Email marketing is also a powerful means to share your brand's content. Statistics indicate that 83% of B2B companies incorporate email newsletters in their content marketing programs. However, with many emails flooding your prospective customer's inbox daily, you need to customize your emails to trigger readership.
Here are a few strategies to ensure your emails don't end up in the trash bin:
• Write enticing subject lines
• Stick to a single call-to-action (CTA) per email
• Segment your emails to reach your most relevant audience
• Ensure your email designs are responsive
Unfortunately, you can't send marketing emails without recipients to receive and read them. HubSpot's Free Form Builder tool provides an easy way to grow your email list. To get started, you can place strategic opt-in forms on your website's homepage, blog, or About Us pages.
2: Embrace B2B Digital Marketing
Whether B2C or B2B, every business should have a digital presence encompassing a website, paid ads, and search engine optimization (SEO). A solid B2B digital marketing strategy begins with defining your target audience and buyer persona. That demographic and psychographic information often informs all other marketing activities that follow.
Secondly, create an informative and engaging business website. Did you know that more than 81% of buyers visit a company website before making a purchase? And since B2B sales cycles involve many key players, a well-designed website is an easy, straightforward way for influencers to share information about your offering. Just be sure to optimize your website to be discoverable, and you can do that through SEO tactics, image alt-text, meta description, and external linking strategies.
3: Create Engaging, Actionable, and Laser-focused Content
B2B customers are often driven by logic, focused on expertise, and desire to be educated. Content marketing is an excellent way to satisfy these priorities and turn prospects into customers. Contrary to traditional PR marketing strategies that interrupt consumers with overly promotional materials, content marketing strategies add valuable information and educate the consumer while at the same time supporting SEO efforts.
To make the most of your content marketing strategy, avoid educating the buyer on your own company, product, or service but focus on addressing their pain points. The buyer may not be ready for your offering – they are just starting to understand their problem. Additionally, try to vary your content and test with different content types, such as blogs, webinars, videos, etc.
4: B2B Social Media Marketing
Statistics indicate that 84% of C-Suite executives and 75% of B2B buyers use social media when purchasing a product or service. However, many B2B companies find social media marketing overwhelming, mainly because of the lengthier sales cycles and longer chains of command.
When utilized correctly, social media is a powerful tool for enhancing brand awareness, humanizing your business, and giving your organization an online personality. Like email marketing, social media is an effective channel for sharing content and strengthening your brand expertise.
If you often get overwhelmed by social media, you can leverage HubSpot's time-saving suite of social media tools to connect with your followers. Your followers are just as valuable in this digital age, and you never know when they might eventually convert to leads or customers.
And since content shared by employees typically receives eight times more engagement than posts shared by brands, always involve your employees in your B2B social media marketing campaigns. Encourage them to set up their social media channels and discuss life at your organization. You could also create a culture account to showcase what's happening at the company, not just the products or services you sell.
Now Go Forth and Conquer!
There are dozens of parameters to consider when crafting an effective B2B content marketing strategy. Although the process can be intimidating to small business owners, working with a professional B2B content marketer can make your content engaging, actionable, and laser-focused on your specific profiled audiences.
At The Gist, we specialize in crafting inbound marketing strategies designed to attract, engage, and delight your customers. Our objective is to address your audiences' pain points, share relevant content, and create better brand experiences. Besides, our inbound marketing strategy embraces a perfect mix of content marketing, lead generation, sales enablement, and automation to help your business grow. Contact us today to schedule your consultation!
