5 Keys to Developing Your B2B Digital Marketing Plan
The fact that Google has over 100 billion searches a month indicates how the behavior of buyers has changed. If your focus is on B2B marketing, you can no longer effectively reach buyers through methods like direct mail and telemarketing. The fact that your prospects are turning to online search to find companies like yours, means that your greatest revenue generation potential lies with your website.
In order to maximize that potential, it is a good idea to develop a digital marketing plan to guide your way to success. Five keys to keep in mind when developing this plan are:
1. Treat Digital Marketing like Any Other Part of Your Business
You probably have a strategic plan for your business. You probably even have a sales plan that says how much you should expect in monthly revenue and where it should come from. What you need now is a written Digital Marketing Plan. This document should access the different tactics you intend to use, the various markets you intend to approach, and what your expectations are for the performance of each. This forces you to define your goals in quantifiable measure, and ensures your ability to measure results effectively.
2. Identify Your Prospects
Much of the success of your digital marketing plan will depend on how well you are communicating with your prospects, so you will need to clearly define who these people will be. You probably know quite a lot about your top prospects, but if you canvas the right people within your organization (outside and inside sales, customer service, etc.) you can come up with a few very accurate personas that will help guide your communication and conversion strategy.
3. Develop a Website That Communicates
Your website can be a huge factor in your digital marketing strategy. You can drive all the visits you want to a website through SEO or SEM, but if you are not communicating properly with your visitors, it will not result in the kind of success you’re looking for. Incorporate the personas you developed in the previous step to come up with a content strategy, and then verify it by running simple usability tests on your current website and on your revised website in a development environment. This will allow you to confirm the accuracy of what you assumed was important to your prospects.
4. Integrate Social Media
Many B2B companies don’t believe that social media is important for them because they view it as a retail engagement. While this may be somewhat true for Twitter and Instagram, having a presence on Facebook and YouTube in particular can help in your overall digital marketing plans. Both venues can drive valuable visits to your website and enhance your reputation in your markets. Facebook has become a place where people go to access your company “personality” and can be a great connection to your website blog to build up a viable email list that you can use to further nurture your prospects. Short YouTube videos, even taken with a phone, can act as a good way show off key differentiators for your business and add digital content that can be indexed and ranked by the search engines.
5. Focus on Your Digital Touchpoints
All along the journey a prospect takes from anonymous website visitor to actual customer there are myriad opportunities for you to interact. And while some are direct one-on-one contact, others are digital and can be strategized. These digital touchpoints begin with your messaging on search engine results pages, and continue through your website landing pages and conversion elements. If you define each of these touchpoints and utilize the information you’ve already learned from your persona development and usability studies, you can come up with the best way to communicate directly with your prospects.
Feel free to contact us to get a head start on your Digital Marketing Plan.