This means catering your B2B marketing strategies toward millennial preferences, like:
You can create pop-ups for guides of varying topics based on the category of the blog post they’re reading. Or even adjust the headline for your homepage based on company size.
- Speed of response (like through live chat).
- Easy mobile experiences (through formatting and geofencing).
- Social media engagement (and not just LinkedIn!).
- Cause-based marketing.
2. Take a B2C approach
PPC comes in many different forms: search ads, social media ads, display ads, app store ads, podcast ads, and more. All of these can be lucrative B2B marketing strategies. For this post, I’m going to highlight three specific strategies you can apply to improve your B2B PPC efforts.
Remote human interaction and digital self-service.
- Personalization (in more than just emails).
- Emotional marketing (more on that here).
- Ease of access (to educational content and self-service).
3. Cater to a longer buying cycle
For example, you can create different live chat options on certain pages based on which channel they came to your website from—like an email or an ad—or you can use Drift’s integration with Clearbit to get even more personal:
Using LinkedIn as a social channel for B2B marketing is obvious, but let’s go over a few tactics:
Without this keyword match type (and without the helpful information that used to be available to us in the search terms report), you can’t exactly be sure that you’re targeting the exact right search query in your PPC campaigns. But you can be sure that you’re targeting the right person.
- Tools that write subject lines or portions of emails within your email automation platform that are highly personalized.
- Smart Bidding strategies or the Insights Page in Google Ads
- Using past data for more accurate lead scoring in a CRM.
Email is the preferred form of communication for 73% of millennials. It’s also a top free organic distribution channel for 87% of B2B marketers. Needless to say, it’s a must-have B2B marketing strategy. Here are my three tips for B2B email:
B2B marketing strategies using SEO
There is so much more to keywords for B2B marketing (intent and location modifiers) but this is an oversimplified version to help you get the gist.
6. Have an SEO keyword funnel
As millennials come to dominate the B2B buyer space and businesses are pushing for a more personal approach to marketing, B2C and B2B marketing strategies are becoming less and less distinct. Traditional B2B marketing methods remain evergreen for the most part, but there is a greater emphasis on buyer enablement, education, and empowerment. And with the pandemic, the push for social change, and the major platform changes we’ve seen over the past year, we’re reminded of the importance of staying on top of trends and changing best practices.
I can’t tell you how many articles there are out there that say B2C marketing is focused on emotion and B2C is focused on logic. (We’ve even been guilty of it.)
B2B businesses can (and absolutely should) inject emotion into their marketing campaigns. I promise I won’t talk about the Dove Beauty Sketches or the Subaru Emotional Outback campaign. From a B2B perspective you can be much more subtle, like in the example below:
7. Create career development content
For any of these campaigns, you can start off with a bot that collects information and then routes the chat to a live agent who can provide the human interaction.
8. Stay on top of algorithm updates
Here are some examples of how AI can augment automation:
- With 100% mobile-first indexing, you need to make sure Googlebot can access and render your mobile content and check your structured data among other things.
- With the page experience update, you need to improve your Core Web Vitals by reducing javascript commands, compressing images, implementing lazy loading, and more.
- With Google’s BERT update, targeting a keyword according to the intent of the person searching for it is essential.
Here’s a great example of a nurture email I got from Moz after creating an account to use their Chrome extension.
B2B marketing strategies using PPC
In order to stand out above the noise, and to millennials, B2C approaches are necessary, like:
9. Use emotion in your ads
This isn’t exactly a new strategy, but it’s more important given the farewell we said to our friend modified broad earlier this year.
Surprisingly enough, Twitter and Facebook are tied as the second-most popular social media platform used by B2B content marketers. It’s a good place to have conversational interactions with prospects and customers, take note of trending topics in your clients’ industries, and interact with influencers.
Back in 2018 when Microsoft bought LinkedIn, they rolled out the ability to use LinkedIn profile targeting for Microsoft Ads. But one tool that doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention is the LinkedIn Website Demographics tool. With this feature, you can look at traffic coming to your site based on company, company size, job function, job characteristics, industry, geography, and more. Use this data to:
10. Combine broad match keywords with audience targeting in Google Ads
Is Facebook a lucrative B2B marketing platform? The answer is 74. 74% of people say they use Facebook for professional purposes, and business decision-makers spend 74% more time on Facebook as compared to other people. Plus, there’s this:
The lines are being blurred between B2B marketing and B2C. This is due to the increasingly competitive nature of the digital space as well as the growing percentage of millennials in the B2B buyer population. In fact, according to Foleon’s 2021 B2B Buyer Insights Report, 80% of B2B buyers now expect a B2C experience.
11. Use LinkedIn Website Demographics for more targeted ads
McKinsey recently released a report on how COVID has changed B2B sales forever. One of the key insights is that B2B buyers have become more in favor of being able to evaluate and purchase products by themselves, which means two things:
- Segment audiences: See which departments and roles are clicking on your ads.
- Further segment by website pixel: Instead of viewing data for all of your website visitors, you can refine by the conversion behaviors they take on your site.
- Compare audiences: Compare the above pixel data for different job functions. For example, if business development professionals make up a large portion of your ad traffic but are not converting, you may want to make tweaks to your ad. If you’re getting decent traffic but no conversions, you may want to eliminate this audience segment altogether.
For more help with incorporating emotion into your ad and copywriting, check out our 273 words for emotional marketing copy.
Now you can’t exactly cater your website to specific companies, but you can use dynamic content on your site to provide a more personalized experience.
There are plenty more B2B marketing strategies that I didn’t cover in this guide—referral programs, interactive content, increasing your overall online presence, influencer collaborations, and account-based marketing to name a few. But hopefully I’ve given you enough material to either try something new or brush up on one of your traditional strategies.
Now that we’ve gone over the overarching themes, let’s talk about ways to apply them in the most popular B2B marketing channels: SEO, PPC, social media, email.
Even when sending HTML emails, you should always have a plain text version. Not only does this help your emails get through spam, security, and privacy filters, but also, plain text emails are more compatible with smart watches and voice-assisted devices. This Litmus guide walks you through creating an optimized plain text email.
- Stage in sales funnel or customer lifecycle.
- Geolocation (such as to offer discounts on tickets to nearby conferences).
- Referral source (SERP, social media, email).
- Website behavior (new or returning visitor, time on site, pages visited).
13. Provide self-service options (with support)
It’s always been known that B2B marketing typically has a longer buying cycle than B2C. But according to a study conducted by McKinsey at the end of 2020, the buying cycle has gotten even longer for B2B businesses since the pandemic.
Here are some tips on using Facebook for your B2B marketing strategy:
Other criteria for dynamic content includes:
Here are some B2B Twitter marketing tips:
- First off, 63% of millennials (which, as already mentioned, makes up the majority of B2B buyers today) now prefer live chat over any other channel.
- Secondly, even though 70% of the buyer journey is already complete before the buyer comes into contact with sales (Leave me alone so I can research), B2B buyers still want support.
- Over 60% of B2B buyers have stated they want more communication during the research stage, while making the purchase, and post-purchase (Leave me alone so i can research but be there for me when I have questions.
And what piece of content about SEO would be complete without the overarching reminder: to produce quality content regularly that conveys EAT.
- Homepage: Run a “what are you trying to do?” chat that helps guide them toward sales, support, or just browsing.
- Blog pages: Offer to answer questions or offer a guide on the topic of that post.
- Solutions page: Try something like “Need help identifying the right solution for you?”
- Support pages: Offering support for live chat is particularly important for retention.
SEO helps you to get found in searches the buyers within your target businesses are performing. Here are three strategies to employ for better B2B SEO:
