Feeling bamboozled by marketing tactics, channels, and buzzwords? There’s a lot to navigate when searching for the best marketing practices for your emerging company. Knowing when and how to get a realistic and effective marketing strategy off the ground may even seem daunting.
In this B2B marketing strategy framework, we provide insights on how to develop a manageable strategy for an early market team. First, we’ll cover the four marketing fundamentals essential for every business to define. Then we discuss the ongoing strategies successful companies use to scale long-term growth.
Let’s get started.
Start-Up Marketing Fundamentals
Before you can develop any tactical strategies or marketing messaging, you first need a clear picture of who you are serving and how you provide value to them. Ideal client profiles and buyer personas are essential building blocks that ensure everything else you build remains relevant to consumer needs.
Define Buyer Personas & Ideal Client Profiles
An ideal client profile (ICP) describes characteristics of a business that make it an optimal fit for your products and services.
Buyer personas are semi-fictional descriptions of the individuals who work at the ICP/businesses that would benefit from your solutions.
Having ICPs clearly defined helps your sales and marketing teams to understand which businesses would make great prospects. Your buyer personas will assist in creating effective messaging that aligns with real customer needs and desires.
Aim to create 2-3 personas and 1-2 client profiles. Your ICPs and buyer personas can be developed based on what you know about past or current clients.
While larger companies may conduct customer interviews to guide the creation of buyer personas, it won’t be as realistic for smaller businesses with less time, fewer resources, and fewer customers. Further, the information obtained from an interview typically reflects just one individual’s problems while an effective buyer persona should be representative of the broader problems your solutions solve.
If you need more insights, look to 3rd party resources such as LinkedIn or online job boards where you can pull information from job listings matching your customer profiles. You can also use professional information sources or industry associations for more information.
What to include in your Ideal Client Profiles:
Demographics including industry, job titles, levels of seniority, location, and company size
Once you document your client profiles and personas, your contact database should be segmented in order to send relevant, targeted messages that resonate with your target buyer personas.
With a deep understanding of your ideal clients, you’re ready to learn how the buyer’s journey further assists your sales and marketing messaging.
Understand the Buyer’s Journey for Aligned Messaging
Mapping out your buyer’s journey will provide you with valuable insights into the decision-making process your buyer personas go through before converting.
By understanding the pains and problems experienced along the buyer’s journey, sales reps and marketing specialists can better empathize with prospects when describing your solutions.
Inbound marketing methodology focuses on providing timely educational materials aligned with the buyer’s journey that draw leads to your site based on their specific needs.
In recent years, there’s been a fundamental change surrounding who holds the power in the sales process thanks to the integration of pocket-sized technology. Buyers have access to more information than ever to compare products and services—making high-quality, relevant content that assists customers along every stage of the buyer’s journey essential for your business to succeed.
The goal of the content associated with your website, emails, and social media is to advance buyers through the sales and marketing funnel. The buyer’s journey will help you prioritize the topics covered in your content.
Competitive analysis involves researching major competitor products, sales, and marketing tactics. Often the first objective is to understand their marketing strategies. The second is to see how they position themselves in the market and how you want to position your company in response.
Your competitive analysis ultimately is the research that fuels how your marketing strategy will develop. A well-performed competitive analysis will support data-driven business and marketing strategies, paving the way for you to excel in capturing market share.
Start by defining what questions you have or insights you hope to gain that will assist you in your business and marketing goals. Then gather the information to answer those questions from your competitors’ websites, blogs, social media, and through analytical tools. Reviews can also reveal immeasurable value regarding the positive experiences and pain points consumers have using your competitors’ products and services. Throughout your competitor analysis, consider how you will position your brand in the market landscape.
Set SMART Goals and Choose your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Using the SMART goal framework ensures your marketing objectives align with your business goals. SMART is an acronym used to create goals that include Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely elements.
In the early stages, your goal may be to increase awareness of your brand. As time progresses, your goal should shift to increased leads and ultimately revenue. Examples of KPIs that align with these goals are shown in the table below:
Goal ->
KPIs
Increase brand awareness
Website visits
Increase leads
Conversion rates
Increase revenue
Sales
It’s important to have an understanding of how many deals or opportunities are needed in your pipeline to close a new customer. Set your marketing goals using the closest key metric that leads to new opportunities–typically new sales leads.
This is the best place to start as you build your marketing program. In later stages of your company’s development, you may advance to more complex goal setting using revenue attribution reporting. Set your goals further up the funnel until you get to website traffic.
A typical funnel looks like this:
Visitor → Lead → Marketing Qualified Lead → Sales Qualified Lead → Opportunity → Customer
You will need to determine how many marketing-qualified leads you need to generate in order to convert the number of sales leads from your goal. This conversion formula can be modeled up to the top of the funnel at “visitors”.
Let’s recap.
Foundational Steps Checklist:
Document 2-3 buyer personas and 1-2 ICPs
Map out your buyer’s journey
Complete a competitive analysis
Set SMART goals and identify the appropriate KPIs
These steps will assist you across all decision-making moments in your business.
With those boxes checked, it’s time to talk strategy.
Create Your Content Strategy
“Content” refers to the digital marketing assets associated with your company that demonstrate your expertise within your field and help communicate your unique solutions to potential customers. This may include blog articles, videos, ebooks, case studies, white papers, or reports to name a few.
An effective content strategy aims to assist potential customers by providing educational information that helps solve problems. Creating content that is integrated with search engine optimization (SEO) best practices will assist your website in being discovered by people actively searching online for answers or help. SEO content focuses on positioning your products and services as timely solutions to those consumer problems.
The topics you choose to cover in your content should be based on keywords that align with how your buyer personas define their problems, as well as the topics that establish you as an authority in your field.
Content Strategy Breakdown:
Categories. Identify 3 to 5 categories of information you want to be known for. Start with the broad topics where you want to be viewed as an authority and which align with your products and services. You can add more categories as your company grows.
Subtopics. Identify sub-topics related to the broad topic categories, based on what your audience is searching for.
Campaign roadmap. Create a campaign roadmap based on those topics and define how each campaign will convert across the stages of your funnel.
Distribution. Create a plan for how to distribute and promote your content, such as through email, social media, and paid advertising.
The content your team creates– whether blog articles, videos, ebooks, or case studies– will serve as more than just resources housed on your website. As you distribute the content through the various channels, these assets will serve as fuel for creating demand for your products and services. We’ll discuss demand generation in more detail below.
But first, you’ll need a go-to market strategy.
Develop Your Go-To Market (GTM) Strategy
When preparing to bring a product or service to market, your GTM business strategy should integrate your sales strategy and marketing strategy to position your product as the best solution to consumer problems. Your GTM strategy is developed based on the four foundational marketing steps we discussed at the beginning of this article.
HubSpot offers 4 questions to help you hone in on GTM:
Product-Market Fit. What problems does your product or service solve?
Target Audience. Who is experiencing the problem?
Competition and Demand. Who offers the same service? How much demand is there?
Distribution. How will you sell the product or service?
With your GTM plans in place, you’re ready to start executing your marketing campaigns.
Advance More Buyers Faster with Demand Generation
Demand generation is everything your brand does to create awareness and interest surrounding your company’s products and services. This includes all marketing efforts to help your organization reach new markets, promote new product features, build consumer buzz, generate PR, and re-engage existing customers.
The purchase decision for B2B products and services typically involves extensive online research and comparisons. Personalized online messaging for specific consumer problems is the best place to start when developing content for use in demand generation campaigns.
Below we give brief descriptions of the modern channels for distributing your message and creating demand.
Paid Media.LinkedIn ads, Facebook ads, Google display, paid search, video ads, and other promoted multimedia are effective channels for expanding brand reach, generating more website traffic, and retargeting past web visitors.
Social Media. B2B companies are embracing online brand development and with it, commanding their social media presence to engage, attract and inform their audiences. Your business can demonstrate credibility and nurture customer loyalty through educational content and resources aimed at helping your target audiences. Whether you share blog posts, case studies, e-books, or how-to videos, your social media marketing strategy will be successful if centered around actionable, helpful content.
Email Promotion. Email marketing is the process of targeting your audience and customers through email promotion. Boost conversion rates and revenue by providing subscribers and customers with valuable information to help achieve their goals. Read more here on email marketing tips.
No matter which channels you choose, the key to success in digital marketing remains the same– consistency.
Time to recap! In this b2b marketing strategy framework, we’ve covered:
4 early marketing fundamentals every business needs established
Foundations to content strategy development
Initiating a Go-To Market strategy and creating demand for your solutions
All that’s left is to ensure you can efficiently track, measure, and analyze your data.
Connect Your Tech Stack
You are likely already using a CRM and various marketing tools. Make sure they are set up correctly to track the metrics you’ve defined as your KPIs. If you’re looking for a CRM and marketing tool all-in-one, HubSpot is ideal. It offers a comprehensive integrated system for managing email, social, paid, website, and more all in the same place as your sales processes. HubSpot is also scalable. As your business grows, you can transition from the free version all the way to enterprise.
Your B2B Marketing Strategy Framework
Whew. We gave you a lot of information in this b2b marketing strategy framework. We know B2B marketing may seem complicated. But running a successful startup marketing strategy doesn’t have to be stressful. Download our content playbook to get started.
If your business has an online presence, chances are you’re already on LinkedIn. It’s a great platform for building a professional community, hiring top talent, and showcasing your industry leadership. However, if you haven’t explored the ads feature, you’re missing valuable advantages the platform has to offer.
In this article, we’ll cover the pros and cons to LinkedIn ads. Learn about the key considerations you should make when adopting LinkedIn ads as part of your B2B marketing strategy.
What Are the Pros to LinkedIn Ads?
When thinking about where to spend ad money, there’s a few key considerations that make LinkedIn stand out. Here are some of the most important benefits:
Target a highly specific audience. Did you know LinkedIn has over 830 million users? Get specific and target by job title, company name, industry, and more to make the most of your budget. Because your audience likely updates their profiles very regularly, you can expect this data to be quite accurate.
Insert tracking links. When you set up a LinkedIn ad campaign, you have the option to include a tracking link. This helps you collect detailed information about your campaign performance.
Create a wide variety of ads. From display ads to video ads to Sponsored InMail, LinkedIn offers a host of options when it comes to ad format. This further helps you create the best possible ad for different niche audiences.
Monitor your budget easily. Bid on a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-mille (CPM) basis and pay as little as $10/day to run a campaign.
Increase conversions. Many people think that LinkedIn ads are only good for awareness, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. On average, LinkedIn ads in the U.S. see a 6.1% conversion rate. That’s more than double the Google search rate of 2.58%!
Convinced? Before you launch your ads, it’s a good idea to audit your LinkedIn page and make improvements. To get started, check out the SmarkLabs blog on upgrading your LinkedIn company page.
What Are the Cons to LinkedIn Ads?
While LinkedIn ads are clearly a great tool in your B2B marketing toolbox, they also have their limitations. As you construct your marketing campaigns, don’t forget to consider the following:
Cost per click. LinkedIn is generally comparable to other social media ad costs, but they do have the highest average cost per click ($5.26).
No custom reporting. Unfortunately, you’ll receive a standardized dashboard for your campaign and a summary when it ends. However, you can extract more data from your campaign by setting it up with a tracking link, as mentioned above.
Geographic limitations. While you can target countries or US states, LinkedIn does not allow you to target highly specific geographic areas (for example, certain zip codes).
It’s good to be aware of LinkedIn’s drawbacks, but overall, the pros highly outweigh the cons.
Conclusion
While they have a few limitations, LinkedIn ads are a powerful B2B tool. As always, don’t forget to pair your ad campaign with inbound to optimize your campaign performance – ads are just one piece of the puzzle.
Creative content, from videos to blog posts, makes your brand stand out. However, the content production process requires a clear scope, lots of communication, and ample time for client reviews and creative edits before the content is finalized. How do you critique creative deliverables? How do you convey your feedback effectively? How can you make the process more efficient?
In this guide, we’ll run through the ins and outs of effective creative reviews.
Benefits of an Effective Creative Review Process
Providing effective creative reviews is in your best interest. With carefully notated creative reviews, you can ensure your project is on the right track to be completed on time and within scope to meet your goals.
It can help you:
Convey vague ideas or feelings in a tangible way
Give feedback that creatives can actually respond to
Help creatives craft a final project that reaches your goals
Ultimately, an effective creative review can help you get the results you want quickly.
5 Steps to an Efficient Content Production Process
Effective creative reviews start with an efficient, well-defined content production process. Over the years, we’ve gathered best practices for creative reviews. There are six key steps to an effective content production process:
Start by conveying your needs to the creative team. Include a description of the project audience, deliverables, desired outcome, and due date. This is also known as the project scope.
Stand by for questions. Creatives may ask questions during the kickoff meeting. They’ll probably run into more questions as they dive into the project. Ensure to emphasize what’s important to you for this deliverable.
Approve the brief. In some cases, your creative team will come back with a proposal, outline, or brief for your approval. Approve it at this stage, or return it for revisions. At this point, your creative team will start working on their deliverables.
Review the creative. Start by reviewing the deliverables thoroughly. Identify sections that you feel haven’t hit the mark and form your feelings into tangible, actionable feedback that the creative team can work with. (More on that in the next section.)
Provide feedback. Pass the feedback back to the creative team and answer any subsequent questions they have.
Allow for multiple revisions. Revision is the most important part of the creative review process. Depending on the contract with your creative team, this is a repeatable step.
The more clear-cut your content production process is, the easier it will be to follow these workflows in the future, saving critical time.
The Creative Review Process at SmarkLabs: The Client’s Perspective
If you’re planning to work with SmarkLabs for your next video or website project, that’s great! We’re here to make the project process easy.
SmarkLabs clients follow a simple, effective process:
Kickoff: During the kickoff call, clients convey their project needs to the SmarkLabs team.
Internal QA: The SmarkLabs team comes back with any questions they have for their client. Then, they start to work on the creative.
Client review: The client reviews the creative and either approves it or if there are suggested edits, sends it back for revisions. SmarkLabs’s creative team begins work on the revisions.
Revisions: The client reviews the revisions and approves them or sends more feedback.
Examples of Effective vs. Ineffective Feedback
Communicating your opinions about creative content can be difficult to express. Focus on tangible changes that creatives can make.
Effective feedback is:
Specific rather than general. (E.g., “I think the copy in this eBook is too clinical” vs. “I don’t like the copy.”)
Constructive rather than destructive. (E.g., “The colors here don’t evoke the feeling of relaxation to me. Can we try a calmer color scheme?” vs. “I hate these colors.”)
Relevant rather than irrelevant. (E.g., “I’d like this copy to sound more like our competitor’s white paper copy” vs. “I’d like this copy to feel like a Pixar film.”)
Specific, constructive, and relevant feedback will help your creative team make revisions that meet your vision.
Useful Tools for Creative Reviews
The technicalities of providing feedback on creative can be a challenge, especially if it’s visual. The SmarkLabs team recommends these tools to get your feedback across:
Govisually: a point and click design review tool with revision tracking
Vimeo review tools: a video point-and-click tool with comment capabilities
Pastel: a web and design point-and-click tool with comment capabilities
It can be hard to articulate what you want until you see it. Refer to these sites for creative inspiration:
Siteinspire: a web and page design inspiration tool
SmarkLabs video portfolio: a video inspiration tool designed by the SmarkLabs team
How to Manage Reviews by Priority
Prioritizing projects helps streamline the creative review process and saves you time. It is especially critical if you have a lot of content in the pipeline. We suggest categorizing low-effort projects or projects that you haven’t made your mind up about yet as low-priority reviews. Categorize high effort or time-sensitive projects as high-priority reviews. Complete high priority reviews before low priority reviews.
The Bottom Line
An effective creative review process helps you get your ideas across, provide effective feedback, and get the results you want. By following best practices, you can empower your creative partners to produce deliverables that meet your vision faster than ever.
Have questions about giving effective creative reviews? Let’s talk.
As more and more information has become available online, sales teams no longer have control over what information buyers have. In fact, over 60% of the sales process is typically over before a sales rep can even enter the picture. Because the sales process relies so heavily on marketing efforts such as social media, blogging, and SEO, it is necessary for the two departments to work together more than ever before. Unfortunately, it often leads to friction between marketing and sales departments, with sales complaining about marketing failing to generate quality leads for them and marketing blaming sales for not being successful with the leads they get. Smarketing provides a solution to this friction and can increase your ROI in the process.
Defining Smarketing
Smarketing (sales and marketing) involves integrating the sales and marketing processes of a business, leading to better growth and larger profits. This alignment is about more than just big picture goals. The departments should agree on a lead generation process, data systems, customer profiles, account scoring, and anything else utilized by the two teams.
How Does Smarketing Drive Growth?
Alignment drives growth. Highly-aligned organizations see a32% year-over-year revenue growth. Less aligned competitors saw a 7% decrease in revenue.
Better alignment, bigger profits. Highly aligned companies are 15% more profitable.
Top-line revenue is a good thing. Highly aligned teams drive208% more revenueas a result of their marketing efforts.
What are the Key Steps to Smarketing?
There are several steps you can take to better align your sales and marketing.
Audit your customer journeyand attack major friction points in the sales process that don’t add value for the buyer. Look to marketing to “digitize” these manual processes.
Skill-up sales teamsto align with the buyers’ process, including the content and tools required to facilitate this alignment.
Align 80% of your sales reps with yourideal customer profile (ICP). Let executives or “whale hunters” develop the other 20%.
Track and analyze your losses more than your wins, including sales objections along the way. Use this data to feed content ideas for marketing teams.
Create a playbook that maps content to the customer journey. Show sales teams how to use this playbook to overcome objections or provoke urgency in buyers.
Overcoming Smarketing Challenges
As you create a playbook for smarketing, be on the lookout for potential pitfalls. In today’s tech-driven marketplace where most of the buying process occurs online, communication and understanding between the two departments is a must. In order to collaborate effectively, they need to be equal partners, not separate silos.
Have sales and marketing meet frequently: Establish that no new sales project will proceed without marketing approval and vice versa. Hold each other accountable.
Build multiple relationships between sales and marketing: Ensure that both teams know each other well and function as one team rather than only leadership meeting together.
Mix marketing and sales desks together: Structure your office so that sales and marketing employees understand each other’s work on a day-to-day basis.
Provide many types of feedback between marketing and sales: Empower all team members to give feedback, and listen to that feedback.
Agree on terminology: Develop a similar language and vocabulary for your smarketing team and build that into your reports and culture.
Use data to communicate: Utilize daily reports that show exactly the progress of both sales and marketing each day.
The Bottom Line
Building a playbook to align your sales and marketing is a great way to increase revenue. Your marketing team will deliver increased high-quality leads, and your sales team will be equipped to transform the leads into new customers.
Want help with your brand’s B2B smarketing efforts?Let’s talk.
These days, SEO is a frequent acronym used among marketing professionals as they develop and implement their marketing plans and campaigns. SEO has become an integral part of marketing strategies for any organization that wants to survive and strive in the digital era of the internet. But as a B2B marketer, you might be asking yourself how does SEO work for my business?
Defining SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of boosting your brand’s visibility on search engines, namely Google. Its goal is to increase your organic web traffic and lead qualified internet users to download your resources and fill out your web forms. SEO requires your team to optimize digital assets by:
Providing metadata
Developing code
Editing digital content
Writing new, SEO-friendly content
Technically, SEO is part of search engine marketing (SEM). SEM focuses on placing your brand’s digital assets at the top of search engine results. While there are other SEM strategies, SEO is the most effective for B2B businesses.
Defining SERP and Indexing
Two other terms are critical to SEO. A search engine results page (SERP) is what appears when you type a query into Google. A complex algorithm determines the order of SERPs, but SEO helps improve ranking. Your business wants to be on the first page. Page one results have a 71% CTR while pages two and three have a combined CTR of 6%. Indexing refers to adding web pages into Google search. Non-indexed sites won’t show up on SERPs. WordPress websites are automatically indexed. Google crawlers also follow links and discover websites to add to their index.
The Three Types of SEO
There are three types of SEO:
On-page SEO includes activities carried out on webpages that will be published (e.g., inserting keywords, links, or meta tags)
Off-page SEO includes activity performed on a webpage after it goes live (e.g., sharing, liking, or commenting on the post to build engagement)
Technical SEO includes behind-the-scenes website setup activities (e.g., creating SSL or XML sitemaps)
For the best results, your team should use each of these tactics.
The Process of Keyword Research
Your website should appear in search results when internet users type in relevant keywords. SEO empowers your brand to rank for keywords. For example, a digital marketing agency may want to rank for the keyword phrase “SEO strategy.” Your team must conduct keyword research to determine which keywords your business should rank for. Keyword research is in-depth research into keywords that receive ample search requests. Once your team identifies these keywords, they can begin including them in their content. As a result, your content will rank higher with search engines and additionally, appear higher on SERPs. When conducting keyword research, here is a recommended approach:
Consider Your Prospects’ Online Searches
Research search queries people are using to find your business, similar companies, and even competitors. These keywords can be found through Google Autocomplete, Google Search Console, Reddit, or even SEO tools like Ahrefs. Make sure to include every stage of the sales funnel. If it helps, replicate the buyer’s journey (awareness, consideration, decision) and designate topics or key phrases that prospects might be searching for. When creating keywords consider:
What are the problems that your personas face?
How could they be searching for ways to overcome these pain-points?
How are you the solution?
What are the main features of your product or service?
What are the keywords driving the highest amount of organic traffic for your competitors?
Use SEO Tools
Type these words and phrases into SEO tools like Ahrefs. These tools reveal volume, competition, keyword difficulty, and more. With this data, you’ll be able to distinguish and create a list of the best keywords to optimize your website and content for.
Optimizing B2B SEO for Businesses
SEO tactics are useful in any industry. However, there are a few B2B-specific SEO tactics every B2B marketing team should know.
Promote Thought Leader Content
B2B businesses make many sales through their thought leaders. Ask your brand’s top thought leaders to write blog posts and other content. Publish them on your website, and link to them on your professional networking sites.
Publish Original Research
Publishing proprietary data on your website will attract attention from bloggers and journalists in your niche. They will link to your website, boosting your SEO without extra effort on your team’s behalf. You’ll also further establish your business as a credible source.
Pick High-Value, Low-Volume Keywords
B2B businesses should focus on high-value, low-volume keywords. Long-tail keywords, which contain 3 or more words, are also preferable. They are more specific and may fit your brand better. This is especially important if your product solves a niche problem.
Use Keywords from Disrupted Industries
If your product is disrupting an industry (or two), include keywords from the industry you’re disrupting. They will probably be more popular than those for your new product, and you’ll be able to draw attention away from older solutions.
Create Keyword-Specific Landing Pages
There’s a good chance that your brand will have multiple top keywords. Create landing pages for each keyword. These landing pages should offer valuable content that centers on the relevant focus keywords, as well as support keywords.
Provide Value
Your content team may feel pressured to create a large quantity of content for the sole purpose of promoting your keywords. However, search engines are getting better and better at identifying keyword-stuffed content. Plus, customers won’t trust your brand if they come across content that’s less than the best. Ensure all of your content prioritizes value—while staying SEO-friendly.
Diversify Content Types
Most blog posts are about 500 words. Most of your website’s blog posts can be this length. However, include additional staple blog posts of 800+ words, eBooks, white papers, guides, and other critical content. Use these longer pieces to collect valuable customer data—and further analyze your audience.
How to Work with a B2B SEO Agency
B2B SEO agencies provide expert SEO advice and content that helps your brand increase web traffic and generate more leads. Working with them should be a collaborative, streamlined process. When you begin working with a B2B SEO agency, be sure to:
Assign a dedicated agency contact
Communicate your goals and business vision
Establish a clear brief review and feedback loop
At the end of the day, a B2B SEO agency will help you improve SEO—and fast. Working with them effectively will only help your team reach its goals faster.
The Bottom Line
SEO gives you the tools to provide the right audience with the right information at the right time. It helps establish your company as a credible source, generate leads, and, ultimately, boost sales.
Want help with your brand’s B2B SEO efforts? Let’s talk.
In the world of B2B marketing, there is a lot to juggle. Between budgets, creative, strategy and leads, B2B marketers definitely have their work cut out for them. To make matters even more stressful, marketing to businesses is completely different than marketing to individual consumers. There are entirely separate methods and strategies for promoting and marketing towards business audiences. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some B2B marketing examples to follow? Lucky for you, we’ve already tried and tested some of the best B2B marketing strategies (so you don’t have to!). If you’re looking for some successful B2B marketing examples to follow, here are a couple to inspire you.
3 B2B Marketing Examples (That Deemed Successful)
Lead Generation with Webinars
Overall, most successful marketing strategies focus on lead generation and guiding those prospects through the marketing funnel. This example shows how Vertrax, a supply chain management solution provider within the oil and gas industry, increased their qualified leads using repeatable and valuable content for their prospects. Vertrax began hosting rotating product webinars — monthly webinars that alternated between Vertrax’s three main products. Unlike a full-on demo or sales pitch, these webinars took a deep educational dive into the problems their solutions were solving. These webinars gave Vertrax’s sales team tangible content to send their leads and the opportunity to repurpose the webinar as gated content to capture even more leads. Since Vertrax’s first product webinar, Vertrax’s pipeline has increased in the number of healthy, reliable, and qualified leads.
Creative Storytelling with Video
When it comes to B2B marketing, It’s always important to know who your buyer persona is. What kind of content are they consuming? Where are they consuming it? What content would resonate with them enough so they are aware of your solution/product? In this B2B marketing example, IngeniousIO, an innovative solutions leader in the AECO space, realized that their end customers were not likely to read heavy content like lengthy whitepapers or research reports. They needed an accessible and exciting way to present their solution. Ultimately, they decided that a humorous, approachable product video would be the best way to communicate their message. After a few weeks of paid advertising on YouTube, IngeniousIO generated tremendous activity from their target demographic with 260k views, 475k impressions, and a total view rate of 54%. The ad also caused a large increase in inbound leads for IngeniousIO, further confirming that video was the best medium to reach their buyer persona.
Repeatable Marketing with Content
Many B2B marketers may have finite resources to dedicate towards strategic marketing efforts and campaigns. Marketing plans might include a reoccurring marketing strategy to enable a continuous stream of content generation without depleting your marketing team’s resources. Take this situation for example. Bridge Financial Technology, an analytics SaaS platform in the financial industry, needed a measurable marketing program that would allow them to be more strategic with their marketing efforts, and enable their organization to scale. As a result, Bridge built a repeatable marketing plan to support their marketing and sales team’s needs. This repeatable solution could be promoted through all of Bridge’s marketing channels. This included newsletters, blogs, social posts, and a weekly webinar to showcase a broad overview of Bridge’s platform functionality. The frequent, repeatable marketing content substantially impacted Bridge’s pipeline, with 29% of Bridge’s MQL converted to SQLs and a 9.6% conversion rate overall.
Looking for success similar to these B2B marketing examples? Let SmarkLabs do the work for you! Drop us a line, and we’d be happy to help.
As businesses start to switch their operations and procedures to software solutions, the Saas industry has begun to take over. Saas products’ virtual and online elements have caused its delivery model to become the core of business applications. This technological shift has not only grown the Saas market significantly but has also created a vast new customer base for Saas companies. While this offers an incredible opportunity for your Saas business, to make the most of this technological advancement, you’ll need to know how to make the most of your Saas marketing. Don’t worry— we got you covered. Here’s a guide to some Saas marketing strategies (and metrics) that will encourage growth for your business.
How is Saas Marketing Different than Other Industries?
No doubt promoting Saas products has its challenges. Since there is nothing tangible to show your potential customers, your marketing efforts must work twice as hard to convince your audience that your product can solve their problems. Ensuring that promotion efforts focus on your product’s value is crucial because users can’t physically see it themselves. Marketing efforts must also target every stage of the buyer’s journey. This is because most Saas users decide which product to use fairly quickly. The decision-making process is sped up as users have access to information with one quick online search. To appeal to the informed buyer, your content must be loaded with pertinent and relevant information to convince users o try your service.
Effective Saas Marketing Channels to Utilize
SEO
Today’s buyer is more informed than ever, and most of the time, they are going to search engines for their answers. This means SEO is crucial for any Saas business that wants their solution discovered on Google. Working on SEO provides businesses with better search engine rankings and visibility to create their presence online and, most importantly, to be found by users.
Content Marketing
No matter the market, businesses use content marketing to grow their brand and build awareness. Most importantly, content drives leads. Creating and promoting content attracts website visitors and ramps up audience engagement to turn uncertain prospects into paying customers.
Retargeting
Retargeting (or remarketing) turns website visitors into customers. After someone visits your website and then leaves, retargeting can re-engage with them by displaying online adverts on other sites they visit. This valuable tool gives your brand another chance to establish trust and familiarity with website visitors so they can come back and convert into customers.
Referrals
For some Saas solutions, users can naturally expand a customer base by introducing the product to others. With referrals being one of the lowest costing and quickest ways for Saas companies to have new users, many businesses have implemented a referral system or program. To ensure quality referrals, organizations will often ask for information regarding the person’s industry, company, or job title and sometimes include an incentive.
Saas Marketing Metrics to Focus on
Next, let’s talk about metrics. Monitoring analytics not only helps the effectiveness of your marketing but also exposes risks and finds opportunities to accelerate scalability. To help to stay focused on the growth of your Saas business, concentrate on analyzing these metrics:
Churn
Churn is one of the most important metrics for any Saas company because it tells a company how much business they are losing over a certain period of time. While customer service may play an essential role in keeping a low churn percentage, marketing should also be analyzing ways to improve this metric. Churn is more than lost customers or revenue. A sure way to keep a high churn rate is to market and sell your product to those who truly need it.
Qualified Leads
Let’s talk about LEADS. Any marketer or sales reps know the importance of generating leads. However, you don’t want to waste your time on just any lead — you need to make sure they’re qualified. In addition, break leads into lifecycle categories like MQL and SQL. This helps outline where potential customers are in the buying process and identify any leads that get stuck in the funnel.
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
Customer Acquisition Costs tells companies how much it costs to acquire new customers and how much value they bring to your business. To calculate CAC, take total sales and marketing spend and divide it by the number of new customers (over a specific time). CAC helps companies manage their growth and accurately gauge the value of their acquisition process.
CLV (Customer Lifetime Value)
CLV shows the average amount of money each customer pays during their engagement with your company/product. This metric is very insightful for Saas companies because it articulates an accurate portrayal of a business’s value and growth.
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For most of us, social media has become an integral part of our everyday lives — whether you’re a marketer or not. With over 3 billion users worldwide, social media is now an essential channel for communicating and connecting with friends, colleagues, and, most importantly, target audiences. You may think only B2C companies are allowed to have social media creative fun — but wait! B2B companies can also find ways to build and spike their social media engagement too. The landscape of B2B social media has completely transformed in the past few years. B2B companies have begun to fully embrace their brand and social media content to engage, attract and inform their audiences. So how can your B2B company successfully use one of the influential marketing channels? Let’s take a look!
4 B2B Social Media Strategies For You to Try
Work on Your Brand Tone
If your audience can recognize your company based on its logo, they should be able to do the same with your brand voice. When posting on social media, your tone should be identifiable and your own. Having this unique voice will make your brand stand out among your competitors while additionally helping with your brand awareness. Don’t forget to use those brand colors to encourage brand association! Most importantly, this should reach beyond social and bleed into your other content as well (website, email, etc.) If you’re having trouble creating a brand voice, look back at blogs or landing pages and try to adapt the same tone to your social messaging.
Test Out Content and Posting
There’s only one way to see if alternate types of content will work — you have to test it out! Every audience is different, so it’s worth trying to experiment with what grabs their attention the most. While there are numerous social media experiments possible, here are a few to try on your channels:
Test out various hashtags for impressions
Adjust your posting schedule (more posts vs. fewer posts)
Place CTAs and links in different places in posts
Put a paid campaign behind alternate posts (image vs. text vs. video)
Test platform features to track views and clicks (polls, stories, etc.)
Change to smart content instead of everyday posts
Recognize Your Channels’ Audiences
Despite what social platforms you use, it’s important to realize that not every channel has the same audiences, which means you should be tailoring your content accordingly. The most important platform to note for B2B marketers is LinkedIn. As one of the world’s largest online professional networks, this channel is one of the best ways for B2B companies to reach targeted audiences and potential prospects. With LinkedIn being a more professional setting, users join to find resources, connections, and knowledge within their career path or industry. As a B2B company, it’s important to use your LinkedIn account to establish your expertise and be a trusted thought leader within your industry to attract engagement and leads. With this in mind, LinkedIn social posts should be meaningful and educational, using content like blogs, webinars, whitepapers, case studies, videos, infographics, etc.
Let the Numbers do the Talking
Now that you’ve posted your social content, it’s time to analyze the metrics. However, you shouldn’t be focusing your attention on vanity measurements like likes and comments. Instead, look at metrics such as clicks, engagement, views, impressions. These numbers give a more accurate picture of how your post resonated with your followers and audience. Using platforms like HubSpot, you can also track WHO is interacting with your social media post (website visits, landing page clicks, etc.) As a B2B company, this is super valuable as it enables you to follow more qualified leads. While these are only a few strategies, it just goes to show that B2B companies can get in on the “social media action” too. Just remember: The more you work on your B2B social media strategies, the more you’ll be on your way to figuring out best practices.
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According to Hubspot, 92% of marketers who use video say that it’s an important part of their marketing strategy. But how do you know when to use video and which versions are the right ones? As the trend for video content continues to grow, one of the most popular video types to emerge is the explainer video. Just like regular marketing content, this specific type of video allows your target audience to receive more information about your products at the right place and at the right time. Let’s take a look further into how explainer videos work with your marketing strategy to help push audiences along their buyer journey.
Explainer Videos Explained
A straightforward explanation is sometimes the only thing a buyer needs to better understand how your product works. Explainer videos make this possible — all in under one minute! Generally, explainer videos are around 30-90 seconds in length (averaging about 200 words in a script). They are educational with simple, straight-forward messaging that additionally captivates your audience using interesting visuals and animation. Think of them as a perfect sales pitch that’s just using a new medium to inform your audience. An essential element of an explainer video is letting the viewer know what solution you offer, how it helps your customer, and why it’s the best option. By focusing on the viewers’ problems, the audience can more easily identify and envision themselves with the product. Take a look at an example below!
You can also find more additional examples of explainer videos here.
Explainer Videos As Part of Your Marketing Strategy
When
The best time to introduce an explainer video is in the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey. This is the stage where buyers have identified their problem and begin researching the best solution. An informed buyer will scope out all of their potential options — including your competitors. With an explainer video, you are putting the information buyers seek front and center to further educate themselves on how your solution fills their needs. These videos not only nurture these potential leads but leave a lasting impression on buyers, making you more a memorable alternative when it comes to the decision stage.
Where
As buyers search for information about your products, you want to make sure that information is available to them in the right place. This is why the best place to put an explainer video is on your website. SmarkLab’s Creative Specialist, Cameron Carney, elaborates more on why: “As soon a someone hits your website, you only have a few seconds to hook them and catch their attention. A video is more likely to keep visitors intrigued and engaged on your website. To further combat people’s short attention span, using a quick, concise video, like an explainer video, additionally keeps visitors interested.”
Why
In addition to informing and helping potential customers complete their buyer’s journey, explainer videos also help with the following:
Brand recognition & awareness
Your explainer video should match your brand tone and guidelines, especially when dealing with the script and animation style. While these videos elaborate more on products, viewers will also get a preview of who you are a brand. Use video tone and style to make a statement and have you stand out from the rest.
As recommended before, your website is the perfect place for an explainer video. While your explainer video provides website visitors with pertinent information, it also encourages viewers to stay on your page longer. If people begin to spend more time on your page, Google and other search engines take note of that and will start to rank your website higher in searches, giving your company better visibility online.
Leave your next video project to the B2B experts. SmarkLabs aligns your B2B marketing strategies with our award-winning video production services and B2B expertise, allowing for high-strategy impact through high-quality content. Let’s get started today!
Traditionally, Sales and Marketing have used inefficient, outdated, outbound methods to monotonously relay their “message” about their products. These methods rarely ever listened to prospects’ pain points or found solutions that fit their needs.
Now, when a buyer identifies their problem, they have access to an abundance of information — finding the solution online in a matter of seconds. To adapt to this new age of informed buyers, it’s crucial for Sales and Marketing to work together, so customers know their product is the right fit.
Inbound Selling Defined
Here’s where inbound selling comes in.
Essentially, inbound selling is the way to sell so that prospects will buy. It’s a modern sales process method that adapts to the buyer journey by looking at prospect’s pain points and then acting as their trusted consultant.
Where does marketing fall into the equation? Both sales and marketing enable each other to achieve inbound selling. When each team’s resources work together, it creates a better, more tailored customer journey for initial prospects to become clients.
Where Inbound Selling Becomes Cross-Departmental
Targeting Prospects
Considering that the power has shifted from seller to buyer, it’s inherently essential for every member of your organization—in both marketing and sales—to know your buyers. When both teams have a common understanding of who your buyer is, it’s easier to keep messaging consistent and provide your prospects with a more personalized experience.
Buyer personas are an effective way to keep track of who your organization is marketing and selling to. Most people believe buyer personas were created for Marketing to target their content at the right prospects. But in fact, Sales should also leverage buyer personas, as they are proven to have several benefits throughout the Sales process.
Sales can take advantage of buyer personas beforehand, in preparation for the sale. Sales reps should review buyer personas to refresh themselves on the pain points, goals, and common objections to prepare for any questions that might come up. Most importantly, buyer personas allow Sales to spend their time the right way,onthe right leads. By continually attracting potential buyers who fit into your personas, you will inevitably generate more qualified leads.
Empowering Sales Processes
Researching Leads
In reality, there isn’t enough time in the day for Sales to spend hours prospecting for the right leads. Inbound selling enables Sales to lean on Marketing for some of the heavy lifting.
Marketing can provide pertinent prospect information, including details about when and how inbound leads convert. With this information, Sales can then work with Marketing to learn more about why the lead converted and then tailor their sales process accordingly.
Monitoring Leads’ Engagement
Marketing and Sales can closely monitor how a lead is engaging with their prospecting efforts with marketing automation software. Using these insights, they can then better align their strategies and move leads further through the sales funnel. For example, say a prospect downloaded a case study about how practice management software increased efficiency. This prospect is most likely at the bottom of the funnel, which triggers Sales to move forward in reaching out to initiate a meeting or discussion.
Connecting with Prospects
When a lead comes in, it’s essential to engage with them right away. However, your efforts will only be successful if they strategically align with positioning yourself as a trusted advisor and expert in your prospect’s industry.
Thankfully, Marketing can provide materials meant to educate, inform, and engage with prospects for each stage of the buyer’s journey. With these available resources, Sales can develop an understanding of which content should be used in which situations.
For instance, it wouldn’t be practical to present a prospect who is just researching their problem with a case study. With the knowledge of content marketing, the sales rep would know to instead send them an email that includes an eBook describing a broad theme in their industry.
For inbound selling to work, Sales and Marketing need to speak the same language. When both teams understand their roles in finding, engaging, and converting prospects into leads, inbound selling is sure to be successful.
Learn more about how SmarkLabs can help you align your sales and marketing teams.
