Digital marketing is becoming increasingly strategic in driving business growth. Covid-19 radically elevated digital experiences and shifted consumer engagement preferences.
Savvy brands optimized their digital marketing channels and embraced emerging technologies that captured these customers’ attention and gave them an edge over competitors.
What seemed like a band-aid tactic to get through the pandemic became the new way of marketing. If you haven’t considered digitizing your marketing efforts or are struggling to pull in new leads, read on. We have some effective digital tactics worth exploring.
1.Maximize B2B Content Marketing
Producing content around the challenges your solutions tackle and other industry-relevant content showcases you as a subject matter expert and creates perceptions of authority.
So, while we should craft blogs, newsletters, tips, and thought-leadership content regarding our industries, it’s important to have a content strategy first.
It works as a road map to aid you in determining the best content for the different buyer stages. Looking at the bigger picture, you can then allocate a budget for content creation, keep you focused on your goal and stay on schedule.
An effective content strategy
- Define your goal. You might, for example, want to generate 100 new leads through content marketing between certain dates. Or, hit 1000 visits via organic searches. The clearer your goal, the clearer your path to achieving them will be.
- Works with realistic completion dates. Realistic here looks at the time and resources you’ll need to create content and hit your goals within a stipulated time frame. Give your team sufficient time to get the tasks done.
- Plans for problems. Challenges will come and possibly throw you off schedule. Think about potential challenges that may arise and ways to counter them before they strike.
- Track progress. Review your progress bimonthly, monthly, or even quarterly depending on your goals. Use the data to refine your approach.
2.Power Up Engagement on Your Virtual Events
Isn’t it easy to get all hyped up about a webinar or online conference only to fall off minutes later? And virtual event hosts know all too well that sinking feeling that grips them when they see the numbers going down.
How are you supposed to connect with potential clients and build relationships when your attendees keep falling off? How do you keep attendees fully immersed in the event?
Here are some ideas
- Use Q&A sessions and Live Chat. With in-person events, people interact directly with experts. Consider implementing live chat and a Q & A session to allow attendees to contribute, ask questions, and share opinions.
- Wow, your attendees. B2B conversations can get boring so you can try to liven things up by starting with icebreaker questions—fun personal questions. You can even send key attendees pre-event gifts like a bag of coffee or tea, or corporate swag.
- Create interactive challenges. Nothing like a little friendly competition to hook audiences. Post the winners on a leaderboard and share gift cards or sponsored prizes with them.
- Facilitate seamless connections. Again, this happens easily with in-person meetings, so you’ll want to offer attendees ample and seamless opportunities to network. These interactions can be small group discussions, breakout rooms, or 1:1 discussions.
3.Make Cold Calls
Is your sales team experiencing way too many obstacles while trying to contact people on the phone? Don’t bury cold calling yet, the problem might lie in the process they use.
Senior decision-makers still prefer telephone contact because they understand the value of human connections in relationship building. There’s an opportunity to boost business growth, but you may need to review your approach.
Here are scenarios you’ll want to avoid
- Using a poor contact list. Bad data doesn’t go with lead generation, they are enemies. Data decay is real but so is data that doesn’t consider your ideal audiences. If your list contains people who don’t need your services, you can imagine how those conversations will go.
- Not knowing your industry. The customer you’re targeting may already be knowledgeable about your kind of products. If you aren’t conversant with your product, top competitors, and the industry, you’re unlikely to have any impact.
- Reading your script verbatim. People can tell when you’re doing so and are likely to disengage. Internalize what you need to say but keep a calling guide handy for reference and steering the conversation.
- Sounding unprofessional. Your language and tone leave an impression on your listener. Being colloquial with prospects or using profanities communicates unprofessionalism even when the prospect does the same. Avoid it.
4.Create B2B Quizzes
The appeal behind B2B quizzes is two-way.
Users find them entertaining and informative, while the creators learn more about their prospects to facilitate future communication.
There are three main quizzes you can create
- Personality quizzes. Users use them to test personality traits, evaluate their EQ, or uncover professional strengths and weaknesses.
- Assessment quizzes. These test knowledge and skills and can help the marketing team understand how brand-aware or product aware their target audiences are.
- Problem diagnosis quizzes. These quizzes help users discover the gravity of their challenges and the best solution. They deliver real value while building brand credibility and help nudge leads further down the funnel.
As people engage in the quiz and receive answers, they are likely to remember what they learned through it better than through a blog post. The best part, they will connect their knowledge with your organization.
5.Account-Based Marketing
This strategy feels like fishing. Rather than cast a fishing net over a large area and haul in all kinds of things, you hook specific bait to capture your ideal fish.
Instead of having your team painfully sort through lead data to determine who’s worth pursuing, the team identifies and zeros in on specific high-value accounts. They research these accounts’ needs and concerns and craft content that addresses those issues.
It’s an efficient use of your team’s time and efforts as they focus on high-value customers to build empathy and trust with them. As the relationship with decision-makers grows, you’re likely to see shorter sales cycles and better deal sizes.
To implement this strategy, you’ll need to
- Identify key accounts. Before venturing into third-party data for possible prospects, look at who’s checking out your site and social channels, or who’s already on your email list.
- Rank your prospects. Which of these prospects has frequented your site severally, interacted with your social content, or downloaded marketing assets? Have they raised questions in online communities/groups that relate to your industry or offerings?
- Create personalized content. Now you are at the heart of ABM. Create detailed and personalized content to address the specific struggles a target company is facing. This content can be an email series, blog posts, or white papers.
- Get your content in front of the right eyes. Targeted email campaigns, direct mail, YouTube videos, and LinkedIn are great distribution channels. Identify which works for your target accounts and use it.
