Today’s Digital Marketing world primarily revolves around staying connected with the customer at all times. Companies use various digital marketing channels not only to acquire more customers but also to create and maintain a strong brand image. In such a scenario, B2C companies are known for ever increasing investments towards digital marketing. But, what about B2B companies? Curious to know, how do they use Digital Marketing to their advantage? Let’s find out.

Strong relationship with the customer drives business in a B2B industry. Sales teams work over longer lead times to convert accounts and bring in business. Through digital marketing, the same purpose is fulfilled over the internet. It helps the business to generate leads online by reaching out to those consumers whom the sales team was unable to tap and providing them with instant after sales service as well. A LinkedIn study shows that the top three goals for B2B marketers were:

• Lead generation (72%)
• Thought leadership – Market education (50%)
• Customer acquisition (45%)

Now let’s dwell into how companies have resorted to increasing their digital presence in the past and what have been the after effects!

Maersk
The world famous Danish Shipping company decided to go digital to increase its brand awareness, employee satisfaction and stay closer to its customers. They started doing this by sharing interesting stories that came up during the course of their business, such as how are they helping to fuel a rise in sale of Kenyan Avocados and where their workforce came from.

Also, by telling the story of how their shipping containers navigated the frozen Baltic Sea during winters, they managed to generate 150 unique leads. This they tapped by hosting a form online and providing a link to download the brochure for their anti-freeze services.

Maersk now has 2.4M+ Facebook fans (out of which 15% are customers) and 60000 followers on Twitter.

Seagate

A B2B technology firm with a large staff of 52000+ decided to digitally market its product directly to the end users, surpassing the traditional B2B channel. They partnered with CISCO to utilise its WebEx online tools, which they were already using internally and pulled off an online launch event from its office with 4 speakers and 1800 attendees. The entire digital campaign was completed in 5 months with zero advertising budget.

The results were mind boggling! Through the event, they were successfully able to generate 5000 leads and exceeded initial volumetric sales goal by 300%, doubling sales forecast within one week of the launch.

What are the best B2B Digital Marketing practices to be followed?

• Marketing Automation: Marketing automation can prove to be a very successful tool when it comes to B2B digital marketing. Since there are lot many marketing avenues through which a company can communicate, the software helps in automating the repetitive tasks such as e-mails, social media and website actions. These automation softwares help in capturing and nurturing leads apart from re marketing on third-party sites. According to a report published by Regalix, 79% of B2B marketers are already extracting benefits from Marketing Automation.

• The Website: The website of an organization is one of the most crucial tools it can employ to engage the customer. The website and online catalogue were rated by the customer as the most important decision marketing touchpoints by B2B customers. A B2B organization should focus on creating a balance between providing information on selling to, informing and entertaining the customer. The website needs to be credible and trustworthy and should make the customer feel that he is in the right place. SaaS products like BrightInfo and Evergage are available these days which make web personalization for websites more affordable.

• Content Marketing: Content is the king of all marketing communications. Content marketing focuses on providing customers the information they are seeking for. For a B2B business, the content marketing tactics involve social media content, newsletters, articles on websites, illustration, photos, videos, blogs, microsites, mobile apps etc. The content should be prepared after identifying needs of the target consumer as the prominence of inbound marketing has given more importance to content marketing and SMO.

• Social media presence: According to a research by Smart Insights, 57% of inbound marketers have obtained leads from LinkedIn, 52% from Facebook and 44% from Twitter. Driving traffic to the website, generating leads, defining and measuring ROI, planning and scheduling content are the major social media challenges.

Brands like Toshiba Air-conditioning which used to primarily spend on channel, influencer and trade marketing and didn’t involve going digital in their strategy, have been highly active on social media these days. They have more than 2 Lakh followers on Facebook and being a premium brand, this isn’t a small number. Social media is also being used for social listening; B2B companies have started listening to their competitors as much as they listen to their customers online. They watch industry players and influencers online and keep a track of the tactics being employed that engage thought leaders and consumers.

• Search Marketing: This concept was initially ignored by the B2B brands since the search volumes are low. But the increasing use of long tail strategies by brands are helping them to achieve their targets. According to the Optify B2B marketing athlete Survey, 33% of B2B marketers spend no time on SEO each week while 55% spend no time on Pay per click. This trend is being challenged by many B2B organizations. The decision makers are now focusing on grouping target key phrases and defining key brand messages for SERPs.

• Mobile Marketing: Google’s new mobile first index and potential penalties have increased the popularity of mobile marketing. Mobile internet constitutes more than half of the entire web traffic and many B2B customers are moving from searching for products on desktop to mobile phones. This brings in the need of providing a smooth user experience on mobile phone devices. Hence, having a mobile responsive site has become a prime objective for B2B companies of today.

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