Ready to take your B2B marketing to the next level? Tired of feeling like your marketing efforts are fragmented and ineffective? These 5 B2B growth marketing strategies will help you reach your target audience, acquire the right customers, entice them to stick around, and even convert them into ambassadors for your business.
Here are 5 B2B growth marketing strategies you can start now:
- Take a Multi-Channel Approach
- Grow an Email Newsletter
- Blog with Purpose
- Lead with Data
- Optimize - SEO and CRO
What is B2B Growth Marketing?
Growth marketing is a full-funnel approach to marketing that helps businesses scale profitable customer acquisition by continuously measuring, testing, and improving at every stage. It’s a bit of an art and a science, in other words. For B2B businesses, growth marketing is particularly salient because B2Bs in many industries today are looking to scale as quickly as possible.
This approach merges data-driven marketing with creative, consumer-centric messaging and content to provide value to your prospects while motivating them to trust you and eventually become your customers. These five B2B growth marketing strategies will help you attract, engage and delight your target customers at every stage of their journey.
Take a Multi-Channel Approach
Where do your ideal customers live online? How do they like to consume content? What types of content do they prefer? Knowing where and how to reach your prospects is a good starting place, but to really grow, you need to also test which platforms, formats, and messages resonate most with your audience.
Does this mean producing tons of marketing content? Yes, it definitely does, but fortunately, there are smart ways to repurpose your existing content and make it work even harder for you. Because, as Gary Vaynerchuk says, “In a volume-centric creative world, it’s about creating more context for the audience you’re trying to reach and more context on the platforms that you’re distributing on.”
So, try extracting some highlights from your most recent blog post or email newsletter to create a series of social media posts. Have a slide deck full of graphics, interesting stats, and images? That’s a perfect source for email newsletter content or eye-catching graphic posts on Facebook or LinkedIn. Do you have webinars or even in-house training videos? Those can also be selectively edited and repurposed too. What about quotes from happy customers that already exist in reviews or on your website? Use them!
You get the idea. Not every piece of content has to be created from scratch, but certainly, creating good content can have an exponential impact if you maximize it through repurposing. It is important, however, to go further than just copy and paste. Each piece of content should be tailored to the platform and ideally, what you know about the customers who spend time there.
Finally, make sure you take a look at which types of content work best for your unique B2B business. Tracking metrics and honing in on what sparks your audience to engage is valuable feedback that can fuel your additional B2B growth marketing efforts.
Grow An Email Newsletter
“But, I thought email marketing was dead?”
Nope, not yet, and until everyone including your grandmother has Slack, email is a great way to stay in touch with your audience, throughout their customer journey. However, you must provide something of value not only to your subscribers but also in exchange for website visitors giving up their email addresses in the first place.
What does this mean?
It means creating compelling lead magnets - free eBooks, toolkits, checklists, etc., – to help build trust, provide value, and establish authority as an expert in your industry. It means hosting complimentary webinars to address a problem your target audience faces and requiring an email address in order to participate. It means designing your website to capture emails through motivating landing pages and CTAs.
The B2B sales cycle is often much longer than B2C, so establishing trust and building a relationship is key. As your email marketing list grows, it’s imperative to give those readers a reason to stay by continuing to educate and entertain them. Most email marketing platforms allow you to segment your audience, perform A/B testing, and really drill down on what information, CTAs, and headlines are most effective. Use this information to shape future marketing efforts.
Plus, your email marketing list is data you own. Your B2B business will have access to these contacts (unless they opt out) regardless of search engine and social media algorithm changes, which is a very valuable thing!
Blog with Purpose
Yes, blogging is nothing new, but we include it because you know what? It still works. Blogging is a tool we employ extensively for Brand Theory clients because it’s a proven way to boost rankings on the SERPs and attract website visitors.
As with all content strategies, how you do it matters.
Blogging as a B2B growth marketing tactic means your ideal customer is at the heart of every post. What problems do they want to solve? What is keeping them up at night? What information do they need to help them make a decision? What options are they weighing? Let the answers to these questions be the subjects of your blog posts.
But that’s not all. To really get the most SEO-bang for your blogging buck, you have to incorporate keyword research. Take those customer pain points, convert them into short or long-tail keywords, and then use a tool like Semrush or KeySearch to help you get even better results.
Unless your website already has established authority (and if you are just starting out, this is not you), you’ll need to build that authority by giving the search engines plenty of proof that your site helps searchers answer questions with quality, relevant content. Optimizing your posts for SEO by sprinkling keywords naturally throughout posts, creating meta-tags and alt tags for images, and paying attention to best practices around word count and layout are valuable steps in ensuring the time and effort you put into your posts aren’t wasted.
Last, but not least, always include a call to action. If your reader hangs on til the end of your post, you know they’ve found value. Capitalize on that built-up goodwill with a direct, compelling CTA. Tell them what to do. Make them an offer. Capture their email so you can stay in touch. Entice them to book a meeting, sign up for a webinar, or subscribe to your podcast. Don’t make it too long or too sales-y.
Remember, it’s about them, not you.
Lead with Data
B2B growth marketing strategy relies heavily on testing, tracking, and measuring everything from blog headlines and landing pages to website metrics and social media posts. It’s also valuable to continually evaluate your buyers’ journey to better understand what processes are working well and where there is friction. Data-driven decision-making is so fundamental to growth marketing, we’ve already mentioned it once or twice in this post!
The basic premise is, you provide consumer-centric, thoughtful, and accurate content across all relevant platforms, testing different versions where appropriate, and then you review and analyze what is attracting and engaging prospects and customers and what’s falling flat. This last bit then informs all your marketing decision-making for the next round. Rinse, repeat.
We’ve already touched on A/B testing in email marketing. Still, this type of testing can and should also be used for landing pages, calls to action, blog headlines and so much more. Many CMS platforms and email newsletter service providers have this capability. Plus, testing can help you further understand your audience and improve engagement rates for your content.
Marketing metrics can be an overwhelming undertaking, but in growth marketing, we often lean on six user behavior metrics that represent the complete buyer journey: Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral & Revenue. Focusing just on the KPIs that are relevant to these so-called “pirate metrics,” can help you streamline your analysis stage and avoid drowning in too much of the wrong kind of information.
Optimize! SEO & CRO
By now, you already understand the importance of optimizing your B2B blog content for Search Engine Optimization or SEO, but optimization doesn’t end there. For one, there are additional on and off-page SEO tactics to help boost your site’s page rank and (more importantly) help your B2B be discovered by customers that need the product or service you’re offering.
On-page SEO includes:
- Ensuring your primary keyword is in your headline, URL, title tag & meta description (bonus points if it's near the front/top)
- Creating a UX-friendly layout including readable fonts, scannable text, short, easy-to-understand paragraphs, and generous use of white space
- Keyword creativity - use of synonymous text, broad match keywords, and variations on the target keyword
- Using internal and external links
- Creating a mobile-friendly website
Off-page SEO is how Google and other search engines determine a website’s authority. It’s like word of mouth for the web. In a nutshell, it’s Google saying, “If people are talking about you and linking to you, you must be credible.”
Off-page SEO includes:
- Building backlinks
- Leveraging social media & content marketing (aka creating content people want to share)
- Creating a podcast
- Guest blogging
- Ratings & reviews
But another important form of optimization is Conversion Rate Optimization. Hotjar defines user-centric CRO as, “the process of focusing on understanding what drives, stops, and persuades your users, so you can give them the best user experience possible—and that, in turn, is what makes them convert and ultimately improves your website conversion rate.”
CRO works hand in hand with SEO to help move website visitors into and through the sales funnel. Remember all that testing we talked about earlier? That’s part of CRO. And even though the word “conversion” is in the name, CRO shouldn’t just be about conversions.
After all, there are vital steps a potential client must make before they convert. If your website is difficult to navigate or your sales team isn’t returning phone calls these missteps undoubtedly affect conversions. CRO helps you uncover what might be misaligned or downright derailed in your sales funnel, ensuring that all those prospects your SEO efforts have brought you have a higher likelihood of converting.
Level Up with B2B Growth Marketing
B2B companies don’t have time to burn on aimless marketing efforts. B2B growth marketing strategies offer a data-driven but customer-centric approach to online marketing that helps ensure your investments aren’t going to waste. A cohesive growth marketing strategy ensures that the right clients will find you at the right time and when they do, the right messages, calls to action, and conversion tools will be ready and waiting.
Too busy to implement these marketing strategies yourself? We can help. As an outsourced growth team, Brand Theory partners with B2Bs to help plan, research, launch and refine a wide range of marketing tools to help companies create profitable customer acquisition channels and thrive in today’s competitive market. Schedule your no-pressure introduction to Brand Theory today.
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