A B2B’s Compact Guide to Digital Marketing

There is a lot of fuss and noise around digital marketing. So let’s simplify the concept to take a closer look at what online marketing is and how B2B businesses can benefit from digital marketing.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is the online promotion of brands to connect with potential customers through digital communication channels. It comprises search engine optimization, pay-per-click marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, mobile marketing, affiliate marketing, and marketing analytics.

In simple terms, digital marketing is the total of all marketing campaigns one sees on the internet and digital channels, from display ads, paid social ads, online videos, and social media posts to email campaigns, content, and search engine marketing.

For a B2B enterprise, digital marketing is all about introducing your brand to other businesses, presenting your product, and communicating its utility and uniqueness to prospective clients. The digital marketing process aims to create content and marketing campaigns to influence prospective clients’ buyer journey and convince them to purchase.

Generally, any buyer goes through the three phases of awareness, consideration, and decision, and internet marketing can take different forms at different stages.

Awareness Stage

In the awareness stage, the prospective client seeks specific information about his business needs or problems. Businesses can use blog posts, e-books, informative articles, and social media posts to inform the audience about their product and its use. Sometimes, a B2B enterprise may have to make the prospect realize that there is an existing problem or need that still needs to be addressed, and your product can help them resolve the situation or simplify things for them.

Consideration Stage

Next comes the consideration stage, where the prospect assesses his options regarding products and companies. At this stage, businesses need to pace ahead by establishing their authority and trust through case studies, positive reviews, customer testimonials, and demo videos of your product or service on your website and social media handles.

Decision Stage

Finally, businesses can win over prospects by providing consultations, meetings, presentations, and free trials. So, providing contact information and schedule links on the website and social media posts is essential.

The digital marketing process is ongoing and does not end with the sale.

Businesses must aim to retain their old customers while creating brand awareness, attracting new customers, and increasing sales. So, to build a loyal client base, it is essential to ask for client feedback, keep them engaged with interesting posts, and offer special promotional rewards or early previews of new products. If a business uses email marketing, it needs to craft an automated email campaign around the buyer journey stages.

The concept of digital marketing may sound complicated, employing a lot of resources. However, it is not so. On the contrary, digital marketing is the easiest way to reach your target audience in a fast and cost-effective way.

For instance, dynamic digital marketing does not mean rejecting your existing resources while spending money on new ones. On the contrary, sometimes it is as simple as repurposing your old content to increase website traffic without going through the hassle of disposing of all old content to replace with entirely new content according to digital marketing trends.

It can be said that digital marketing is the magic formula that can open the gates of the global market for your small or medium-sized B2B business. Although digital marketing is vast and dynamic, you can learn from numerous informative articles and blogs that can be found online.

How can B2B use Digital Marketing to Build their Business?

The first step towards online marketing is creating a user-friendly and mobile-responsive website. Next, the B2B company should focus on SEO to enhance search rankings and content marketing to educate and attract a quality audience. Next, businesses should set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely (SMART) goals, decide on a marketing budget, choose the most appropriate digital marketing channels, and modify marketing efforts as and when needed.

Social media marketing with PPC ads could help increase online visibility and drive engagement. However, a business should also be aware of the latest digital marketing trends to stay ahead of its competitors and grow globally. Further, B2B businesses should integrate online and offline marketing efforts to optimize the marketing process.

The main advantage of digital marketing is that it allows small businesses to reach a global audience with their limited resources. Through the right digital marketing campaign, companies can do target marketing by segmenting their market, conducting competitor analysis, and building an ideal customer profile or buyer persona for each market segment. It enables businesses to zero down on their target audience, tailor marketing strategy according to their needs, and convey the right brand message with its USP to the prospective client market segment.

As a digital marketing agency for B2B, we seek to make businesses aware that B2B businesses need to take a different approach. Our content marketing team crafts customized digital marketing plans for a B2B business to communicate how their business can help other companies and establish their competitive edge to win over clients and grow their B2B business.