Want to enhance your existing digital marketing strategy?
This may be your best decision yet, as the business environment in 2024 gets even more competitive and uncertain.
Sprucing up your marketing strategy may allow you to stand out from the crowd and maintain stability through the challenges thrown at you.
This would explain why more and more businesses are prioritizing marketing for growth.
In fact, 69% of B2B market leaders plan to increase their investment in video marketing in 2024, according to research by the Content Marketing Institute. This figure further proves the growing importance of digital marketing to the success of B2B companies.
But it doesn't come without its challenges, demanding for forward thinking business owners to get creative. Fortunately, leveraging digital B2B marketing hacks such as AI can help you gain an advantage.
In this article, we will discuss the fundamentals of digital marketing for B2B companies in 2024 and tips for smashing your own marketing strategy.
Let's get started.
1. Leveraging AI for Personalized Content
Personalization is among the top trends in B2B marketing.
Each business you are going to engage with is different and with needs unique to each one of them. Personalization conjures up feelings of relevance by acknowledging your customers' individuality and making them feel valued.
In fact, Google reported that 90% of leading marketers say personalization significantly contributes to business profitability, further supporting the benefit of personalizing customer experiences.
It is a simple psychological hack, but it goes a long way. You need to understand your customers and tailor each communication to suit them, proving yourself a trusted partner.
Now, the question you're probably asking yourself is how?
First, you need to collect huge amounts of data about your existing and potential customers. That includes their previous purchases, their behaviors, and key decision makers to mention a few.
All these are going to empower you to understand them and how to cater to their needs.
However, this can be a challenging undertaking that requires accuracy for better results. But we live in an era where AI rules, so why not leverage it?
AI uses machine learning and advanced algorithms to analyze huge amounts of data, identify trends, and make accurate predictions. It uncovers all hidden insights on key metrics, including customer behavior to help you make data-driven decisions that promote business success.
This enables you to achieve more. First is the ability to tailor your communications and experiences to suit individual businesses or decision makers. Think creation of content that resonates with your customers as well to ensure you get value out of your marketing budget.
Other benefits include anticipating market changes and trends, leading to better personalization.
2. Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Strategies
Do you want to increase efficiency?
Evidently, pouring your resources into marketing that isn't targeted is nothing close to efficient, and I am sure you can agree. While you want to capture a broad audience, it is essential to have your ideal customers in mind"”these are the businesses that are ready to spend money on your product.
Account-based marketing only improves this marketing strategy, making it a great digital B2B marketing hack. It involves concentrating your resources on a set of target accounts within your market.
This means that you will be publishing personalized campaigns based on the specific needs of these accounts to increase lead generation.
This approach enables you to save time and costs by weeding out less valuable businesses early in your marketing journey and focusing on high value ones. And the results are evident and significant.
Actually, a report by ITSMA revealed that 92% of companies with mature ABM programs report higher ROI than other types of marketing, highlighting the benefits of leveraging this strategy.
Businesses implementing account-based marketing need to ensure alignment between sales and marketing teams as it is essential for identifying key prospects.
To successfully implement this marketing approach, there needs to be a streamlined flow of information between the teams involved.
This ensures that they are on the same page and that their goals align.
Additionally, depending on your ideal customer profile, identify your high value target accounts. These should be businesses that are more likely to benefit from your product and service.
After researching these accounts, segment them depending on different factors such as size and vertical. This way, you can templatize your content for better outreach.
3. Optimizing for Voice Search
Website optimization is critical in increasing visibility.
As customer behavior changes now and then, it is important to adapt to ensure you remain relevant and ahead of your customers.
Having a great SEO strategy is a great starting point. But the development of voice-activated devices such as smartphones and smart speakers (Google Home and Amazon Echo) has changed how customers interact with search engines.
In fact, approximately 98 million people in the US own a smart speaker in their household, according to Edison Research, indicating the need for business owners to adjust their tactics for a speech-centric environment.
The popularization of voice search isn't just a trend; it represents changes in the industry that businesses must adapt to remain competitive.
With an increasing number of users searching for information using speech, it is imperative then to optimize your content for voice search.
The goal is to be read out first by the voice assistant when customers perform a voice search. The same applies to search engines when users use voice search on search engines.
You can achieve this by adapting your website structure, content, and technical elements to align with the unique features of voice queries.
This means your content needs to be more conversational and resemble spoken language while also being context-specific.
Just like SEO, this digital B2B marketing hack requires you to conduct keyword research. Typically, long-tail keywords that capture specific user intent tend to perform better with voice searches.
Note that this does not exempt you from creating high quality content. Develop content that is informative and, of course, mirrors a conversational tone to align with how typically customers engage with voice-activated devices.
4. Influencer Marketing in B2B
Traditional marketing alone is not enough for B2B businesses.
For an effective marketing strategy, it is paramount to implement other digital B2B marketing hacks.
Like other customers, B2B clients are also influenced by the people around them, so we think it is time for your business to leverage influencer marketing.
Fundamentally, it helps build trust while leveraging the attention that influencers get.
Working with known experts in your field allows you to use their credibility to reach a wider audience and attract high-value leads.
For instance, when setting up your innovative warehouse business for B2B logistics, collaborating with influencers can help you grow from the ground up before you establish yourself as a market leader.
Actually, Linqia's report revealed that 36% believe influencer-generated content performs better than branded posts, showing that customers are often biased toward content created by brands as opposed to influencers.
However, a challenge presents itself when it comes to choosing the right people to collaborate with.
Obviously, it is important that you do your due diligence and conduct research to identify influencers in your niche. But that isn't enough.
They need to be active, have a strong following, and have consistently valuable insights. On top of that, they need to align with your brand values.
Additionally, along your influencer marketing journey, I recommend that you measure the success of your efforts to identify what changes or improvements you need to make. This can involve tracking lead generation, evaluating ROI, and analyzing engagement.
5. Omnichannel Marketing Approach
How do you interact with your customers?
Phone and email are great communication channels. However, as the business landscape evolves and changes, we need to adapt in order to meet customer expectations and remain competitive.
Omnichannel marketing is essentially what it sounds like; interacting with your customers over any channel they prefer.
This customer-centric marketing approach has proved beneficial to B2B companies as it delivers a unified and consistent brand experience across apps, stores, and websites.
In fact, a McKinsey study found that over 50% of customers engage with three to five channels during each journey they take toward making a purchase or resolving a request, indicating the need to adopt an omnichannel marketing approach.
Rather than approaching every channel differently, omnichannel marketing enables you to view each one of your channels as part of a single brand experience.
Picture this: once a B2B client engages with your brand by clicking an ad or visiting a website, each of their social channels is now a tool to continue to communicate the brand message
This helps you stay consistent throughout a customer's journey, from brand recognition to when they make a purchase.
The benefits?
Firstly, consistency. This strategy ensures that your brand presence and messaging remain consistent, regardless of the channel used. Additionally, it helps accommodate different customer preferences.
For instance, some customers prefer low-touch, 24/7 interactions, while others require more than one service for a transaction.
Conclusion
Customers are the cornerstone of your business.
To ensure that you attract more customers and create marketing content that pays off, it is imperative to strategize properly.
Maybe even go the extra mile and implement different tips to improve your marketing efforts.
Actually, a survey by CMO indicated that B2B organizations allocate about 9.7% of their total budget to marketing, highlighting that not enough priority is being put into marketing.
Even with limited resources, leveraging the digital B2B marketing hacks we have listed such as AI and account-based marketing, can help you optimize results.
However, I recommend exploring other trends shaping the B2B industry, including SEO. You can hire the best SaaS SEO marketing agencies to provide industry expertise, help your business reach more people, and increase brand awareness.
Additionally, their think tank will develop high-quality, optimized content to help you rank higher and reach your targeted audience faster.