Digital marketing offers immense opportunities in the B2B space, but in even a moderately competitive field, it takes organization and planning to get the most out of its potential.
Blindly pouring resources into an online campaign is unlikely to generate the returns you want. However, if you create a detailed B2B digital marketing plan optimized for your unique business situation, you can often see positive results in a surprisingly short time.
A typical planning approach can be broken down into six major sections. We can work with you to adapt each stage to the specific needs of your business and have worked with various technology equipment manufacturers and professional service providers in the Bay Area. At our San Jose Digital Marketing agency here are the things we incorporate in developing a plan.
- Determine Recent Marketing Trends
Digital marketing can be used successfully in any B2B niche, but no single approach works equally well across all sectors. Every business is unique, and a marketing plan must incorporate this and other things specific to your business niche. Before creating your plan, it’s important to research which techniques and channels are commonly used in your business niche to have a starting point for success.
Look for recent stats on which social media platforms are most used by players in your niche, which strategic elements seem to be recently increasing in popularity, and which ones may be passing their peak. Once you know the high-level picture in your sector, you’ll have a solid base to build on without needing to reinvent the wheel.
- Defining Your Target Audience
Any successful marketing plan needs to focus on its target audience. Whom are you trying to reach, engage, and ultimately convert into a lead? The best way to define your target is to draw up one or more ideal customer personas, setting down each fictional person’s typical role in their organization, their level of decision-making ability, the daily problems they face, and so on.
Once you’ve defined your targets, your plan can focus on positioning your products or services as solutions that will make their working lives easier and attract their interest.
- Comprehensive Website Audit
Even if you already have a full-featured website, it’s unlikely to be operating at its true business-generating potential. A thorough website audit will identify its strengths and shortcomings, revealing possible optimizations to make the most of the traffic your marketing plan will generate.
- Competitive Analysis
No marketing plan operates in isolation. To be effective, it needs to consider your competition’s strategies and approaches. Which marketing areas are they active in, and which might they be overlooking? Can you realistically compete on equal terms in the most competitive fields, or should you be looking for smaller niches that you can exploit more easily?
- Reviewing Your Current Online Approaches
Unless you’re starting from a clean slate, you’ll likely have some existing digital marketing success you can build on. A solid plan will detail which current activities provide the best results and which could use some extra attention. This review lets you determine which ones could be scaled down or stopped altogether to get the most out of your resources and budget.
- Actionable Recommendations
Lastly, your B2B digital marketing plan should come together with concrete proposals for expanding digital outreach and visibility. It might be most efficient to build on what you’ve got, or it might take branching out in new directions, but there are four main marketing areas available for exploration.
– For fast results, paid advertising is hard to beat, directly reaching your potential customers via search engines, social media, or targeted media with a B2B readership in the technology and IT services sector.
– Content marketing involves developing high-quality, relevant material that your customers will find helpful. This content is initially published on your website or other platforms and then promoted on social media or other channels.
– Using regular or advanced search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to improve the visibility of your website on the major engines, as well as enhancing site quality for lead generation, customer conversion, or branding capability.
– Lastly, the reliable old warhorse of email marketing. Build and maintain a quality email list, and send out useful helpful on a regular basis. You can effectively create traffic on demand when you have a new product, service, or news item your customer base would be interested in.
Get Help with Your Digital Marketing Plan
Within this six-point outline, there are countless ways of optimizing each stage of the plan to suit various business sectors. Our San Jose digital marketing agency, will help you develop an action plan tailored to your business, your sector, and your target B2B customers to deliver the online results you need. Contact us for a free consultation.
The post Why B2B Companies Need a Digital Marketing Plan and How to Make One appeared first on Smart Web Marketing.