Guide To B2B Marketing To Drive Traffic

The advent of the global pandemic changed a lot of things including the marketing world. Now, the digital world has become of greater importance. Businesses are focusing more on digital platforms for marketing their content, brand, product and connecting with their customers.

This global pandemic has brought an evolution in B2B marketing. This evolution has now compelled B2B companies to convert changes and pivots brought during the pandemic into more permanent changes in marketing. These changes are taking place because of the growing preferences of customers for information discovery, consumption, and interaction.

B2B marketing is growing as a digital-first practice. Now, most marketers have understood that simply relying on a push marketing strategy is not enough. With the growth of digital platforms, customers are also evolving.

Now, the b2b customers have a more vast variety of content choices. For instance, text, images, video, and other interactive formats on different platforms. This is why their expectations of your brand are also changing in terms of your content marketing strategy.

People want a more enriching experience. Therefore you should focus on providing content that is customer-oriented. For this, first, you have to know your customers and Hybris B2B customer software can help you with this.

Customer experience is more important than ever, so, you must understand your audience. You must get familiar with how to find b2b customers. You can find them through various social platforms, podcasts email marketing, etc.

You can optimize for B2B customers with the help of digital-first content marketing. Meaning, that you should deliver your content to new media channels. This will help in enhancing the integrated content experience.

In this blog, you will understand why B2B marketers must change their approach.

Also read – How To Generate The Best Content Marketing Results?

Understanding the changing scenario of b2b marketing

B2B marketing is the practice of selling one company’s products and services to others. B2B customers make their purchasing decisions on profit potential and price, they look for useful information from the companies.

Now the customers want more than just helpful information. Because of the changes in buying preferences, technology, and market, now brands are focusing on creating more content. So, B2B marketers are now including more content in their marketing strategy.

If you want to stay ahead in this fiercely competitive market, you must take a look at Hybris's B2B customer marketing solution. This software combines the customer’s data into a centralized hub. It helps you understand your customer in a better way and helps you provide relevant, contextual, and consistent experiences through your customer’s journey on every marketing channel.

You should deliver customer-based content. So to optimize for B2B customers, you should deliver it through new digital channels. It will help you in providing a more meaningful and personalized CX (customer experience).

The concept of traditional digital marketing is transforming. Now, the marketing strategy is a more integrated content experience focused. To bring these required changes in the marketing approach needs you to look at some essential shifts.

Other B2B marketing tactics include as follows: 

• SEO
• Live Chat
• ABM(Account Based Marketing)
• PPC
• Social Media Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing

3 Essential Shifts In B2B Marketing

1. Surplus information

With the ever-rising competition in the market, brands are delivering a plethora of information or content. This has compelled brands to evolve their content publishing efforts. Every social media platform, blogging site, and other network is dramatically powered by brands and user-generated content.

B2B companies are competing with each other for time and attention. Because of this, customers are excessively bombarded with thousands of marketing messages on a day-to-day basis. However, as a b2b marketer or a b2b brand, you need to understand that delivering enormous content is not the right way to gain attention.

This can provide you with meaningful information. It will help you curate relevant, contextual, and great customer experience. You should try to understand who influences you the customer so that you can build an effective influencer marketing strategy.

To improve your content investment performance, focus on using the right tools for everything. Right from influencer spotting to topic optimization, you have to use effective tools. You can create a better customer experience by changing your social media, content marketing PR, etc approach.

2. Upheaval or Evolution

With the beginning of digital media and the rising demand for it, a lot of changes happened. Now, customers' preferences and technologies are changing. These transitions in the marketing world are evolution for one but disruption for another.

These transformations in technology, increasing information demand or content, and changing customer expectations have affected traditional publishing models. The rising digital platform has brought a decline in print-based publications. Now, the role of content, traditional media publishers, and brand publishers are changing.

3. Run by the customer journey

The customer’s journey and experience are more important than ever. Customers are now empowered with diverse information on several devices. This provides them with more decision-making power.

Your customer’s journey from awareness to purchase is dynamically linked with social media, news, and search. This is increasingly dull to push messages. If you can attract and engage your customers earlier in their journey, you develop a brand connection with them.

This will positively impact your sales. So, you should craft your content marketing strategy around the customer’s journey. This will help you create stage-wise valuable content topics.

You should plan your content marketing plan for the optimization of customer experience. Build a strategy that combines both brand goals and customer insights. It will help you create content that you can optimize for B2B customers and accomplish your business objectives.

Also read- What Do You Mean By Customer Insights Marketing? Easy Steps To Use It

Concluding note

After understanding the major shifts, you should focus on addressing key questions like who are your target audience, their influence, goals, how to find b2b customers, and what business objectives you can achieve by meaningful content, etc. You should create an editorial calendar to segment each target customer’s journey.

Include best social media, search, and media optimization practices in your content planning efforts. Analyze your performance indicators and results. Focus on crafting content that you can optimize for b2b customers.

Now the role of content has changed. It has shifted from just providing useful information to giving an enriching customer experience. So, give importance to your b2b customers.

This will help you optimize your content marketing performance. Considering these transitions while crafting your content will help you stay ahead of your competitors.