The Difference Between Marketing Strategies And Tactics
Even seasoned content marketing experts often mix up marketing strategies with tactics and vice versa. If you, too, find yourself confused, here’s a simple way to differentiate the two. A strategy is your plan and entails your goals, target audiences, and ways of measuring success. On the other hand, tactics are the tools you utilize to achieve the strategy’s goals. For instance, if your goal is to increase signups on your landing page, you may use a variety of tactics to achieve that, including social media marketing, paid ads, and SEO. In other words, tactics are a continuous stream of content marketing ideas you implement in your B2B strategy to attract and convert leads. Typically, they are utilized for short periods until you can check their effectiveness. You may alter and modify them accordingly to boost their performance or completely remove them from your agenda.
Marketing tactics and strategies may differ, but they are inseparable since even the most engaging and crafty tactics can’t succeed if no solid strategy is in place. Likewise, even the best strategy can fail if the tactics implemented are weak and low in value. Remember that you can’t know which tactics will work for you until you try them and measure their results. So, keep experimenting until you identify the perfect recipe for success.
The Different Approaches To B2B Marketing
B2B marketing strategies are typically divided into lead-based and account-based strategies. The first refers to capturing as many leads as possible, regardless of whether they work for a B2B company or not. It’s not even important if they are your target audience. The top of your sales funnel is very wide and aims to attract a large number of leads who become aware of your business. In the end, though, only a very small percentage reaches the bottom of the funnel and makes a purchase. With account-based marketing, your sales funnel has a much smaller top tier, as you target specific businesses you want to convert. Each company is treated individually, and you create a trusting and loyal relationship with them. That’s why you may tailor your promotional campaign and tactics according to their unique and varying needs. Contrary to lead-based marketing, this approach has higher conversion rates as customers are closer to making a purchase.
B2B Marketing Customer Stages
1. Awareness
In this first step, companies are aware of their challenges and are actively looking for solutions. It’s where you come into the picture and inform them of your existence. Maybe they had no idea who you are, or they had heard of you but were unfamiliar with your product. You get the opportunity to pitch your content marketing services and provide proof for your claims. You also need to educate them regarding their pain points and highlight the reasons you are the perfect option for them.
2. Consideration
Here is where customers start considering your business and your competitors to see which solution suits them the best. You should provide them with testimonials, case studies, and informative blog posts to prove credibility. Don’t shy away from making comparative articles regarding your services and your competition’s offerings. Clients want to see how your product excels compared to the rest of the market.
3. Decision
Finally, the customer has decided to opt for your services and visits your website to make a purchase. You must proceed with landing page optimization techniques so all crucial information is clearly stated and clients can easily make their pick and proceed to checkout. Also, you should offer a variety of payment options to fit different needs.
4. Retention
Your job isn’t done once you’ve converted a client. This is where building loyalty begins, as you need to go above and beyond to show appreciation to your customers. From sending personalized emails to offering unique rewards and discounts, your efforts must be consistent and genuine. Thus, buyers will feel connected to your brand and become your advocates. You may even offer a referral program for devoted clients who promote your business to their peers.
Crucial Tactics To Create A Successful B2B Marketing Strategy
Invest In Content Marketing
One of the most pivotal B2B marketing tools is producing and publishing content, including blog posts, infographics, webinars, podcasts, guides, and eBooks. These media forms are great at generating interest for your brand and driving traffic to your website and social media pages. This channel is also ideal for small business content marketing efforts since you don’t need to invest resources in creating ads. Your goal is to produce high-quality educational material that captivates your audience’s interest and generates organic traffic. As you publish invaluable content frequently, you establish thought leadership, and your client base starts treating you as an expert in your field. Therefore, they are more likely to purchase from your company.
Improve Your SEO
Now that you have crafted your content, how do you increase visibility among your target audience? Search Engine Optimization allows your website, landing page, and online store to rank higher on search engine result pages (SERPs). To achieve that, you must improve your SEO abilities and research keywords and phrases your competitors implement in their content to maintain a high ranking. For instance, if you’re writing a blog post about content marketing techniques, you should insert this phrase and other synonyms throughout your article to appear high on Google’s results. Based on the funnel stages you target, you have to identify the most relevant and appropriate keywords. You can also optimize your online store so people who are looking to purchase something right away can easily locate you.
Utilize Paid Ads
One of the best B2B growth marketing techniques is implementing paid ads in your strategy. Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook are three of the most popular channels companies in various niches choose to promote their products and services to increase sales. Not only do you promote brand awareness, but you also reach vast audiences that belong to different buyer personas and are in different funnel stages. Furthermore, you can utilize banner ads. You can simply use Google Adsense to cater photo and video ads to specific buyer personas. These ads appear only on websites with relevant content and visitors whose search history resonates with your niche. Let’s not throw the trade press out the window, though. In some sectors, magazines and newspapers are still popular, and featuring your brand in them can serve as amazing exposure. These promotions are very targeted, as they only reach professionals with similar interests.
Publish Case Studies
Customer testimonials and real-life success stories are wonderful practices for B2B MarTech companies to shine a bright light on their products and their capabilities. Hearing your products’ benefits from a client helps build credibility and solidifies you as an expert in your field. However, a case study should not concentrate on your company. Your customers should be the stars of the story. Enforce storytelling and explain the challenges clients were facing before you came to the rescue. Explain what your proposed solution was and how your client reversed a bad situation by implementing your proposition. You may use UGC videos and photos as proof and an opportunity for everyone to get a glimpse of how your product works. Your case study should not be overly promotional or salesy and must educate potential buyers while motivating them and fostering an emotional investment.
Build A Social Media Presence
Social media, like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, are heavily utilized by businesses all over the globe to promote their products and services. They offer you a unique opportunity to engage with your audience, learn their preferences, and boost your product’s visibility. You can use Q&As to identify what your audience cares about and publish short videos explaining common pain points. If you have a new webinar or podcast episode being released, you can let your followers know about it and share the corresponding links. B2B video marketing is one of the most effective right now due to the popularity of visuals. You may also share case studies, industry news, upcoming events, and official statistics. However, not all social media platforms are created equal for B2B audiences. LinkedIn is the only platform ideal for promoting your SaaS solutions.
Retarget
Extensive digital marketing skills don’t focus solely on generating new leads and blog post readers, but on retargeting viewers who exited your domain before making a purchase or without researching your services further. You know that they are interested in your business based on the time they spent on the website and the web pages they visited. Why didn’t they buy your products, though? While you can’t know the exact reason, you can’t treat them as lost causes. That is because retargeted leads convert up to 50% of website traffic. Tracking cookies helps you identify the needs and preferences of a potential buyer and tailor content that fits their profiles. Therefore, you can promote relevant content to them and push them toward your sales funnel.
Many people confuse retargeting with remarketing. While they sound similar, they have key differences. Retargeting utilizes ads to reignite a lead’s interest. On the other hand, remarketing promotes targeted content to inactive leads through email.
Automate For Personalized Support
B2B audiences typically require detailed information before purchasing a product or service because they need to trust your company. Automation and B2B content marketing can help you nurture your leads and prove to them why you are the best solution for them. Automated emails are sent to potential buyers depending on their level of interest in your sales funnel. Once the lead is ready to make a purchase, you can let your sales team take over. Your content should be valuable, informative, and target individual pain points. As you’re warming up your clients, you should create comparisons between your business and your competitors. Make sure you stand out and are clearly a much better choice.
Test And Measure Your Efforts
Your B2B marketing strategy isn’t a done deal once you’ve fixed your plan and implemented your tactics. Instead, it’s a work in progress, and you should continuously measure and check its effectiveness. Define your KPIs and keep monitoring the clicks, number of visits, and bounce rates. This way, you can identify which tactics and channels are fruitful and when you need to make alterations. Customer behavior changes all the time, and you must stay updated. Just because you created an amazing paid ad and banner does not mean your client base is responding positively to it. Maybe you need to make simple changes or drop your chosen tactics altogether.
Ways To Craft A Powerful Marketing Plan
Understand Your Market
Marketing to B2B starts with understanding your brand position and the market in which you operate. Your marketing team should explain how your product and offerings compare to the competition and what it is that makes you unique. What differentiates you from other companies, and why should customers choose you? Which problems do you solve? Client testimonials and case studies help you prove your trustworthiness and credibility. You may also point out your competition’s weaknesses and how you outmatch them. Additionally, explain honestly where your company ranks among competitive brands. If you are a startup, you must establish thought leadership by publishing informative blog posts and eBooks.
Design Your Buyer Personas
Any successful marketing leader knows that B2B product marketing entails segmenting your target audience and crafting buyer personas. You should do extensive research to identify your ideal customers’ age groups, company size, industry, annual revenue, and challenges. Divide them into various profiles and tailor your messaging to each of them. You must know which media forms they prefer to use to promote your content effectively. Moreover, what pain points does each buyer persona have, and how can you help them? People want to feel like you care about them and that you’re willing to do whatever it takes to offer assistance.
Set Your Goals
At the core of every B2B content marketing strategy are your goals. Do you want to increase registrations for your webinar so you can introduce your service to leads or increase sales in your store? Your goals may vary based on your industry, company size, and annual budget. However, they should be SMART, meaning specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Meet with your sales team, agree on objectives, and set a timeline. Do you want to measure success rates monthly, quarterly, or annually? It’s best to analyze each tactic regularly and revise it based on its performance.
Define Your Tactics
Now it’s time to decide on the measurable tactics you want to implement to achieve your objectives. Choose a wide variety of tools that you can easily alter if their performance isn’t optimal. You may want to perform A/B testing before deciding on the tactics you utilize. Based on the buyer personas you’ve crafted, you must choose the right platforms to promote your product. For instance, if you want to reach a Gen Z audience, you should probably focus on publishing content on TikTok and Instagram instead of printing ads in newspapers. Each tactic should be connected to your overall marketing strategy and create a clear path toward the sales funnel. When you measure content marketing performance and notice something is not working for you, simply change gears and go to plan B.
Marketing Trends To Consider
You probably already have a B2B marketing strategy and a few tactics you implement religiously. The future of digital marketing is being enriched daily as new technologies appear and audience preferences change. GenAI is the most pressing trend companies must study extensively and incorporate into their marketing techniques wherever possible. The benefits of AI in marketing include content creation, ad targeting, and personalization. For starters, the algorithm can produce a plethora of blog post suggestions and generate engaging headlines and relevant keywords and phrases so you can upscale your SEO. Also, GenAI can gather information about your clients, divide them into groups, and personalize your content. Therefore, your ads become more targeted, and you can convert customers more easily. At the same time, the corporate world is becoming more interested in sustainability. This means that your company should actively prove social responsibility and collaborate with groups and organizations that work to improve our planet’s condition. Lastly, account-based marketing is seeing an increase in preference, with organizations realizing that generalized campaigns are not as effective as highly targeted promotions.
Key Takeaway
Sooner or later, your marketing results will be positive, as inbound traffic will be directed to your website and landing pages. However, only a tiny percentage of the companies that visit you will convert and become loyal customers. The vast majority disappears, and you may never hear from them again. So, how can you identify them and understand why they left your domain? You may use a visitor identification tool to locate these businesses, check their behavioral information, and see how many of their employees visited your website. After gathering more details about them, you can tailor your messaging to fit their unique needs and convert them.
