I recently wrote about the three big goals you should be aiming for in your B2B marketing strategy: building your audience, capturing new leads and referrals, and staying top-of-mind with your audience. But how do you achieve these goals?
It’s time to build the three pillars of your B2B marketing foundation:
- Mobile-first, responsive website – start with what you want to communicate, then create a mobile-optimized design (70% of first-time visitors to B2B websites are mobile!). I’ve met a lot of people who have had negative experiences with website builds due to the way websites are typically built: design first. While this might seem like a logical first approach, it’s actually backwards. In order for your website to work for you 24/7 and be an optimized sales tool, you need to think about the great content that’s going to drive your website first. That means clearly articulating your story: WHY you do what you do, WHO you are, and then HOW you do WHAT you do. Remember what Simon Sinek said,
“People don’t buy what you do,
they buy why you do it.”Your website is a living entity – it’s not a one and done build that you can forget about. Your long term marketing strategy depends on your website being updated and iterated constantly, based on the data you’re tracking. Google Analytics is the perfect tool for this kind of data tracking, and you should let the data inform how you tweak your strategy around UX and SEO.
- Email marketing – staying top-of-mind in today’s saturated email communication streams means, perhaps counter-intuitively, that you need to be sending more email. Your content needs to be insight-driven, valuable information that helps your audience understand or solve problems they are facing. And this content needs to be sent out consistently, over a long period of time. That means having great content writers who are familiar or have worked in your field or industry and know what they are talking about. Copywriters are great, but it’s not going to do you any good having someone with a background in tech writing to your audience of home construction B2Bs.
- LinkedIn – a B2B gold mine. You’ve taken the time and done the work of producing all this great content for your website and email marketing, now you need to leverage what is currently the best word of mouth tactic: building your network on LinkedIn. I have some best practices you can reference on the Advice page of our website to get you started.
The key is that great content drives all three of these pillars. Avoid the #1 mistake in marketing: talk about what your audience cares about, not yourself, and remember that tying all three of these together drives the customer journey.
All the best,
Bill Bice
CEO
