Most people know that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and most also understood the basic concept that SEO is about optimizing your website to rank higher on Google’s—and other search engines’ — SERP.

However, there are still many misconceptions surrounding B2B SEO, especially regarding the technicalities and purpose.

First, B2B SEO is not a secret method to cheat the search engine’s algorithm so you can rank quickly. Instead, it’s a series of optimizations so your site—and your content— aligns better with Google’s goal, which in their own words is: “Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

The more useful and accessible your content and website are for the user, the higher you will rank, period. SEO is simply a series of optimizations both on-site and off-site to achieve more usability, relevancy, and accessibility.

Also, the end purpose of B2B SEO is not the #1 ranking, it’s just a means to the actual end: increasing the quantity and quality of organic traffic to your B2B website.

Building 7-Figure Companies With B2B SEO

Learn how founders, CEOs, execs and thought leaders use SEO and Content Marketing to grow B2B, SaaS, technology and startup companies from zero to 7 and 8-figure revenue.

How Incapsula Doubles Their Business Year Over Year With SEO, Content Marketing and CRO

Content Marketing and SEO are the main customer acquisition channels that helped Incapsula achieve:

• Market Capitalization: $1.5 billion
• Protects: 5,000,000+ websites
• #1 customer acquisition channel: Content Marketing and SEO
• Year over year growth: 100%

Learn more

How Content Marketing and SEO Helped BuildFire Become a 7-Figure ARR SaaS Company

Content marketing, the first page rankings on Google and SEO helped BuildFire to grow to where they are at right now:

• Revenue: 7 Figure Company
• Customers: 1000, Powering over 10,000+ apps in the App Store
• Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO
• Organic Traffic: 140,000 visitors/month

Learn more

How SEO Helped Time Doctor Become a 7 Figure SaaS Company and Generate 20,000 Trials Per Month

SEO and content marketing are the only lead generation channels for Time Doctor and helped them to generate:

• Revenue: 7 Figure Company
• Customer Acquisition: 20,000 trials/month, 7000 customers/month
• Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO
• Revenue growth: 10% MoM

Learn more

With those points being said, there are three additional terms we should understand to learn the concept of B2B SEO:

• Organic traffic: simply put, any traffic to your website that you don’t pay for. A huge portion of traffic coming from Google and other search engines come from paid search ads.

• Traffic quantity: pretty self-explanatory, the more people coming to your website by clicking on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) results, the better.

• Traffic quality: not all traffic is equally valuable for your business. You want to attract visitors that are actually interested in your brand/product/service with the highest chance of conversions.

Organic SEO for B2B is not only effective in getting more organic traffic (quantity), giving you a more cost-efficient source of leads. However, SEO also ensures that you get the most relevant, most valuable traffic with the highest chance of conversion (quality).

How B2B SEO Actually Works: Understanding The Ranking Signals

Above, we have mentioned that B2B SEO is as simple as a series of optimizations. So, what do we need to actually optimize?

There are some aspects on and off our site that will affect SEO performance more than the others, and we call these the ranking signals, or ranking factors. While there are over 200 SEO ranking factors considered by Google’s algorithm today, we can divide these optimizations into three main categories:

•  On-Page Non-Technical SEO. Referring mainly to any optimizations you implement on your content, such as optimizing keyword usage, meta descriptions, optimizing titles and headings, proper website design to achieve decent user experience score, and so on. So, also often referred to as “content SEO”.
• On-Page Technical SEO. Any technical optimizations on your site from improving the load speed of your site, implementing a mobile-responsive design, structured data markup, AMP, SSL, improving XML sitemap, and so on. Often called just “technical SEO”
• Off-Page SEO. Anything outside your website that will affect your SEO results. While there can be many different ranking factors that can be categorized as off-page, most of them will deal with backlinks quantity and quality. Backlinks—links pointing to your website—, are the most expensive asset you can have online, not only for B2B SEO, but for the overall digital marketing results.

With those three being said, there are only 4 crucial steps in implementing SEO for B2B brands:

1. Find what people are searching for via a proper keyword research
2. Develop high-quality, relevant content to target these keywords according to the searcher’s user intent.
3. Optimize the technical and non-technical SEO aspects on your site, with the goal of providing the best experience for the user and keeping them as long as possible
4. Promote your content and get more backlinks in the process. Remember that the quality of your backlinks is more important than quantity.

That’s it, and the key here is to do these consistently and slowly climb the SERP rankings.

B2B SEO VS B2C SEO

Now that we are starting to understand the importance of having a B2B SEO strategy and its key concept, we can discuss how B2B SEO is quite unique compared to its B2C counterpart.

Remember, that SEO is essentially about reaching your ideal audience via the SERP. In a B2B environment, this will translate to getting the professionals/stakeholders within your target company to find your business from search engine results.

For example, let’s say you are a B2B SaaS company selling a cloud-based big data analytics tool, then the possible targets for your B2B SEO campaigns can be:

• An IT manager or CTO searching for “Big data analytics”
• An entrepreneur or startup founder looking for “startup analytics tools” or “big data for startups”, among other keywords
• A data analyst or data scientist looking for data science-related keywords

So, while the main principles of SEO remain the same, there are a few uniqueness you can expect in B2B SEO compared to B2C, and here are some of them:

1. Targeting Multiple Stakeholders and Decision Makers

B2B products and services are generally—although not always— more expensive than B2C products and typically designed for long-term investments. Organizations tend to have more considerations and tend to involve more decision-makers before deciding on a purchase.

These different decision-makers can consist of different roles—managers, staff, financial directors, etc. —, and they will use Google with different search intents.

So, in implementing SEO, a B2B company must target all these different stakeholders and decision-makers while considering the different intents, for instance:

• Practitioners (i.e., marketing officer) might require more actionable, tactical content like “How to improve click-through rate”.
• Executive and managerial roles might want a more high-level strategic content, for example, “How to develop a marketing plan”
• Finance roles and high-level executives might want content that informs how their investments will be justified, such as “key benefits of X tools”

So, you will need to develop several different buyer personas and create a content strategy that can target all these different roles. The better you can define these roles, the more effective your B2B SEO strategy will be.

2. Expect Lower Conversion Rate and Longer Sales Cycle

It’s the nature of B2B products: when 10,000 Googled a keyword related to a consumer product, let’s say “iPhone”, a bigger percentage will buy the iPhones compared to B2B-related keywords, for example, “marketing automation tool”.

This can be caused by many different factors, but the common ones are a higher price range, more decision-makers involved (as discussed above), and a longer sales cycle.

What would this mean to your B2B SEO strategy? For instance, we should develop our content pieces not with the intent to directly convert visitors into purchasing customers—which is very difficult if not impossible—, but aim to slowly inform and educate the user from more general information to specific tips and education about your product/service. Think in the mindset of B2B sales funnel.

This, however, wouldn’t mean we should completely neglect keywords with conversion intent, as there can be some high-purchase intent searches in your niche that you can capitalize upon. Also, if you are implementing B2B eCommerce on your site, you should target keywords that can capitalize on this.

3. Low Search Volume Keyword With High Value

It’s no secret that the B2B environment is much smaller than B2C. More people will, for example, search for “recreational fishing tools” than “marine fishing solutions”. A lot more, in fact, and so B2B businesses should focus on high-value, hyper-targeted, and very low-volume keywords.

So, if you are already familiar with B2C SEO, this fact can throw you off balance. In B2C SEO, it is common to target keywords with over 10,000 or even over 100,000 searches a month. In B2B SEO, even keywords with just 10 searches a month can be extremely valuable.

The common (and effective) approach here is to group several keywords together into a topic we can address with just a single content, so it will bring more traffic every month. However, even with this approach, hundreds of organic views per month is already pretty good.

In short, focus on the quality of your traffic instead of quantity.

4. The Importance of Establishing Expertise and Thought Leadership

Since, as mentioned, B2B site visitors aren’t likely to convert at their first visit. For example, an IT manager might stumble upon your content and is now aware of your brand. They are interested in your product, but now they have to convince their higher-ups and the finance team.

It’s also possible that problems related to your niche haven’t materialized in the searcher’s organization but only appear a few months after this initial “encounter”. In this case, establishing your brand in this searcher’s memory is very valuable.

This is why in B2B content marketing and SEO, we should approach our content with a long-term approach. It isn’t solely about making sure your site shows up when people search for keywords related to your product, but it’s about getting your presence everywhere in the SERP when your ideal audience asks questions and tries to find information related to their work.

In short, one of the goals of B2B SEO services and arguably the most important one is to establish your brand’s position as a thought leader in your niche. This will mean consistently publishing high-quality, relevant, and informative content covering all the possible nooks and crannies of your industry.

Developing a Comprehensive B2B SEO Strategy in 2025

Above, we have mentioned that there are only four crucial steps of implementing a B2B SEO strategy. To reiterate, they are:

1. Proper Keyword Research

No B2B SEO strategy can run without proper keyword research, since SEO for B2B is mainly about optimizing our content to rank for certain keywords.

With that being said, we should run our keyword research based on the following principles:

1. The keyword should be relevant and popular for your target audience. This is mainly measured by monitoring monthly search volume.
2. The keyword should be relevant to your brand and product/services. Not all keywords that are popular with your target audience are going to be relevant for your brand.
3. Depending on your available budget and timeline, the competition for the target keyword should be manageable. The more popular the keyword/query is, the heavier the competition, so finding the right balance is key.

2. Content Development

B2B SEO is about content, period. Your SEO performance will only go as far as your content’s strength, and not the other way around. That is, no amount of optimization will help weak, low-quality content to rank higher on the SERP, but on the other hand, there is a chance that high-quality and relevant content can rank higher even without any specific SEO optimizations.

How can we determine if a piece of content is ‘good’, SEO-wise? The secret is not to focus on pleasing Google and the other search engines but instead focuses on how we can provide value to our target audience with the content.

While content development for B2B can be a very broad subject on its own, here are some best practices to follow:

1. Do a quick Google search for your target keyword and check the highest-ranking pages on the first page. These are your competitors, and your job is to develop content better than them. Analyze their structures, flow, length, and check their readability, and aim to develop something better while focusing on your target audience.
2. Make sure your content has a clear structure: intro, challenges, solutions, conclusions. Make sure your posts are non-promotional.
3. Include your target keywords naturally throughout the content. Again, focus on delivering valuable information for your human readers.
4. Include external/outbound links to prove claims and points in the post. Also, make sure to link your own content (internal links) and maintain a healthy internal linking structure.
5. Don’t forget to include other forms of media (images, infographics, charts, video) to keep your readers engaged.

However, even after you’ve created high-quality, relevant, and valuable content, your job is not yet done, as we will discuss below.

3. On-site Technical Optimizations

Another important factor in implementing SEO for B2B is ensuring your website and all the pages are performing well so that your audience can consume your content with an optimal experience. On the other hand, you’d want to make sure Google and the other search engines can index your site.

While technical SEO is a pretty deep subject, and you can check out our previous guide on the technical SEO checklist to get started, here are some important areas for you to consider:

• Optimize each page for the target keywords that have been identified in the keyword research stage. Make sure to naturally include the focus keyword in the page’s title/heading, META description, and URL beside the body of the content itself.
• Make sure your site has an optimal load speed. According to Google, more than 50% of users will bounce when the page loads in more than 3 seconds. On the other hand, bounce rate is now a B2B SEO ranking factor.
• Make sure your site is mobile-friendly/mobile-responsive. Remember that more and more people are not accessing websites exclusively from their mobile devices. Again, if your site is not mobile-friendly, it can increase the bounce rate.
• Make sure your website is using HTTPS instead of HTTP (SSL certificate), if you are not using HTTPS, Google might brand your site as unsecured and Chrome might block your site from their users.
• Make sure your site can be properly indexed by Google, and fix any existing crawl errors
• Implement structured data markups (schema.org) so Google can understand all the different elements on your site.

To reiterate, remember that there are three objectives of technical SEO for B2B:

1. Ensuring your audience can comfortably consume your content and use your website’s functions
2. Keeping your audience for as long as possible on your site
3. Ensuring the search engines can properly understand your site’s content and all the different elements in it

4. Link Building, Both in Quantity and Quality

Backlinks or inbound links remain the most important ranking factor in B2B SEO, but it’s important to know that nowadays, the quality of your backlinks is just as, if not even more important than quantity.

So, we can no longer rely on simply getting as many low-quality backlinks as we can in our link building, but we know getting those high-quality backlinks from famous sites that are relevant to our niche can be easier said than done.

So, how can we do it?

First and foremost, give them a reason to link your content, what we call the link hook. For example:

• Totally unique data or information (statistics, research reports, etc.)
• Aesthetically pleasing assets (infographics, beautiful photos, well-designed images, etc.)
• Engaging original stories
• Informative, actionable tips not available anywhere else

Again, your content is going to be the key.

However, no matter how good your content is, it won’t really bring any value if it doesn’t reach anyone. This is why promoting your content is very important in link building and also to generate more traffic to your content.

Utilize all possible marketing channels like social channels, guest posting, outreach, and other means to build your backlinks while also promoting your content.

You don’t even have to do it manually, as there are numerous automation tools that will get the work done in no time. For example, with an outreach automation software like Snov.io, you can conduct email address search of your target audience, check their validity, and craft email drip campaigns, all in one place.

That’s it, there are only four key areas in implementing B2B SEO strategy, and while they might seem complicated at first, implementing them is actually quite simple once you’ve got the hang of it.

So, when developing our B2B SEO strategy, it’s important to keep things simple and focus only on the important aspects, instead of over-complicating it.

There are only three key considerations to address when developing a B2B SEO strategy.

1. The Intent(s) Of Our Audience

B2B SEO marketing is only as good as how well our content and keywords are reaching our relevant audience.

We can certainly rank for all the possible keywords out there, but it won’t bring any value to our business if our ideal audience is not searching for them.

So, here we should focus on two things:

1. Understanding our audience through methods like market research, buyer persona development, using the latest analytics tools, etc. We should find out our audience’s behavior, pain points, needs, and how to address them.
2. Keyword research. You most likely will need a paid keyword analytics tool (Ahrefs, SEMRush, among others), and remember that B2B keyword research can be a deep and painful process.

Here are some common approaches to finding keywords for your B2B SEO campaign:

• First and foremost, check keywords you already rank for (if any), and emphasize on them if they are valuable
• Check your competitors’ keywords. If you can beat them with better content, do so. Also, check keywords of publications in your niche.
• Group different keywords by intent. You might be able to target several of them with a single content.
• Consider the competition. Most keyword research tools will provide “keyword difficulty” metric.
• Remember, relevance is more important than search volume in the B2B environment.

2. How To Deliver Value-Based on These Intents

Now that we know what our audience wants, how can we address their needs?

In short, here is about content and providing information. Develop a content calendar. Remember that SEO for B2B companies is a long-term game and you’ll need to maintain consistency both in quantity (how often you publish) and quality (maintain high relevance and value).

For each keyword you target, you have two different options:

1. Create content that is significantly better than your competitors’ (the top-ranking pages)
2. Take a different approach and cover the topic from a different angle. In short, be different

That’s it, and again, don’t overcomplicate things.

3. How We Can Convince The Search Engines

You might want to check out this guide by Search Engine Journal for the most important ranking signals we have today. However, in the end, it will boil down to just two things:

1. How recognizable and indexable your site is by Google and other search engines (technical factor)
2. How many sites are linking to yours, and if there are any relevant sites linking your site (backlinks quality)

The first is mainly about technical optimization, and you might want to check out this technical SEO checklist to get started.

For backlinks, although there can be many different strategies, remember that the best approach is to actually have content worth linking to. If your content is good and it’s promoted properly, sooner or later you’ll get those valuable links to fuel your B2B SEO strategy.

End Words

SEO for B2B is actually pretty simple. Executing it, however, will require commitment and long-term consistency and in some cases help of an SEO consultant. Remember that there are only three things to consider: your audience’s needs, how you can cater to these needs, and how you can appeal to the search engines.

The post B2B SEO: How to Develop an Effective B2B SEO Strategy appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

On the other hand, the resource to learn about this is—not quite limited—, but confusing. Do a quick Google search about “B2B lead generation”, and you’ll get various content discussing different points that often contradict each other. Many of these articles are pure misinformation, that will further confuse an already-stressed B2B marketer.

The Main Lead Source for B2B Is More Complex Than You Thing

Let us address the elephant in the room: there is not one single most effective channel to generate B2B leads.

Let us take a look at this chart, published by Hubspot a while back.

Image source: Hubspot

What is the most effective source of leads according to the chart? We see popular channels like SEO, which as expected is among the most effective, social media, email marketing, and so on.

However, the highest on the chart happens to be “Other”. Meaning, we don’t even know where the leads actually come from.

We might get lead while attending a conference, “oh, I saw your blog posts before!”. We might get a lead when a business partner recommends us to their peers, and so on. The fact remains, however, that having a consistent marketing effort and proper presence are still essential to allow these “other” things to happen.

So, think of lead generation as a culmination of an integrated digital marketing strategy. We have to make all the different channels, even unquantifiable efforts,  to work together for one purpose: generating leads.

1. Content Marketing, SEO, and Consistency

Content marketing, together with SEO—the concept we call “inbound marketing” — is a very effective lead generation tool if we do it right.

First, let us discuss how we can generate leads through content marketing:

The Lead Magnet Method.

A very common (and very effective practice) which typically involves two “stages” of different content. The first stage is a valuable, informative content for your audience to capture their interest.

Then, we offer the second stage, which is a more informative, more interesting piece of content that they can get in exchange for their contact information.

These lead magnets can come in the form of:

• Ebook, white papers, research reports. These can be very valuable for professionals, especially if you can publish unique data and information not available anywhere else (i.e. reports from your own research). This type of content can also help establish your position as an expert in your niche—building your credibility.

• Webinars. Another effective and relatively cost-efficient way to capture leads is to offer a free webinar. Remember that your webinar’s purpose is not to promote your product/service (you can still do it, but avoid hard-selling), but rather to provide information related to the original (first stage) content.

Remember, however, that before you can offer these lead magnets, you have to first capture your audience’s attention with your content.

This, can be easier than done, but here are some important principles to follow:

Define and Understand your Target Audience

Great content marketing begins with a proper understanding of your audience.

So, do your market research and develop your buyer’s persona.

Remember that in B2B, there can be different stakeholders in a single company that will be involved in the purchase process for your product, each with different roles. You have to develop a buyer persona for each of these roles.

Keyword Research

Based on your target audience, find the target keywords with three main principles:

• The keyword(s) but be valuable and relevant for your brand, product, or service.
• The keyword(s) must be relevant for your target audience, indicated with a high monthly search volume.
• The competition for the keyword must be manageable depending on your budget and time frame.

Develop Your Content

Do a quick Google search for your target keywords (or you can use various keyword research tools for this), check out the top ranking content for these keywords (at least the top 3 results).

Your job? Is to create significantly better content than these. Consider the fact that there are millions of content being published every single day. If you aren’t much better than most, it simply won’t cut it.

Alternatively, you can aim to be different and cover the topic from a unique angle.

Simply put, give people a reason to consume your content.

Promoting Your Content

Content marketing doesn’t stop in the content development process, but how you promote your content is just as—if not more— important.

Promote your content via various available channels with two purposes: getting traffic to your content, and in relation to SEO, getting more backlinks in the process.

Backlinks

Backlinks are the most important asset in B2B SEO. Think of backlinks as votes. When a website links to yours, Google will view your site as more relevant, even more so when the ‘vote’ comes from a high-quality site.

Contrary to popular belief, the quality of your backlinks is more important than quantity. In fact, getting too many backlinks at one time can get you penalized.

Aim to get just 2 or 3 high-quality backlinks every month for all your content pages, and you are good to go.

Consistency is Key

The most important thing to keep in mind is the fact that B2B content marketing and SEO are both long-term strategies. It will take months if not years before you can rely on them as lead generation devices, but the results will be worth it as you’ll get a sustainable source of leads.

Thus, the key here is consistency: keep publishing high-quality and relevant content.

2. Social Media Marketing

One of the most common myths surrounding B2B social media marketing is the statement: “I’m in a boring industry, social media won’t work in this niche”.

Here’s the deal, there are over 3.2 billion people that are active on various social media platforms daily, almost 45% of the global population. Do you seriously believe none of those 3 billion people are interested in your brand?

Even if there’s only 0.00001% of those 3 billion people that are interested in your brand, it’s still a huge potential revenue, and it’s worth pursuing.

So, your job as a B2B social media marketer is to find them.

There are, however, two key facts we must consider in implementing social media marketing for B2B:

• Social media marketing is not only about good—even excellent— social media presence. It’s much more than that, and we’ll discuss more about this below.
• No, we’ve moved past the misconception that social media is the ultimate source of leads, ever. However, it’s still an effective lead generation channel where—as mentioned—billions of people are active in. Don’t underestimate social media as a lead source, but don’t overestimate it either.

How To Use Social Media as a Lead Generation Device

Social media is still a very effective lead generation medium, the thing is, it’s still fairly underutilized in the B2B environment.

There are mainly three ways to use social media to generate leads:

• Convert social media audience for newsletter signups. This is an effective way to generate leads on social media. For example, you can allow newsletter signups on your Facebook page, or you can encourage people to join your newsletter when a post or content is gaining some traction.

• Drive people to visit your website. Capturing leads is—in essence— getting a visitor’s contact information, mainly email address, so we can follow up with a lead nurturing process. The thing is, it’s harder to do this in a social media environment (i.e., it’s ineffective to include a lead capture form in 140 characters). So, we have to direct them to our website for a more effective capturing process. Give them a reason to visit your website.

• Effectively use Call To Action(CTA). Don’t be afraid to include CTAs in yous social media posts, however, use them sparingly and naturally.

Linkedin as a Lead Generation Channel

Linkedin deserves a special mention in the world of B2B social media marketing. Why? Because it’s simply effective. 80% of B2B social media leads come from Linkedin, compared to 7% from Facebook and 13% from Twitter.

So, it would only make sense to put extra attention on Linkedin as your lead generation channel.

In B2B marketing, your main target audience is professionals in your niche. For example, if you are selling a SaaS digital marketing tool, then your target market is marketing professionals in specific companies.

Linkedin is where these professionals gather, making it an ideal place to get your prospects.

Here are some tips to generate leads from Linkedin:

• Have a strong Linkedin presence. pretty self-explanatory. Make sure you provide clear and specific information on your Linkedin profile so they know what your business is about. Be active, and start to make connections with industry professionals.

• Join relevant groups. There are a lot of groups in Linkedin that you can join right away—probably one of Linkedin’s strongest features—. Find groups where your target audience gathers. Linkedin provides the feature to filter groups based on the audience’s behavior and demographics, so use this to your advantage.

• Engage. Build relationships, join relevant information, ask exciting questions and provide useful answers. Again, be active.

• Use Linkedin’s paid options. Linkedin understood that many businesses like you want to use the platform to generate leads, so they offer paid campaigns for lead generation purposes. This can be cost-effective if you target the right audience. If you don’t want to run ads, you can alternatively try LinkedIn automation tools that help you automate organic marketing techniques.

It’s important to understand that nowadays, social media can be divided into two different aspects:

• Organic: pretty self-explanatory, build your organic presence and grow your followers, then convert your followers into leads.
• Paid: using various paid advertising and campaigns to generate leads. With organic reach in all social media platforms continues to decline, we have to invest in these paid options. The idea is to balance out your paid and organic efforts to maintain cost-efficiency.

3. Influencer Marketing

Influencer was a fairly underutilized marketing channel in B2B environment. In recent years, many B2B businesses tried to follow their B2C counterparts by endorsing influencers and celebrities. Some are quite successful, but many aren’t.

With that being said, influencer marketing is a very effective lead generation device based on a fairly simple idea:

In this saturated digital world, it’s really difficult to get our voices heard amidst all the noises. An influencer can help bypass this situation by promoting our message directly to their loyal followers.

With that being said, here are several important principles in implementing influencer marketing to generate leads:

• In recent years, people are getting more resistant to sponsored messages from big influencers and especially celebrities. Aiming for micro and nano influencers can be more cost-efficient and might result in less resistance
• The most important thing to consider is finding the right influencers for your business. This can be even more difficult in a certain B2B niche when there aren’t many “experts” or “thought leaders” available. Various influencer outreach tools can help you in this aspect.
• Build relationships with these influencers before you inquire them for marketing opportunities. This might help with cost-efficiency and can help in developing the best possible campaign for the influencer. Also, some influencers might not want to work with your brand at first.
• Since your purpose here is lead generation, design a proper way to capture leads through the influencer marketing campaign. For example, ask the influencer to present a link to your landing page where you can display CTAs and lead capture forms.

One last thing to consider is that influencer marketing won’t bypass the need of having your own online presence. Let’s say a website visitor comes to visit your website after being directed by an influencer. If the said visitor finds that your website is not interesting and your content is shallow, they simply won’t convert.

Think of influencer marketing as a way to amplify your business’s online presence and your already-decent digital marketing efforts, not the other way around.

4. Email Marketing

Even with all the new marketing channels and technologies, email marketing—as one of the oldest digital marketing tactics around—remains one of the most effective channels with the highest ROI.

Email marketing is more commonly implemented as a lead nurturing campaign. That is, to nurture leads that have been captured through other channels. However, email marketing can still be effective as a lead generation device.

Although email marketing is one of the oldest marketing channels around, doesn’t mean that it hasn’t changed.

Nowadays, the average people can get hundreds of promotional emails every single day, a lot of them will go straight to spam or to the “promotions” tab in Gmail. Meaning, if your email is not interesting at first glance, it won’t get noticed, ever.

To tackle this issue, we have to send the right message to the right people at the right time, and the answers for this are automation and personalization.

Personalization

Email personalization is much more than using the receiver’s first name in the subject line. Think carefully to create subject lines that can interest your audience, use interesting images, find the right position for your CTAs, and so on.

You might want to check out this guide by Neil Patel on more about email personalization.

Automation

Email marketing automation is more than automating some of the processes to lessen your workload, but rather, it’s about timing. A marketing automation tool can give us the ability to send different messages exactly at the right time, a concept we call drip marketing. For example, we can send a personalized offer to website visitors who viewed our product page, increasing the chance of a conversion.

End Words

B2B lead generation is—admittedly— a long and hard work. As mentioned, not one single lead generation tactic can work for all situations, but rather, it’s about an integrated effort using many different marketing channels and working with B2B marketing consultant to build your online presence and credibility.

Thus, it’s important to continuously evaluate your progress, re-optimize and adjust your tactics, and always pay attention to changes in trends and your customers’ behaviors.

The post The Truth About B2B Lead Generation appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

In this guide, we will discuss all you need to know about B2B lead generation in 2025. Let us begin by discussing the most important factors to consider when planning a B2B lead generation strategy.

Key Factors of B2B Lead Generation Strategy

B2B lead generation can be a very complex beast since there are a lot of available tactics, channels, and campaigns we can utilize in achieving our lead generation objectives. On the other hand, implementing the right lead generation strategy is essential so we can achieve the best possible results.

Here are the four most important factors to consider in planning a B2B lead generation strategy in 2025.

1. Your Product or Service

It’s very important to note that people don’t actually purchase your product or service, but instead, they purchase the benefit tied to the product/service. With that being said, the primary of your business—and in this case, B2B business—, is either to solve a problem or provide additional value for your target customer’s business performance.

Ultimately, the better you can communicate this benefit offered by your product or service, the better we can interest more people and generate leads. Your marketing content should revolve around the benefit (or solution) your product offers.

If, for instance, you are a B2B company that helps other businesses to analyze their marketing performance, then you should talk about marketing analytics. There might be other topics that are interesting, but if they are not relevant to your product/service, they won’t be effective in generating leads for your B2B company.

2. Your Target Audience

A very important aspect not only for lead generation but the overall B2B marketing strategy, in general, is a thorough understanding of your audience. In practice, this will mean properly doing your buyer persona research.

Buyer persona in the B2B setting, however, is rather unique since we are targeting companies. There can be several different stakeholders in a target company that might be involved in the purchase decision process. So, we will need to create different buyer personas for these different stakeholders.

Know your potential customers: their needs, pain points, behaviors, and how they are currently positioned in the sales funnel.

3. Revenue Model

The revenue model—-or business model— of your business can have a massive impact on which B2B lead generation channels and tactics you should choose. If, for example, you are using scaled pricing to target different buyer personas, then you’d need to vary your lead generation devices and channels to reach these different personas. On the other hand, if you are adopting a subscription-based recurring revenue model, then you’d need to focus all your B2B lead generation efforts on sign-ups.

4. Where Your Customers Are

One of the most important considerations in lead generation for B2B is about knowing the acquisition channels where your audience is most likely to engage with your product or service. If your ideal audiences are active on LinkedIn, this is where you should put your effort. Are they more likely to consume videos, podcasts, or would they have the time to consume an in-depth ebook?

Again, the key here is understanding your buyer personas and their behaviors and then map the channels that are going to be effective in reaching them.

The above four are the most important factors to consider before you can plan your B2B lead generation strategy. Below,  we are going to translate these four factors into a series of key questions you can answer in order to plan your lead generation.

Key Questions To Ask When Planning a B2B Lead Generation Strategy

As we’ve established above, understanding your audience and also understanding your business’s capabilities to cater to your audience’s needs will be the key to achieving lead generation successes.

Asking the what, who, where, when, and why of your sales and marketing processes can help you in gathering these valuable insights into your audience’s needs, and here are the key questions to ask:

1. Who Is Your Ideal Audience?

We have addressed this above, and this is the first and most important question to answer. Again, in the B2B setting, there are two layers to this question: your ideal target organization/company, and your ideal decision-maker(s) within the target company. Research and develop your buyer persona, analyze your current customer base, do your proper competitive analysis, and so on.

This is a very important question to answer, that can make or break your B2B lead generation success. Invest your time and resources to refine the answer.

2. What do these target customers want and need?

Now that you’ve known your targets, here we are going to find out their behaviors, needs, and pain points. In a B2B setting, this will mainly translate to what is the target organization’s objective and pain point(s).

The main purpose of answering this question is to gain insights into what kinds of value you must deliver. Also, this can tell you how to properly communicate your marketing and B2B lead generation messages when engaging with these target companies and stakeholders.

3. What value can your business deliver?

This is about developing a USP (unique selling proposition) for your business to cater to your target audience’s pain points.

Your value proposition should be able to communicate why your target audience should consider your brand/business as their solution, and also what differentiates your B2B business from your competitors.

The USP message should be communicated as soon as you engage with your target audience, at the very start of their buyer’s journey.

4. Who actually are your leads/prospects?

Different businesses might have very different definitions of “leads”. Make sure you know yours and make sure your sales and marketing teams—as well as other teams involved in the lead generation process—.

5. How can you engage these leads?

Here, our job is to figure out the most effective tactics, channels, and campaigns you can use to reach out to your target audience. You can set up surveys, monitor social media, conduct interviews with existing customers, conduct A/B testing on your website to gather more information about this.

Once you’ve figured out the answer, you can use various tactics like content marketing, email marketing, advertising, influencer marketing, and others to target your prospects.

6. When in the sales/marketing process will you generate leads?

Technically, at every stage of the marketing process, we can generate leads. But, the quality might be (significantly different). This is why we should use different approaches at each different touchpoints.

Analyze the common buyer’s journey of your existing customers, and figure out the best time to generate B2B leads. The idea here is to understand your sales and marketing funnel and maximize your conversion rate by avoiding potential bottlenecks.

Four Top Channels For B2B Lead Generation

1. Content Marketing SEO

Content marketing and SEO forms a marketing concept we call inbound marketing, which is currently the most effective way to generate B2B leads (when done properly).

So, how can we generate leads with content? In general, here is the main flow of the process that is used by SEO consultants:

1. We publish relevant, valuable content that is designed to cater to the specific audience’s needs or to solve a specific problem.
2. People that are looking for the specific information or solution included in our content will visit our site to consume the content (i.e. via organic search)
3. We capture this visitor’s contact information, mainly by a method we call “lead magnet”, which we will discuss below. After we captured their contact information, we effectively converted them into leads/prospects.

Lead Magnet

The lead magnet method is, essentially, offering something valuable for those who consumed our content for free, in exchange for their contact information.

The key to this method’s success is obviously the value of your offer, and here are some of the effective examples:

• • Gated content: a more in-depth content that is usually related to the original content like an ebook, white paper, original research report, and so on. This can be very effective if you can publish unique information and actionable tips. Effective in establishing your position as a thought leader in your niche.
• Freebies: limited-time discount or free stuff. It can include an exclusive free-trial and other similar offers.
• Webinar: offer a free webinar to capture leads. The webinar’s role here is not to promote your product (hard-selling) but to provide information that is usually related to your initial content.

Remember, however, that your lead magnet will only be effective if you can effectively capture your audience’s attention with your content, and this can be easier said than done.

Below we will discuss some of the important principles in implementing effective content marketing.

Content Marketing Best Practices

• Define Your Target Audience

The most important factor affecting your content marketing is how well you can create the right content that can cater to your specific audience.

Unique to B2B marketing is the fact that you are targetting companies and organizations (and not individuals). And, there can be several different stakeholders and decision-makers in one target company that can have different roles.  Ideally, you should develop an individual buyer’s persona for each of these roles.

Understand their needs and pain points. Your job is to develop content to provide solutions to their problems.

• Keyword Research

Based on your target audience we have discussed above, define your target keywords according to these principles:

1. The keyword must be relevant and valuable for your target audience, signified by the high monthly search volume.
2. The target keyword must be relevant to your business.
3. The competition for the keyword must be manageable according to your available resources and timeline.

• Content Development

While there are various approaches we can try here, the easiest approach is to do a quick Google search for your target keywords(s) and check the top-ranking pages. Check at least the top-3 pages, but if possible check all pages on the first page of Google SERP.

Your main objective in content marketing is to beat these competing pages. Check the structures of these pages and how they approach their content strategy. You can either develop significantly better content or take a different angle and cover the topic in a unique way.

• Content Promotion and Link Building

How you promote your content is just as, if not even more important than the content development process. No matter how good your content is, it won’t bring any value unless your target audience actually consumes the content.

With that being said, B2B SEO services remain the most effective way to generate leads and revenue, and on the other hand, backlinks remain the most important factor in any B2B SEO strategy. Think of backlinks as votes of confidence, and when you get a vote from a high-quality site, it’s going to significantly boost your ranking.

So, promote your content via all the available promotion channels with two purposes: getting traffic to your content, and get more backlinks in the process. Fortunately, the quality of backlinks is more important than quantity, and getting too many low-quality links at one can time actually get your site penalized by Google.

Aim to get just two to three high-quality backlinks every month, and you are good to go.

Consistency

The most important thing to keep in mind is that content marketing is a long-term game, and so consistency is the key to success here. Monitor your content marketing progress, assign KPIs, and re-optimize your strategy whenever necessary.

2. PPC Advertising

Previously, we have mentioned that content marketing is a long-term campaign and we should generally expect to invest 6-12 months or more before we can see results. Yet, obviously not all B2B businesses have that luxury of time.

The answer to this issue is PPC advertising (or any online advertising in general). They can generally guarantee short-term, instant results, but the issue here is cost: they can be very expensive and you might end up losing money if you are not careful.

So, finding the right balance between your content marketing (and other inbound marketing efforts) and PPC advertising is very important to find the middle ground between time and cost.
There are two main ways we can do today to maximize the ROI of the PPC ad: targeting and remarketing.

Targeting is pretty self-explanatory, and the idea is that by sending the right ad message to the right people at the right time, we can maximize the click-through rate and conversion rate of your advertising campaign and thus maximize cost-efficiency and ROI.

Remarketing—or retargeting—, on the other hand, is displaying your ads to people who have visited your website or have triggered certain actions. Remarketing is now a very effective way to improve your ad’s targeting and thus can improve CTR and ROI.

3. Social Media Marketing

Yes, your B2B business should implement social media marketing, even if you are in a boring, very technical industry.

There are now over 3.2 billion people that are active on social media. That is more than 40% of the whole population of the world. There’s definitely a good chance that out of those 3 billion people, some are going to be interested in your business.

So, how can we use social media as a B2B lead generation device? In a B2B setting, there are three main ways:

1. 1. Effective CTA: You can include CTAs (mainly links) with your social media posts. Use them naturally and don’t hard-sell.

• Drive them to your site. It’s hard to capture contact information in a social media environment, so it’s best to direct them to your site or landing page. There are various ways you can do this, but the main idea is to give them compelling reasons to visit your site.
• Convert them for e-mail signups. You can encourage people to perform email newsletter signups on your website, for example, when a post is gaining some traction, offer newsletter signup.

B2B Lead Generation with LinkedIn

In a B2B environment, LinkedIn deserves a special mention because it’s where your prospects are. According to the Foundation, 80% of B2B leads from social media come from LinkedIn, and only 20% comes from Facebook and Twitter.

So, putting our effort to generate leads from LinkedIn is fairly obvious, and here are how we can do it:

1. Build your presence on LinkedIn. Optimize your profile to include clear and accurate information.
2. Be active. Post relevant and valuable content and start to make connections with relevant industry professionals.
3. Join relevant groups. Groups are probably LinkedIn’s strongest feature in lead generation sense since there plenty of groups where your ideal audience potentially gathers. You can filter groups based on demographics and behavior data.
4. Engage, build relevant relationships, join conversations, ask questions, and provide answers.
5. There are various paid options for lead generation offered by LinkedIn. If you can target the right audience, these can be very cost-effective with high ROI.

4. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing used to be a marketing channel more popular in B2C businesses than B2B. However, in recent years, influencer marketing rose in popularity among B2B businesses. Some B2B businesses saw successes in it, but many others fail.

Influencer marketing can be a very effective B2B lead generation channel: an influencer can deliver your message directly to their loyal followers, and so you can reach more audience and make it yours.

Here are several best practices in B2B influencer marketing for lead generation:

• People are getting more resistant to sponsored messages from influencers (and especially celebrities). Instead, you can target nano and micro-influencers. They are more affordable and can offer a more genuine experience for your audience.
• The key to a successful influencer marketing campaign is finding the right influencer that can actually help your business. Arguably, this is even more of a challenge in the B2B environment since there are certain B2B niches with a relatively limited number of influencers. Use various influencer outreach tools to your advantage.
• Since the purpose of influencer marketing here is lead generation, develop a proper scheme to capture contact information. For example, you can ask the influencer to drive their followers to your website or landing page, where you can, in turn, present them with lead capture forms and other means.
• Another important factor in influencer marketing is to build relationships with these influencers before you ask them to promote your brand. Some influencers might not want to work with your brand at first, and this can significantly help in cost-efficiency and maximize ROI.

Also, an important thing to note is that investing in influencer marketing won’t necessarily mean you don’t need to develop your own online presence.

After they learned about your brand from this influencer, you’d still need to present them with a proper website/landing page, content, and social media presence so they can perceive your business as trustworthy—which is arguably even more important in the B2B environment—. Think of influencer marketing as a way to amplify your already-performing online presence.

End Words

B2B lead generation can be a very challenging and lengthy process. It’s important to remember that a lead or a prospect is not a random potential client—especially in a B2B setting, not a random potential company to target—. You should focus on the most qualified ones by capturing their attention, provide value, and proof your credibility that your brand, product, and service can solve their issue.

Generating qualified leads is extremely important for any B2B business, and we can consider it as the most important foundation for any B2B marketing. Thus, having a clear B2B lead generation strategy, working with B2B marketing consultants, maintaining consistency, and monitoring your progress are essential if you want to generate growth for your B2B business.

The post Effective B2B Lead Generation Strategy in 2025 appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

So, in this guide, we will cover all aspects of the content marketing strategy for technology, startup and software companies: from figuring out your audience to planning your topics to creating conversion devices for your content pieces. Yet, let us first discuss the main differences between B2B and B2C content marketing tactics.

B2B VS B2C Content Marketing

Content marketing, in a nutshell, is how you use content to attract new audience, converting the audience into prospects, and ultimately, into paying customers.

With a proper content marketing, you can establish credibility, a very expensive asset in this saturated digital age. Why? Because simply, people only buy from brands they can trust. If you publish valuable, relevant content regularly, you can establish your position as the expert/thought leader of your industry, which is the principle of inbound marketing.

The main difference between B2C and B2B content marketing planning, obviously, is the audience. With B2C content marketing, you are dealing with personal customers, while with B2B content, you are dealing with businesses, or professionals within the businesses. This main difference will further gives fruit into several important differences, namely:

• B2C audiences are mainly influenced by emotion, while B2B audiences are mainly influenced by logical information, although this is not absolute
• The purchase process of B2B businesses tend to be longer than B2C consumers, meaning, generally you will need more content pieces to nurture a B2B audience
• There can be several different decision-makers in your target companies, and each of them can have different roles with different needs. Your content pieces should address each of these roles, and so B2B content marketing must be more diversified.
• B2C content marketing is more effective for brand awareness purposes, while B2B content marketing plan is more focused towards results (conversion)

Obviously, there are other differences, but these four we have discussed above are the most crucial ones. So, based on those differences, B2B content pieces are required to be more engaging, valuable, relevant, and developed with professional-quality.

Planning and Executing Content Marketing Strategy for Your Technology, Software and Startup Company

Now that we’ve understood the main principles of B2B content marketing, and the differences to B2C content marketing, let us further discuss how to develop a content marketing strategy for technology and software companies.

1. Finding and Understanding Your Audience

It’s impossible to please everyone: our time is limited, our resources are limited, and our manpower is limited. This is why it’s very important to focus on an ideal audience.

Here are some key considerations before we delve further into this subject:

1. Your core value proposition

Remember that people aren’t essentially buying your product or software, but rather the benefits tied to it. Identify the single, most important value about your product or service. If you can define the extra features and benefits, that’s fine, but don’t let these extra features dilute your judgment about the most important benefit.

2. Who would benefit most from that value?

Now that you’ve defined your core value, you will need to find out who, or at least, which companies will benefit the most from this value. For example, if your product is aimed at improving productivity, you might want to target startups with fast-paced growth.

3. Your unique value

What makes your business unique compared to your competitors? What should be the reason your audience will purchase from you and not from your competition? This can be a lower price tag, but remember that your competitor can always lower their price as well. Identify your unique value, and build your business (and content marketing) around it.

Based on those three considerations, here are some targeting approaches you can implement:

• Start by defining your target companies

If you are a B2B technology, startup and software company, your customers will be companies and organizations. List all possible target companies and pick 3 or 5 biggest/most relevant ones. Research these companies thoroughly, especially their key decision-makers.

Each company can have more than one decision-maker, and by studying these key companies, you can have a clearer picture of ideal roles you should target. If possible, segment this audience according to the various stages of the marketing funnel.

• Using analytics and available data

If your brand (and especially site) is not totally new, you should be able to use analytics data to analyze your current visitors. You can use Google Analytics or other analytics tools like Mixpanel or KISSmetrics to do this.

Then, you can take notes of the important metrics. You might want to check out this guide by Tech Funnel listing all the important metrics in tracking qualified audiences.

With this data, you can learn a lot about your site visitors, from basic demographics like gender and age, and more in-depth behavior and interest data from the topics they are interested in, what time they are active on your site, what device are they using (mobile/desktop/tablet), and so on.

Understanding this data will be useful not only for your startup content marketing strategy, but for your overall marketing and business strategies you can apply for your tech or software business. Here are some key metrics to observe:

• Demographics: fairly obvious, for example, if your main target audience is millennial women working in California between the age of 25-34, you can figure out how to develop content for this group.

• Behavior: there have been arguments that behavioral targeting is now more important than demographics targeting. The better you can understand your audience’s behavior, the better you can tailor your content. Check out this guide by Google on how to use Analytics to analyze behavior.

• Keywords: analyzing keywords that bring these visitors to your blog/site will be extremely beneficial for your startup digital marketing planning. You can plan out topics to target keywords that have brought results.

• Interest: you can use Google Analytics data to track the social channels that bring visitors to your site. Then you can use the analytics feature on each social media channel to find their interests. You might want to check this guide to learn more about this aspect.

In short, with this approach, we analyze various data of our current visitors and readers to develop better content. Obviously we can’t use this approach if your site is brand new, but you can analyze your closest competitors’ data for a similar effect.

• Developing reader persona

Reader persona, similar to buyer persona, is a fictional model of your ideal reader. So, as opposed to the previous approach where you use the available data to understand your current audience, here you analyze possibilities to create your most ideal future audience.

One way to do this is by analyzing your business and marketing goals, and finding the audience with the highest possibilities in helping you to achieve those goals.

Another approach is to analyze various data, similar to the previous discussion, and use this data to shape your ideal reader. Developing a reader persona can be a pretty broad subject on its own, and you might want to check out this guide by Neil Patel on developing a data-driven reader persona.

2. Planning Your Topics

One of the biggest challenges in developing a content marketing strategy for tech and startup businesses is consistency. A proper content marketing is not about just one or two high-quality content pages, but you will need to publish a lot of content blogs, articles and pages in various forms, while maintaining consistency in quality.

The best way to tackle this issue is to plan your topics ahead, or better, develop a 6 to 12 months editorial calendar. At the very least, you should aim for two to three content pieces per month. The more the merrier, as long as you can maintain quality.

Here are key steps to consider when planning your topics:

• Keyword research

In this saturated digital marketing world, thousands of content pieces are being published every single day. No matter how good your content is, you won’t get any value from it unless it’s visible to your audience.

One of the best ways to achieve content visibility for software companies is through SEO, and this is why targeting the right keywords is important. In general, you should target keywords that are:

1. Valuable for your business and relevant to what you are offering.
2. Have enough search volume (people are actually searching these keywords).
3. Ranking for these keywords is possible (manageable competition/keyword difficulty).

Then, you can develop topics to target these keywords. You might want to check out our previous guide on keyword research here.

• Social Monitoring

Another indicator you can use in planning your topics is to see the current trends in social media channels: what topics are currently talked about, what’s being shared the most, what’s the popular hashtags, and so on.

There are various marketing tools that can do this, but the most popular one is BuzzSumo. With BuzzSumo, for example, you can collect real-time data from all major social networks according to your industry/niche, and you will be given a list of popular topics with the most traction in your niche.

Using this data, you can either aim to make better content on the topic or use a different approach to cover the topic. Obviously, since you are measuring trends, this approach will be limited to a time frame.

To tackle this, you can first develop a content calendar using the keyword research approach, and use social monitoring to fine-tune it. For example, if you see a topic that was planned for December is trending today in June, you can move it forward. You can also stick to your initial content calendar while developing another content to cover the trend.

• User Intent Prediction

Every activity on the internet from searching to browsing to making a transaction has an intention behind it. This is the concept of user intent, and there are three basic user intent types:

1. Navigational: when you are aiming to get to a specific website
2. Informational: when you are searching for information
3. Transactional: when you are looking to make a purchase

In a B2B sales cycle, it is important to understand that user intent can move progressively according to their position in the sales cycle or marketing funnel. Let’s use an example to illustrate this:

Let’s say you are a marketing manager in a company, and you are currently searching for information on improving your team’s productivity. Your intent here is informational but you are not yet looking for a specific product. Here, a marketing automation tool company can target you with content like “how marketing automation tools can improve productivity”, covering the benefits and main features of marketing automation tools.

Then, after reading the content, you are now interested in buying a marketing automation tool and decided to research your options. Notice your intent has shifted here, and in this stage, content like “best marketing automation tools comparison” can appeal to you.

As you can see, the better you understand the various user intent, the better you can plan your topics. Here are several principles to consider when using this approach:

• The more expensive your product is, the longer your sales cycle will be, and thus generally more people will be involved in the purchase decision
• Understand your sales process, how a typical user usually stumble upon your product and their key considerations until they finally make a the purchase
• Understand the unique values of your product compared to your competitors
• Develop content pieces according to the possible user intents.

3. Validating Your Content

Now that you’ve planned your topics and probably developed a content calendar, it’s time to validate your topics. We all know creating content can be a painful, arduous process. So, we have to make sure our efforts, time, and resources are going to the right ones.

Thankfully, with social media as well as other channels, we can validate our content by using simple social experiments. For example:

• You can create a simple infographic covering a topic, and post in on social media to see number of shares, etc.
• Develop simple, short, but valuable content and post in on social media or over email marketing.
• Use A/B testing to test various aspects of your content from headlines to forms to images and videos.
• Surveys and one-on-one interviews are always effective.

The idea is, don’t blindly produce any content and let your precious time and/or money go to waste. Make sure to focus on topics that actually matter.

4. Planning Content Promotion

Planning and actually developing the content is actually only half the job done. As we have mentioned, excellent content won’t bring value unless people (and ideally, a lot of people) are consuming it.

This is why it is very important to plan how you are going to distribute and promote the content.

As we have discussed briefly above, optimizing your content for B2B SEO with the aim of increasing your organic reach is very effective. However, that’s not the only effective way to promote your content, and here are some tactics you might want to consider:

• Social media marketing

Social media is how many people finding out news, new products, new places, and especially, contents. So, it’s fairly obvious that social media will be a very effective channel for your content promotion.

Take notes, however, that organic social media reach has been in decline for some time now, and you will most likely need to invest on paid social advertising.

• Influencer marketing

The key here is finding the right influencers of the B2B industry you are in, that will align well with your content. Influencer marketing on the B2B environment is still less common than the B2C counterpart, but it can still be very effective when done right.

• Email marketing

You can use email marketing to promote your content, while on the other hand a valuable content can help improve the performance of your email marketing.

The idea here is to deliver the right content, to the right people, at exactly the right time, and we can do it by implementing drip marketing.

5. Planning Conversion Device

Now that your audience is consuming your content, what then? Obviously, for your content pieces to be effective, they must be able to convert your readers, either from readers to prospects or from prospects into actual, paying customers.

There are several different approaches to do this, and here are some of the most effective ones:

• Offering free but valuable, in-depth content in exchange of the user’s contact information (mainly email address), a pretty common but effective tactic
• Offering free-trial of your product, free sample, or discount within the content, using a sense of urgency.
• Using a comprehensive, in-depth content about your product and its unique values to encourage them to purchase. This can be effective, but you will need to find the right balance between being informative and hard-selling.
• Use social proof like testimonies, user reviews, etc. within your content. A common approach is to develop a video highlighting these social proofs.

End Words

The most important aspect of any B2B content marketing plan is finding and understanding your ideal audience: always aim to provide value by offering solutions to their problems or presenting new information to improve their businesses. If you are looking for professional content marketing and SEO check my SEO services for startups.

Remember that the key here is consistency: regularly publish your content pieces, yet maintain the quality. Monitor your progress, evaluate your results, and use the data to develop even better content in the future.

The post Content Marketing Strategy for Technology, Software and Startup Companies to Grow Traffic and Revenue appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

The B2B environment has also evolved to be mostly online, and this is where B2B digital marketing comes in.

Here, we will discuss all you need to know about B2B digital marketing: from its basic concept to inbound marketing to a discussion for all the different channels. By the end, you can have more insights into how to plan a B2B digital marketing strategy, and how to execute it well.

Let us begin.

Building 7-Figure Companies With SEO

Learn how founders, CEOs, execs and thought leaders use SEO and Content Marketing to grow B2B, SaaS, technology and startup companies from zero to 7 and 8-figure revenue.

How Incapsula Doubles Their Business Year Over Year With SEO, Content Marketing and CRO

Content Marketing and SEO are the main customer acquisition channels that helped Incapsula achieve:

• Market Capitalization: $1.5 billion
• Protects: 5,000,000+ websites
• #1 customer acquisition channel: Content Marketing and SEO
• Year over year growth: 100%

Learn more

How Content Marketing and SEO Helped BuildFire Become a 7-Figure ARR SaaS Company

Content marketing, the first page rankings on Google and SEO helped BuildFire to grow to where they are at right now:

• Revenue: 7 Figure Company
• Customers: 1000, Powering over 10,000+ apps in the App Store
• Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO
• Organic Traffic: 140,000 visitors/month

Learn more

How SEO Helped Time Doctor Become a 7 Figure SaaS Company and Generate 20,000 Trials Per Month

SEO and content marketing are the only lead generation channels for Time Doctor and helped them to generate:

• Revenue: 7 Figure Company
• Customer Acquisition: 20,000 trials/month, 7000 customers/month
• Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO
• Revenue growth: 10% MoM

Learn more

What Is Digital Marketing?

In a layman’s term, digital marketing refers to all kinds of marketing efforts that utilize any electronic device.

It’s important to note that electronic devices can be both offline and online. Advertising on an LED electronic billboard, for example, is offline marketing but is still technically a digital marketing effort.

However, nowadays the term “digital marketing” is used almost exclusively for online marketing efforts like social media marketing, online advertising, SEO and search advertising, email marketing, and more.

Digital Marketing VS Inbound Marketing

The terms “digital marketing” and “inbound marketing” have been used interchangeably in recent years, and some might even argue that they are virtually the same thing. However, they are technically two very different things from each other.

To truly understand this, we have to learn about the definitions of inbound marketing and its counterparts: outbound marketing and their key conceptual differences:

Outbound marketing—or traditional marketing—- refers to any marketing efforts that are designed to push our promotional message to as many people as possible. Showing an ad to those who are browsing a certain website is a common example of outbound marketing. Outbound marketing disrupts what the prospect/customer is currently doing, and thus they often resist the message.

Inbound marketing, on the other hand, is about putting our message out there and pulls or attracts prospects and customers. This is mainly done by publishing valuable, relevant content or information, and our audience can find them via the search engine. Inbound marketing is less disruptive since the audiences are the ones proactively searching for information, and so is generally more effective in today’s saturated marketing environment.

Thus, as you can see, digital marketing can be both inbound and outbound, depending on the campaign/channel. It’s true, however, that inbound marketing is widely regarded as more effective nowadays, and so most of today’s digital marketing campaigns are inbound by nature.

However, that’s not saying outbound marketing activities like online advertising doesn’t have its uses. We can basically think of inbound vs outbound as the case of time vs cost:

• Inbound marketing is typically more affordable (and even can be 100% free) but will take more time before you can see the results you desire. It can take months or even years before you can generate sustainable leads and customers from inbound marketing efforts.
• Outbound marketing, on the other hand, can virtually guarantee short-time results anytime, but the cost can be extremely expensive if you are not careful.

So, the idea is to find the right balance between your inbound and outbound marketing efforts so we can minimize cost while also maximizing time-efficiency.

B2B VS B2C Digital Marketing

Is B2B digital marketing different compared to its B2C counterpart? Although the main concept of the two remains the same, there are some important differences to consider, namely:

• The Audience

In B2C marketing, your audience is direct consumers, while in B2B marketing your target audiences are companies/organizations and the stakeholders within it.

It’s also important to note that in B2B digital marketing, there can be more than one stakeholder/decision-maker in one company, each of them can have different roles. More often than not, we’d need to tailor our marketing efforts for each of these stakeholders.

Although not always, the B2B audience tends to make their decisions based on logical reasons: they are looking for viable solutions for their businesses, and it’s going to be accounted for as an investment. So, B2B digital marketers must properly convey how the product/service can save costs, boost profit, and add significant value to the target company.

Also, price is usually the most important factor in the B2C purchase decision, but it is less pronounced in theB2B environment.

• Market Size

This one is fairly obvious. Since we are targeting direct consumers, the market is significantly larger in B2C marketing. On the other hand, in B2B digital marketing, the market is (very) limited and focused. This can be both a good and bad thing: it’s easier to conduct market research in B2B marketing, but at the same time we wouldn’t have too many wiggle rooms.

• Social Media Behaviors

In B2C marketing, Facebook and Instagram are the main platforms to target in order to reach wider audiences. In the B2B environment, however, LinkedIn is the main platform to focus on if we want to establish engagement and valuable connections with prospects and customers.

• Sales Cycle

In most cases, the sales cycle in B2C marketing is much lower than in B2B. Business transactions in B2B marketing need more considerations compared to B2C transactions, and typically the research process tends to be much longer.

• Content

Not always, but in B2C marketing we mainly need to create engaging, entertaining content that can play with the audience’s emotions. However, with B2B content we generally need more detailed, informative, and data-accurate content. B2B content is very important as a way to establish trust and to justify the company’s credibility and value to the potential audiences.

B2C Digital Marketing

In B2C digital marketing, price is a really sensitive factor to determine your overall digital marketing strategy. If your product’s price point is fairly low, then it’s quite likely that the digital marketing objective is to attract new traffic to the company’s website (or other eCommerce platforms) and get them to purchase the product right away.

So, B2C digital marketing is typically more focused on pushing for conversions rather than nurturing the leads. In short, creating a hyperspeed funnel right when someone visits your site until they make the purchase. This generally means using stronger CTAs and discussing your product much faster (higher up in the buyer’s journey stages) than in B2B marketing.

As a result of this principle, Instagram and Pinterest as visual social platforms are typically more valuable for B2C companies.

B2B Digital Marketing

Contrary to B2C digital marketing as discussed above, generally B2C digital marketing efforts are usually focused around online lead generation and lead nurturing. So, B2B digital marketing strategy is to attract more leads, qualify the leads, and convert the most qualified leads and pass them to your salespeople (or to your website, email newsletter, and other digital marketing channels).

LinkedIn is usually where the B2B demographic is spending most of their time online, although other social media platforms can also be valuable.

Why Digital Marketing is Important for B2B Businesses?

Above, we have established that the term “digital marketing” is now mostly used to refer exclusively to “internet marketing” or online marketing.

Thus the short answer here is fairly simple: even in the B2B environment, almost everything is done online nowadays. B2B stakeholders research for potential solutions and investments online, and even make the purchase 100% online. According to Google in 2018, 67% of purchases in multiple pack-and-ship industries were influenced by digital. Surely this number has grown in 2024 and 2025.

Simply put, online digital marketing is now the most effective and cost-efficient way to reach your target audience and grow your revenue. With digital marketing, we also have a number of endless channel possibilities including email marketing, video marketing, social media, and website-based promotions to reach our audience.

Last but not least, it’s far easier to measure the performance of any digital marketing campaign compared to, say, running print ads or direct mail. We can have an easier time justifying our marketing investments, evaluate results, and adjust our tactics/strategies based on data.

More versatile, more cost-efficient, and more trackable.

Important Principles In Developing B2B Digital Marketing Plan

Successful digital marketing is based on proper planning, so we can effectively generate awareness, leads, and ultimately, grow our sales revenue.

In general, a proper digital marketing plan should be based on four important principles:

• Define Your Objectives

Your digital marketing goals should be:

• Specific: that is, easy to understand and focused on a tangible object
• Realistic: in a way that it’s attainable. If an objective is too tough to accomplish, it can hurt you and your team’s morale. Break down big goals into smaller, more achievable milestones if necessary.
• Measurable/tangible: you can measure and evaluate your progress towards a specific goal by assigning KPIs and monitor metrics.

• Creating a Strategy

A digital marketing strategy is mainly about meeting your target audience’s needs and their purchase behaviors with your marketing efforts. So, it should always begin with proper B2B market research.

As mentioned above, your target company might have several different stakeholders with different roles, so you might need to create separate buyer personas for each of them. Figure out their needs, their pain points, and develop a marketing strategy to cater to these needs.

You can utilize various digital marketing channels to achieve this: social media, content marketing, search marketing, online ads, email marketing and more. Create a detailed tactic for each channel on how we can provide value and attract our target audience.

• Content-First Approach

Nowadays, content is no longer king, but everything. It’s very important to publish relevant and valuable content on all the different marketing channels: your blog, your social media post, your ads, information on your website and so on.

Content is what’s going to shape your digital marketing campaigns and our main way to establish trust and credibility as the thought expert of your niche: how you show prospects and potential customers that you are indeed a viable solution for their company’s problems and needs.

Develop content to establish your social media presence, and also for your salespersons and brand ambassadors to use. Also, remember that timing and consistency are very important in today’s always-online environment.

• Monitor and Evaluate

Always remember that your B2B digital marketing is not a one-off thing, but rather a long-term process that can take months if not years of consistency before you achieve the desired objectives.

Thus, it’s very important to establish a system to monitor and evaluate the progress of each channel and campaign. Assign KPIs and measure the right metrics according to your digital marketing objectives. However, you shouldn’t solely focus on tangible data and metrics, but also qualitative information like the quality of engagement, conversations, and other intangible metrics.

The most important aspect of B2B digital marketing is arguably about building relationships. So, consistency is very important here. Test your content relevance, quality, and consistency thoroughly, and always monitor the cost-efficiency and ROI of each channel.

The Digital Marketing Channels

Digital marketing, as we have established above, is technically an umbrella term that can refer to many different channels that utilize any electronic medium—especially online—.

“There are various digital channels and campaigns that can engage your audience throughout the various stages of their buyer’s journey. The idea of a proper digital marketing strategy is to have all the effective channels work together to achieve the overarching marketing goals.” – says Jacek Zmudzinski, Team Lead at MakoLab.

With that being said, below are the examples of important digital marketing channels, and a brief discussion of each. However, keep in mind that this is not an all-inclusive list, and there are certainly other digital marketing channels that aren’t specifically discussed here.

Without further ado, here they are:

Content Marketing

Content marketing refers to the processes of content development and content creation with the objective of generating brand awareness, building organic traffic, and ultimately generating qualified leads and grow your sales revenue.

Nowadays, content marketing can involve various mediums and channels, such as:

• Blog: the most obvious content marketing form and still the most popular even with the emergence of videos and podcasts, especially in the B2B environment that is generally more “serious”. Consistent publication of blog posts can establish the company’s position as the thought leader and expert of your industry. Proper execution of blog marketing can provide more opportunities to convert random website visitors into qualified leads.
• Video marketing: fairly obvious, video is everywhere nowadays. However, it’s true that video marketing is less popular in B2B digital marketing compared to B2C. There are, however, various implementations we can try in B2B video marketing like education/tutorials of your product/service, behind the scenes showcase of your product and team members, and so on. Video marketing is effective in building trust and credibility, but also how you can show the human aspect of your B2B digital marketing (this is why showing real humans and not just animation in your videos is important).
• Infographics: a cost-effective way to present visually aesthetics content that can also be effective in providing al lot of relevant information to your audience in an interesting way.
• Ebooks, whitepapers, research results: great forms of long-form content that are useful as lead magnets where we exchange the valuable content (often contain valuable data and unique information) with the audience’s contact information and mainly email address. This is one of the most effective ways of generating leads for your company. You can also create promotional materials like brochures, flyers, and posters using tools like a poster maker to enhance your content marketing efforts.

It’s important to note that content marketing is not only the content creation process but how we promote the content is just as, if not even more important. Use various marketing channels to build more traffic to the content and create backlinks, which is going to be very important for the next channel we’ll discuss: SEO.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is, in a nutshell, a series of optimization done to your website so your pages can rank higher on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), mainly Google SERP.

SEO is mainly done together with content marketing. In fact, we can think of SEO as the best and the most effective content promotion effort. SEO in combination with content marketing are the backbones of inbound marketing, which we have discussed above.

Getting ranked higher on Google SERP is obviously very effective in increasing the organic traffic to your website, and arguably SEO is now even more important than ever in the saturated digital market—even for B2B—-.

So, SEO is alive and well, although indeed there have been notable changes to how we should approach SEO in recent years. Although SEO might seem like a complicated and arduous process at first, it is actually quite simple to explain. Our site can be ranked higher on Google SERP if:

1. Your content is relevant and valuable for your audience
2. Your site is properly optimized to maximize user experience so the site visitor can stay for as long as possible
3. Google (and the other search engines) should be able to crawl and index your site properly, and accurately recognize all the different elements and content

So, here are the crucial elements of a B2B SEO strategy based on these three factors:

• Content is king. Your SEO will only go so far as the quality and relevance of your content, period. No amount of SEO optimizations can help shallow, low-quality content without any value. Clinching content value involves removing grammatical imperfections from it, properly formatting it with the right tags, and using a plagiarism checker to ensure uniqueness.
• Keyword optimization. Including the target keyword(s) throughout the content naturally while maintaining readability and value
• UX-related optimizations like improving the site’s speed, ensuring mobile-friendliness, optimizing menus for easier navigation, optimizing the content’s structure and layout, and so on
• Technical optimizations to ensure Google can properly index your site. This includes optimizing headlines and META tags, implementing structured data markup, optimizing robots.txt file, and so on
• Getting more backlinks, arguably the most important of them all. Backlinks are like the votes of confidence on the internet, and it’s important to note that the quality of the incoming backlinks is more important than quantity.

It’s important to understand that SEO is a long-term strategy, and so consistency is key. In general, expect to invest at least 6 to 12 months before you see the desired SEO results.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is obviously where the audience is nowadays. In 2019, there are 3.2 billion daily active users among the major social media networks.

That is, around 42% of the population all around the world, and we can certainly bet that most of our B2B target audience—execs and managers in the companies— are also active in these social media platforms. So, in short, if we are not putting our marketing efforts on social media, we are going to miss out.

In general, there are 5 major social media networks to focus on today:

1. Facebook
2. Instagram
3. LinkedIn
4. Twitter
5. Pinterest

Depending on your niche/industry, you might also want to pursue opportunities on YouTube and the recently popular TikTok. In the B2B setting, however, LinkedIn deserves a special mention, since it has been proven time and time again as the place to generate B2B leads.

With that being said, Social media marketing can be divided into three different categories:

• Organic social media marketing: growing your own followers and traffic, and then share your content to these loyal audiences
• Paid social media marketing: organic reach in all major social media platforms has declined rapidly in recent years. This is why we need to counter it using various paid advertising offered by these social media platforms.
• Influencer marketing: working with influencers to spread your promotional messages to their loyal followers.

As with SEO and content marketing, content quality and relevance are the most important factors in determining social media marketing success.

PPC Advertising

PPC stands for Pay Per Click, referring to the pricing model of the advertising: you pay the ad publisher every time your ad is clicked by the audience.

We have mentioned that inbound marketing is generally the more effective approach nowadays. However, it’s not saying PPC advertising—as an outbound marketing channel—doesn’t have its place.

As mentioned further above, outbound vs inbound is mostly the case of cost vs time, and wisely investing in PPC ads can help offset the lengthy time investment of, for example, your SEO efforts.

• Google Ads is the most common and most popular PPC publisher, simply due to the massive size of Google as a platform (encompassing the whole internet). Google Ads can be very expensive and can reach a lot of potential audiences, but is often the most expensive option.
• Facebook Ads, another popular platform. You can, for example, “boost” your Facebook post, customize a video or image post, display a slideshow ad, and so on.
• Linkedin paid options. Linkedin offers various types of PPC promotions like Sponsored Messages, where you can send direct messages to specific LinkedIn userbase based on certain demographics data.

The key to a successful PPC campaign is targeting. The more specific you are targeting the right audience, the higher the conversion rate of the PPC ads, and thus the higher your ROI.

Email Marketing

Even with all the new technologies, platforms, and marketing channels, email remains one of the most important platforms we can use to directly communicate with our audiences.

In fact, email marketing is still the marketing channel with the highest ROI in 2025 and can generate up to 4,000% ROI (that is, $4,000 for every dollar you spent). This is even after GDPR and its equivalent in regulations, which has significantly affected email marketing.

Why? Because apparently people still prefer to receive promotional messages in emails (so they are more likely to open them) compared to other platforms. In a B2B setting, email marketing is also quite versatile, and we can send various types of emails depending on the objectives, such as:

• To promote new content (i.e. new blog post or video)
• Promote new events, limited-time offers, discounts, etc.
• Drive people to your website
• Welcome emails for new customers and prospects
• Follow-up emails for site visitors who downloaded something or purchased a product/service
• Holiday and seasonal promotions
• Specific promotions for loyalty program members
• Customer/lead nurturing via tips, tutorials, and other educational content

Affiliate Marketing

Depending on your niche/industry, affiliate marketing can be an effective approach to promote your brand or product/service.

Affiliate marketing is essentially commissioning people outside your company (the affiliate marketer) to promote your business. When an affiliate marketer sold your product, which is tracked via affiliate links/cookies, you share some of the profit to this marketer.

Admittedly, affiliate marketing campaigns in the B2B setting are relatively rare and it’s much more common in B2C businesses. However, it’s definitely possible for certain B2B products/services for example if you are selling B2B SaaS solution.

Online Public Relations

Online PR—or digital PR—, is simply the process of securing earned online media from reputable sources like digital publications, blogs, websites, and social media influencers. If you are familiar with the concept of traditional (or offline) PR, then online PR is a fairly similar process just in the online realm.

Since the online world is a much wider environment than offline, we can use more variety of channels in online PR efforts, such as:

• • Encourage more reviews for your company. Online reviews are arguably the most important form of PR nowadays. When someone reviews your company online (whether it’s positive or negative), it is always valuable. Engage and respond to all reviews, including and especially the bad ones. This is one of the most effective ways of encouraging even more reviews in the future.
  • Social media outreach to find influencers, reporters, and so on. We can try to find journalists on social media platforms or even platforms like HARO (Help a Reporter)  or Quora. Build valuable relationships that can open up earned media opportunities in the future.
  • Guest posting. Fairly self-explanatory, find opportunities to publish your post on other websites and blogs.

• Engaging comments. Respond to comments on your blog and social media conversations. The idea is to build relationships, engagements, and productive conversations around your niche.

Understanding B2B Marketing Automation

It’s important to note that marketing automation isn’t exactly a marketing channel, but refers to the technology or software that can automate some marketing tasks or operations. Thus, marketing automation can improve the performance of different marketing channels, save time and costs, and ultimately maximize results.

Here are some important implementations of B2B marketing automation across various channels:

• Email automation: Email marketing automation is not only about automatically sending emails to our email list, but ultimately about sending the right message to the right audience at the right time. It’s about the ability to send personalized content to a targeted audience with a specific, personalized schedule. Email automation can also include the function to segment our contact list automatically according to the needs of a specific campaign or promotional message.
• Lead generation and nurturing: For example, by engaging specific prospects only after they’ve met certain triggers or criteria. For example, we can send a lead with specific content or email when they’ve signed up for our free-trial campaign. This can be very useful so our valuable resources only go to prospects with the highest conversion rates.
• Social media automation: The number of your posts and consistency are two of the most important factors in ensuring social media marketing success. At the same time, manual posting can be a tedious and time-consuming process. Social media scheduling and automation tools can help us save time and resources for the things that matter.
• KPI tracking, analytics, and reporting: B2B digital marketing can involve many different people, channels, platforms, campaigns, and more. Marketing automation tools can help us track the performance of each of these, perform analytics, and provide a comprehensive report in real-time.

B2B Digital Marketers And Their Roles

What does a B2B marketing consultant and expert do?

The answer to this question can be fairly complicated, but in general, B2B digital marketers have the responsibility to:

• Build awareness to the B2B company, so your target audience is aware of your brand’s existence and its products/services)
• To generate leads, capture the contact information of people/companies that have indicated an interest in your company or your product/service.

That’s it, basically.

Different digital marketers can have different roles and/or responsible for different channels, but in the end, their responsibilities will boil down to the two above.

With that being said, typically the digital marketers can focus on different KPIs for each channel to measure the channel’s progress according to the two objectives above.

For example, a digital marketer specializing in social media can measure “followers growth” which can be a strong indicator of how well the social media channel can generate leads. On the other hand, SEO marketers might measure “organic traffic” more closely.

In smaller companies, one or two digital marketers might act as “generalists” that will manage several different channels and campaigns. In larger B2B companies, it’s more typical to have several digital marketing specialists that each focus on just one digital marketing channel and/or campaign.

Here are some examples of these digital marketing roles, and brief discussions of each.

SEO Specialist/SEO Manager

KPIs:

• Organic traffic
• Link profile
• SERP ranking

B2B SEO agencies and services typically focus on how the business’s website can rank higher on Google (and other search engines) to drive more organic traffic to the website. The person oversees all the required optimizations (look at the SEO section above) of the SEO campaign, monitors the progress over time, and adjusts the SEO strategy if necessary.

Content Marketers

KPIs:

• Organic traffic to each content and overall traffic
• Subscribers/followers growth
• Dwell time on page

Content marketers might refer to content creators but also the person who is responsible for the content promotion process. Their responsibilities include planning and supervising the execution of the content calendar and content strategy. Content marketers must work with other teams to make sure all elements of the business are properly supported with appropriate content.

Social Media Marketers

KPIs:

• Followers growth
• Impressions and reach
• Engagement and shares

Pretty self-explanatory, the role of a social media marketer or social media manager is to manage social media marketing: plan and establish a posting schedule, supervising content creation including visual content, and so on. They might need to work together with a content marketer (as discussed above) to develop a specific content strategy for social media.

How To Track B2B Digital Marketing Performance

Digital marketing efforts—-or more specifically, online marketing efforts— allow us to track their performance and results in practically real-time.

If, for example, we set up a traditional billboard on the side of a crowded highway, it is difficult to accurately know how many people have visited the website, how many people visit your store after they saw the billboard, and how many people actually purchase from you.

Yet, if we set up a Google Ads campaign, for instance, we can easily track everything and measure the ROI of the campaign.

For example:

Analyzing Organic and Paid Website Traffic

There are various digital analytics tools, like the free and handy Google Analytics that can accurately track the exact number of traffic that have visited your website and their referral source (i.e., whether they are coming from Google search or after they’ve clicked on your ad).

You can also track other related metrics like how many pages they’ve viewed—and which pages—, the device they used to visit your site, their location, the page after which they’ve bounced from your site, and so on.

You can use this data to evaluate many things, including which marketing campaigns and efforts you should prioritize. For example, if 30% of your website traffic is coming from a specific query on Google search, then you should definitely focus on this keyword on your next SEO and content marketing campaigns.

On the other hand, if only fewer than 5% of your traffic is coming from a specific ad, then you might not want to invest more money in this ad campaign.

This is simply not possible with traditional, offline marketing. With proper digital marketing analytics, we can quite easily identify our audience’s preferences and adjust our strategy and tactics to cater to these behaviors and needs.

If we can make the most of this situation, we can maximize the conversion rate and optimize the ROI of our digital marketing campaigns by spending our time and resources on the channels that actually matter.

If we compare it with traditional, offline marketing. It’s very hard if not impossible to figure out exactly how your audience is interacting with your promotional messages and your brand before they make a purchase. So, we can’t properly evaluate whether an offline marketing channel (i.e. a billboard or a magazine ad) is actually effective.

With digital marketing on our website alone, we can gather more insights into how we can attract prospects and customers, and plan a better marketing strategy.

Implementing Marketing Attribution

Although we have mentioned that the key advantage of digital marketing over offline marketing is how we can monitor progress, there are digital channels and campaigns where measuring their contributions to revenue can be quite difficult.

For instance, if we’ve found out that a specific customer made a purchase after they clicked on your online ad (1), consumed your content (2), checked out your website (3),  and downloaded your ebook (4), then how did the four different channels contribute to this customer’s purchase?

Pretty tough to answer, right? This is how a marketing attribution model can help.

Marketing attribution is, in a nutshell, the process of analyzing marketing touchpoints or events (essentially, actions made by users or customers) that are encountered by a customer from where they first learned about your business (awareness) until they actually made the purchase.

This is mainly done by assigning credit for each event or touchpoint. Let’s use an example to illustrate this. Let’s assume here are the events/touchpoints that happened before a specific customer made a purchase:

1. Seeing an online ad
2. Visited the website
3. Consume content
4. Signed up to email newsletter
5. Received an email offering a limited-time discount
6. Purchase

So, there are five events or touchpoints. Now, there are several ways we can assign a marketing attribution model to these five touchpoints, and here are the common ones:

• Last-touch or last-interaction model: the last event (in the example, the email offer), would receive ALL credit for the revenue
• First-touch or first-interaction model: contrary to the above, the first event (the online ad) would receive 100% of the credit for the revenue
• Linear model: each event/touchpoint in the conversion path would share equal credit for the sale. (In this example, each channel would receive 20% of the total credit)
• Time Decay model: the touchpoints closest to the actual purchase gets most of the credit. In this example, the email offer (for example) might receive 50% of the credit, while the online ad might receive only 10%.
• Position-based model: here, 40% of the credit is assigned to the very first and latest touchpoints/events, and the rest (20%) is distributed equally to the other events in the middle.

There are more ways we can assign marketing attribution models depending on our business process and/or industry, and above wasn’t an all-inclusive list.

Marketing attribution allows us to identify trends of how our audience do their research and make their decisions to buy our product/service. Again, this allows us to properly assess which channels and/or campaigns are effective in growing our revenue, and which simply don’t work.

Another function of a proper marketing attribution model is to find ways to improve your business’s buyer’s journey by connecting the dots between marketing and sales. Arguably this is even more important in B2B digital marketing where sales cycles tend to be much longer and a lot of nurturing needs to happen. Sales and marketing must work together in nurturing and qualifying prospects until they are really ready for purchase. Data suggested that sales-marketing alignment can help sales conversion rates by 38% and improve retention by 36%.

Content as a Lead Generation Device

Another important distinction between digital (online) marketing and offline marketing is how the audience consumes content.

In an offline marketing setting, we can’t effectively track how many people who actually reads your brochure and how many threw it straight away into the trash. This is not actually the case with digital content: we can accurately measure how many people viewed the content on our page, how long they spent on a page, the actions they took after they consume the content, and so on.

We can also measure how each content performs as a lead generation device by implementing a gated content method: offer valuable content for free in exchange for their contact information, which you can capture using forms. We can accurately measure how many leads are generated from a single content.

B2B Digital Content

What types of content should my business create?

This can be a very difficult question to answer. Ultimately, the kind of content to develop should depend on your audience. More specifically, what your audience needs.

In B2B digital marketing, however, this can be even more complex due to one key fact: in B2B digital marketing, we are mainly targeting companies, and there can be several different stakeholders in a single company, with different roles and needs.

So, in B2B content marketing, we’d need to create several buyer personas for these different stakeholders’ roles. Again, these different personas can have different goals and needs, and so our most important step is to identify their objectives, needs, and challenges.

1. In its most basic principle, our digital content should aim to help these audiences meet their objectives, provide a solution for their needs, and overcome their challenges.
2. The next stage is to develop content (based on the above’s principle) in relation to what stage they are currently positioned in their buyer’s journey. The closer the person is to the actual purchase, generally, the more specific and “aggressive” the content should be.

Doing these two principles can narrow down our options, but there are still a lot of different things we can try. In general, here are the common stages of the buyer’s journey and how we can approach the content on each stage:

• Awareness Stage: when your target audience is just aware of your business and your product/service

• • • Informative/solutional blog post, providing an actionable solution or tips in a blog post. Great to attract a new audience looking for specific information and can increase your organic traffic when paired with SEO.
    • Video content, very shareable nowadays and you can also attract new audiences.
    • Infographics, shareable and can generate a lot of backlinks (for SEO purpose), so can attract a new audience when this content is shared on social media.

• Consideration: the audience is considering your product and comparing it to your competitors’

• • • In-depth, unique content like ebooks, whitepapers, research reports, and so on. Very effective in lead generation purposes so we can share these content pieces as lead magnets.
    • Video content is still effective and popular in this stage, for example, to educate our audience about the unique benefits of your product.

• Decision: the audience has narrowed down their options and just need a final push before they’ll purchase your product

• • Case studies can be a very effective form of social proof to influence their purchase decision. In B2B content marketing, factual case studies are often very important in maximizing conversion rates.
  • User/client testimonials are also very effective, although they are typically more common in the B2C environment. However, they can still be effective in the B2B setting especially when you have big and famous clients.

It’s important, however, to note that although it’s easier to measure progress and ROI with digital content marketing, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll see results faster than offline marketing.

There are various factors that can affect this but will ultimately depend on how well you understood your audience’s needs and issues. If you have a proper B2B content marketing strategy and have created high-quality and relevant content to cater to these needs, you can see sustainable results within 6 to 12 months.

Conclusion

The most important key to successful digital marketing is really to really understand our audience and create a B2B digital marketing strategy that can cater to this audience’s needs and pain points. Creating relevant and valuable content should be the center of any digital marketing strategy agency.

Digital marketing can work for any B2B business in any niche/industry. Whatever your company sells, the main principle above remains: if you can understand your target audience and drive value, you can acquire more customers and retain existing ones.

The post How to Create a B2B Digital Marketing Strategy that Drives Sales and Revenue appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

While it may seem you sell B2B products that look alike or overly scientific in nature, it doesn’t mean you can’t differentiate yourself from competitors. Working with the right B2B marketing consultants will help you stand out and personalize your efforts toward your customers.

If you can treat your buyers like a good friend, you’ll do more toward making the B2B industry look more human.

Take a look at six practical ways you can go about this directly through your website or outlying marketing content.

1. A Personal Approach to Email Marketing

Email never becomes old, and email marketing is still one of the most important ways to personalize your B2B marketing content. It continues being the perfect place to introduce yourself and tap into the pain points of your targeted demographic.

For an introductory email, you’ll want to use some specific phrases and approaches to ensure your new prospects pay attention.  What’s most important when starting is to examine customer personas so you don’t send irrelevant information.

According to statistics, more than half of business recipients receive B2B marketing emails that don’t apply to their needs.

To make your first email more personal, use the first name of the recipient. However, you’ll want to make the business know you thoroughly understand what they need to a point where it looks like you’re talking to a close friend.

Some additional keywords and phrases you’ll want to include in your first email to make it more personal:

• Use the word “now” to give a sense of urgency to their pain points.
• Add the words “you” and “your” to give the feel you’re talking directly to them rather than in third person.
• The words “free” and “new” also work well since businesses are always looking for something that can improve their bottom line.

Don’t forget about the option of customizing your emails with automation software and nurture campaigns.

2. Personalizing Content on Your Website

The content you provide on your website is going to determine how long your prospects stay without leading to a high bounce rate. Your goal should be to make your content and products personalized for the visitor so you solve their business problems.

Part of this comes in personalizing your calls to action at the end of all your content. However, you’ll want to do a few other things to personalize your content before getting there.

As Kissmetrics points out, you’ll need to determine what category your content fits under. Is it segment specific, as in segmented groups? Is it persona specific, stage specific, account specific, or lead specific?

Some other techniques to consider before personalizing the content you create:

• Do A/B testing to see what the response is to the content you’re targeting. These tools allow real-time metrics so you can change things quickly to better suit the message you’re conveying.
• Take existing content you already have and repurpose it to suit the demographics visiting your site. In some cases, this may mean taking white papers, case studies, or e-books and turning them into videos. Doing so gives a more personalized feel to overly formal content.
• Use real-time analytics to measure your baseline. Analyzing page views, bounce rates, and clicks per page better determines what’s really working and what isn’t.

Many CMS’s have personalization options to switch content based on visitor interests. Plus, automation is being used more all the time to personalize content on B2B websites.

3. Creating Behind-the-Scenes Videos

The mention of videos above wasn’t a fluke. Those in the B2B industry now realize that creating marketing videos are by far a better way to bring a more human angle.

Content, though, needs some considerable thought since you don’t want to make things too boring. Just because you sell an industrial product doesn’t mean you have to make a typical how-to video.

To make your videos more personal, doing a behind-the-scenes tour is a compelling creative option. It literally opens the doors to your B2B business so you’re 100% transparent.

Creating a tour of all your departments allows viewers to see who your employees are and perhaps how you manufacture your products. Part of this can become what’s called “subject matter interviews” where you interview staff experts on-camera to use as a form of how-to. These help prove your expertise in your particular industry niche.

Of course, client testimonials can also become a big part of creating a video series. Be sure to prove these are real business owners talking about how you helped them solve problems with your products.

Your best approach on videos is to make everyone speak from the heart rather than read from a script. Also, using real people rather than actors is better so you prove how human your B2B business really is.

4. More Specific Targeting of Audiences

Thanks to analytics, it’s possible to improve targeting to demographics you maybe never knew you had.

Sometimes you’ll see this known as “persona-lizing”, a clever term better defining targeting to a specific audience rather than marketing to one business at a time.

The above term also connects to creating customer personas, something you should start doing if you haven’t already. This works similarly to writing fiction where you create a bevy of characters comprising the basic characteristics of your projected buyers.

When creating personas in the B2B industry, it’s best to segment them by work-related attributes for better targeting.

Some things to include in your personas:

• Where do your business prospects exist in the world? Geography gives you a lot of information on how you’ll approach your marketing personalization.
• Who has seniority in the business you’re targeting? Since they have the buying power, they should be your prime recipient of personalized marketing content.
• Find out the function of the business customer. What pain points do they have that can help them function better in the immediate term as well as long-term future?
• What is the company’s niche and size? Knowing these two things helps you segment by niche and whether you want to target large or small companies.

Many social networks now offer persona-targeting paid ads. Facebook’s targeted lead ads are a good example.

5. Using Social Media to Start Conversations

At one time, social media might have seemed off-limits for your B2B business. Perhaps you thought you couldn’t possibly make your industrial products look interesting enough to anyone frequenting places like Twitter or Facebook.

While marketing on social channels depends a lot on where your demographics hang out, it’s important to find where they are and market to them personally.

It’s also possible to make your B2B company look interesting on social media. Much like videos, the best way to do this is to simply look more human by starting social conversations.

One of the best places to start those conversations is on LinkedIn. Most B2B marketing strategies focus there exclusively because it’s tailor-made for linking businesses with other businesses. If you don’t already have a LinkedIn page, you need to start one now. These give other businesses a way to find out exactly what your expertise is and what kind of products you offer.

To further prove your expertise, it’s smart to take part in LinkedIn Groups. It’s easy to get started there because you can find industry experts, peers, and prospects all in one place.

Starting conversations here can become valuable because you’ll connect with potential leads while proving your expertise in the process. Still, it’s worth reminding you should never do a hard-sell, no matter where you start social conversations. Always make friends and gain respect with the prospect first to prove you know your industry well.

6. Personalized E-Commerce Methods

You don’t have to make B2B e-commerce so cut and dry either. Personalizing it to suit a business’s needs is another essential step in gaining the trust of your customers.

To begin, you may want to follow some recent trends being used by those in B2B to make e-commerce more helpful.

Adding account-based pricing is a good option to add first. This is a more personalized method of displaying specific messages or pricing details to a particular business. If you’ve negotiated a price with them individually, account-based pricing personalizes that price you agreed to.

One-to-one product recommendations are an additional way to create a more personalized shopping experience. Using recommendation algorithms is the key here, much like what Amazon does.

Ultimately, gathering data plays a big part in personalizing e-commerce, something you should alert your customers to. Using big data (and analytic tools) should become a major investment in your B2B company so you know as much as you can about the businesses you target.

Conclusion

As you can see, more personalized marketing in B2B isn’t overly complex with the right roadmap. Using these six steps, you’ll be able to nurture trust and keep a loyal set of business customers. When you face more challenging times, you’ll know you can fall back on these customers because they’ll feel like you know them better than they know themselves.

The post Six Practical Ways to Make Your B2B Marketing More Personalized appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

With that being said, this guide will discuss the necessary steps required to develop a B2B marketing plan: from figuring out the right channels to measuring their effectiveness.

Let us begin.

Defining Your Goals

Every plan is, in essence, made to accomplish a certain goal or goals. So, if your goal is not totally clear, not realistic, or worse, you don’t know your goal at all, your plan won’t be effective.

The first principle here is that your marketing goal(s) should properly align with the overall goals of your business: if you are aiming to increase revenue by 10%, it can translate to putting your marketing efforts to generate more leads by 30%, for example.

So, we should start this step by defining your business goals. Your goals should be based on the current state of your business, as well as the current market conditions. Then, we can define marketing goals to help achieve the business goals. Here are a few key areas to focus on:

• Understanding your audience

In the B2B space, we are targeting organizations where there can be several different decision makers You might need to develop different buyer personas for each of them.

• Communicating the benefits of your product/service

People aren’t essentially buying your product or service, but rather the benefits tied to them. Develop and communicate your value proposition properly.

• Competitive analysis

Understanding how your competitors are approaching their marketing strategies is essential. You can either learn something from their efforts, or imitate their successful tactics.

Develop Inbound and Outbound Tactics

This is the most crucial step, as there are many different tactics, channels, and campaigns to choose from. However, generally we can divide all the different marketing activities into two big groups:

Inbound

Inbound marketing, in essence, is the marketing efforts that are designed to pull your audience “inwards”. This is mainly done by publishing valuable content out there, so that the prospects that are looking for a specific information can find this content.

The main idea behind inbound marketing is to establish your position as the expert/thought leader of your niche, and so there are two main aspects of inbound marketing:

• Developing your content: the better you understand your audience, their needs, the specific keywords they are looking for, and so on, the better you can develop relevant content pieces for them.
• Promoting your content: your content, no matter how good, will only bring value when it’s consumed by your audience. Use various channels to promote your content, and aim to get more backlinks to improve your B2B SEO.

Outbound

Inbound activities are generally more effective nowadays, especially for B2B businesses. However, outbound, or traditional marketing activities do have their benefits over inbound marketing: inbound marketing is typically a long-term tactic, and you will need to invest a significant amount of time before you see results.

In most cases, we should expect to invest at least 6 to 12 months before we see significant results from inbound marketing. Yet, not all businesses will have that luxury of time.

This is where outbound marketing activities like advertising come in: with traditional outbound marketing, you are guaranteed to get short-term results, provided you have the money to spend. Here are some common outbound marketing activities for B2B businesses:

• Advertisement, offline and online, including social media marketing
• Email marketing
• Cold-calling
• Direct mail

The thing about outbound marketing is maintaining cost-efficiency, and so, maximizing ROI. So,the key here is to find a good balance between your inbound and outbound marketing strategies: the balance between cost and time. Inbound marketing is more cost-efficient and sustainable, and outbound marketing can generate short-term results.

Optimizing Your Website

Your website is an integral part of your marketing strategy, the equivalent of a storefront in this digital age.

An optimized, presentable, and professional-looking site can help establishing your credibility. Your site’s content can be effective in generating and nurturing prospects, while optimizing your site and landing page for conversions can ensure growth.

Here are some key areas to consider when developing and optimizing your site. The main thing to consider is your audience’s needs. Understand their intent, and optimize your website to address this intent.

There are three main stages of the marketing funnel where you should optimize your site:

• Lead generation: how your site can capture more prospects, mainly covered by inbound marketing (your blog, podcast, etc). Your site should have at least several lead magnets like offering valuable content in exchange for email address.
• Lead nurturing: nurturing prospects until they are ready to buy. This is mainly done through content and email marketing, as well as on-site tutorials, etc.
• Conversion: convincing prospects to actually purchase your product is a difficult process, so don’t make things even more difficult by not giving them a clear conversion path. Make sure your site is optimized for conversion.
• Make sure your site is mobile-responsive. All your buttons should be clickable on mobile devices. Also, if you are including forms, don’t use too many fields and make sure they are easily read.
• Set up the necessary analytics to track important metrics. You can use Google Analytics or paid options like KISSMetrics and Mixpanel.

Develop a Marketing Plan

We can’t have a proper marketing plan without a proper budget allocation. Develop a 12-month marketing plan, consider all the details and the smallest possible steps.

For example, if you are planning a content marketing campaign, figure out all the details from finding the right keywords, planning the topics, finding the right distribution channels, and how you will promote the content. Allocate a set budget for each of these steps.

Evaluate this plan regularly. You can look for new opportunities, optimize the performance of your campaigns, and eliminate the ineffective ones. Adjust your budget based on performance.

Monitoring Your Progress

An important part of your marketing plan is to continuously measure your performance, the effectiveness of each campaign, and optimizing them when necessary.

We should monitor the performance of each channel, tactic, and campaign based on goals and KPIs. For example, if your marketing goal is to increase revenue by X% and you have content marketing as a campaign to achieve this goal, your KPI is can be the number of traffic and conversion rate, among others.

Set up necessary tracking tools to measure these KPIs. We can use Google Analytics to track most of the important metrics such as the number of website traffic, the number of email newsletter subscription, and so on.

For a more detailed measurement, you can implement a marketing attribution model. In essence, marketing attribution is assigning credits to various marketing channels and campaigns based on their contribution to revenue.

For example, if a marketing channel is assigned with 10% credit, and your revenue is $100, then this channel is perceived to contribute $10 to your revenue. Marketing attribution is a pretty deep subject on its own, and you might want to check this guide to learn further.

End Words

While developing a B2B marketing plan and strategy might seem complicated at first, it is actually quite simple once you get the hang of it. The first step is to define your goals. Then, you should talk to B2B SaaS marketing consultant to define the necessary steps and tactics to achive these goals and monitor your performance.

The post Developing a B2B Marketing Plan: A Step-by-step Guide appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

For example, the common perception is that B2B content should always be technical and informative, limiting creativity. However, that isn’t always the case, as we will discuss in this guide.

Here, we will discuss all the ins and outs of B2B content marketing strategy, and how to generate more leads with it. First, however, let us discuss the differences between B2B and B2C content marketing strategies.

B2B VS B2C Content Marketing

Why does content marketing differ between the B2B and B2C? Because the audiences, and especially how they make the purchase decisions are also different.

We all have been a B2C consumer in one way or another. When, for example, we are considering purchasing a new smartphone, what is the typical buyer’s journey? Most of the time, it’s something like this:

• A company launched a new smartphone model, and we saw the trailer or read the announcement article (we consumed content that piqued our interest)
• If we do have the budget, we then consider purchasing the phone. If not, we are going to wait and see.
• Depending on your interest level, you might check different reviews about the phone, as well as competing products. Sometimes during this “research” period, we ends up picking another phone.
• The decision is made, and we make the purchase.

Both B2C and B2B purchase decisions are made to fulfill a (perceived) need. However, the main difference is that in a B2B purchase, the buyer will also consider tangible profitability. So, although both B2B and B2C purchases will use logic and emotion, in general B2C purchases are more emotional, while B2B purchases are more logical.

Although B2B purchase processes will vary depending on the business types (both the seller and buyer), size, and many other factors, in general it will look something like this:

• B2B purchases typically began when a business (the buyer) encountered some problems. An employee will then look for possible solutions for this problem (they might directly search for products to solve this issue, or just look for information).
• During this “research”, this employee stumbled upon a product, which they consider as a possible solution. They might check the features of the product, online reviews, or even contact the sales representative for further inquiry.
• This employee will then discuss the prospect of buying this product with their higher ups. Probably they will also research other alternatives for the product.
• When all the higher ups agree, the purchase finally happens.

As you can see, another clear difference between B2C and B2B purchases is the number of people involved in the decision. In a B2B purchase, multiple people with different roles can be involved, which might require different marketing approaches. For example, a marketing executive might be interested in the benefits of the product, while an IT executive might prefer a breakdown of technical features.

So, what will this mean to our approach in B2B marketing? Here are some important consideration:

• B2B marketing must target all the possible buyer personas, each with their role and behavior.
• The core of B2B marketing is communicating our product/service’s abilities to provide solution(s) for specific problems.
• We must be prepared in discussing profitability, and communicate how our product/service can provide tangible value.
• Depending on your product/service, communicating the technical aspect of your product might be necessary.

B2B Content Marketing, Step-By-Step

Based on the principles discussed above, we can design the proper B2B content marketing strategy to accommodate our audience. Here are the key steps we can do in achieving this:

1. Knowing and Understanding Your Audiences

In B2B businesses, we are targeting other companies, and within these target companies we can have several roles involved in the purchase decision. So, when identifying our audience, there are at least three different layers of considerations:

• Your ideal target companies. Different organizations will have different goals. The idea here is to find the right companies where your product/service can help in achieving their goals.
• Key decision makers within the company. Again, this can include different roles with different needs and preferences.
• Key prospects—for lack of better words—, which is, the person/role who are most likely to find out about your product/service first. For example, if you are selling a tech product, the IT manager might be your most ideal prospect. On the other hand, if you are selling a marketing tool, you should be targeting marketing managers and officers.

Carefully consider these three layers, and develop the proper buyer personas accordingly. The better you understand your audience and their needs, the better you can plan your content.

2. Having The Right Mindset

Without defining proper and realistic goals, we can’t have a proper content marketing plan in place. Be as specific as possible. For the most of us, the goal is to get as many people consuming the content as possible, which in turn can be converted as paying customers.

But how can we achieve this? There are several facts we should consider:

• The market is getting really saturated. There are a lot of businesses promoting their products and services every single day through various channels. Getting our voice heard amidst all these noises will be more and more difficult.
• People will only purchase from brands they trust. This is even more true in the B2B environment where—again— profitability is the main consideration.
• Tell a compelling story. Even the most technical and complex content can be engaging. It’s no use being informative when people fell asleep when reading your content.

In short, yes, our ultimate goal is to get more people to buy our products or services, but we can only do it by building credibility and trust. So, avoid hard-selling, but be informative and deliver value to your audience. This way, slowly but surely, we can establish our position as the thought leader/expert of our industry.

3. Keyword Research

Based on the target audience you’ve figured out above, the next step is to find the target keywords that are searched by these audience groups. While keyword research can be complicated at first glance, here are the key principles to consider:

• First and foremost, the keyword(s) should align with your brand value and benefit your business goal in the long-run. While you can target keywords that will guarantee lead generation, it won’t be sustainable if the keywords don’t align well with your brand.
• In general, you should look for keywords that are relevant for both your business and your audience, with high enough search volume, yet manageable competition. Aiming for overly popular keywords with excessive competition be very difficult (and expensive), so the key here is finding the right balance
• Consider different layers of audiences discussed above when looking for different keywords. Remember that each of these groups can have different needs and will search for different queries.
• Your aim in content marketing shouldn’t always be about selling your product and service, but to build trust and credibility.

4. Expand Your Keywords Into Topics

We can expand a single keyword into virtually an endless amount of possible topics.

On one hand, this can be an advantage since we can develop a lot of content targeting the same keyword. However, too many options can often lead to confusion, so we’ll have to be careful here.

So, when planning your topics, here are some key principles you can consider:

• Remember that properly understanding your audience is key. This way, you can plan topics that they are interested in, and content that will ultimately provide value.
• Nowadays, there are various tools that can help you in this aspect like BuzzSumo, Link Bait generator and Hubspot’s blog ideas generator, to name a few. Use these tools to your advantage.
• Consider topic clustering, which is, creating a big content covering one big idea, and smaller content pieces covering the details. For example, you can have a pillar content covering “digital marketing” in general, and then cluster content pieces covering “SEO”, “content marketing”, and “social media marketing” which are linked to the pillar content. This will help increase your relevance in the eyes of Google, as well as your human readers.

5. Editorial Calendar

If you are serious about your content marketing, it is wise to develop a marketing calendar. Your content calendar should describe what (the topics you’ll cover), why (why it’s relevant for which audience), when (when this content will be published), where (the channel where you’ll publish your content), and how (how you will promote the content).

Content marketing by itself is a long-term game, so ideally you should plan an editorial calendar for at least six months to one year. We haven’t covered the where and how mentioned above, and so we will discuss in on the next steps.

6. Content Development

Now that we’ve figured out the target keywords and expanded them into topics, it’s time to actually develop the content according to the content calendar.

Nowadays, it’s important to consider that there are various forms of content we can use, four being the major ones:

• Text, pretty self-explanatory, ranging from blog posts to ebook to whitepaper among other forms
• Images, from shareable images and photos to infographics
• Audio, mainly podcast, which is increasingly popular as a medium nowadays
• Video, from the popular YouTube videos to live streaming to webinar

You can cover the different topics with various forms of content, and you can also integrate different forms in just one piece of content.

There are two main benefits in doing this:

1. Even in B2B environment, fewer people are huge readers. With this layered content, you can attract those that prefer infographics, videos, and podcasts
2. A textual content can be monotone and boring even for the most avid readers. Using images or even videos can help break this.

While content creation can have many different approaches and involve many different techniques,  here are the main principles to focus on in a B2B content creation:

• Remember that as discussed above, B2B marketing is about providing our audience with facts that our product/service can provide a tangible benefit. Let this concept translate into your content marketing: make sure your content is factual and informative.
• Your goal is not only for someone to click the content (through an interesting title or click-baiting), but for them to consume your content as much as possible, get value, and trust your business. Make sure your content is engaging throughout the whole piece.
• Remember the different groups of audiences, and always make sure that the content will provide value for the respective audience.

There is no one surefire way to develop perfect content, and you’ll have to experiment with different approaches that will fit your brand. Remember, however, that your goal is to establish trust, so develop your content with that purpose in mind.

7. Optimizing Conversion

It is important to realize that website visitors that came to consume your content are not necessarily equal to leads or prospects. We have to convert these visitors into actual prospects by capturing their contact information.

There are several different approaches we can use here:

• Using lead magnet, which is essentially, offering something valuable for free in exchange for the audience’s email address. A common approach in content marketing is to offer in-depth content (ebook, whitepaper, etc.) regarding the topic covered in the article.
• Directly offer CTAs within the content, for example, by saying “don’t forget to subscribe to our email newsletter” within the closing section of the article.
• You can use other elements within the page (which are essentially outside the content) to capture leads. For example, by using a CTA button beside the content.

Lead generation can be tricky and difficult, and without it your content marketing won’t bring any value. You might want to schedule a call with B2B marketing consultant to develop your marketing strategy.

8. Content Promotion

No matter how good your content is, it won’t bring value unless your audience actually consumes the content.

A common misconception is thinking that content marketing is only about publishing great content pieces. However, promoting your content is just as, if not even more important.

Here, we are dealing with how and where. There are various ways to promote your content, and there are various promotional channels in achieving this feat.

In general, however, the best way to promote your content is through B2B SEO. By letting this piece of content climb higher on the search engine results page, more people will be aware of the content.

While SEO is a pretty broad subject on its own, in general, there are only three key elements of SEO strategy:

1. The quality of your content, and how relevant it is to the target keyword.
2. Inbound links (or backlinks), especially from quality sources.
3. Technical aspects from page load speed to mobile-responsiveness to structured data markup, among others. You can check this technical SEO checklist for this aspect.

Backlinks are especially important here, because when we are promoting our content in other channels, we can also get more backlinks in the process, for example:

• By using influencer marketing to promote our content, we can get backlinks from the influencer
• Guest posting, another common content marketing approach where we can also get backlinks
• Social media marketing, where any shares for our content can count as social signal
• Even through various forms of online advertising, the more people consume our content, the higher the chance we’ll get more backlinks from them

In short, treat each piece of content as a landing page, promote them individually and aim to get more backlinks in the process. The backlinks—especially quality backlinks— will in turn improve your ranking on the search engine results, which will also translate to more traffic.

As we can see, content promotion is not a singular effort, but rather a continuous effort where multiple channels work together.

9. Monitoring and Re-Optimization

Our business, the market, and the industry are always evolving, and so must our content also evolve.

So, here we must monitor the performance(s) of our content pieces, and make adjustments when necessary.

Just because content is not performing well at the moment, doesn’t mean we should just ditch it or leave it as it is. There are various approaches where we can use this content in further achieving our goals:

• Update the content. We can update the information with newer ones, while we can also re-optimize the technical aspects.
• Leverage in other forms. Sometimes, a content that’s not working in its current form can be re-made in others. For example, if a blog post is not performing well, maybe creating a video of the same content will generate better results.
• Adding other forms. For example, you can add images and videos to textual content to enhance its performance.

Depending on the situation, you might also need to adjust other factors like targeting new keywords or adding more internal links. The idea is, monitor your progress and adjust when necessary.

End Words

In implementing B2B content marketing strategy, remember that the end goal is not simply more website traffic or even a higher SEO ranking, but rather, more customers. You can download my SEO Growth Program on B2B SEO service page to learn more about my approach to content marketing strategy. So, make sure your content fulfills the purpose of establishing your credibility and encouraging conversions.

Another thing to remember here is that content marketing is a long-term game, so the key here is consistency both in quality and quantity. Regularly monitor your progress, and adjust your strategy whenever necessary.

The post B2B Content Marketing: How To Get More Leads and Conversions With Your Content appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Building a B2B buyer persona has several crucial differences when compared to the B2C environment, which can produce unique challenges.

Here are some of the crucial areas to pay attention to, which we will also address one by one throughout this guide:

• B2B higher-ups tend to adopt a more conservative point of view, that usually opt for a wide-net marketing strategy instead of specific targeting. 
• In B2B, our target customers are companies or organizations, and there can be more than one decision makers with different roles and pain points. Each will need a specific buyer persona.
• Nobody really knows where B2B prospects are coming from, and so it can be difficult to create a lead generation strategy even after we’ve defined proper customer profiles.

To really answer these challenges, B2B marketers must really understand the key benefits of targeted marketing campaigns. With that, we can develop a proper lead generation strategy and convince the bosses to shift to highly-targeted campaigns. 

The Truth About Customer Retention VS Customer Acquisition

What actually costs more? getting new customers or retaining existing ones for repeat orders?

Many studies have suggested that customer retention is (significantly) more profitable, with a huge claim that increasing retention rate by just 5% can increase profitability as high as 95%.

So, it’s pretty clear, right? If you want to increase profits, then customer retention is the way to go, as it can cost 500% more to get a new customer than to retain an existing one. 

However, it’s no secret that generating leads—that is, the effort to acquire new customers—remains one of the most sought-after goals for any marketers, B2B and B2C.

After all, the number of acquired customers is one of the metrics most commonly related with business growth.

Yet, it’s important to understand that your project to acquire more customers shouldn’t neglect—or worse, push away— the efforts to maximize retention.

It’s important to understand that growth should consist of both customer acquisition and customer retention. Yes, you might acquire a customer, but if that same customer cancelled their subscription or doesn’t make any repeat purchase, you don’t really achieve growth.

With that being said,  understanding your ideal buyer persona should help in both customer acquisition and customer retention strategies. The better you understand a certain segment’s pain points, the better you can build lasting relationships. 

What Is an Ideal Buyer Persona?

Simply put, a buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal,perfect audience, which in the case of B2B: a business or an organization. 

The buyer persona is a full description of this hypothetical organization, describing all the necessary details including how they might get value from your products/services, and how they can provide significant value for your business.

So, it’s the perfect model of a customer you’d want to get in your lead generation efforts, and those you’d want to retain at all costs. 

Remember, however, that your relationship with the buyer persona should be beneficial in two-way: you have to deliver value to them, and they to you. If it’s only one-way, the relationship won’t be sustainable.

How To Build B2B Buyer Persona

Step 1: Information Gathering Process

We have two options here. 

If you already have a significant number of existing clients (let’s say, more than 10 companies), then gather all information of these companies.

If not, for example if you are a brand new business, then pick at least 10 potential companies that might be your customers. You can, for example, list the customers of your competitors. 

Collect as much information as possible and write them down (i.e., create a dedicated spreadsheet). List down basic information such as:

• Their organization size
• How long have they been in operation (stage of the business)
• Company culture
• The different decision makers, their roles and backgrounds
• Location

If you are using data from existing customers, there are more information you can gather, such as:

• The total cost of acquiring this customer (Customer Acquisition Cost) compared to the total revenue they’ve brought
• Whether they’ve made any referrals, and how many
• Their influence in the market (i.e. whether other businesses are likely to follow their step in buying your product)

Identify patterns, and re-check the data if there are any information gaps. The goal in this step is to list out as much information as you can and present it in an organized record. 

The more organized and complete your list is, the better we can execute this next step.

Step 2: Analyze The Data To Make a Description

In this step, our main goal is to understand who our perfect customer is by analyzing the data. 

Find patterns, correlations between variables, and similarities on these following factors:

Demographics Data: size of the company, the company’s position in the market and supply chain, number of employees, revenue size

Behavior Data: time required between touch points, their purchase patterns, their problems and pain points, their goals (current and previous)

Company Culture: their branding, offline and online presence, traditions, what they are known for

Look at overlaps in data between different companies, but aim to be as objective as possible instead of relying on assumptions. 

For example, you might find out that 4 out of 10 of your customers have revenue sizes between $1 million and $3 million, this might be an indicator. 

Also, discuss this data with key people in your company, especially those that often interact with customers. They might have useful insights about your existing clients.

Here are some of the key questions to ask when analyzing this data to describe a buyer persona.

• What’s their most important reason to purchase your product/service?
• What’s the most possible reason preventing them to buy your product/service?
• What makes your brand/specific offer appealing to them?
• What benefits would they get with your product? What goals do they want to achieve with your product/service?
• How are their previous/current approach in achieving this goal?
• Why did they decide to pursue this approach? What was the possible decision-making process?
• What is the main issue with their previous/current approach?

Step 3: Defining Three Customer Circles

In practice, we won’t always get the prospects and customers that are the perfect fit to our ideal buyer persona. Thus, we can divide three different customer circles into three different buyer personas:

1. The Best Customers

 This is the perfect, most ideal customer for you, and you value their business as much as they value your service. Your pricing and their budget are a good match with each other, so they won’t have any issue in buying your product/service.

2. The Near Best, Near Ideal Customers

Those who fill a lot of your ideal customer criteria, but fall short in one or two aspects. For example, they might have several decision makers, some of which might not agree with investing in your product, even if they can meet your pricing comfortably. 

3. Opportunistic Customers

These are the customers that have transactional relationships with you, but they don’t have any real relationships with and loyalty to your brand. Meaning, if a competitor launched a cheaper alternative to your product, these opportunistic customers won’t hesitate switching. They only look at your business as a valuable opportunity. 

So, how should we approach these different groups? First, define these factors for your “best customers” group:

• The company size: revenue size, number of employees, number of locations, etc.

• Special conditions/prerequisite: for example, if your product is a WordPress plugin, then using WordPress is a prerequisite. 

• Ideal customer industries

• Precipitating events: for example, if you are selling chatbot service, companies that just made the commitment to improve customer service are more likely to look for your solution

• Typical stakeholders in the buying decision: sales VP, procurement, IT manager, etc. depending on your product/service and niche.

After you’ve figured out all these details, move on to the “near ideal customers” group. Figure out the attributes that are similar to your “ideal customers” group, but note those that chance, and how significant is the change.

Then, figure out the key attributes that might shift this group into an ideal customer, and on the other hand, the factors that might shift this group into an opportunistic customer.

For example, this “next best customer” might turn into an ideal customer if they have a slightly higher budget (then you might want to offer them discounts).

In general, you wouldn’t want to specifically target opportunistic customers in your marketing efforts. They tend to be unqualified leads, and might waste your time and resources.

Step 4: Write It All Down

Now that you’ve (hopefully) figured out all the necessary information, write everything in a concise description for your buyer persona.

Create a template listing all basic information and in-depth information like we have discussed above. Make sure it’s easily customizable, you might need to add new information along the way as you execute your marketing and sales efforts.

Step 5: Describe Key Decision Makers

As mentioned, the key difference between B2B and B2C buyer persona is the number of stakeholders—purchase decision-makers—-. You should’ve figured out these different decision-makers on the very first step above, and here you’ll need to also describe them. 

Different stakeholder roles might have different behavior, pain points, and preferences. You might need to develop different marketing tactics for each of them. 

Again, list as much information as you can, but be prepared to add more information in the future.

End Words

Now that you have a full, in-depth description of your buyer persona(s), you can create a better lead generation strategy with your marketing consultant to go where the stakeholders and decision-makers are and start capturing their attention.

You can, for example, use a targeted content to target the keywords they search for. Every marketing effort will be more effective the better you understand your audience, and target lead generation tactics will produce better cost-efficiency. 

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