So, what actually is B2B inbound marketing?

To really define the concept of B2B inbound marketing, we have to first take a look at the concept of traditional marketing which we now understand as ‘outbound’ marketing.

Traditional marketing efforts like advertising, the billboard we see on the side of the road, below the line activation, and so on, are about reaching as many people as possible with our promotional messages. In short, we push our messages ‘outwards’.

However, in this digital age of social media, there is a significant problem with traditional marketing: people now have more choices and are now more resistant to advertising. Not to mention, ad blockers are now everywhere, and various platforms even offer their users an ability to eliminate ads via premium membership or other means.

Traditional marketing also interrupts what the user is doing—whether watching a show/movie, browsing a website, or others—, so it can create a negative perception for the user and might hurt the chance of conversions.

This is where B2B inbound marketing comes in.

The main idea of B2B inbound marketing strategy, as opposed to traditional, ‘outbound’ marketing, is to pull and attract our audience inward. This is mainly done by publishing our content out there and making it available via SEO.

In such cases, the audience is the one proactively searching for the content, whether looking for information or a solution for a specific answer. So, inbound marketing won’t interrupt what the audience is doing and won’t hurt their overall experience. This audience will consume your content and is now aware of your brand and/or product/service. We can then build and nurture a relationship with this audience until they are ready to buy.

B2B inbound marketing can be divided into three core steps:

• Attracting the audience inwards: inbound marketing is about attracting highly-qualified leads and potential customers with valuable, relevant content, and social media conversation. We are establishing our position as a credible source and that we can be a potential solution for their problem.
• Engage the audience: We start building a relationship that we can provide solutions and insights to achieve their objective. We nurture them as leads until they are finally ready for purchase.
• Post-purchase treatment: Another key difference between outbound and inbound marketing is how inbound marketing should also be around after the purchase, to retain them as loyal customers, and convert them into advocates. Content and B2B inbound marketing should serve to provide support and help and to ensure they can achieve their objective with the purchase.

B2C VS B2B Inbound Marketing

Although the main principle of inbound marketing is relatively the same for both B2B and B2C businesses, we have to remember that B2B audiences are significantly different than their B2C counterparts.

Since inbound marketing is driven by the audience, then it would only make sense that there are also several key differences to consider between B2B and B2C inbound marketing approaches:

1. Purchase Motivation

B2C consumers are more likely to make a purchase based on their emotions, and this is why B2C marketing is mainly focused on driving emotional triggers. B2C customers mainly purchase a product or service based to improve their lives in one way or another: whether about fulfilling their satisfaction or solving a life problem.

On the other hand, in a B2C environment, we are purchasing something to improve the business’s or organization’s performance. That’s not saying B2B consumers can’t be driven by emotions, but it’s more likely that the B2B purchase is driven by the value provided by the product or service.

So, in B2B inbound marketing, we should focus on publishing content that can establish our credibility as a thought expert in the niche, and that our product or service can provide immediate value and/or provide a viable solution for the consumer. B2Bc content should include things like proven statistics to testimonials/success stories to further establish trust.

2. Purchase Decision Maker

This is one of the most essential differences between B2C and B2B marketing. In a B2C environment, there’s typically only one decision-maker in a purchase, and even if there’s more than one, they are typically closely-related (child and parent, asking spouse for agreement, etc.)

In a B2B environment, we are targeting companies/organizations instead of individuals, and there can be more than one decision-maker with each purchase. In fact, according to Gartner, there are now, on average, six to ten stakeholders involved in a B2B purchase.

These six to ten decision-makers can have different roles, interests, and priorities and so we’d have to approach them differently. In inbound marketing, this would translate to the need for publishing different content for each of these roles.

In B2B inbound marketing, we might have to create different buyer personas and take into account each persona’s needs, pain points, and priorities.

3. Conversion Timeline

This is, at the surface, a subtle difference, but the impact can be very deep. B2C consumers are more likely to purchase quickly after they consume content or even see an interesting ad. However, B2B customers typically involve a deeper research and comparison process, and so the purchase process can be much longer.

Meaning, in developing our B2B inbound marketing campaign, we should take this relatively long sales cycle into consideration. We might need to publish more content pieces to cater to the lead nurturing stage like educational content and content pieces that are designed to convince conversion.

Also, help your target audience with their research process. Don’t be afraid to publish a content comparing your product with your competitors’. You can feature all the proven statistics, infographics, and other data-driven content to help them with their research and convince them that your product is indeed their best option.

The key takeaway is that B2B inbound marketing should be about communicating your product’s unique value proposition (UVP) and establishing our credibility as the expert in our niche.

Developing B2B Inbound Marketing Strategy

1. Defining B2BInbound Marketing Objectives

The first step you should take is to define clear objectives for your B2B inbound marketing campaigns. Unlike traditional marketing activities like advertising, the ROI for your inbound marketing campaign can be quite difficult to measure. So, it’s very important to have clear objectives and KPIs before you begin your inbound campaign for B2B.

Depending on your business model, it’s probably best to start from your revenue goals to determine your marketing objectives. For example, if you are targeting a 20% annual increase in revenue, it could probably translate to an objective of a 40% increase in lead generation. From this, we can further define marketing responsibilities and what campaigns to prioritize.

Make sure your inbound marketing objectives are:

• Clear: easy to understand and won’t create confusion within your team. Be as specific as possible.
• Realistic: having an attainable goal is important to maintain your team’s morale. It’s okay to have a big, visionary goal, but it’s better to break it down into smaller, more realistic milestones.
• Measurable: figure out a system and assign metrics to each objective so you can properly measure your performance for the specific objective.

Since the cores of B2B inbound marketing are content marketing and SEO, it’s very important to consider that both will take time to build. So, keep that in mind when building your objectives so you can have the right expectation about your timeline.

Make sure you give enough time for the inbound marketing campaign to flourish, and consider long-term objectives. Although inbound marketing will indeed take time, the payoff can be big and sustainable.

2. Develop Your Buyer Personas

Above, we have discussed how one of the key challenges in B2B inbound marketing is the fact that there can be several different stakeholders affecting the purchase decision. So, we will need to create different buyer personas for each of these stakeholders, each of them can have different roles.

These different roles would have different needs and expectations, and 72% of B2B buyers nowadays expect vendors to provide personalized engagement according to their needs. So, it’s is very important that we truly understood our B2B buyers well.

Before anything else, we should make a list of the basic facts of our potential buyers:

Job details

Don’t underestimate the power of LinkedIn in researching potential B2B buyers. Find out their poles, skills, professional backgrounds, job titles, and other relevant information. You can also check people reporting to them as well as who they report to. By researching these for several target companies/organizations, you can have a clearer picture of which roles you should target, and what kinds of buyer personas you should develop.

Demographic data

Pretty self-explanatory, you should find out about gender, age groups, and other demographics information of your target audience. The more information you can gather, the better you can develop your buyer persona for this specific role.

Organizational information

This one is specific for developing a B2B buyer persona. You’ll need to research at least the basic details about your organizations. Find out the industries they belong to, the size of the organization, the product/service they provide, and other information. The idea here is to figure out how your product/service can help their business.

You might also want to research the clients/customers these businesses cater to, and study their needs and pain points. If your product can help this business in providing value to their customers, you can create a more personalized B2B inbound marketing and also your overall unique value proposition (UVP).

Needs/Pain Points

Identify the stakeholders that are involved in the B2B purchase, and try to understand their needs and problems they are currently facing. Again, figure out how your product or service can help solve these pain points.

Remember that different stakeholders might face different pain points and might have different needs, and your product might offer different values for each of these stakeholders. Identify the needs and challenges faced by each stakeholder and communicate your key values accordingly.

Now that you’ve gathered enough information, you can use the information to develop your buyer personas. Try to answer the following questions:

1. Where each persona fits in the sales cycle and what are their roles in the purchase decision
2. What are the key pain points of each stakeholder
3. What are their objectives and what are the organization’s objectives
4. Where each stakeholder spend their time online so you can focus your content

3. Content Creation

As we have discussed, the core of the inbound marketing strategy for B2B is content.

Based on your buyer persona, now you should have a better idea about what type of content you should develop for each stakeholder. Remember that content nowadays can come in many different forms from traditional blog posts to YouTube videos to podcasts, and although the goal of B2B inbound marketing is to bring people to our website and capture them as leads, we have to use all the different mediums to succeed in today’s diverse content marketing.

However, in B2B content creation, textual content, and especially blogs are still an important foundation in any B2B marketing strategy. Other mediums, like videos and podcasts, can support your blog by, for example, driving traffic to your blog post, and vice versa.

As discussed above, the objective of your content marketing is to provide content that is going to be informative and valuable for your target audience, while at the same time should establish your business’s credibility as a viable solution for your target audience’s pain points.

Here are some important content marketing tactics you can use in B2B inbound marketing:

Communicate your product’s value instead of the product itself

Remember that people, especially in the B2B environment, are not actually buying your product or service, but rather they purchase the value or benefit they get from your product. In B2B, your target businesses are only going to spend their money on yours if you can help them make more money somehow, either directly or indirectly.

Your product/service might save them some money or make them some money, and you should focus on communicating this on your content. However, communicating value alone simply isn’t enough. A 200-page datasheet is obviously a way to communicate value. Bullet points listing your product’s key features are also a way to communicate value. However, they aren’t enough.

For your content to be successful in B2B inbound marketing, your content should be both valuable and engaging, and it is a very common mistake, especially in B2B content, to forget about the latter.

So, how can we develop engaging content in a consistent way? The general principle is to tell a great story. Stories are what engaged people: it’s much more interesting to read a success story from someone who used your product or service than simply listing your product’s benefits. Tell your audience a story about how your product can help them generate value, share testimonials, and so on.

Make your content about how your brand can be a solution for your audience. You don’t really have to mention your product at all: give them practical, actionable tips, share industry news, and so on. Engage them first, and then you can worry about introducing your content.

Combining various mediums

Above, we have discussed the fact that there are various content marketing mediums we can focus on nowadays, and we have also discussed how we should focus on creating engaging content.

Creating multi-layered content utilizing various mediums can be a great way to improve engagement. We can combine, text, images, video, and audio in a single piece of content to ensure engagement throughout the whole content.

You can, for example, embed your YouTube video in the middle of your blog post. We can obviously insert images and infographics, and even podcast. Another common technique is to create an audio version of your blog post so people have more ways to consume your content.

Again, focus on improving engagement. If the blog post is already engaging enough with just some images, then don’t force adding videos.

Don’t forget technical optimization

No matter how good your content is, people won’t enjoy it if your website is not properly functioning, or even when the layout is not properly optimized. Again, your content’s objective is to produce as much engagement as possible. The longer you can engage people with your content, the more chances you’ll have to convince them to purchase your product or service.

So, make sure your website is properly optimized so it loads fast enough and mobile-friendly/mobile-responsive. If you include videos and images, make sure they are at least decent in quality (although, you should always aim to be great.)

Create a seamless user experience to boost engagement. Be holistic and thorough, make sure your audience is having the best possible experience in every interaction with your brand from your blog post to your videos to your product and customer service.

4. Content Promotion

Just because your content is good and engaging, doesn’t mean your audience will automatically find them. Remember that B2B inbound marketing is about pulling (attracting) your target audience to find your content.

So, how exactly are we going to achieve that?

SEO

The key to making our content available for our audience is SEO: making sure our content ranks high on Google’s (and other search engines’) SERP so your target audience can find it when they search for your target keywords.

While SEO is a pretty broad subject on its own, and you might want to check out our previous guide on B2B SEO strategy. However, here are some key tips to focus on:

Content quality

The most important factor in SEO success is your content quality, period. If your content is good, sooner or later you’ll get those valuable backlinks, and we all know that backlinks are the most important ranking factor in SEO.

On the other hand, no amount of SEO techniques and strategies will help boost a weak, low-quality content. So, go back to the content creation section above, and again, focus on developing high-quality, engaging content that is valuable for your target audience. You can also decide to work with a B2B SEO agency or services if you want professionals to work on your campaign.

Guest posting and collaboration

Don’t underestimate the power of guest posting or collaboration (in videos, podcasts, etc. ). Collaborate with other businesses and influencers in your industry, and even your competitors when it’s appropriate.
Build relationships with other businesses, authoritative sites, and influencers in your niche, join their social media conversations and establish your position that you are also a thought leader in this niche and you can provide value for their audience (or their business).

Also, don’t forget that it works bost ways. You should also host other’s content on your platform, which can actually provide a lot of benefits. For instance, you are posting high-quality content and can attract the writer’s/content creator’s audience to your site without having to create the content yourself. Your own audience can also see that you have a relationship with other industry leaders which can be a showcase that you have a clear understanding of what’s valuable in your niche.

Don’t forget that in these guest posting opportunities, you can also generate backlinks, which in turn will help your SEO.

Social media

Social media is obviously where our audience is nowadays, even in the B2B environment. In fact, 75% of B2B buyers are influenced by social media in their purchase decision.

It’s important to note that social signals like the number of likes and shares when we post our content on social media won’t help with our content’s SEO. However, the more our content is shared on social media, the more people will notice it, which will translate to a higher chance of us getting those valuable backlinks. So, social media performance will indirectly help your SEO.

Sharing your content on social media just when they are being published will also help Google and the other search engines to notice them, and so the content will get indexed quickly.

Remember that your B2B inbound marketing should serve the whole purchase cycle from when the audience first learns about your brand to when they make a repeat purchase or subscription renewal (hopefully). Creating content can be difficult and time/resource-consuming, so by doing this you can leverage maximum value from each publishing effort.

On the other hand, remember to develop content for each member of your target audience from qualified leads, semi-qualified leads (cold prospects), lost prospects, newly acquired customers, repeat clients, and so on. If you can develop content with a broad scope, the better it can help in encouraging conversion at the bottom of the funnel. So, diversify between specific, highly-targeted content and broader content pieces to encourage conversions.

5. Optimize Your Lead Magnets and CTAs

Now that you’ve successfully attracted people to your content, now what?

Your content by itself won’t really bring value unless the readers/audiences are convinced to buy your product/service and convert them into actual customers. Again, in a B2B environment, this can be much more complicated since the content consumer might not be the only one that has a say in the purchase decision.

We should devise a system to capture our content consumers into prospects, which starts by us capturing their contact information so we can follow-up with our lead nurturing efforts (i.e. email marketing).

We can do it by including CTAs and lead magnets in our content to encourage our readers to convert. A lead magnet is an offer that should be perceived as valuable by our target audience but is offered for free in exchange for their contact information.

So, what should we offer?

The key here is that our offer should be perceived as valuable by your potential customers. It’s them who dictate what’s valuable, not you. So, go back to the very first point above and review your target audience’s needs and pain points. Figure out what’s going to be valuable for them, but at the same time remember that you are going to offer this for free, so make sure the cost of this ‘gift’ is justified.

Here are some common lead magnets we can offer in B2B inbound marketing:

Product demo/free-trial:

A very effective approach in the B2B lead magnet is to offer your time-limited product demo or free trial. This is how your potential buyers can try your product or service, so you can convince them that your solution is indeed the best for their business.

Ebook/whitepaper

A classic approach is to offer an ebook or whitepaper that offers a more in-depth discussion of the content the audience is consuming. For example, if the blog post is about SEO strategy, you can offer an ebook about advanced SEO strategies and techniques.

While this approach can still be effective, keep in mind that it’s already saturated. So, unless your ebook is perceived as really interesting or valuable, it might not attract them.

Webinar

An invitation to a webinar can be a very effective lead magnet if the topic of the webinar is interesting. You can also invite famous guest speakers and influencers in your niche to boost the attractiveness of the webinar.

Also, the benefit of a webinar as a lead magnet is two-fold, as the webinar by itself can create a very personal, lasting engagement and relationship with your target audience.

Educational videos

An engaging, valuable video can be a very powerful lead magnet format. You can, for example, show a few minutes of your video offer before you give them the opt-in form. This can be a very effective lead magnet if your preview video is attractive.

You can create tutorial videos on how to use your product to solve a specific problem (which they might be interested in), or actionable tips and tricks related to your niche.

6. Measure and Evaluate Your Progress

As you can see from the previous steps, inbound marketing for many B2B companies is a long-term game and although the payoff can be big and sustainable, you might need to invest months before you see any significant results from your campaign.

So, having an appropriate system in place to keep track of your progress and evaluate the key metrics of your B2B inbound marketing campaigns is very important. During this long-term game, you might need to make adjustments here and there, upgrade and update your content, find new ways to promote your content, and so on.

Remember that consistency is very important in your B2B inbound marketing: trust is very hard and can take a very long time to build, and yet a single mistake can easily ruin all your efforts.

If necessary, invest in a marketing solution like HubSpot or Pardot where you can analyze all your key metrics for the various channels in a single dashboard (which will make the whole evaluation process much easier to manage).

Keep track of all the data-driven insights you can gather, analyze your content performance, and adjust your strategy when it’s necessary.

End Words

Since B2B inbound marketing is a long-term game while at the same time content is always evolving, it’s very important to always maintain between speed and quality control. It’s important to pay attention to every detail about your content especially to maximize your SEO.

As you can see from the above, the key to a successful B2B inbound marketing campaign is whether you can consistently publish engaging, valuable content for your audience. However, how you promote the content is also important.

While SEO remains the most effective way to promote your content and should be the core aspect of your B2B inbound marketing strategy, we need other channels from social media, email marketing, and other promotional channels to drive traffic and get more backlinks to each of your content.

The post The Ultimate B2B Inbound Marketing Strategy appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

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.

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.

However, in this competitive marketplace, B2B lead generation has never been this difficult. We face numerous challenges from the difficulty in qualifying leads to creating high-quality content consistently to monitoring the performance of your lead sources, among others. That is why we will need to update our lead generation skillset to ensure our success.

In this roundup, we will cover tips, actionable tactics, and strategic implementation shared by these digital marketing and lead generation experts below.

Let us begin with the first one.

The Right Customer: Build a relationship with everyone involved in the Buying decision: Extend your marketing to reach not just your primary buyer, but influencers and users. B2B buying is a business decision, but it is after all made by people: Get to know your buyers at a personal level with deep profile insights from social media and understand what matters to them most.

The Right Time: Gather customer intelligence from social media, websites and other big data sources to determine a customers stage in the buying journey.

The Right Message: Persona Based Campaigns: Creating tailored campaigns that have content within a context that resonates with your Buyer Persona.

The Right Place Omni Channel Campaigns: Email, Phone, Social, Events, Direct Mail all of them play a role. Choose the channels that are most likely to reach your buyer.

–Terry Suppers

What I did in 2018 and that worked really well for me is very easy to do. With all the attention for funnels and email marketing it is easily overlooked.

1. Create a list of all your contacts and add their email address and phone number (I had a list of 200 contacts)
2. Schedule 2 massive action days and call the people on the list. That’s all you do these 2 days. No computer, no social media, just keep on calling. Spend no more than 5 minutes per call. The objective of the call is to schedule an appointment to meet in person. Since these all are people that know me, 95% of the people that I reached said yes to the meeting.
3. During the meeting with your contact ask questions to learn what the developments are in their lives and business. Than give a short update on the developments in your live. Than I ask 2 questions: 1. “How can I help you?” before I end the meeting I ask my last question “Do you know an entrepreneur that needs my help?”

The calls were scheduled beginning July and the meetings were scheduled during the months July, August and September. For entrepreneurs in B2B it means it is less busy during these months. I had about 100 meetings during these months. The meetings last about one hour.

It was great to catch up with my contacts. They now understand what I do at this moment. I got some orders directly from the meetings and I got new referrals that became clients later. This was the springboard for a new direction in my business in 2018.

–Erno Hannink

Leads are not generated. Leads are real people working at real companies and their needs, goals and wishes are already there. Be there where your audience is and make a great impact. You don’t want a list of leads, you want to be on the shortlist of your leads. How? Serve the best content you are able to generate and be the lighthouse for your audience! And the best part is: b2b marketing is much more fun if you connect with your potential buyers with 10x-content!

– Marcel Nanning

Segment your prospects by target industries and other filtering criteria. Conduct your research to identify challenges and opportunities in those segments. Craft your sales and marketing messaging to align with each other and create a campaign that addresses the challenges you’ve identified in a personalized manner.

– Darren Howard

The most effective B2B lead generation tip out there is to work on extending your funnel. Too often I see marketers taking a B2C mindset when approaching B2B marketing. While the end goal is the same (a lead/sale) the way you go about marketing is much different. The B2B buying cycle is much longer and requires more research. Thus, invest in “top of funnel” tactics such as content marketing to get prospects in the door.

– Dan Scalco

1. Focus on the right target accounts and personas. By narrowing down to a small list you can spend much more time and budget on each account.
2. Experiment constantly. By trying out many different combinations of collateral, creative, channel, campaign type and persona, you can find your optimal marketing mix to generate the most leads and pipeline.
3. Start manual, automate at scale. I execute every campaign manually (simple emails from my inbox or a super small recipient list) until I get to nice vanity metrics (open rate, click rate) and only then do I “blast” it in production.

– Gil Allouche

Before we jump into the case studies and discuss specific strategies, it’s important that you get the foundations right and ensure that you’re able to capture and convert a large percentage of leads from your campaigns.

I’d like to focus on just one tip: Avoiding the leaky bucket effect Many B2B marketers spend a lot of time, metaphorically, pouring water into leaky buckets. Rather than fixing the bucket (the marketing funnel), they pour more water (traffic) into the bucket to keep it full.

This is a recipe for inflated acquisition costs and below-average results. The biggest culprit here are landing pages (appeal, content and structure) and, in particular, your forms. Forms separate your leads from non-leads, and have a huge impact on your conversion rates and overall lead generation results.

    – Primo Bonacina

1. When selling to businesses you are still dealing with real people and it’s important to remember that people prefer to deal with who they know and like. Because B2B deals often involve larger $ values, building personal relationships and trust is very important. That’s why regardless of the lead generation method, it’s always advantageous to have a human interaction at some stage. It could be as simple as a quick introductory phone call.
2. Achieve better results by targeting companies which are the best fit with your ideal client. Take time to define who your ideal client is and where to find them.
3. Stop wasting time on activities that seem to be important, but don’t bring result. That includes

 – Searching for a list – most lists already exist and you can save a lot of time and frustration by investing in a list

 – overthinking results of every conversation, especially unsuccessful ones – sales is known to be a numbers game, so success is about going through numbers

 – choosing a CRM – there are many great options, start from one and if needed you can always change later on

4. Above all – take massive action.  If you start from aiming for 10% success rate that means you have to approach / speak to 10 people to get one successful conversation or it could mean speaking to 18 with no results and then having 2 really good conversations. So when you approach 3-5 people and have no result that means absolutely nothing except that you are not taking enough action.

– Assia Salikhova

1. Utilizing LiveChat to capture leads immediately from the website.
2. Utilizing Lead Forensics to follow up on visitors who do not initially convert.
3. The use of ad retargeting tools to recapture visitors with thought leadership content–it typically takes 4-6 visits to a website before a B2B prospect initially converts.

– Jeremy Durant

The post B2B Lead Generation Strategies and Tactics 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. 

The post Developing Buyer Persona for More Effective B2B Lead Generation appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.