With that being said, in this guide, we will discuss all the ins and outs of SaaS marketing strategy for B2B companies in 2024.

Building 7-Figure Companies With SEO

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

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

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

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

Learn more

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

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

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

Learn more

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

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

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

Learn more

The Uniqueness of B2B SaaS Marketing

B2B SaaS marketing, in many ways, is unique and in some cases, more difficult than other types of marketing.

This has a lot to do with the nature of SaaS business itself, and so let’s briefly discuss the concept of SaaS.

SaaS, Software as a Service, is essentially businesses selling cloud software over the internet, where the user wouldn’t need to install the software. SaaS businesses typically adopt a subscription-based, recurring revenue business model.

This will mean that the financial aspect of the SaaS business is significantly more complicated. Let’s say your software is developed with a cost of $20,000, and you are selling the software with a subscription fee of $9/month (discounted for $100 if paid annually).

In this case, let’s say that you have 100 active users that paid the annual subscription, for the sake of simplicity. Then, you have recouped $10,000 of the cost— or $10,000— lost. This will obviously be more complex when some customers are subscribing to different plans or when some of them are cancelling mid subscription. The bottom line? Your cash flow can be more complicated.

This will translate into several unique requirements of SaaS marketing, such as:

1. Maintaining customers long-term is the secret to growth

It’s a fairly new insight that maintaining existing customers turns out to be more profitable than acquiring new ones. This is even more prevalent in the SaaS environment where, as discussed, a customer’s monthly subscription fee is usually only a fraction of your software production cost. Meaning, it will take a long subscription commitment—or a long time— before you make a profit from a customer.

So, maximizing customer retention is an integral part of SaaS marketing, and should be emphasized more than acquiring new customers. It is also worth noting that new customer acquisition is significantly more expensive than retaining existing ones.

To summarize, customer retention should be the focus of B2B SaaS marketing.

2. Unique sales process

What is the typical purchase decision process for a SaaS product?

If it’s a B2C product, for example, DropBox, it’s usually like this:

• We learn about DropBox from somewhere (recommended by friends, through an article/video, advertisement, etc.)
• We signed up for the free trial
• We decide whether to buy or move on

With B2B products, it’s slightly more complicated but quite similar

• Someone in the company is looking for a solution for a specific problem and stumbled upon your product
• They signed up for the free trial
• They presented the product to other decision makers on the company if they liked it
• If the stakeholders agree, the purchase happened

So, the lead nurturing process is usually non-existent replaced by the free-trial period. The sales process is very transparent and in most cases, the sales cycle is relatively short.

How will this translate to our marketing approach? First, there’s no workaround to a bad product (and customer service as a part of SaaS). Second, you will need to provide as much information without overwhelming the prospect and convince them as best as you can within the short time-frame.

On the other hand, it will be very hard to convince a prospect that simply didn’t like your SaaS product. In this case, if you can generate sufficient leads, move on to the next.

3. Content is king

While content marketing is definitely very important for any business, it is one of the most important parts of SaaS marketing strategy for B2B.

When we take a look at most of the biggest players in the SaaS industry, they all have one thing in common: strong content marketing game. Buffer, a SaaS leader in the social media tools niche, is famous for its blog as one of the best resources for social media marketing. The same can be said with HubSpot or Moz in digital marketing.

Your content marketing should encompass two things: educating your audience on how to use your product better, and establishing your position as the thought leader of your niche.

This will extend to your approach in social media marketing: aim to provide information and establish your position as the expert.

Credibility and trust are very important assets in the SaaS industry, and you can get them not by keeping—but spreading— valuable information.

4. Free stuff is the way

Again, this is something contradictory to the traditional marketing practice: in the SaaS business, giving away your product (and even your full product) for free is the norm.

Free-trial in its several different forms is the core of SaaS marketing. However, this doesn’t mean we should go blindly without any strategy.

Optimizing the conversion rate within the free-trial period should be the focus of any SaaS marketer, and this will also mean one other thing: your product must be good.

Also, since there’s the service aspect of SaaS, the free-trial period is also the chance to showcase your customer service excellence, which we will discuss below.

5. Product and service as a package

Remember that the service is also a half of the SaaS business. In fact, it’s often that the service aspect is even more important than the software product.

This is not saying that your software is not important, as we have discussed above, it’s virtually impossible to sell a flawed SaaS product due to the transparency of the free-trial period. However, service quality will often be the decisive factor in determining a purchase.

This will include excellent and fast-responding customer service, frequent updates so your software can stand the challenges of time, resources and training to help customers with the learning curve, and other services.

Developing a B2B SaaS Marketing Strategy

Due to the uniqueness and complication of SaaS marketing, developing a proper marketing plan and strategy is necessary for success.

In developing a SaaS marketing strategy, there are four key areas to focus on:

1. Your Audience

A proper marketing strategy for SaaS must be customer-centric, that is, all the included aspects must be planned with your audience’s needs, behaviors, interests, and problems in mind.

This will start by defining your audience, which is done via proper market research and developing a buyer persona(s). The more specific you can define your audience, the more specific you can plan a strategy that can capture them.

There are four key considerations in this aspect:

1. The specific problem they are trying to solve

Your SaaS product is a solution to a problem. The successful ones are the ones that can alleviate a huge problem (quality) or a problem that is affecting a lot of people (quantity). Figure out the problems that can be fixed by your SaaS, and find the audience that is most likely to have this problem(s).

2. Their buyer process

There are various different factors that can affect the purchase decision. B2B purchase decisions will usually involve several stakeholders in the company (we will discuss this below). Your price tag, as well as the pricing model will affect how your SaaS product will be purchased and thus should affect your marketing approach. Design your pricing plans according to your audience’s preferences (and your competitors’ approaches)

3. The key features of your SaaS product that will interest your audience

Identify how your buyer persona will relate to specific features of the product. For example, if you are selling a cloud storage software, a buyer persona might be interested in huge storage space. On the other hand, another buyer persona might be interested in a good mobile app.

4. Their potential obstacles in choosing your product.

What are the potential objection points for every buyer persona? It can be your high price tag, it can be a lack of certain features/technologies compared to your competitors, and so on. If you can define these potential obstacles and find ways to convince your audience over these, you’ll get a higher chance of success.

It’s also important to define different buyer personas for different types of stakeholders if you are a B2B SaaS business. For example, if you are a tech-based SaaS software, these stakeholders might include IT officers/managers, finance managers, and CEOs. Each of them might have different needs and behaviors based on 4 factors above. So, adjust accordingly.

2. Define Your Goals

Effort without the right direction is meaningless. So, defining clear and realistic goals is the key to successful B2B SaaS marketing.

Your goals should be specific and measurable:

• Figure your overall business goals. For example, to achieve revenue growth by X%. The idea is that your marketing goals should align with these business goals. For example, we can achieve this growth by increasing leads by 30%, which will be the responsibility of the marketing team.
• It is also important to figure out how the sales and marketing team can align to achieve the organizational goals. For example, the marketing team must commit to deliver 200 sales-qualified leads to the sales team. This way, we can also figure out how many salespersons/account executives will be needed.
• Find out how each marketing goal can be measured by assigning KPIs and key metrics. Also, determine the way(s) to measure these metrics (i.e. by using a certain analytics tool, will be discussed below).
• It’s better to set realistic, attainable goals. Goals that are too hard to achieve can hurt your team’s morale. You can break down bigger goals (and company mission) to smaller, more realistic milestones to tackle this issue.

3. Define Tactics To Achieve The Goals

Based on your SaaS marketing goals, and your audience’s behaviors, devise the right tactics to achieve your goals.

With all the available digital marketing tactics, this can be a very broad subject. However, in general, there are three core tactics you can include to any SaaS marketing strategy:

1. Content Marketing

As mentioned above, content marketing is very important for SaaS businesses. In 2015 or so, those with strong content marketing game are virtually guaranteed with success. That is no longer the case nowadays as content marketing is now the norm—-no longer the luxury. Think of content marketing as the prerequisite foundation of your SaaS marketing success.

Regarding SaaS content marketing, there are several factors to focus on:

• There are three different stages in the SaaS buyer’s journey: lead generation, lead nurturing, retaining customers, and delighting them to become your advocate. While you should develop content for each of these stages, you should focus on one or two of these to emphasize your strengths. These examples of 17 SaaS companies with strong content marketing game might inspire you.
• There are always two different ways you can approach with each piece of content: be the absolute best or be unique. You can for example, develop a comprehensive, in-depth, most informative content about digital marketing, or you can also develop a piece covering a totally unique tactic no one’s discussed before.
• Remember that content nowadays come in many different forms from a blog post to infographics to podcasts and videos. Diversify your content (or, use several forms in one piece) according to your audience’s preferences. You can also cover one topic in many different forms to attract as many prospects as you can.
• Use various tools to help you. Keyword research is a fairly standard practice nowadays: aim for keywords with high search volume and yet manageable competition. Tools like BuzzSumo or Uber Suggests can help you find topic ideas, and you can also analyze the performance of competitors’ content to gain valuable insights. SaaS content marketing is already so saturated, so get all the help that you can.
• Developing good content is important, but it won’t bring you any value if you can’t attract prospects. Promoting your content is just as—if not more— important than the content creation itself. Working with SEO consultants is obviously the best way to promote your content, but you will need to get help from various other promotion channels to get traffic and get those valuable backlinks for your SEO. You can check my guide on SEO strategy for SaaS to learn more about optimizing your website.

The key to successful SaaS content marketing is a proper understanding of your buyer persona (discussed above). The better you can engage your audience (and promote your content to reach this audience), the better you can convert them into valuable leads.

2. Paid Promotions

Although content marketing is very important (and very effective) for SaaS businesses in generating and nurturing leads, it has one major flaw: content marketing is long-term, and you will need to invest at least 6 to 12 months of consistent content publication—or more— before we can get significant results.

This is where paid marketing channels can fill the gap. If you do have the budget, advertising, paid endorsement of influencers, etc. will virtually guarantee short-term results. The issue, however, is cost, as they can be very expensive if you are not careful: you can get a lot of traffic but not making any money in the end.

So, paid promotional channels and content marketing should work hand-in-hand to maintain cost-efficiency and yet shorten the time required to get results.

While there are certainly many options where you can invest on paid advertising, there are three main channels to focus on:

1. Retargeting

Retargeting is, display advertising where you only show the ad to those who have visited your website (via content marketing, social media, or other promotional channels). Some retargeting ad publishers (i.e. Google Ads) also allow us to target users that have triggered certain actions like visiting other sites (including your competitors) or searched for specific queries— essentially a more affordable paid search ad.

You can implement retargeting campaigns in Google Ads, LinkedIn Sponsored Updates or Facebook Ads, while there are also platforms like Perfect Audience that can spread your promotions into several different publishers.

2. Paid Content Promotion

There are various channels where you can promote your content. The idea here is to support your content marketing so that it would take a shorter time to get results by reaching more people. The most prominent channels here are Google Ads and social media advertising (Facebook Ads, Linkedin Ads if you are a B2B SaaS company, etc.). Paying for guest posting opportunities (so you can also get backlinks from the site) can be included here.

3. Paid Influencers

Influencer marketing can be effective for certain niches of SaaS. An influencer can help promote your content and/or your SaaS product.

The key here is obviously to find the right influencer that is relevant to your niche, and various influencer outreach tools can help you in this aspect.

Depending on your niche, working with micro or even nano-influencers might be more effective—and cost-efficient.

Remember that these paid promotional efforts should amplify your content marketing. Aim to get backlinks at every possible opportunity, so you can also generate sustainable results.

3. Resources to Execute The Tactics

Now that you’ve figured out the right tactics to achieve the goals, it’s time to consider the necessary resources to execute these tactics.

This, will start with planning a marketing budget:

How much should you spend on marketing? While there are no set rules to answer this, there are several key points we should consider:

1. SaaS companies typically have low production costs. You don’t have to manufacture a new physical product for each user, so the costs of developing your SaaS product is spread over all your users. This will allow more leniency when it comes to the marketing budget.
2. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, maintaining customer retention is very important in the SaaS industry. Your marketing budget should reflect this, and you will need to spend more on preventing churn than acquiring new customers.
3. Since you are not selling physical products, it’s often difficult for customers to differentiate your SaaS product from your competitors’. Extra effort (and investment) is necessary to educate prospects about your unique value proposition.

With those points being said, it’s important to understand that a big marketing budget in a SaaS business is pretty common—if not necessary.

Tomas Tunguz from Redpoint Ventures mentioned in his article that in the first three years, SaaS companies spent 80-120% of its revenue, and this number will go down to around 50% after five years.

In the end, the exact amount of your marketing budget will be up to you. However, in general, every dollar you spend will generate $2.20 in a two-year period. The more you spend (properly), the faster you can grow your business.

Another important consideration is who will execute your SaaS marketing strategy. Planning without execution is—well—, nothing.

In general, you have three options:

• Building an in-house marketing team (or, you probably already have one and will only need to make improvements.
• Outsourcing to a marketing agency
• Working with an expert consultant as a freelancer

Or, any combination of the above.

Also, you might need to invest in digital marketing tools and other assets.

Plan your resources needs carefully while weighing all the possibilities.

4. Setting Up an Evaluation Process

SaaS marketing is a long-term game, and we should also consider the fact that the field is rapidly evolving. It’s important to figure out how your marketing efforts will be measured.

Set up KPIs for your goals, and find out how each KPIs can be measured with the right metrics.

Here are some important metrics to pay attention to:

• Customer churn rate: essentially, the number of customers you’ve lost within a specific time period.For example, if you originally have 100 customers and 10 of them cancelled their plans within one month, your churn rate for that month is 10/100 x 100%=10%
• Revenue churn: the loss of actual revenue (related to the customer churn above) in any given time. Some customers might generate more revenue than the others (i.e. subscribed to a more expensive plan)
• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): the projection of your monthly revenue stream. Calculating MRR can be very simple or very complex depending on your pricing model, among other factors. You might want to check this guide for a more detailed calculation.
• Marketing-Qualified Lead Velocity Rate (MQL velocity or LVR): your growth in qualified leads in a monthly basis. You might want to check this guide for more about LVR.
• Customer Acquisition Cost: the amount of money you’d need to spend to acquire a single customer.
• Customer Lifetime Value: the (projected) amount of revenue generated by the average customer during their relationships with your brand.

There are certainly many other metrics you can track to measure the performance of your SaaS marketing efforts. This is a very in-depth guide discussing all the metrics you need to know in SaaS marketing, a good place to start to set up an evaluation system.

Measure your progress regularly and whenever possible, analyze your competitors’ performances. Make your adjustments accordingly.

End Words

While SaaS marketing is certainly unique and can provide more challenges than most other industries, proper planning and creating a SaaS marketing strategy can help you in achieving success.

In the guide above, we have discussed several key steps you can take to develop a SaaS marketing strategy, and how you can execute and evaluate the strategy. Executing SaaS marketing strategy can indeed be daunting and tedious, and if you need B2B SaaS marketing consultant, schedule a call with me!

The post B2B SAAS Marketing Strategy in 2024: Planning, Execution, Evaluation To Achieve Rapid Growth appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

So, there is not one single marketing tactic that can fit every situation, and most likely you will need to experiment with all the different ones.

However, here we will discuss five of the most effective marketing tactics and strategies for technology companies in 2025. All of them are relatively future-proof and can act as a good foundation for the years to come.

Without further ado, let us begin.

1. Inbound Marketing

While inbound marketing is extremely effective for virtually any SaaS business, it is arguably even more important for technology companies. A lot of key players in the industry have a strong technology inbound marketing game, HubSpot, KissMetrics, and Moz being just a few of the examples: all three have strong inbound marketing teams establishing themselves as the perceived thought leaders/experts of the industry.

Since you are not selling a physical product, gaining customers’ trust can be more difficult compared to other businesses, and this is why establishing credibility through inbound marketing (and content marketing in general) is extremely important.

While inbound marketing for technology companies can be a very broad subject on its own, generally we can divide it into two big aspects: content marketing and SEO. Here are some key strategies in implementing inbound marketing:

Keyword Analysis, Topic Design

As we have mentioned, half of inbound marketing is essentially SEO, where we optimize our content according to the target keyword(s). So, the first thing we should do is find these target keywords that are relevant to your business, have enough search volume, and manageable enough competition-wise.

We can use various keyword analytics tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, or even the free Google Keyword Planner to assist you in this aspect. Research the keywords your top competitors are targeting, and see if you can find opportunities.

After you’ve found your target keyword(s), do a quick Google search and check out the top-ranked content pieces. Analyze the content types, how many words are included, and whether they are using other media like videos or podcasts among other factors. Aim to create better content than these competitors.

It is also wise to keep an editorial calendar listing your topics, the target keywords, and when you will publish these content pieces. A 12-month calendar is ideal, but you can start with a 3-month worth of calendar.

Aim for Longer, In-Depth Content

Remember that your main goal here is to establish yourself as the expert of your industry, so a lazy 500-word content simply won’t cut it.

Aim to create high-quality, in-depth content with unique ideas that are valuable for human readers. How long should you aim? According to Backlinko, top ranking results on Google averaged at 1,890 words per content.

Also, using other media forms like videos and podcasts in the middle of your textual content pieces can help to keep your prospects engaged, as well as adding value to your content. Dwell time is now a ranking signal thanks to the Google RankBrain.

Consistency is also a key factor here: you will need to keep publishing in-depth content pieces regularly to build a reputation. This is where a content calendar can also help you, as have mentioned on the previous point.

Promote Your Content

Content development is just one part of content marketing (and inbound marketing) for technology companies. No matter how good your content pieces are, they won’t bring any value to your business if your audience can’t find them. This is where the importance of content promotion comes in.

There can be many different approaches to promoting your content, and this guide by Moz can be a good starting point. Arguably, however, SEO is the most effective tactic to promote IT, Software, SaaS and Technology companies, but it will require long-term consistency and investment.

For a short-term gain, there are two main tactics you can utilize: social media and influencers. Paid social media advertising is a good approach to promote your content to a wider audience, and the key here is to maintain cost efficiency.

You also want to schedule promotional posts every time you publish new content pieces. You would want to find the right frequency and timing here: promoting your content when the users are most active will ensure more people actually consuming it.

For influencer marketing, the key is to find the right influencers of your industry. While there are many tools that can assist you in this process, the hard part is to build relationships with the right influencers, persuading them to actually want to promote your content.

2. Influencer Marketing

While we have briefly discussed how influencer marketing for technology businesses can be effective in promoting your content, the benefits don’t end there. Influencer marketing is also very effective in promoting your product or service in the various stages of the marketing funnel.

In this saturated technology marketplace, it is extremely hard to get your voice heard by the audience. This is where utilizing influencers can benefit your business: they already have their loyal followings that trust their voices.

As mentioned, the key to a successful influencer marketing is finding the right influencers according to your niche or industry. We should also consider the fact that even after you’ve found the proper influencers, not all of them are willing to promote your brand.

There can be many factors causing this, but as long as you have a similar audience as theirs, the key is in building relationships. Here are the common tactics you can try:

• Approach them personally, sometimes a personalized email is all it takes
• Join the conversations in their channels (blog comments, social media channels, etc.) Ask relevant questions and if possible, provide valuable answers
• Link their content within yours, and send them a link to that specific content
• You might want to offer incentives, but be sure to follow the rules to avoid problems in the future
• Aim to get their trust first before attempting to get backlinks or promotions
• Keep in mind that there are other options than celebrity influencers and major ones with millions of followers. Utilizing micro-influencers can be just as, if not even more effective.

Another important factor in getting the right influencers to work with you is your own credibility. So, the inbound marketing strategy discussed above will work hand-in-hand with influencer marketing for almost any technology company. Also, make the full use of various influencer outreach and research tools.

3. Video and Podcasts

Content marketing for technology companies is slowly shifting from textual content pieces to videos and podcasts, and we can expect them to get bigger in the years to come.

There is one main benefit of audio and video content over textual ones which is TIME. When consuming written content, we have to dedicate our time solely to read the content. On the other hand, we can listen to podcasts while driving or commuting, and we can consume videos while working out on the gym or other activities. In this world where time is becoming more valuable than ever, no wonder these content types are now preferred.

When producing valuable audio and/or video content in a technology company environment, here are some key principles to focus on:

It’s all about great stories

As humans, we are all addicted to stories. This is why we enjoyed movies and novels, and also why we love gossips. No matter how advanced and machine-like our software is, we can always write great, compelling stories about it.

For example, we can tell a story of how a customer achieved progress and results with your software, how your company started from the very beginning or even behind-the-scenes stories about your team. You can also develop a video tutorial with compelling storytelling elements.

The main idea here is to engage your audience with interesting, easy to understand stories. You can fill up the details and specifics later on during sales calls or other activities.

Informational, Educative Content

Your podcasts and videos should work together with your overall inbound marketing activities to provide valuable information and solutions. Usually, this comes in the form of video tutorials, demos, “how-to” videos, and webinars.

You might also want to develop a dedicated webinar campaign, which can be effective for lead generation purposes. You can invite people to join your webinars in exchange for their email addresses or other contact information. This way, you can grow your email database quickly.

Fun Content

Just because you are a technology company in a B2B environment, doesn’t necessarily mean your videos and contents should always be technical and serious.

In fact, publishing videos and podcasts that are humorous and entertaining can help you stand out from your competitors, even more, when these fun content went viral.

Testimonials and User Stories

As mentioned, one of the hardest aspects of the software business is gaining credibility, and there are few things more powerful than user testimonies in projecting trusts.

When an existing user shared their experience about how your software help in their successes, new prospects might wonder whether the same solution will also work for their problems.

You might want to check out this article by HlinkubSpot on successful user testimonial examples.

4. Marketing Automation

The sales cycle of a technology company can be very short to very long depending on product complexity, customer behaviors, and especially, price.

If your product costs $50 a month, obviously the sales cycle will be faster compared to a software costing $10,000 a year. This is even more true if you are a B2B software company: the more expensive and complex your product is, the more stakeholders and decision-makers will be involved in the purchase process, which can lengthen the sales cycle significantly.

Both slow and fast sales cycles have their own issue: in a fast sales cycle, if you are putting too much attention on the wrong prospects, it is easy to miss out on the qualified ones. On the other hand, the lead qualification process of a slow sales cycle can be time-consuming and often expensive.

This is where having a marketing automation tool can help, among other benefits. A proper marketing automation tool can significantly help in the lead nurturing process for your technology company.

Also, some advanced marketing automation tools like HubSpot, InfusionSoft, and ActiveCampaign offer an integrated all-in-one tool including a CRM system. This way, you can monitor various marketing channels and campaigns in just one dashboard, so you can monitor and control the various channels easily.

Last but not least, you can use the marketing automation tool to start a drip campaign (automated email campaign), which can be very effective in various stages of the marketing funnel.

Choose the right marketing automation tool according to your business model, marketing activities, and your overall business needs.

5. Remarketing

Remarketing (or often known as retargeting) is showing your advertising to those who have visited your site, or have triggered certain actions (searched a particular keyword, visited your competitors’ sites, etc.).

As you can see, remarketing can be very effective in promoting any technology company because the promotion is targeted to the audience who have taken an interest in your brand or at least your niche.

Both Google AdWords and Facebook Ads offer quite advanced remarketing features. Commonly, the remarketing campaign involves putting a snippet code generated by the platform on your site, which then the code will capture the user data and will display your ad.

While remarketing is generally more affordable than traditional display advertising, it can still be quite expensive if you are not careful. So, the key here is to maintain your cost efficiency, and here are some key tactics you should consider:

Refine Audience Targeting

The more specific your targeting is, the more cost-efficient your remarketing campaign will be.

Generally, you should target the audience with the highest chance of conversion, and you can combine the common remarketing targeting method with other methods like demographic and behavioral targeting.

So, the key here is a better understanding of your audience.

Frequency Management

Maintaining the proper frequency is not solely for cost-efficiency purpose. Showing your ads too frequently might annoy your audience, and yet too little frequency and you might not get enough exposure.

Finding the delicate balance here can be quite difficult, and you might need to do some trial and error. Generally, however, two impressions a day is quite ideal.

Optimize Your Landing Page

Ideally, you should have one landing page for each of your remarketing campaigns targeting specific tech audience, where you might want to have separate campaigns for different purposes.

For example, you might want to have one remarketing campaign directed towards upsells, and another one to engage those who have viewed your product listing page but didn’t make any purchases.

Optimize your landing page(s) with the proper content, and make sure they are mobile-responsive with proper loading speed.

Bottom Line

As mentioned, the technology industry landscape is fast-paced and always evolving.

While these five tactics we have shared above are relatively future-proof, you will always need to stay updated to the changes, especially regarding your customers’ changes in needs and behaviors.

The key to successful marketing, not only for technology companies but for any businesses, is working with experienced startup marketing consultant and to constantly monitor your progress. Measure the right metrics, have the right benchmarks and adjust your strategy when it’s necessary.

The post 5 Effective Marketing Strategies For Technology Companies appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

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

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

Let us begin.

Building 7-Figure Companies With SEO

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

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

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

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

Learn more

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

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

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

Learn more

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

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

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

Learn more

What Is Digital Marketing?

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

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

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

Digital Marketing VS Inbound Marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

B2B VS B2C Digital Marketing

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

• The Audience

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

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

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

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

• Market Size

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

• Social Media Behaviors

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

• Sales Cycle

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

• Content

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

B2C Digital Marketing

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

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

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

B2B Digital Marketing

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

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

Why Digital Marketing is Important for B2B Businesses?

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

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

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

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

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

Important Principles In Developing B2B Digital Marketing Plan

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

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

• Define Your Objectives

Your digital marketing goals should be:

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

• Creating a Strategy

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

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

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

• Content-First Approach

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

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

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

• Monitor and Evaluate

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

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

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

The Digital Marketing Channels

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

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

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

Without further ado, here they are:

Content Marketing

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

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

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

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

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social Media Marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PPC Advertising

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

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

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

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

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

Email Marketing

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

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

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

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

Affiliate Marketing

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

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

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

Online Public Relations

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

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

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

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

Understanding B2B Marketing Automation

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

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

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

B2B Digital Marketers And Their Roles

What does a B2B marketing consultant and expert do?

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

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

That’s it, basically.

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

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

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

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

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

SEO Specialist/SEO Manager

KPIs:

• Organic traffic
• Link profile
• SERP ranking

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

Content Marketers

KPIs:

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

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

Social Media Marketers

KPIs:

• Followers growth
• Impressions and reach
• Engagement and shares

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

How To Track B2B Digital Marketing Performance

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

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

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

For example:

Analyzing Organic and Paid Website Traffic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Implementing Marketing Attribution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Content as a Lead Generation Device

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

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

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

B2B Digital Content

What types of content should my business create?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Building 7-Figure Companies With SEO

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

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

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

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

Learn more

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

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

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

Learn more

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

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

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

Learn more

1. First, Know Your Metrics

Unless you enjoy throwing money down a dark hole without ever really knowing what becomes of it, you’ll have to get to know some basic metrics. Without measurement, marketing is just a guessing game driven by hunches and whim.

Before dipping your toes into the vast, icy waters of SaaS marketing metrics, it might help to understand why they’re the backbone of every successful SaaS marketing strategy.

Without metrics, you’ll never really know how effective your SaaS marketing strategies are. That’s pretty obvious. But perhaps more crucial, for any company that wants to grow, is that metrics can reveal areas of opportunity. Whether it’s new markets, new customers, or new products, moving forward requires looking back at your metrics. Here are a few of the most important marketing metrics for SaaS companies:

1. CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost). CAC is a measurement of how much it costs to convince someone to buy. Combining sales and marketing expenses for acquiring visitors, then measuring how many of them become leads, and in turn measuring how many of those leads become customers, you’ll arrive at CAC.
   Yes, there’s a bit of math involved. But in the old days, all companies could do was ‘spray and pray’, relying merely on how many leads they got to tell them whether their campaigns were working. Thanks to data-driven advertising campaigns that use tracking codes and powerful data-crunching tools, companies have this great new metric to help them assess their SaaS marketing efforts.

2. LTV (Lifetime Value of a Customer). Hopefully, you’ll have repeat customers, which brings us to LTV. There are all types of customers, and hopefully, through careful targeting and constant mindfulness of customer satisfaction, your business will attract the ‘good’ kind — the kind that sticks around for a long time. The more of those you have, the better your LTV metrics will look.
3. ROI (Return on Investment). The most elemental metric of all, the classic ROI. Simply put, it’s the benefit of your investment divided by the cost of that investment. This metric is versatile, simple, and beloved by SaaS marketing experts since the beginning of time. It’s also a bit rudimentary, which is why it’s best used when combined with other metrics like LTV and CAC.

2. Now, Dig In and Study Your Competitors

Now that you know what to measure, here’s some actual strategy. This first plan of attack is used not just by marketers, but by anyone attempting to win at anything: study the greats. Want to play guitar? Study Slash’s technique. Want to rise to political power? Look at historical figures who’ve made it.

In our case, we’re studying the competitors — especially the really successful ones. We’ll be looking at:

• Get familiar with digital marketing strategies they use for their startup
• How strong their social presence is
• Their organic rankings
• How many backlinks they have
• Whether they run AdWords ads

Ahrefs.com will help out a lot here, showing data on organic ranking, backlinks, and Adwords.

3. Then, Create an SEO Strategy

If SEO marketing for SaaS companies seems dull to you, then perhaps it’s time to adjust your perceptions. True, it’s different from B2C because you’re targeting a narrower, more specialized audience — buyers and business owners. Both groups are generally more knowledgeable than the mass markets that B2C companies deal with. Business buyers are already well past the half-way point on the buyers’ journey by the time they’re ready to engage with an SaaS company’s website.

But that doesn’t mean they won’t respond to engaging content.

Marketing your SaaS company is, in some respects, just like marketing any product to a general consumer audience. Try and provide content that’s useful and which engages your visitors, and then you can start thinking about conversion. This technique, known as content marketing, generates triple the amount of leads when compared to outbound marketing techniques like trade shows and cold calling.

It also helps to have content that’s actionable, and that doesn’t just sit there. If your whitepapers aren’t doing the trick, or if your self-promotional blog posts aren’t converting, it’s time to reassess your SaaS SEO strategy.

To do this, map keywords to the buyers’ journey and create your content accordingly. For example, did you know that 94% of B2B buyers research their purchases online? That right there is a very strong case for putting out some fantastic whitepapers to capture those buyers at that stage of their purchasing journey.

Begin by using keyword planner tools and ahrefs.com to come up with keywords suggestion. Then, create landing pages for each set of keywords you come up with. Finally, support those landing pages with a series of on- and off-site blog posts on the same topic. If you need help you can always reach out to SEO consultants to get professional help on ranking your website on the first page.

4. Next, Optimize Your Website For Conversion & Capture Emails

By now you sense that just having a pretty website is not enough. To capture leads and convert them to subscribers, you’ll need your website to work harder and capture emails for you. Then, once you know as much about your prospects as possible, hit them with stunning emails that reach them at the right time in the buyers’ journey.

Maybe they responded to a whitepaper download CTA. Or maybe they subscribed to your blog after reading a particular post. It’s that sort of information you’ll need to study in order to know where they are in the buyers’ journey.

That will set you up nicely for generating effective nurture campaigns for all those emails you collected. Different prospects will receive different series of emails, depending on how they came to you. Some of your emails will serve to convert prospects who didn’t subscribe to your software, for example. Others may target people who have let their free trial of your SaaS service expire.

Others will be nurtured along the buyers’ journey differently — there are dozens of touchpoints at which you can create opportunities for conversion. Sending the right email is key.

5. Don’t Forget to Submit Your Profile on Review Sites

Just as general consumers turn to Yelp to help them decide where to eat and shop, business software consumers turn to review sites as well.

There are plenty of SaaS directories for listing your business and, since online customer reviews are growing in influence, it’s essential that you check these directories out. Some of the biggest names include:

• Trust Radius
• Capterra
• GetApp

6. Finally, Run Ads

Identify your ideal customer, run paid campaigns and target them on Adwords, Linkedin and Facebook. One thing to keep in mind, so that you don’t bust your budget, is to remember your long tail keywords.

This is especially true for SaaS companies, who may be up against some very stiff competition. Let’s face it, there’s always a big dog who’s all but cornered the market in SaaS products and services.

Then, if you want to up your SaaS marketing game, you’ll want to also set up remarketing campaigns on all platforms and social media sites.

One Final Word…

Now you’ve got your six steps and your work is cut out for you. Better get cracking, since gone are the days when marketers could get by without knowing about metrics, buyer’s journey, keyword-driven content, email nurturing campaigns, and all the ways to use powerful data to run targeted ads.

If you’re feeling a tad overwhelmed, or if you feel your SaaS company can never compete in SEO, think again. SaaS businesses of all sizes are making steady progress with all these techniques I’ve outlined for you here. It’s a matter of studying your customer, learning your metrics, and working with experienced SaaS marketing consultants that fit your SaaS business to a tee.

The post 6 Steps to a Complete Marketing Strategy for SaaS Companies appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

The increasing sophistication of digital tools has encouraged companies to refine their client acquisition strategies. Such strategies require insights into the needed formulas and skills that guarantee the best possible results.

At most, the best they can do is to hire someone else to run their marketing for them. With the rise of “startup culture,” the market for outsourced digital marketing services has been flooded by a high surplus of skills.

The rise of digital marketing agencies has also met considerable challenges as companies aim to outdo one another in a race to get a larger share of their respective markets.

Newcomers, in particular, will find it impossible to build an initial client pool, let alone position their brands in the best possible manner.

Then again, it is only a matter of using the right strategies to enable digital marketing agencies to gain a great deal of leverage.

Here are a few important ideas that will help boost your digital marketing agency’s lead acquisition campaign.

1. Formulate a realistic action plan

We all know what SMART stands for, but does it really hold up for digital marketing agencies that are out to acquire more clients and secure more conversions?

It takes a lot more than drawing up a simple mission and vision statement to know about building a business that’s sustainable and highly engaging.

You can’t risk making estimates and expect things to go your way. For example, your agency has to be firmly planted in the reality that it’s impossible for startups to survive in an over-saturated market.

It is these types of realities that should help shape the way you build your business strategy. Make sure to get real-world insights and examine possible action plans for implementation.

Analysis is essential for building your strategy, but don’t forget to keep your ear to the ground. Pay attention to buzz on current market trends.

Between these two approaches, you should have a clear idea of what you’re going to do once you start to roll out your strategy.

2. Monitor the competition

Coming up with a lead generation strategy should come with knowing who your competitors are. This is crucial because you want to build a campaign that produces results that can impact the bottom line and make it easier for you to position your brand better.

Knowing what your competitors are doing is as basic an activity as it comes, but it’s not so easy in practice. In fact, it will take you weeks or even months to prepare a comprehensive report on your closest rivals.

You need to know certain information about your competitors, including:

Their products and services: What do they offer that you don’t? What are the potential factors that would influence people to buy their products?

Their current position: How do they rank in terms of searchability? Do they command a large following across different locations and demographic segments?

Their image and reputation: Do they suffer from too much negative publicity in the form of comments and reviews? How well do they connect with their audience?

Their presence across all channels: Where do they usually get a lot of engagement? In what channels are they strong?

These questions should help you compare your competitors and see if there are gaps you can fill in. In other words, you might want to work on the propositions and messages they weren’t able to deliver before.

Competitor analysis should form the basis of all your marketing endeavors and it makes perfect sense to replicate what works for your audience and to try and improve it.

3. Build your marketing funnel

Once you have laid down the foundation of your lead generation campaign, it’s time to build the process that leads prospects from point A to point B, which is a sales conversion.

This means creating a sales funnel that is guaranteed to acquire leads, nurture them, and convert them into sales.

Easier said than done! Tracking the journey of potential buyers takes into account a few important dynamics, much of which involves knowing how to keep leads from dropping out.

This will all depend on how you build effective sales processes that address your main goals of growing revenue. These include the following principles:

Awareness

You want people to recognize your brand and let them know that you’re in the business of selling social media marketing services or content creation services. Since this is the first tier of the funnel, prospects are not that likely to purchase a product. Your goal here is to attract them with what you’re offering and lead them down the funnel.

Interaction

At this level, the prospect wants to know further details about your digital marketing agency. You might want to publish relevant blog posts that lead them toward signing up for a newsletter. That way, you can handle follow-ups that keep your audience within the pipeline.

Interest

By the time your client becomes familiar with your services through blog posts and email campaigns, it’s time to provide a high-level sales call where you can make your pitch. Whether or not the prospect agrees to make a purchase, your main goal here is to keep them interested until they develop a desire to buy.

Action

This is the culmination of all your efforts in trying to reach out to your audience and get them to buy something from you. The quality of your pitch will determine whether the client decides to hire you or not.

The main point of having a funnel is to have an effective reference for what you need to do and deliver to potential clients.

However, you might still need to ensure that your campaign is properly equipped to produce the results you need for propelling your digital marketing agency forward.

Using the right platforms, you can create sales funnels that allow you to track deals and determine whether your prospects are ready for a sales pitch or not. But aside from using the right lead databases, you still have to consider the best possible channels to use in your lead generation campaign.

4. Gather all your resources and platforms

Let’s face it, you can’t reel in new business and convert leads into sales without content. After all, content is the lifeblood of any digital marketing strategy for startups, so it makes sense that you use the right channels for marketing your digital marketing agency.

You will need to have a good mix of digital content to be able to drive the results you want.

These would include:

• Blogs:

Look along the lines of tips and tricks. Write engaging, timely, and industry-specific articles relevant to your clients.

• Social media:

What are the best practices for creating content on Facebook or LinkedIn? Discuss them at length so as to prove you have industry knowledge. Also, you can use different social media marketing tools to help ease your workflow.

• Videos:

In terms of conversions, it’s high-quality videos that attract high-value clients. You just have to know how to make videos that strike a balance between informational and entertaining.

• Infographics :

If you want to explain difficult concepts in digital marketing, you might as well create infographics that simplify such things as “personalized content” and using cloud computing for data backup.

All these items are typical of any digital marketing arsenal, but these are just a part of the larger dimension that your website maintains.

5. Develop a highly engaging website that’s searchable

Your website has to be your main driver and leads conversion source. Its success in achieving the numbers you are aiming for will depend mostly on how well you design and maintain your website.

That being said, make sure you follow these important principles when building a website for generating, nurturing, and converting interested prospects:

Design: Make your website user-friendly. In other words, make it less of a hassle for users to navigate from one web page to another and find what they need.

Mobile responsiveness: A majority of users accessing websites use mobile devices. This is a good reason to optimize your site for phone and tablet screens.

Keyword research: Keywords make your website searchable, so you might want to spend time and money on building a list of high-value keywords that your competitors might also want to rank for.

Readable content: It’s not enough that you create content that includes all the relevant information that’s bound to make your audience want to take a better look. To keep them interested, you need to write blog posts that are also easy to read.

Building a digital marketing consultancy from scratch is one thing, and building an initial client base is another. For this reason, your lead generation strategy should be carefully crafted.

The post How to Generate Leads for Your Digital Marketing Agency appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Yet, surprisingly many marketing tactics and strategies are not aligned well with that goal. Many marketers assume that all “common” marketing activities, when done right, will in the end produce sales. While there’s some truth to that statement, there are certain tactics that can drive conversions better than others.

In this guide. we will share seven of those tactics, and by the end of this guide, you will be able to develop a marketing strategy that is more effective in generating more sales.

Let us begin with the first one.

It’s All About Value Proposition

Here’s the catch: your customers aren’t exactly buying your product or service, but rather the benefits they get after the purchase. So, value proposition, which is communicating the value of your products to your prospects is the key to your conversion success.

In its essence, value proposition is a statement that:

• Clarifies specific benefits of your products or services (quantifiable value)
• Explaining how your product and/or service can solve the current problems of your customers or improve their current situation (relevancy)
• Persuade the customers to purchase your product/service and not from your competitors by communicating your unique values (unique differentiation)

Your value proposition should be visible especially on your home page, ideally to be the first thing the visitors see. Also, it should be clearly visible in all major entry points of your website without being too hard selling.

Remember, however, that value proposition is not a catch phrase or a slogan like “the world’s #1 golf ball”. It can be a part of the whole value proposition, but not all of it. While there can be many different formats, value proposition is usually presented with a combination of text (a headline, subheadline, and a paragraph) and a visual.

Here is the basic format of value proposition:

• Headline: This can be your slogan or catchphrase, and should be your attention grabber. You can simply mention the product, the customer, and the key benefit.

• Sub-headline: A clear explanation of what you offer, your target customer, and why the product/service can be useful. If the product/service addresses any specific problem, you can also mention it.

• Body: Can be in the form of bullet points listing the key features of the product/service, or a simple paragraph.

• Visual:They say pictures speak louder than words. You can show the photo of your product, an image highlighting your core messages, or even an infographic.

Remember that clarity and visibility are the keys to a successful value proposition. Check out this article by WordStream for a few excellent examples on value proposition.

Targeting The Right Customers

This is seemingly obvious, but you will be surprised how so many marketers fail (or worse, didn’t try) to understand their ideal customers. The strategic choice of your primary customer, with a strong emphasis on the word “primary”, defines your business. Why? Your business should always aim to please this primary customer through all your activities.

Amazon have several group of customers: consumers, content providers, sellers, and business. Yet, their evolution over the years was based on their primary customers: the consumers, so now we have things like the detailed product reviews and consumer-generated reviews, free prime shipping and so on. One of the reasons why Google overtook Yahoo! and other early search engines is the fact that they targeted their customers well: the technology-affluent people and so their newer features are technology-focused like Android, Maps, and others.

The bottom line: find your ideal customers, and utilize your resources to please them. How to do this? Develop a buyer persona as an ideal model of your customer. After that, do an extensive research on their behavior, needs, problems, and values. You can now develop a comprehensive strategy to allocate your resources for this specific target customer.

Content Marketing

While people generally won’t make a purchase directly after reading a content, there are many benefits in properly utilizing content marketing for conversion purposes. First, people are more likely to buy from the brands/companies they can trust, and consistently publishing relevant, high-quality content is one of the best ways to establish credibility.

Next, content marketing can effectively educate your customers about your product benefits, and how your product differs from your competitors’. Last but not least, content marketing is far more affordable compared to other marketing channels like advertising or paid social.

How to use content marketing effectively? To start, your content must be visible to your audience. The best way to achieve this is by utilizing SEO to allow your content to rank higher on Google search results. While SEO can be quite complicated on its own right, here are the key steps you can do:

• Use keyword research tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and SEMRush among others to find keywords that are related to your brand/product and have enough search volume.
• Do a Google search on those keywords, and see how the top-ranking content pieces are doing. This way, you can get a clearer picture of what kind of content(s) to develop.
• Plan topic(s) to target the keyword(s) you’ve found on the previous step. Keep in mind that your content pieces should first and foremost, be valuable for human readers.
• Develop your content and publish it, yet your work doesn’t end here.
• Treat your content pieces as landing pages and start your link building efforts. Build relationships with influencers and/or high-authority sites of your industry, and ask them to link to your content.

Besides SEO, you can use social media marketing (paid and organic), influencer marketing, and paid advertising to promote your content. So, remember that there are two aspects to effective content marketing: consistently developing high-quality content pieces, and promoting them.

Collecting User Feedback

In the end, the customers are the ones buying your product/service, and so their (honest) feedback is extremely valuable. Sometimes, we see our own product with a tunnel vision, and it is quite often we didn’t realize our mistakes, or any flaws in our product before our customers did.

Yet, gathering honest customer feedback can be difficult, especially if you haven’t implemented the necessary tools to do it, and especially to automate the process.

In general, you get customer feedbacks from surveys, email (through “contact us” page, etc), in-person interactions, social media interactions, and reviews among others. So, how can we get more feedbacks from these channels? One of the most effective ways is by offering incentives in various forms, and automate the process of giving offers/asking questions.

Ask them what they liked and especially what they didn’t like from your product/service, talk about the sales process: the number of steps they took and the difficulties they faced. Ask them where they learned about you, and what part about your company caught their attention.

Also, keep in mind that your customer’s needs and perceptions are always evolving. So, keep asking for more and more feedbacks. Check out this guide by Moz on how to get more customer feedback effectively.

Events

Even in this advanced digital age where most of things are online, offline events are still very effective in boosting your sales, simply because events allow you to show your physical presence and also enables you to engage your customers in-person.

Your events shouldn’t necessarily be overly complicated, and the idea is to present your customers with the things they love. So, go back again to customer and demographic research, and figure out their hobbies, interests, and values. For example, if you found out that the majority of your customers love football, consider hosting an event where your customers can watch a game together, probably with a Super Bowl ticket as a door prize.

In short, event marketing is an effective way to keep your brand at the top of your customer’s mind. Still not convinced? These statistics compilation by Bizzabo lists some interesting marketing facts about event marketing performance. Some notable ones are:

• 63% of marketers plan on investing more in live events, both in number of events and budget-wise
• 80% of marketers believe that offline events are critical to their success
• 80% of C-Suite executives plan to invest more in live events in the future
• 75% of marketers believe that live events will become increasingly important in the upcoming years

Video Content

Video as a content medium has seen an enormous rise in popularity in the past few years. Yet, although there can be many reasons to implement video content on your site, the biggest reason is arguably the fact that it is very effective in encouraging purchase. Studies even suggested that having a video on a landing page can help increase purchase conversions by more than 80%.

So, how can we use video to drive more conversions? Here are a few ideas:

• As a general rule of thumb, put your lead capture form in the first 10% or 20% of your video
• A video tutorial highlighting the key features of your product/service is always effective, as well as behind-the-scenes content like the making of your product or a showcase of your team
• Use an interesting thumbnail. In general, a thumbnail showing a human is better
• Make your video short and comprehensive, or at least if it’s relatively long, hook your audience with an immediately entertaining section upfront. In general, you will need to capture the audience’s attention within the first minute
• If resources allow, send personalized video to your prospects. Personalization and human touches are extremely effective in driving conversions

Upsell and Cross Sell

Getting the actual sales is arguably the hardest aspect not only of your marketing activities, but also for the overall business in general. So, with each sales, we will need to attempt to maximize revenue and profit through upselling and cross-selling.

Upselling, in essence is offering the better version of the product itself for a higher price. It is especially common for software and digital products, where we can offer the “premium” version with better features. Cross-selling, on the other hand, is offering other related products and/or services, preferably the ones that can complement the first product/service.

While upselling and cross selling are more common in some businesses than others, they can easily be applied to virtually any business, and are very effective in improving the bottom line of the funnel. Also, upselling and cross selling can indirectly maintain your customer retention. Check out this guide by Marketo for more upsell and cross sell strategies.

End Words

These seven marketing tactics to increase purchase conversions are by no means the only available ones. Yet, they are by far some of the most effective in capturing prospects’ attention and generate more revenue from each of them.

Keep in mind that each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages, and you might need to hire a marketing consultant to gain more success.

Also, it is a common occurrence that your sales results aren’t maximized because your website is not optimized enough for conversions.

The post 7 Effective Marketing Tactics To Increase Sales appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

It Starts With Research

There’s more to a successful marketing strategy than just your great ideas. You need to do some research so you can back up your plan with actual data. Often, you’ll be surprised at what you find. Your customers may feel much differently than you thought they did, for example. It’s much better to prepared and learn this kind of information early on than have it turn up as a nasty surprise at a more damaging stage. Find out which customer profiles spend the most. Which customers will be most likely to come back?

Get to Know Your Audience

If you want to effectively market to a group of people, you need to get to know them. Your target audience should be something that defines your brand and can be something you come back to when you need to make adjustments to strategy. Find out where your audience spends their time online. What kind of social media do they like? Sites such as Facebook allow you to target your audience based on up to 10 interests. The more knowledge you have, the better you can interest your target market.

Find a New Place to Advertise

One sure sign of an outdated marketing strategy is a company that refuses to (or doesn’t think to) change where they advertise. Don’t throw your money at banner or magazine advertising just because it used to work. People see these conventional ad spots so often that they unconsciously ignore them; they don’t work. Get creative with your advertising dollars.

Use Creative Visuals

People respond to visuals. Identify some unique visuals you can use to make your brand stand out and put them out there. Maybe you’ve got a nice-looking logo, a cool mascot, or even just a very recognizable and branded color scheme. Remember you’re trying to get attention, but you’re also trying to keep that attention, so they’ll remember you later on. People see hundreds of ads in a day, so you need to find a way to make them remember yours. Try and keep things consistent aesthetically so your campaign will be familiar, but not boring.

Spend Your Resources Wisely

When you’re allocating your ad dollars, remember that not every platform is as effective as the next. Do your research and determine which ones are actually worth your money. Some platforms may work great for one business, but that doesn’t mean it will be as effective for yours. Search advertising, for example, can be very useful for an established brand or product/service, but not very useful for a startup company.

Try Micro-targeting

There’s no sense in marketing to everybody. A huge target doesn’t mean huge profits, it likely means you’ll appeal to nobody. The more specific you can target the better. Don’t target women, micro-target young middle-class women in urban areas. Think about what your product does and then think about who will benefit from it. Once you’ve got a target you can create much more effective ads specifically appealing to them.

Throw a Popup Event

Holding a fun event can be a great way to introduce yourself to the community and show them your value. Your best bet is to do something fun that people will want to do, rather than just throwing a trade show. Ask yourself, what would you want to do at a popup event? You could give people a fun inside look at what you do and even let them try something out.

Conclusion

Digital advertising should be a part of every business’ marketing strategy. Life happens online and that is where your audience spends a lot of their time and looks for new solutions to their problems. Improve your marketing strategy with these seven digital advertising ideas.

The post Improve Your Marketing Strategy with these 7 Digital Advertising Ideas appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

In this guide to inbound marketing strategy, we will divide our discussion into three big parts. By the end, you can develop a sound inbound marketing strategy and start implementing it.

Let us begin with the first one.

Targeting The Right Audience

Knowing who to target and understanding their needs are very important factors for the success of your inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is ultimately about delivering valuable content to your target audience. Without knowing their needs, you simply can’t deliver value.

The market is also rapidly changing, as do the behaviors and needs of your audience. Focusing on the target audience that matters will also help you in dealing with this changes. So, how can we effectively determine the right audience? Below, we will share some of our methods:

1. Social media insights

If your business already have performing social media profiles with several hundreds followers for each, you can analyze their demographic data to figure out your existing customer base.

Most major social media platforms offer features to analyze the demographic data of your followers, especially their gender, age, and location. For example, if you have a Facebook Page, there’s the “Insights” tab on the top of the page for this purpose.

This is also why social media should be one of your main ways of publishing and promoting content.The more followers and fans you have, the more data you’ll have, and the better you can understand your audience.

2. Conducting Online Surveys

Conducting surveys can be very effective to know your target prospects, and you can easily do this if you already have a growing email database. Also, there are many different tools that can assist you in this process.

The main goal here is to find out your target audience’s needs and problems, so you can ask a question like “what is your current biggest issue related to X (your niche/industry)”. By figuring out their problems, you can then develop content pieces providing solutions to these issues.

3. Conducting Interviews

While broadcasting surveys can be an effective way to figure out the general picture of your target market, it is fairly difficult to capture an in-depth data with it. This is where phone or even in-person interviews can fill in the gap.

Select a few of your existing customers (it’s better to conduct interviews with existing customers compared to prospects, since generally they are more willing), and ask them if it’s okay to conduct short phone calls or video chats (a maximum of 10 minutes). Again, your main goal here is to find out their current problems: ask their current struggles, the solutions they’ve tried in the past, and what are they looking in a solution.

You can then use this data to develop your content.

4. Content Development

Content quality is obviously the core of any inbound marketing strategy. In fact, in theory, if your content quality is excellent, you won’t need any strategy at all.

On the other hand, no amount of promotion can help low-quality content pieces. Even when a low-quality content somehow rank on the top of search engine results, it won’t bring any business, period.

The value of your content is directly tied to your audience’s needs: a good inbound marketer should always adapt their content according to the current needs of their audience. Yet, it’s not the only thing you should consider when developing your content.

Here are a few areas you should focus on:

Content types

First, understand that textual content, especially blog posts, is still the most effective content form in generating new leads.

However, more and more businesses are shifting towards podcasts and videos, and not without its reasons:you can’t consume textual content while driving or while working out in the gym. Podcasts and videos tackled that issue.

Yet, when researching for services and products, people trust textual content more, especially due to its ability to cover in-depth information.

So, a majority of your content should be textual, while podcasts, videos, and webinars can assist these textual content pieces. For example, you can create a podcast covering an outline for a topic, and offer a link to a more in-depth blog posts covering the same topic. If necessary, you can offer e-books or white papers for even more in-depth information.

Content length

This is the main principle you should understand: the longer is always the better, as long as you can maintain engagement throughout the whole content. Yet, we all know that maintaining quality will be more difficult with longer content pieces. The key is finding that balance.

For textual content pieces, the average word count to maintain this balance looks like to be 1,890 words. For videos? This research by Minimatters might help.

Optimizing titles

Titles, or headlines, if you will, are the first thing people read when they stumbled upon your content, and so they are the ones determining your click-through rate (CTR).

Optimized titles are also important for SEO purposes. You should include your target keyword in the title while making sure the title is also appealing to human readers. Putting the target keyword at the front of the title will also help. For example, if your focus keyword is “Local SEO”, you can make a title like “Local SEO: Top 10 Tactics for Higher Google Maps Results”.

You might want to check this guide by QuickSprout on optimizing headlines.

Optimizing snippet

Similar to titles, your snippet (META description) is very important not only to improve CTR, but for SEO purposes. Include your target keywords, but make sure the description is comprehensive and engaging for human readers.

You might want to check this guide by Neil Patel on how to optimize META description.

Diversify your media

Even if you should focus on primarily textual content pieces, you should utilize other media like images, infographics, audio, and even videos to enrich your content.

Remember that these additional media should support your core content, do not use them just for the sake of it. You can also optimize these images and videos for SEO benefits.

Tell a compelling story

Every human being is attracted to great story: we either spend our lives consuming exciting stories (through books, movies and so on) or writing our own (literally, or by living a successful life).

So, even if your content is technical and data-driven, doesn’t mean it can’t be interesting and fun. Use storytelling techniques to enhance your content, use a conversational approach to engage your audience, and aim to create an interactive story.

Content Promotion

No matter how good your content is, it won’t bring value if no one consumes it. This is why content development is just half of the process, and you shouldn’t neglect content promotion as the core part of your inbound marketing strategy.

There are various ways to promote your content, and below, we will list some of the most popular (and effective) ones:

1. Social Media Marketing

Quite obvious, with so many people using social media nowadays, it is one of the most effective platforms to promote anything.

The thing is, organic reach on major social media platforms have declined rapidly in recent years. So, you will need to consider paid promotional options. Your main goal here is to have more people sharing your content, which can bring exponential benefits both for short-term and long-term basis.

2. Guest Posting

When done right, guest posting can be very effective inbound marketing strategy. Why? Because you get many different benefits with one action: you get backlinks (probably not immediately, but very possible), you get awareness and authority, and you develop relationships with influencers and high-quality sites.

There are several key principles to a proper guest posting campaign:

• Consistency is key, find as many sites accepting guest posting,and approach all of them
• Take notes on sites with high engagement rates, these are your priorities
• Build relationships before you pitch them with your blog post: engage in their conversations, comment on their previous posts, and so on
• Don’t focus on getting backlinks at first, aim to get authority

3. Influencer Marketing

Utilizing influencers not only can effectively promote your content pieces, but you will also get the benefit of getting backlinks from their authority sites.

Again, here are some key principles for a successful influencer marketing campaign:

• The most important step is finding the right influencers for you. There are many tools that can assist you in this process, for example, Buzzsumo.
• Gradually build a relationship with these influencers. Engage them on their social media profiles, join their conversations, and only after gaining their trust, you can propose them for a content promotion opportunity
• Don’t solely focus on major influencers and celebrities, micro-influencers can also provide values

4. Host a Webinar

You can utilize webinars to promote your brand or your personality, while also indirectly promote your content. Host a free webinar session in exchange for their email address, which can be an effective lead generation device.

If you can provide value, people who attended your webinar might also be interested in future content, as you establish your position as the thought leader of your niche.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing is still a very effective tactic not only to promote your content, but also to encourage those who have consumed your content to convert.

Here are some important principles for a successful email marketing campaign:

• Be consistent and think long-term, regularly provide excellent content through email marketing. Don’t focus on hard-selling your products, but focus on providing value
• Understand the behavior and needs of your email subscribers (back to section I). You simply need to provide them with proper values, a reason to stay subscribed
• Personalize your email marketing by using first names. Many email marketing tools can help with this
• Use an interesting, engaging subject line.
• Keep your email messages to-the-point and engaging, you can use animated gifs, images, and even videos, but make sure they have decent loading speed
• Make sure all email messages are mobile-responsive

6. SEO

SEO is obviously an inseparable aspect of inbound marketing, and the primary way you can increase your content’s visibility.

To maximize your SEO results, there are four main areas to focus on:

• Make sure your content is targeting a proper keyword with enough search volume. Check the top-ranking content pieces of this keyword, and aim to develop a better content
• Optimize these keywords on your content, but don’t overstuff the keywords. Include keyword variants and make sure they occur naturally
• Use various content promotion techniques discussed above to generate more backlinks
• Work with SEO expert and consultant to streamline your traffic improvements and avoid search engine penalties

Remember, however, that SEO is a long-term game. Be consistent with your SEO optimizations, and expect at least 6 to 12 months before you see your content on the first page of search results.

Utilizing Your Content to Achieve Results

Inbound marketing won’t bring any value on its own, unless it can generate traffic (leads), educate customers (lead nurturing) or encourage conversions.

Below, we will discuss how to optimize inbound marketing in those three different areas.

1. Lead Generation

The most common practice in this aspect is to offer free but valuable content to acquire leads. You can offer well-researched reports, white papers, e-books, or even in-depth videos and webinar sessions in exchange of their email address.

The key here is obviously the value of your content: the more valuable it is, the more leads you can capture. Check out some of the best examples of this practice, as compiled by Contently.

There are other tactics you can try, for example, offering your readers to subscribe to your email newsletter within your blog post.

2. Lead Nurturing

This is the stage where most inbound marketing practices shine the brightest. Your content will be a powerful weapon to nurture your prospects until they are finally ready to purchase. There are two main goals here:

• Establish trust and credibility. The thing is, people only want to purchase from brands they can trust. This is the most important purpose of inbound marketing.
• Educating your audience about your product or service, especially your unique value proposition. Only when people realize your unique values, they will purchase your product and not your competitor’s.

In this stage, inbound marketing will be even more effective when combined with other lead nurturing campaigns like email marketing and social media marketing among others.

The key here is to refer to the two main goals discussed above when planning and developing your content pieces.

3. Conversion

There are two different conversions to discuss here: converting visitors to prospects/leads, and converting leads into actual customers.

Inbound marketing is very effective in driving blog visitors into leads, as we have discussed on the lead generation section above. However, inbound marketing is less effective at converting leads into actual customers, although it’s not impossible.

Here are some key tactics you can implement to optimize conversions:

• Optimize your site and landing pages

Make sure all your pages, including your email content is mobile-responsive and have fast loading speeds.

If you include links, make sure it is easy enough to click on mobile device.Similarly, make sure all forms are easy to fill on phone screens, and don’t use too many fields (4-5 is the maximum).

• Optimize CTA placements

You can include CTA buttons within your content. Yet, make sure the placement doesn’t disrupt the user in consuming the content. You might want to check this guide by Crazy Egg (written by Neil Patel) on optimizing CTA buttons.

• Monitor and Refine

Monitor the performance of your content, and aim to refine future content pieces according to this data. You can also re-optimize or even leverage existing content pieces.

End Words

As you can see, although inbound marketing seemed like a simple strategy at first, there are many different tactics and optimizations you can implement to maximize your results.

Inbound marketing is a very effective way especially to generate and nurture leads. The key here is to understand your audience, especially their needs and behaviors, and provide values and solutions according to their needs and problems.

If you work with a professional digital marketing consultant to implement inbound marketing properly, you will see sustainable growth in your business.

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

In this guide, we will share the blueprint of developing a recurring revenue model where you can automate your marketing. Let us begin by discussing the benefits of the recurring revenue business model.

The Advantages of Recurring Revenue Business Model

In the past decade or so, one of the most interesting shifts in the business world is the rise -and success- of subscription-based business model, which we often call the “recurring revenue” business model. Yet, the recurring revenue business model is not solely about subscription, as there are many different models that can produce the recurring revenue.

Here are some of the best advantages of the recurring revenue model.

Predictable Revenue Stream

With a recurring revenue model where customers will need to pay a fee monthly or annually for using a product or service, we can easily predict our monthly revenue.

Having a predictable, and especially measurable monthly/annual revenue has many benefits on its own. For starters, you can notice immediately when there’s something wrong or when you are not seeing any growth. This way, you can evaluate and adjust your strategy if necessary.

Scalability

Another key benefit of the recurring revenue model is the amazing scalability, and so it is easier to achieve growth. When a customer is locked in into the recurring revenue via subscriptions and monthly payments, you wouldn’t need to spend your time -and resources- to retain customers.Meaning, you can put your resources into acquiring new customers and only managing your churn rate when necessary.

Minimize Churn, Maximize Loyalty

We have briefly discussed churn rate and customer retention above, and with a recurring revenue model, it is significantly easier to manage retention and brand loyalty. This is mainly because with a monthly payment or subscription, the purchase -the hardest part of running any business- has been made on a monthly/annual basis. So, all the business has to do to maintain or increase retention is to keep the customers happy and engaged. Compare this with a regular business model where a customer can so easily switch to your competitor’s product every month, and you will need to keep convincing them.

Maximizing Revenue and Profit

Also, a recurring revenue model will allow you to more frequently reach out to customers, because they know they are tied to your service/product, and won’t be annoyed when receiving another promotional email. This way, you will have a higher open/click-through rate on your email marketing, where you can update your customers with new product features, or even offering up-sell.

By offering your existing customers add-ons, new features, expansions, and even new products/services, you can generate higher revenue and profit.

Now, we’ve learned the key advantages of the recurring revenue model, and especially why you should adopt the business model. For the rest of this guide, we will discuss the key steps to build a recurring revenue business and automate your marketing processes. Let us begin.

Step 1: Choosing The Right Product

Not every product can be sold in a revenue-recurring business model. Yet, contrary to popular beliefs, your options are not solely limited to tech-based products and especially SAAS (Software as a Service) products. There are many different products across many different industries, and here are a few examples:

• In the F&B industry, you can start a daily food box delivery business where clients pay a monthly fee
• Property rental is actually a form of recurring-revenue business,probably the oldest one in the world. Billboard advertising leasing alo belongs to this category
• Similarly, leasing vehicles and equipment belongs to this business model
• Laundry all-in service (pickup, wash, delivery) where your clients pay a monthly fee
• Supplying regular office consumables (i.e. printer ink) in a contract-based relationship
• Supplying raw food materials or beverages to restaurants

Those above are just a few examples to give you an idea. As long as you can charge the client with a monthly fee or subscription, the product is viable. Now, obviously there’s two different approaches you can take for this step: producing your own product/service, or reselling from vendors. If you do have the available resources, obviously manufacturing your own will generate a higher profit margin in general.

Producing your products can have many different approaches and unique strategies on its own, so we won’t discuss it here. Instead, here we will discuss some key principles when you decide to resell your products:

• Test many different vendors: make sure they are reliable with their delivery, quality control, etc. Make sure you can stand behind the product and build a brand around it. Don’t be hasty when choosing your vendors. Remember, it can make or break your business

• Have a plan B: have at least two different vendors unless it’s absolutely impossible (your vendor is an exclusive manufacturer of the product). There will always be cases where your vendor wouldn’t be able to deliver on time, or when you have an order overload and would need a second supplier. Always have a plan b and even plan c and d whenever possible.

• Dropship when possible: dropshipping has many benefits. It eliminates your needs for a warehouse (at least, a big one), it saves your time and resources, and especially, eliminates your need for a big capital.

• Cost efficiency: in the end, we want to make profit in this business, and we need to make sure we get the best possible COGS (cost of goods sold) to ensure maximum profit.

Step 2: Getting Your Foot In The Door

Now that you’ve decided on a product, it’s time to finally build the infrastructure of your business. This can be an extremely simple of overly complicated process, depending on many factors. Yet, here are some key areas you should focus on:

• Branding: develop a brand according to the chosen product in the previous step. There are several elements here from design to core messages to packaging among others. Check out these huge list of branding examples compiled by HubSpot.

• Write your business plan: having a clear business plan will help especially when the going gets tough. So, don’t neglect this seemingly unimportant step. Check out this guide by Bplans to help you.

• Legalize your business: do the legal aspect of your business early so you won’t have to worry about this later. The process might vary depending on your area, so double check with your local lawyer/small business association if necessary.

• Finance your business: figure out how you are going to finance the business. The money can come from your personal savings, loan from friends and family, getting an investor, and other means. Plan your finances well, as it will be the backbone of your business in the long run

• Building your team: your business is only as strong as your team’s weakest member. So, whether you will need a partner, employee, or outsource to a freelancer, do this step carefully. Check out this guide by Entrepreneur.com on building a startup team.

• Find a location: you might or might not need a physical location depending on your product choice, budget and overall business strategy. Keep in mind that renting a space can be a major expense.

• Build your website: developing a website is now easier (and cheaper) than ever, and there are many tools to assist you in the process. By having your own website, you have more control of your online presence and are not dependent of third-party solutions.

• Choose an ecommerce platform: most likely in this business model, your main platform to sell your product will be your ecommerce. There are many different platforms available today in various price ranges. So, choose one according to your needs and available budget.

• Social media channels: register your social media accounts based on your branding.

As we have mentioned, there might be other areas you will need to focus on in this step depending on your industry. Double check everything, as your infrastructure will play a huge part in your chance of success.

Step 3: Determine Your Pricing Model

While pricing strategy is very important for any business, it is arguably even more important in a recurring revenue model. Why? Because instead of a one-time purchase, your customer must commit to a relatively long term deal, which is also relatively more expensive in value. Second, with the subscription-based model, the pricing strategy will obviously be more complicated compared to “ordinary” businesses.

While there can be many different pricing tactics in a revenue recurring model, they will usually boil down to four big categories:

1.Tiered Pricing

In this pricing model, there are several different “tiers” of pricing where users get more when they choose to pay more. This pricing strategy is generally ideal, but not limited to usage-based services. For example, a cloud storage service like DropBox might charge 10$ monthly for 10GB storage, $20 for 20GB, and so on. On the other hand, a healthy food box business might have a more affordable menu option for $200/month, a more expensive menu for $300 monthly, and so on. For usage-based services, usually penalties/higher rates are billed when users exceed the monthly usage limit.

2.Unlimited Plan

In this pricing strategy, users can use the service or order the products as much as they want after paying a specific fee. This pricing strategy can be applied for any products/services, but is generally more appealing for a usage-based services like cloud storage or phone’s data plan. This pricing model is usually used in combination with other models, and especially the tiered pricing model. Balancing the value between the limited and unlimited prices will be the key to success in this pricing strategy.

3. Freemium

The term freemium rose in popularity around a decade ago with various internet-based products and services. Here, you essentially offer the product for free, while customers have the option to pay for the “premium” version of the product with more features. Another version of this model is to give free-trials, where you offer a specific period where customers can try the product/service for free.

4. Installment/Flexible Payment

This pricing strategy is used in combination with other models. Typically in a recurring revenue business, customers can have a more affordable price if they opt to pay for 12-months of more in advance instead of just a month. To further make this option more interesting, we can offer them a flexible payment options or installments, where they can pay for 4-months or 6-months first in advance. This pricing model can also work if you are a contract-based supplier. For example, if you are a meat supplier for a restaurant, you can let the restaurant pay every quarter instead of monthly.

As mentioned, these are not the only available pricing strategies for revenue recurring businesses. Be creative with your pricing options, and the key here is how you can make the price interesting enough for customers while maintaining profit.

Step 4: Scaling Your Model

Above, we have mentioned how one of the key advantages of the recurring revenue business model is its scalability. In any industry, the market leader always have an almost unfair advantage, which is especially true in the tech-related businesses. So, it is very important to plan your scaling strategies ahead and aim to achieve as much growth as you can, to be the market leader as soon as possible.

But, how can we actually scale the business? Again, there can be many different strategies, but there are generally two approaches you can take: to acquire more customers, or to get more revenue from your existing customers.

Acquiring More Customers

While there can be many different strategies to acquire more customers, it will boil down to just three:

• Generating More Leads

You can’t have new customers when you don’t have new prospects (or leads). So, to scale effectively, you will need to have working lead generation devices. We will discuss this more in the next steps, but check out this guide by Optinmonster listing a lot of creative lead generation methods.

• Have More Sales Team

Having more (proper) salespeople in your team will generally result in more sales. Yet, won’t having more people in your team results in a higher overhead and less profit? The higher overhead is correct, and this is why many revenue recurring businesses offer a cheaper price for customers who are willing to pay upfront (for 12-months, usually). Yet, it doesn’t necessarily result in less profit, as each performing salespeople can bring more than one customers, resulting in exponential rise in revenue.

• Customer Advocacy/Referral Marketing

Arguably the best way to achieve scalability is when your customers turn into your advocates and promote your products for essentially free. This is the dream of all businesses, but it is obviously easier than done. In essence, you will need  to have your product went viral or be a market leader before you can achieve exponential growth from advocacy.

To tackle this issue, we can do referral marketing instead, which is offering incentives to your customers and even non-customers to be your referral marketers. The key of a successful referral marketing is the amount of your incentives: give too much, and your risk the quality of your referrals. Yet, offering too little, and you might not get any referral marketers.

Step 4: Setting Up Marketing and Sales Funnels

Customers won’t generally buy your product/service immediately after they have been introduced to it. Instead, they typically follow a process we know as buyer’s journey.

This is why, we should develop our marketing and sales strategies based on this buyer’s journey, by creating a model we know as marketing funnel and sales funnel. We call them “funnels” because with each step, generally we have less prospects, and so if we put these steps into a diagram, we will see a funnel shape.

Typically, the bottom of the marketing funnel is also the top of the sales funnel: marketing generates interests (leads), and then it’s the job of the sales team to finalize the deal. Different businesses and products will have different sales process, and thus different funnel. However, generally we can divide the marketing and sales funnel into three big stages: the top, the middle, and the bottom, each with their own different goals.

Top of The Funnel

The goal here is to attract new prospects, or technically, generate leads. This stage of the funnel is mainly about making your business known, and so that the targeted audience can be aware that your company/brand/product exists.

It is important to note that your audience in this stage is generally not ready to purchase your product/service.So, your main job here is to showcase credibility and authority as an expert in your niche/industry, to also show that you have a reliable product.

In practice, activities in this stage of the funnel can be a  new audience who stumbled upon your content after a Google search, or someone who clicked on your banner ad while browsing.

Middle of The Funnel

More often than not, we give too much focus on the top and the bottom stages of the funnel and neglect the middle one. Yet, this stage is actually very important, as this is where you build relationship and trust so that those that are already aware of your brand can then be interested. In short, this middle stage of the funnel is about nurturing leads until they are ready to purchase.

So, this stage is all about amplifying your credibility and authority which you have built on the previous stage. Also, in this stage you should qualify (link to lead qualification) and nurture your leads.

Bottom of The Funnel

The audience that stayed in this stage already has an adequate level of trust with your brands, and so here your main goal is to convert these prospects into purchasing customers.

Here’s the catch: even when people are already convinced with your product/brand and is ready for a purchase, they won’t buy immediately when there’s no urgency. This is why many marketers often use limited time offer or similar tactics to build urgency in this stage.

So, what you’ll need to do in this step is to break down the processes and strategies you will have for each funnel stage, which will be necessary for the next step. Simulate different funnel possibilities, for example, a prospect might stumble upon your content from a Google search (the top of the funnel), nurtured through email marketing (middle), and finally converts after attending a webinar (bottom). Trial and error different funnel scenarios, and optimize on the most effective one(s).

Check out this guide by Teachable to help you further in building your marketing funnel.

Step 6: Developing A Marketing Strategy

Now that you have known how your marketing/sales funnel will shape, and the key processes that should be addressed, we can work with B2B marketing expert and consultant to develop a proper marketing strategy according to the funnel.

As we have discussed above, since there are three primary stages to the funnel, we can also divide the marketing activities into three big groups:

1. Lead Generation

Here, the purpose of the marketing activities is to attract as much prospects as possible. While there can be many different approaches, the strategies will boil down into two: first, attracting leads by reaching out to potential prospects through advertising, paid social media marketing, events, cold calling and other similar “outbound” activities. We call this “outbound” or traditional marketing. Next is allowing ourselves to “be found” by customers, mainly by consistently publishing valuable contents that are relevant to our customers. This way, we get “inbound” leads that come to our business instead of us to them, and so we call this inbound marketing.

Common tactics in this category are:

• Content marketing: by regularly publishing valuable contents, you can establish your position as the industry expert, and thus gain customers’ trusts.

• SEO: Search Engine Optimization works hand in hand with content marketing, especially written content. The main way people consume content is through a Google search, and with SEO experts you can give your content visibility.

• Influencer marketing: essentially, getting influencers of your industry to promote your brand. In this saturated marketplace, this tactic is very valuable.

• Advertising (including paid social media): always effective, but can be extremely expensive not managed well. The key here is to balance

• Referral marketing: getting people to market your product/service in exchange for an incentive.

Obviously, there can be many other lead generation tactics you can try. Check out this guide by Marketo to help you further.

2. Lead Nurturing

As the name suggests, in this category our activities should focus on nurturing the prospects until they are ready to buy the product. There are two main aspects to lead nurturing: qualifying (scoring) leads, and content marketing. Content marketing here serves two purposes: educating your prospects with the benefits of your product, and to maintain your relationship with the prospect.

Qualifying Leads

Although at first glance, having as many leads as we can to work with can be a great thing, the thing is, we only have a finite amount of resources and especially time. This is why qualifying your leads is very important: we only need to nurture those with the highest chance of converting. Yet, how can we determine that? Lead qualifying can be a pretty broad subject on its own, and there can be many different frameworks to utilize. You might want to check out this guide by HubSpot to learn further, but here are the key aspects to consider:

1. Fit

How the prospect will fit to your business according to demographics. You can use the infamous BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Time) to assess this aspect: can the prospect afford your product? Do they have the authority to make the purchase decision? Can you answer their specific need/problem? What is their timeline to fix their problem or increase their life quality?

2. Interest

You can track various behaviour to determine the prospect’s interest by using various analytics tools like Google Analytics or KISSMetrics. If the prospect spent a lot of time on your site and engage a lot with your social media channels, for example, this prospect is interested enough.

3. Behavior

Further examining the prospect’s behavior can show whether they are looking to purchase, or just researching for information. For example, prospects that are only consuming blog posts should have a lower score compared to those who registered for a free trial or attend an event/webinar.

4. Time

How ready is the prospect to purchase the product, and where are they currently on the marketing and sales funnel? Analyze behaviors and align them with the top, middle, and bottom stage of your funnel.

Content Marketing

Above, we have mentioned how content marketing is a very important aspect of the lead generation activities. Yet, it is also highly essential in this lead nurturing stage, showing its importance in any marketing strategy and at every stage of the marketing funnel.

In this saturated and highly advanced marketplace where customers are now highly resistant to advertising, content marketing is now the primary voice of any brands online. It attracts, engages, and educates your audience until they are ready to buy. There can be many different applications of content marketing as a lead nurturing device, but here are the primary ones:

Email and Content Marketing

Even with all the new platforms and technologies, email is still one of the most effective ways to communicate with your prospects and customers. In fact, email marketing still has the highest ROI of over 4,000% compared to other marketing channels. Why, it’s simple, because studies apparently suggested that 73% of consumers prefer emails over other channels, especially to receive promotional messages.

On-Site Content Marketing

Your brand website is your storefront, it’s where your prospects ultimately will judge whether they can trust you or not. Content marketing on your website primarily comes in three different forms: your blog, where you can update it regularly with fresh content pieces, your highly-targeted landing pages, primarily as a showcase that you are an expert in your industry, and a centralized resource center where people can find any information related to your product and/or your industry.

Social Media Content Marketing

Social media content strategy can be a pretty broad subject, and we probably won’t give it much justice here. The key here is to find the right social media platform(s) where your ideal audience are primarily active, and present these audience with the right content type according to the platform. Check out this guide by Curata to learn further about this subject.

3. Conversion-Focused Marketing

In the past, the job of the marketing team stopped in the lead nurturing and even in the lead generation stage, while conversion was primarily the job of the sales team. Nowadays, however, the lines between marketing and sales are increasingly blurred.

The ultimate goal of your marketing strategy, after all, is to drive more sales, and here are the key marketing tactics in this category:

• Content marketing: yes, content marketing is also here. Your content pieces will be the ones educating customers about your product, and where you can establish yourself as a trustworthy brand in front of the customers
• Email marketing: as mentioned, email marketing still has the highest ROI over other channels. Keep the content short, to the point, and consider giving interesting offers
• Advertising: one of the most effective ways to drive more conversions is by investing on high-quality ads paired with conversion-focused landing pages
• Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Bottom Line

A recurring revenue business certainly has many benefits over the traditional models, especially since we can accurately predict our monthly/annual revenue. Remember, however, that the key to success in recurring revenue model is still similar to other businesses: providing value and answer your customer’s problems.

Many recurring revenue businesses made the mistake of too aggressively pushing products (that are often low-quality) and pressuring their customers with scammy sales funnels, and yet still complain when their business doesn’t grow. So, the secret here is to manufacture and/or resell high-quality and reliable products that can bring value to your customers.

The post How To Automate Your Marketing: Building a Recurring-Revenue Business appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.