So, what actually is B2B inbound marketing?

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

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

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

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

This is where B2B inbound marketing comes in.

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

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

B2B inbound marketing can be divided into three core steps:

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

B2C VS B2B Inbound Marketing

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

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

1. Purchase Motivation

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

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

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

2. Purchase Decision Maker

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

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

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

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

3. Conversion Timeline

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

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

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

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

Developing B2B Inbound Marketing Strategy

1. Defining B2BInbound Marketing Objectives

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

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

Make sure your inbound marketing objectives are:

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

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

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

2. Develop Your Buyer Personas

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

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

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

Job details

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

Demographic data

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

Organizational information

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

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

Needs/Pain Points

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

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

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

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

3. Content Creation

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

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

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

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

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

Communicate your product’s value instead of the product itself

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

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

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

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

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

Combining various mediums

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

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

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

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

Don’t forget technical optimization

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

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

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

4. Content Promotion

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

So, how exactly are we going to achieve that?

SEO

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

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

Content quality

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

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

Guest posting and collaboration

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

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

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

Social media

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

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

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

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

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

5. Optimize Your Lead Magnets and CTAs

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

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

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

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

So, what should we offer?

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

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

Product demo/free-trial:

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

Ebook/whitepaper

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

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

Webinar

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

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

Educational videos

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

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

6. Measure and Evaluate Your Progress

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

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

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

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

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

End Words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building 7-Figure Companies With B2B SEO

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

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

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

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

Learn more

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

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

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

Learn more

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

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

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

Learn more

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

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

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

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

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

How B2B SEO Actually Works: Understanding The Ranking Signals

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

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

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

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

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

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

B2B SEO VS B2C SEO

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

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

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

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

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

1. Targeting Multiple Stakeholders and Decision Makers

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

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

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

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

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

2. Expect Lower Conversion Rate and Longer Sales Cycle

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

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

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

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

3. Low Search Volume Keyword With High Value

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

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

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

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

4. The Importance of Establishing Expertise and Thought Leadership

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

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

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

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

Developing a Comprehensive B2B SEO Strategy in 2025

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

1. Proper Keyword Research

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

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

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

2. Content Development

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

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

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

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

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

3. On-site Technical Optimizations

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

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

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

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

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

4. Link Building, Both in Quantity and Quality

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

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

So, how can we do it?

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

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

Again, your content is going to be the key.

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. The Intent(s) Of Our Audience

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

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

So, here we should focus on two things:

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

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

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

2. How To Deliver Value-Based on These Intents

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

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

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

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

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

3. How We Can Convince The Search Engines

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

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

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

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

End Words

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

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

Why Do You Need to Hire an SEO Company (And The Right One For You)?

The first thing you’ll need to understand is that SEO is actually not a rocket science. Technical-wise, SEO is fairly easy to learn, and if you are willing to learn about the concept and spend your time and resources, you can implement SEO by yourself without spending any money.

So, with that out of the question, why do we actually need to work with an SEO company or even a full-service digital marketing consultant?

The answer lies in the fact that although SEO is – as mentioned – fairly manageable to implement, it is a long-term effort that will demand consistency. SEO will require long-term hard work in at least several aspects:

• Publishing high-quality content pieces that are properly optimized for SEO
• Link-building, often the most tedious aspect of SEO. This can consist of several different aspects from analyzing backlinks profile to building key relationships to re-optimizing
• Technical optimizations, from assessing the current state of your website to analyzing your competition to implementing the best practices of SEO optimizations
• Monitoring and handling reviews – including and especially the negative ones, especially in the case of local SEO

With these being said, the real question is whether you have the time, and manpower, to implement SEO. On average, it will take 6 to 12 months of consistent SEO efforts before you can see significant results (i.e., your website ranking on the first page of Google search).

Depending on the size of your team and whether you have the luxury of time, most of the time working with an SEO expert is a better choice so that you can invest your time and resources elsewhere.

Remember that SEO is just a single aspect of an integrated digital marketing strategy. SEO will only bring its maximum results when other marketing channels such as social media marketing, content marketing, and email marketing, among others are also performing well.

1. Mike Khorev

Mike Khorev is a U.S.-based SEO consultant and the founder of mikekhorev.com, specializing in data-driven SEO strategies for SaaS, B2B, and eCommerce companies. With over a decade of experience, he focuses on technical SEO, content optimization, and scalable organic growth strategies. Mike typically works with mid-sized and enterprise-level businesses, offering hands-on consulting rather than high-volume agency services. Because of this personalized approach, he works with a limited number of clients at a time and positions himself as a premium SEO consultant.

2. Nine Peaks

Nine Peaks Media is a digital marketing agency specializing in SEO and lead generation. This agency has as strong global reputation, and is focused on maximizing SEO results through content and inbound marketing.

In this modern day of SEO, there’s no shortcut to ranking on the search engines besides consistent publication of relevant content, and this is precisely what Nine Peaks Media offers. Nine Peaks Media also take pride on their local SEO services to help small businesses improve their ranking on Google Maps.

3. Growth Partners Media

Growth Partners Media is a B2B-focused SEO agency specializing in authority-led organic growth for B2B companies operating in competitive global markets.

Rather than treating link building as a volume exercise, the agency focuses on editorial-quality backlinks, strategic niche edits, and community-driven brand mentions to strengthen authority, trust, and long-term ranking stability. Campaigns are built around manual outreach, established industry partnerships, and page-level prioritization to ensure link equity supports revenue-driving pages, not just traffic growth.

Growth Partners Media also aligns its SEO execution with modern search behavior, including AI-generated results and entity-based ranking signals, helping clients build durable visibility across both traditional search and emerging AI discovery surfaces. This authority-first, strategy-led approach makes Growth Partners Media a strong choice for B2B companies seeking scalable, defensible SEO growth rather than short-term ranking wins.

4. SeoLogist

SeoLogist is an SEO company in Toronto that partners with brands across Canada, the U.S., and beyond to build sustainable, long-term organic growth. As a company, they focus on strategy and execution rather than quick hacks, combining Technical SEO, Content optimization, and Link acquisition to help businesses compete in demanding markets. SeoLogist works with both local businesses and larger, multi-location brands, tailoring each campaign around the client’s goals, industry, and growth stage. Company also at the forefront of AI-driven search. They help brands adapt to the shift toward Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Their services include comprehensive GEO and SEO audits, On-page and Technical SEO, Local SEO and ongoing performance reporting, giving decision-makers clear visibility into results.

With an experienced team and a process refined over many years, SeoLogist is a solid choice if you’re looking for a hands-on SEO partner that can manage complex campaigns while staying aligned with your broader digital marketing strategy.

5. Aira

Aira is a UK-based marketing agency that is not only focusing on SEO, but search marketing (PPC), social media marketing, content marketing, and overall digital marketing campaigns. Specializing on small and mid-size tech companies, Aira is a relatively small but experienced agency that emphasizes on understanding the client’s goals and deliver results.

6. Cloud22

Cloud 22 (formerly known as HallAnalysis) is a results-driven SEO agency focused on building sustainable organic growth through data-backed strategies. The team emphasizes technical SEO, performance analysis, and risk mitigation to ensure long-term search visibility. Cloud 22 works with mid-sized and large businesses that require scalable, analytics-focused SEO campaigns and a strategic, measurable approach to growth.

7. Vertical Measures

A Phoenix-based, award-winning full-service marketing agency, Vertical Measures (also known as IDX) is a global reaching agency with Fortune 500 companies as some of its clients. Specializing on content marketing, SEO, link acquisition, and paid advertising optimization, Vertical Measures focuses on enterprise and especially B2B clients. Relatively expensive, but certainly is one of the best agencies in the world.

How To Choose A SEO Company?

As stated, the main purpose of working with an SEO company is to save your time and resources. However, choosing the wrong one can be counterproductive, as it can ruin months or even years of SEO efforts if you are not careful.

With that being said, here are some important considerations when choosing the right SEO agency:

1. Defining Your SEO Goals

The first, and arguably the most important step in choosing the right SEO company is actually to look inwards: assess the current state of your online presence, and decide the key areas you would want to improve. If you can define clear and realistic SEO goals, you can have an easier time judging the different SEO companies to find the right team for the job. In this step, you would want to perform a thorough SEO audit, as well as overall marketing analytics. Thankfully, there are now various analytic tools that can help you in this step. The principle is relatively obvious: the better you understand your needs, the easier you can find the right people that can help with these needs.

2. Data-Gathering and Analysis Capabilities

As we can see from the previous step, a huge part of SEO is collecting, analyzing, and actually using data to improve your website’s performance. The thing is, different companies will need to track different KPIs and different metrics according to their niche, goals, and many other factors. So, it is important to work with an SEO company that can measure and analyze the right metrics according to your needs. This way, you can properly align your SEO goals and track the performance of your SEO campaign. Before you approach an SEO company, list your important online KPIs and metrics, and discuss these with the potential agencies.

3. Define Your Budget

SEO agencies and freelance SEO experts (which are also viable options here) come with different price tags and packages. Remember that we have mentioned that technically, you can implement SEO by yourself for absolutely free, so here you are actually buying time. It is wise to plan your budget ahead, so you can narrow down your options and avoid unnecessary spending. So, when approaching an SEO agency, it is wise to ask upfront about their costs and packages. This way, you can know early on if an agency is within your price range. Most SEO agencies will offer their service with a variety of monthly costs, so it’s relatively easy to compare between them, budget-wise. Remember to also consider your SEO goals when deciding on the appropriate budget.

4. Checking Reviews and Reputations

We are checking agencies offering the SEO service, which is centered around online presence. So, it would only make sense to choose agencies with a prominent digital presence where we can transparently check reviews, testimonials, and even case studies. You can explore the company’s site for this information, but you can also check third-party review platforms (sometimes a quick Google search will do). If possible, request case studies from the agency, which can often be done by simply submitting a request on their sites. You can also contact their previous client (or even a current client, which some reputable agencies can arrange). This way, you can get a more objective assessment of the company’s reliability.

5. Scheduling a Consultation

Once you’ve narrowed down your options, you can schedule consultations with your chosen SEO agencies. This will be a great approach to learn about their methods and strategies, and whether they can meet your goals. It’s important to remember that there’s no secret strategy or the “holy grail” for SEO: it’s all about consistency and hard work. A reputable SEO company will be transparent about their tactics and in most cases, will be upfront with the required timeline (6-12 months or even more being ideal). In the world of SEO, it can’t be more true that if something is too good to be true, it is. This consultation will also help you to understand the people behind the agency—their team—, and whether their level of passion, work ethics, and creativity will work well with your company. Ask as many specific questions as you can here, and figure out all the necessary information. Remember that you are making a long-term investment, so don’t be afraid to ask.

Comparison Table

Conclusion

Hiring the right SEO company isn’t about outsourcing “something technical”-it’s about buying consistent execution over months, across content, links, technical improvements, and reputation monitoring. Since meaningful results often take 6–12 months, the best agencies are the ones that align with your goals, can measure what matters, fit your budget, and are transparent about timelines and tactics. The right partner also understands that SEO performs best when integrated with broader marketing channels like content, social, and email.

Key Takeaways

• SEO is learnable, but successful SEO requires long-term consistency across content, links, technical fixes, and monitoring.
• Most brands need an SEO company because they’re really buying time, expertise, systems, and execution capacity.
• Expect meaningful SEO wins in 6 – 12 months, not weeks-be wary of “too good to be true” promises.
• Choose a provider by aligning goals, KPI tracking ability, budget, reputation, and consultation fit.
• The best SEO outcomes happen when SEO supports (and is supported by) a broader digital marketing strategy.

FAQs

Q1. If SEO isn’t rocket science, why hire an SEO company?

Because SEO is less about knowing what to do and more about doing it consistently for months-publishing optimized content, building links, improving technical health, and tracking performance without slipping.

Q2. How long does it take to see real SEO results?

Typically 6 to 12 months of consistent effort to reach significant outcomes like first-page rankings and steady organic lead flow (sometimes earlier for small wins).

Q3. What should I look for when choosing an SEO company?

Start by defining goals, then evaluate: (1) data & KPI tracking ability, (2) budget alignment, (3) reviews/reputation and case studies, and (4) transparency during consultation about methods and timelines.

Q4. How do pricing and value differ between consultants and agencies?

Consultants (like premium hands-on operators) often deliver deeper strategic focus and direct execution with limited clients, while agencies may offer broader teams, systems, and multi-channel marketing support-value depends on your needs and internal resources.

Q5. What questions should I ask during an SEO consultation?

Ask about: target KPIs, expected timeline, what’s included (content, links, technical), reporting cadence, how they handle algorithm changes, examples of past results, and what they need from your team to succeed.

The post The Best SEO Agencies in the World appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

So, without a proper customer acquisition strategy for your startup, you are going to run into various problems along the way, and it’s going to be very difficult if not downright impossible to grow your business both B2B and B2C.

On the other hand, figuring out which channel is the most effective and sustainable to use in generating new customers is often the biggest challenge for any business.

In this guide, we will discuss all you need to know about how to plan and execute a working startup customer acquisition strategy. By the end of this guide, you’ll be able to recognize the most effective channels you can use to acquire new customers sustainable and how to properly execute your campaigns.

Let us begin by discussing the basic concept of customer acquisition for startups so we can be on the same page for the rest of this guide.

What Is Customer Acquisition

Customer acquisition, in a layman’s term, is any effort and process of bringing in new clients or customers to your business. We say we have “acquired” a new customer when we have successfully persuaded a consumer to purchase a product and/or service.

So, a customer acquisition strategy is a systematic, sustainable process of acquiring new customers on a long-term basis, and this customer acquisition strategy should be able to evolve and adapt to new market trends and evolving customer behaviors.

Different startups with different revenue models might have different customer acquisition strategies. However, all effective acquisition strategies should begin by identifying quality prospects (potential customers).

Typically, all consumers must go through a customer journey or buyer’s journey before they finally purchased a product or service, which can be divided into three main stages:

• Awareness stage: they figured out a new business or brand, and gain awareness about this brand and its product and/or service
• Consideration stage: the prospect considers purchasing the product/service from this brand. They might compare it with other similar products and services during this stage, check reviews, and ask for recommendations from their peers.
• Decision stage: the prospect choose to purchase a product and converts from a prospect into a customer

There are typically more people in the awareness stage compared to those in the consideration stage, and only a select few of those in the consideration stage will enter the decision stage. So, if we visualize these stages, we can see a funnel-shaped chart similar to the image below.

Customer acquisition for startups typically refers to this funnel as a whole, but mainly the first two stages (awareness and consideration), which are often also referred to as the top (lead generation) and the middle (lead acquisition) of the funnel.

The bottom of the funnel—the decision stage— or lead conversion phase, is technically still a part of the customer acquisition but may be considered a separate initiative called conversion-rate optimization or CRO, especially for eCommerce startups.

Preliminary Step: Define Your Target Audience

As we have established above, all customer acquisition strategies for any startup should begin by identifying your target audience.

An important principle to understand is that your product or service won’t please and attract everyone. There are very, very few products that meet a universal need.

Instead, your product will be a solution for only a certain group(s) of people, your ideal audience. Discovering who your target audience is is the essential preliminary step of your customer acquisition strategy, so you can tailor your strategy and focus your efforts primarily on this target audience.

If you haven’t defined your target audience, you are essentially adding unnecessary handicaps to your customer acquisition efforts, and so they won’t be effective.

So, conduct your market research and develop your buyer persona. Find as much information as you can about who you should market your product/service to and how to attract this audience effectively.

This insight will be the strongest foundation of your whole customer acquisition strategy.

Customer Acquisition Strategies

What is the most effective customer acquisition strategy for startups? There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as the best strategy for your startup will depend on various factors from your available resources, overall business objectives, and ultimately, your target audience.

Nowadays, however, there are only four main tactics or methods of acquiring customers: content marketing, search engine marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing. We will discuss them one by one:

1.  Content Marketing

In 2026, we can now safely say that content marketing is marketing itself, and in regards to startup customer acquisition, it is an effective method for virtually all kinds of startup.

The main idea in content marketing for startups is to consistently publish high-quality and relevant content to attract the target audience’s attention and drive them to your website. So, content marketing is especially effective in the awareness and consideration stage: the audience stumbles upon your content when they are looking for information and learn about your product or service (awareness), and they might consume more content when they consider between your product and your competitors’ (consideration).

Content marketing is the preferred marketing strategy today (in a concept we know as inbound marketing) because of one main reason: people are getting increasingly resistant to traditional advertisement and promotion. Traditional ads disrupt our initial activity. For example, we are browsing a website and then there’s a pop-up banner. Obviously, the ad is disruptive (and annoying).

Content, however, is not disruptive since the audience is the one proactively looking for information. In fact, if the content is relevant and helpful, they will perceive the brand (your brand) as trustworthy and helpful, so you are eliminating barriers rather than building walls.

Content marketing can come in several different mediums, such as:

Blogging

The most common form and arguably still the most effective, you can implement blogging as an effective customer acquisition strategy for all kinds of startup, industries, and audience types.

Blogging has two main benefits over other forms: it’s accessible (both for the audience and the publisher), and it’s versatile. You can easily explore different topics and content approach in your blog with minimum risks. On the other hand, if you’ve found any specific niche, you can be consistent and leverage it to build your credibility as an expert/thought leader in the niche.

Also, building a blog—even from scratch—-is very affordable. Your biggest cost here will typically be your investments in content creators/writers.

In-Depth text-based content

This can include forms like white papers, ebooks, research reports, guides, and others. Typically these types of content are delivered as “gated” content. That is, the prospect typically needs to provide their contact information before they can access or download the content.

So, these in-depth content forms are often very important in capturing leads. We won’t be able to acquire customers before we first capture them as leads or prospects, so this is a very important customer acquisition method.

The idea behind this method is to convince the audience that you are offering something valuable for free so the audience is willing to provide their contact information.A common tactic is to attract readers with a blog post, then offer a more in-depth ebook covering the same topic as the post. This way, if a reader feels that your blog post is relevant and valuable, then they might be interested in consuming the gated content (and exchange their contact information).

As we can see, these in-depth content forms have a different purpose than traditional blog posts, and obviously the production process is also different. We’d need more time and commitment to create this in-depth content, and they might also need a unique and specific promotional plan.

This method, called the lead magnet, is a very crucial lead generation device.

Videos and podcasts

We can’t deny the fact that more and more people are consuming video content as their main way to consume information. 85% of all U.S. internet users watched online videos in 2018, and nowadays it’s probably close to 100%. Also, podcasts are also rising as a medium since mid-2019.

Obviously, videos and podcasts are more complicated to produce than text-based content, but nowadays quality cameras, microphones, and other video and audio production equipment are now much more affordable and accessible. Also, there are now a lot of freelancers and affordable agencies, so producing videos and podcasts are actually easier than you think.

Remember that the content itself is always more important than the overall production quality of your videos and podcasts (but that’s not saying the quality is not important). Since videos are usually the most expensive to produce, it’s best to preserve your best content for videos first. If, for example, you are only going to visualize a blog post, you can use various animation software and even Slideshare to reduce production costs.

The principle of using videos and podcasts in customer acquisition is similar to text-based content: provide value to attract users, introduce them to your brand/product/service, and drive them to your website to capture them as leads.

2. Search Engine Marketing

It’s important to note that when we refer to “search marketing”, it doesn’t necessarily mean SEO.

Instead, there are two different sides to search engine marketing: organic (or free) search engine marketing, which is search engine optimization (SEO), and paid search marketing, which is PPC ads.

The case of PPC ads vs SEO is just like any case of paid vs organic efforts: it’s about time vs cost.

Organic efforts are (at least it should be) free, but it’s going to take a significant amount of time before you can get any significant result. In the case of SEO, it typically takes at least  6 to 12 months before we can get on the first page of Google’s SERP and gain a significant amount of traffic.

On the other hand, paid efforts like PPC ads will guarantee results, provided you have the budget. But, they can be extremely expensive if you are not careful.

Nevertheless, both sides of search marketing is a very important customer acquisition channel due to several reasons:

• There are over 3.5 billion searches on Google every day, and the number is still growing by roughly 10% every year
• 89% of B2B professionals use Google to find solutions and services that can help their business
• 95% of internet users will not go to the second page of Google, so investing in SEO is very important
• Traffic from organic search converts 566% better than traffic coming from PPC ads, so you can’t rely on PPC ads alone

SEO for startups is currently one of the most popular customer acquisition methods due to several reasons. First, it is relatively accessible and easy to implement (even if you are going to do it yourself), and it is cost-effective with relatively low initial investments and high ROI. However, as we have established, hiring an SEO agency or services for your startup and seeing the first results can take time, and this is where PPC ads can help.

Search marketing works in combination with content marketing (as discussed above). You won’t rank on Google unless you have relevant, quality content, while your content won’t get any traffic if you don’t have enough search presence.

3. Social Media Marketing

Similar to search engine marketing, social media marketing can be divided into two: paid and organic, and the same case also applies: time VS cost.

Organic social media marketing is about growing your own followers on social media and posting your content regularly. This is obviously cost-effective and when done right we can do it for absolutely free. However, growing followers on social media can take years before we get a significant amount (say, above 10,000), and obviously it’s not always successful even after we’ve regularly published high-quality content.

Paid social media, on the other hand, is about using paid advertising and other paid promotional channels provided by the respective social media networks. For example, on Facebook and Instagram, we can invest in various Facebook Ads.

Again, while investing on these paid options can guarantee short-term and even instant results, they can be very expensive to invest in. The current average CPC (Cost Per Click) for Facebook ads is $0.97 or if you prefer CPM, it’s around $7 per 1000 impressions. As you can see, the cost is pretty high.

So, as with search marketing, finding the right balance is very important here.

Organic social media efforts are especially important in building awareness and to develop an online personality. This is a great opportunity to establish your position as the thought leader and expert of your industry, especially when it’s paired with effective content marketing–as discussed above.

You can also use social media to share content you’ve published on other platforms. So, we can think of social media as an amplification of your other acquisition tactics.

There are several reasons, however, to why social media is now increasingly more important as a customer acquisition strategy:

• Reach: a viral social media post can reach a lot of people in a very short amount of time, making. The virality factor is a very important advantage of social media as a customer acquisition channel, as you
• Targeting: another great advantage of using social media in generating leads and acquiring customers is the transparency of the platforms. We can easily know the demographics of a social media account (if it’s not anonymous) and decide whether it’s a good fit for your company.
• Two-way: you can use social media channels to gather feedback from your customers, and at the same time can provide suggestions and promote your brand.
• Big data: social media actively generates massive customer data with the sheer number of posts, videos, pictures, mentions, and so on. You can collect, analyze, and leverage this data to custom-tailor your customer acquisition strategy.

In general, there are several ways we can use social media to generate leads and acquire customers:

• Drive your social media audience a lead-capture landing page or your website. It’s relatively hard to capture contact information straight from social media posts, so it’s more efficient to drive them to a web page instead.
• You can include links for opt-in forms on social media posts, so people can sign-up for your newsletters.
• Include CTAs in your social media posts as natural as possible, but don’t be afraid to use it.

The secret to useful utilization of social media as a customer acquisition channel is to develop a strategic plan to tackle three core issues:

1. Choosing the right network(s) you are going to focus on, and which ones to avoid depending on your customer profile
2. Developing the brand voice on your social media, and establish a person/team responsible in delivering this brand voice and managing content
3. Developing a crisis plan to tackle issues like backlashes and negative feedbacks

For example, if you are a B2C startup, then nowadays you should mainly focus on Instagram and Facebook, probably YouTube. On the other hand, if you are a B2B startup, you should focus on LinkedIn.

4. Email Marketing

Even with all these newer platforms and communication technologies, email marketing is still the top-performing digital marketing channel with the highest ROI of up to 4,000%.

The main role of email marketing, especially in relation to the three channels discussed above, is that the three channels will involve building an email list. Leveraging on this email list to nurture prospects and convert them into customers is the key to a successful email marketing strategy.

Although this might seem like an obsolete acquisition method, the truth is that is is still a very effective way to stay engaged with your customers by promoting content through your newsletter, informing them of the launch of a new product, discounts, events, and so on.

The secrets to modern email marketing as a customer acquisition method are personalization and automation.

We can use the above channels to gather more customer data, and leverage on the data to create personalized email messages: sending the right message to the right people at exactly the right time.

Startup Customer Acquisition Strategy Best Practices

An effective customer acquisition strategy must follow three important principles:

• Highly Targeted

It’s obvious that not all consumers are the right fit for your startup. Customer acquisition can be a lengthy and expensive process, so we’d need to make sure that our resources and time are focused on the right people.

The secret to a targeted customer acquisition strategy is to do your market research, and there’s no shortcut around it. Figure out your target audience, and assess your available resource to develop a tailored strategy focused on your ideal customers.

• Diversified

We can’t rely on one channel and strategy alone to sustainably generate leads and acquire customers. You’d have a better chance of reaching new customers with more channels, and at the same time, can mitigate your risks on a channel/platform.

• Adaptable

The world is rapidly changing all the time and so does purchase behaviors. Consumers are now increasingly resistant to promotions, and more than 80% of consumers trust social proofs and advice from friends over brand claims. Gone are the days when we can have one sustainable acquisition method and rely on it. Now, we have to always be on the lookout for new opportunities, adapt, and be flexible

End Words

Customer acquisition is not only about getting more customers, but also about acquiring the most valuable customers that can stick around with your business, and ultimately can act as an advocate to convert even more people.

Every effective customer acquisition strategy must start with defining your target customers, and only then can we create a highly targeted, adaptable, and diversified strategy to effectively convert these target customers while working with a digital marketing consultant.

Consistency is always key, so it’s always important to monitor your customer acquisition methods, evaluate, and adjust your tactics whenever required.

The post Effective Customer Acquisition Strategy for Startups appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

You can implement all the advanced optimizations and even  ‘buy’ the highest-quality backlinks out there. But, if your content is low-quality, you won’t get far with your SEO.

On the other hand, SEO is also very important for content marketing. Ranking on the first page—or better, top 3 spot—of Google SERP remains one of the most reliable organic traffic sources for your content.

In short, content marketing and SEO are inseparable, and it’s best to plan the two together as an integrated strategy to get the best possible results in getting organic traffic, generating leads, and finally, converting these qualified leads into sales.

Step-by-Step Guide To SEO Content Marketing Strategy

Below, we will discuss all the necessary steps that I use in my B2B SEO services to implement content marketing and optimize content for SEO, beginning with the first step.

Step 1: Define Content Marketing Objectives

Before anything else, it’s very important to first define the objectives—or goals— of your content marketing and SEO strategy.

Your content marketing goals should align well with your marketing goals, as well as your overall business objectives. Defining these goals is very important, so we can build the right strategic framework to pursue these goals.

The main principles are that your SEO content marketing goals should be:

• Specific: clear enough to understand and to implement.
• Realistic: in a sense of, attainable. This is important to maintain a sense of achievement and maintain your morale (and your team’s). Breakdown big goals into smaller milestones, if necessary.
• Measurable: you can assign KPIs and evaluate key metrics to measure the content marketing performance according to these objectives.

With those being said, here are some common SEO content marketing objectives you might want to apply to your own:

• • Establish credibility and trust. A common objective for SEO content marketing, and a pretty obvious one. Consistent publication of relevant content can help establish your position as the thought leader in your industry.

• Attract new prospects. Also an important objective. Compelling and valuable content can attract new potential leads. This is mainly done by publishing content that gets shared a lot on social media—and if possible, go viral—.
• Educate prospects and customers. Inform potential leads and existing customers about your product/service. It can also be about solutions to your audience’s pain points (not directly discussing your product).
• Persuade people to buy. Here, the content is designed to handle sales objections, so content might talk about why your product is worth the hefty price, or a case study on how your service can save more money in the long run.
• Tell a story. All content should essentially aim to be a storytelling medium.
• Maximize retention/loyalty: content marketing is one of the most effective channels in maximizing retention. Maintaining existing customers can be more cost-efficient than acquiring new ones, so this can be a very important goal.

This list is certainly not exhaustive, and there can be more objectives you can pursue with SEO content marketing strategy. The important thing is to actually define at least one so we can move forward.

Step 2: Keyword Research

The next step is to find your target keywords according to your objective.

This is mainly done by first defining our ideal audience. The idea is to find keywords that our audience is searching for, and this will be impossible if we don’t know who our audience is, their behavior, needs, and pain points.

We can do this by conducting market research and developing a buyer persona.

The main thing to consider here is to find keywords based on your audience’s search intents, according to your SEO content marketing objective, as discussed in the previous step.

For example, if your objective is to attract new prospects, then you might want to find keywords that are related to informational intent. (Check this guide on different types of search intents and their examples).

You can use various keyword research tools to help you in this process, from the free Google Keyword Planner to relatively affordable ones like KWFinder to premium ones like Ahrefs or SEMRush.

There are three main principles in implementing keyword research:

1. The keyword must be relevant to your audience according to their search intent. This is mainly measured through search volume.
2. The keyword must be valuable for your business, according to your objective. Not all keywords or keyphrases with high enough search volume will be relevant to your objectives.
3. The competition for the keyword(s) must be manageable, according to your available resources and timeline. Some keyword research tools might use metrics like keyword difficulty (KD) or similar ones to measure this.

Make a list of potential keywords according to their priorities, and include related metrics like search volume. We will use this list for the next step.

Step 3: Topic Research and Planning

The next step is about how we can expand the target keywords into topics—and later on, actual content—.

The best, and very accessible approach to do this is to do a quick Google (or your target search engine) search for your target keywords and look at the top-performing content:

• If there’s any rich/featured snippet for the query, take note of this. We will also aim to get this featured snippet (see Step 5: Content Marketing Best Practices for more about this)
• Check at least the top 3 ranking content. If possible, analyze all content on the first page.
• There are two main approaches you can do here:
  • Create something  better than the top ranking content
  • Take a unique angle and create a really different content
• In most cases, creating a unique/different content is somewhat easier since if you want to create a ‘similar but better’ content, you’ll need to be significantly better to get noticed.
• There are various tools that can help you get topic ideas. BuzzSumo, for example, is a popular choice. You can also use various keyword research tools (most notably SEMRush’s Keyword Magic Tool) to help in this aspect.
• Although you can be as creative as you can, make sure the topic aligns with the search intent related to the keyword. For example, if the search intent for a specific keyword is mainly informational (the audience is searching for this query to find solutions/information), then your topic should be informational or educational and not transactional.
• In some cases—for example, when targeting long-tail keywords—, the topic might be fairly obvious (and limited)

Be as creative as possible, but make sure to pay attention to the content’s objectives.

Step 4: Planning Your Content/Editorial Calendar

Remember that SEO is a long-term game. We can’t expect to create a single content, optimize it and get ranked (although there are very rare exceptions), but typically we’ll need to be consistent— both in quantity and quality—for at least 6 to 12 months.

This is why it’s important to create a content calendar—or editorial calendar— to keep track of your content marketing strategy. Ideally, you’d want a year’s worth of content calendar, but you can start with a 6-month calendar at the very least, utilizing Notion templates to streamline the process.

The content calendar should list the following items (not an all-inclusive list):

• The target keyword
• The topic idea and/or working title
• Meta tags, meta description, tags and categories to be used
• CTA (call-to-action) plan
• Who’s in charge of the content (if you have more than one content writers)
• Type of content (blog post, video, podcast, etc.)
• When to publish the content
• Where to publish the content (publication channel)
• How to promote the content
• Where do you plan to get backlinks from
• Status (Started, working, published, etc.)

The more details you include in your content calendar, the better. The idea is to brainstorm topics with SEO expert and consultant and consider all the different aspects beforehand, so the execution will be seamless.

Step 5: Content Marketing Best Practices

It’s time to execute the plan and actually develop your content.

Here, the process might vary (significantly) between individuals and organizations, but below we will list important best practices to pay attention to:

1. In most cases, the content should be non-promotional, except for special content designed for transactional intent (i.e. product tutorial, introducing a new product, etc.)
2. Have a clear structure with your content—introduction, problems/challenges, solutions, conclusion—. You can also follow different structures, and this might also determine the tone (or voice) of your content.
3. The ideal length for the textual content is 1,000 to 2,000 words, but you will also need to maintain quality and engagement. Divide the content into subheadings, at least one subheading every 300 words with no more than 150 words in each paragraph. Maintain readability with a lot of white spaces. 
4. Make sure to use universal, widely understood terms and definitions instead of niche ones. For example, “qualified leads” instead of “MQL/SQL”. If you used specific or unique terms, explain them or provide outbound links to justify their definitions.
5. In general, add outbound links whenever you made any claims or mention data. This is important to establish your content’s credibility.
6. Build a proper internal linking structure between your content pieces. A good internal linking structure can help with crawl and indexing—among other benefits.
7. Implement structured data markup (schema.org) to your content. This will allow your page to be eligible for featured/rich snippet, and also will improve the page’s indexability in general.
8. One of the most important things to focus on is generating backlinks—or inbound links—. We will discuss it a little deeper in the next step.

Again, the key here is maintaining consistency, both in quality and quantity. That is, consistently publishing your content—and generate backlinks but also internal and outbound links—, and maintain the quality and relevance of your content (as well as the quality of your backlinks).

Step 6: Content Promotion and Backlinks Building

How you promote your content is just as important as the content development process, and that’s why we mentioned that you should include your content promotion strategy as a part of your content calendar.

We can use various channels to promote our content, and here are some of the most important ones:

• Social media: fairly obvious, since social media is where the audience is. It can be divided into organic, paid, and influencer promotion.
• Email marketing: still one of the most effective channels with the highest ROI.
• Blog commenting: also including forum commenting, an old-school blogging tactic that can still be effective when done right.
• Paid promotions: from various types of ads to content delivery networks (CDNs) and other channels.

The main principle to hold here is that content promotion has two main purposes: generating organic traffic to your content and building backlinks. Every time you promote your content, aim to get backlinks from relevant and high-quality sources.

It’s also important to note that nowadays, the quality of your backlinks is more important than quantity. In fact, getting too many low-quality backlinks at any given time (i.e. a month) can get you penalized by Google and the other search engines.

In general, getting just 2-4 high-quality backlinks every month is sufficient.

Step 7: Evaluation, Re-optimization, Content Leveraging

As mentioned, content marketing and SEO are long-term tactics.

Typically it will take 2-6 months for a page to climb (slowly) from page 5 to page 1—if we consistently implement all the above optimizations—, and then another 6 months at least to climb to the top 3 or #1 spot.

Thus, it’s very important to constantly monitor our progress during these months, and here are some important areas to evaluate:

• SERP ranking
• Improvements in organic traffic
• Reach and impressions
• Bounce rate and dwell time—how much of your content are they consuming—, other on-site engagement metrics
• Conversion rate, if the content involves CTA
• Technical factors like page load speed and mobile responsiveness
• Backlinks profile

In short, evaluate your content according to all the above steps, monitor its progress using various KPIs and metrics, and re-optimize your content accordingly. If necessary, we can update the content or even change our tactic altogether, depending on the case.

End Words

Textual content—such as blog posts— typically have an average conversion rate is around 0.5% to 1%, which is higher than the CTR of display advertising at ‘only’ 0.46%. Thus, SEO content marketing strategy can be a very cost-efficient channel to generate highly targeted traffic, build an online presence and credibility, grow your remarketing list, and most importantly, a very effective lead generation device.

The post SEO Content Marketing Strategy to Drive Leads and Sales appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

There are over 1 billion websites in the world, with more being created by the second. This means that every second, there are web pages being made that are competing for the visitors that you want.

A strong digital strategy can be the difference between a successful business and a bankrupt one. If you are in charge of a small to medium sized company and want to grow your online business, here are the best tips from the industry leaders and professionals on what’s working.

Melih Oztalay – smartfindsmarketing.com

CEO of a 30 year old marketing agency and we have been in the digital space for 25 years now.  For the past 13 years we are 100% digital.  You will find that I am a guest author with different publications like Search Engine Journal.  I get called to conferences as a guest speaker and radio shows call me as a subject matter expert.

The strategies we employ with our B2B clients is an Inbound Marketing Strategy using the website’s marketing (including blog posts), content marketing, and social media marketing.  With Social Media Marketing we focus heavily on LinkedIn.  In order to make LinkedIn effective you have to complete daily activities and develop relationships.  The activities I would suggest to focus on in LinkedIn can be found with the attached image of 30 LinkedIn triggers.

Steph Taylor – wearewildbloom.com

Steph Taylor is a corporate misfit turned health and wellness entrepreneur and digital marketing guru. She is the founder and director of health and wellness marketing agency, Wildbloom.

B2B marketing should be viewed as one big picture, not as individual tasks in isolation. Focusing solely on one channel won’t give you the results you’re after. You need to combine multiple channels into your sales funnel.

Content marketing: Content in the form of blog posts, guest posts, videos and podcasts are all fantastic ways to position yourself as an expert in your industry. Podcasting is a highly effective way to reach other businesses and create a meaningful connection with a large audience, as they have you in their ears with them for up to an hour at a time. Content will also drive your marketing efforts through other channels.

Social media: Instagram and Facebook are less effective at generating awareness with B2B than with B2C, however it can be worth maintaining a presence on these platforms. Linkedin and Twitter are both very effective ways of reaching B2B customers, particularly by sharing authoritative content.

Paid Linkedin advertising: Linkedin allows you to target people based on the company or industry they work at, which means you can get your content in front of the key decision makers at target businesses.

SEO: It can take a while to achieve any meaningful results, but B2B SEO will provide high quality traffic to your website as the visitors are actively searching for what you have to offer. A successful SEO strategy is highly dependent on the content being created and shared on your website.

Adwords: Like SEO, this provides traffic that is actively looking for what your business has to offer. This works best in conjunction with an offer that will allow you to capture the lead’s details and progress them to the next stage in the marketing funnel.

Email: Once you’ve got the lead in your system, you need to nurture them. Email marketing allows you to automate this stage.

Retargeting advertisements: Facebook and Linkedin advertisements are a great way to retarget people who have visited your website. This is a good way to remind a potential customer of your products and push them across the conversion line.

Sophie Livingston – kickstartcontent.com

Sophie Livingston is a writer specialising in B2B blog posts. She also teaches content marketing to freelancers.

Having a clearly defined niche and a strategy for targeting that niche is crucial if you want to cut through crowded online spaces. The number one tactic I both use and recommend for building strong relationships with loyal clients is email marketing.

To build a worthwhile email list who you can market to, start by publishing quality blog posts that provide added value and speak directly to your audience. Then, use these posts and the organic traffic they generate to promote relevant free resources that are made available following email subscription.

The subscribers you’ll gain will be qualified leads. You’ll know they’re interested in your services and – if they appreciated your free resources – they’ll be open to learning more about what you have to offer.

Natalie Athanasiadis – ormimedia.com.au

The head of digital in Melbourne for Ormi Media

The best strategy any organisation can adopt is to not have a channel preference, rather they should use a customised combination of all digital channels to smash their goals. Start by identifying your short term, medium term and long term goals. Conversion rate optimisation is one of the most under-used yet effective tools any business can use. Many digital marketers focus on metrics that you can’t take to the bank, such as impressions and clicks. What we suggest is you develop a plan that focuses on customer acquisition while not putting all your eggs in one basket.

Larissa Pickens – floatdesign.com

What really works for B2B Marketing?: In our design studio, we love experimenting with new ways to attract qualified B2B leads. While social media is arguably the most trendy and fun, we’ve found it difficult to reach decision makers through those channels. We’ve scaled back our efforts to focus primarily on LinkedIn. The longer, less glamorous route of content marketing is where we’ve seen the best results. Usually those leads come to us already interested in working together and it becomes more about defining the scope of the project than selling per se. I’m sure this varies by industry, but service-based businesses should consider making the long-term investment in sharing their expertise with content creation.

Cyril Lemaire – traktekpartners.com

Managing Director of Traktek Partners, a full-service B2B digital marketing agency based in Boston.

Implementing website user identification and tracking technology and feeding visitor behavior back into our client’s customer databases has helped them to prioritize lead follow and increase sales conversion rates. By focusing the sales team on the right leads and arming them with intelligence on what the leads were looking at and browsing on their site, our clients have achieved record sales volume and recaptured what would have otherwise been lost customers.

Website analytics tools such as Google Analytics have evolved quickly, become highly robust in functionality and in 2024 I anticipate this will continue. I expect Google will come out with new enhancements to Google Analytics to help companies drive more engagement online, increase leads through their websites and provide B2B users with a more customized user experience.

Social media advertising through Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest will continue to grow as companies realize their audiences are more engaged on social than other digital marketing avenues. However, I predict Twitter will experience double digit decline in active users, become irrelevant to advertisers, and will get bought by another digital media company.

There will be a growing trend in personalized display & intelligent B2B online marketing through the use of session and user identification tracking technologies. As marketers find it more difficult to engage prospects through email marketing, it will be important to drive interest through re-targeting and capturing user online behavior to inform targeted display advertising.

Steven Dubin – PRWorkZone.com

STEVEN V. DUBIN, president of PR WORKS, knows the news business. His newspaper career started by covering the Boston Celtics for the New Bedford
Standard Times, Steve and Larry Bird shared rookie years. From there Steve progressed to editing and marketing positions in several publishing companies, including Mariner Newspapers.

Here are some trends we see, in particular to B-B marketing…

Our PR/Marketing clients tell us that they don’t give a damn what “channel”
we use, they just want new CUSTOMERS.

LINKEDIN

LinkedIn is much misunderstood. Considered a panacea by some and a nuisance by others.

LEVERAGING LINKEDIN

You probably have a LinkedIn profile. You also probably question why. Maybe because everyone else seems to have one as well.

The real VALUE of LinkedIn? Two components – groups and the sales funnel.

Groups!

Yes, groups within LinkedIn can help you target your niche audiences. For example, one of our clients manufactures green products used in residential and commercial building and renovation. As a relatively small company, they don’t have the budget for a major media advertising campaign or other big-ticket rollouts. How do they reach their core prospects and referral sources?

Right. LinkedIn is among the tools we are helping them access. They’ve tapped into LinkedIn’s robust array of groups specifically formed for facility directors, commercial real estate investors, green building leaders, etc.

With a bit of research, we helped our client join these groups. The next step is to post news, research and other information to these groups on a regular basis. Another way to connect is to START discussions with a question or ask for feedback.

Our client continues to expand their relevance, visibility and viability to key prospects.

LINKEDIN SALES FUNNEL:

The LinkedIn Sales Funnel and “drip campaign” develops “warm” leads upon developing a “know, like and trust” relationship with a targeted group.

Highlights include:

• Taking LinkedIn from passive to PROACTIVE – the reason for the Microsoft merger
• Create a System vs. Serendipity
• LinkedIn profile enhancement – Maximize to emphasize benefits.
• Prospect profile development – Choose Title, geography, industry, etc.
• Expand core connections – “Friend” 5 Connection requests per day.
• Draft Messaging System – A multi-touch drip of 4 – 6 touches
• Conversations to conversions – On the fourth contact request a 10 minute phone call or coffee meeting to determine how you can help each other.
• Export LinkedIn contact to Email

 Ian Wright – britishbusinessenergy.co.uk

Founder of British Business Energy – an energy comparison service.

In 2019, I think paid Google search (PPC) remains far and away the best marketing channel for any B2B brand, especially those just starting out.
You can get started quickly and see how your various ads/landing pages perform. My number one tip is to make sure you budget for losing money off the bat. You want to get ads up quickly, to start finding out conversion rates. This means setting your CPC spend well above what you’d likely want to see in the long run.A second tip is to track conversion rates based on ad positions, I worked with one company that upped all its bids to position #1 and saw its conversion rate more than double! Often people who click on the first result are in a hurry to find a solution to their issue so are more willing to buy.

Michael Shearer – selecthub.com

Partnering with 3rd Party Industry Resources: Having managed marketing programs at multiple B2B companies, working with 3rd party companies that provide industry research, lead generation and other vendor/buyer relationship tools should be a de facto practice for any B2B company, especially software companies/resellers. These industry resources often outrank vendors organically and generate the bulk of search traffic – B2B companies have to tap into this channel.

Consider it at least a practice in extending your SEO efforts beyond just your company website. Here’s a good article explaining this piece as well:
http://searchengineland.com/fresh-perspective-seo-b2b-companies-275329

Danyal Effendi – purevpn.com

Danyal is a Digital Marketing Professional with 6+ year’s global experience. He is currently working at PureVPN as Digital Marketing Manager.

The must to adopt digital marketing strategy for B2B companies in 2024 is the Marketing Automation. It helps in the alignment of sales and marketing team. Through automation, sales team can be provided all the available information about the customer in real time that helps them in closing more leads.

The best way to implement marketing automation includes customer segmentation, A/B Testing and drip emails. B2B Companies can develop detailed customer profiles on the basis of data and can gain better understanding of their potential customers. With the help of marketing automation B2B companies can learn about their target users through web pages, email, online forms, paid and social campaigns. They can be able to understand what there need is and what type of content they like. Different segments and persona can be created, which help in engaging more leads with sales team. Through A/B testing, marketers can discover which thing is working for which persona or segmentation.

Using the data from marketing automation, and analyzing with ROI from recent campaigns, companies can optimize marketing campaigns and align with the sales team to generated more engagement and conversions.

Lindsey Havens – phishlabs.com

Lindsey Havens is the Senior Marketing Manager with over 10 years of experience in Marketing, Communications, Public Relations, Lead Nurturing/Generation, and Analytics. With a unique blend of marketing and communications experience coupled with a background in behavioral and situational analysis, she brings metrics-driven results and the ability to focus sales and marketing efforts in a direction that offers the highest potential for long-term, sustainable growth.

There are some great digital marketing tools that can help B2B’s in their marketing strategies. Google Trends allows you see the latest trends, data, plus visualizations on what’s trending in your area right now. It’s a great option for planning a strategy when starting a business, researching competitors, or when you are creating a new campaign. Another tool worth mastering is Ahrefs Site Explorer, a SEO tracker you can use to see exactly where your competitors traffic is coming from. You can see their ranking for specific keywords in Google Search, and exactly how many backlinks are going to their site. Their “Content Explorer” allows you to find the most shared content on the web as well.

 Keith Baumwald – leverag.com

Keith is a B2B marketer with over 10 years of experience working with agencies, startups and large corporates and has been working as an independent consultant for the past 2 years in New York, London and Berlin.

Facebook lead ads

Lead ads are one of the newer and least utilized ad formats on Facebook. They are especially valuable for those in the B2B space. The real advantage of using Facebook Lead Ads is the ability for potential leads to fill out a form within Facebook without having to click through to a lead generation form on an external website. Facebook will also pre-fill the users’ information (name, email, phone, etc.), so the amount of friction involved to complete the form is greatly reduced. I have seen clients reduce their cost per lead by as much as 300% without a drop in the quality of leads. In addition, Facebook’s platform allows companies to automatically import their leads directly into other CRM tools like Mailchimp, alternatives to Mailchimp, Zapier and Salesforce.

Bottom line: With a mix of good ad copy and targeting, B2B companies can dramatically reduce their cost per lead while taking advantage of this still relatively new channel.

Brianna Valleskey – braveinkdetroit.weebly.com

Brianna executed B2B marketing strategies for tech companies both in the midwest and in Silicon Valley.

Best actionable tips for B2B marketing in 2024 and beyond:

Messaging: You must clearly define what your business does and how it will help the businesses of your target customers. I get countless emails from polite sales people who want to tell me about their product or service; they say they can help my business (usually with some combination of buzzwords including predictable revenue, maximum ROI, and low-hanging fruit.), but never actually explain how their product or service works. Clear communication is key. Take the time to effectively craft what your company does, how it does it and why it does it. Human brains love stories. They will be much more likely to resonate with your pitch if your can give them an authentic, articulate story to follow. When your messaging is clear, your sales go up. You should be able to explain how your company helps other companies in 1-2 sentences. If you can’t, hire someone who can.

SEO & Content: If you have a website – and you want people to find it – you must format the pages for search engine optimization. Find long-tail keywords that you want to target, then utilize them in the meta data, page headers and body copy. Start a blog on your website. This not only helps you tell the story of your company, but blogs with educational content and practical advice provide immense value for your customers and prospects. The more quality content you have, the better your website will rank on search engines. If you don’t bolster your website with SEO and content, I’m sure your competitors will.

Thought Leadership: This is the most powerful point of leverage for B2B companies today. Being a thought leader builds your credibility as a company and as an expert in your industry or field. Make connections with industry publications and offer to write editorials or guest articles. Create value for your industry and the greater public by sharing your expertise. A very effective way to do this is to analyze the data from your own product or service and then use it to tell a story. For example, if your company offers a dialer system for sales teams, you could collect data on the average amount of time sales reps spend on the phone. Then write a press release about your findings to send out over a newswire; offer to write posts for industry blogs about your findings and how people can use the data; and reach out to upcoming conferences or events to see if you can participate in a breakout session or panel where you can share the data and educate people about what you learned from it.

Mike Khorev – Digital Marketing Consultant

Mike helps small and mid-size businesses drive leads, increase sales and grow revenue online. He designs, develops and executes integrated digital marketing campaigns across paid, social, organic and digital channels.

Using Automation to Increase B2B marketing ROI

We use Dynamics CRM and Click Dimension to automate lead nurturing. Aside from saving marketing and sales from repetitive tasks like following up, data entry and email marketing, we also were able to improve ROI and increase MILs to MQL conversion rate. There are few tactics that are very common in email nurturing and yet still so many marketers overlook those:

Follow-up sequence that builds upon the content they’ve read on the site or assets they downloaded. We include a call to action to bring them back to our site to watch a webinar or read the use case. Develop separate follow-up sequences for different personas — one for prospects and one for customers — because the focus changes after their first purchase. Think of the experience you want each visitor to have before and after they make a purchase or become your customer.

Setup and monitor lead scoring that tracks every prospect’s action on the site, email opens and clicks and digital assets downloads. Once the leads hit a Lead Score threshold, pass them to the sales team for a call, chat, and closure.

These are simple in principle and at the same time remarkably powerful when taken together. It will help to nurture your new-found leads into customers, and once that happens, upsell/cross-sell with more products and services!

Chris Allen – firmtree.com

Founder of Firmtree as well as a digital marketer with 8 years experience in with B2B marketing.

Digital marketing in 2019 should start with developing personas for the target markets. A thorough analysis will reveal data on items such as firmographic trends, pain points that customers experience, features that they’re seeking, service expectations they have, familiarity with the product or service being offered and how soon they may purchase.

Next keyword research should be performed to understand what queries users are making in search engines. These keywords should be prioritized by search volume and opportunity they present to bring in a qualified web visitor.

Armed with personas and keyword research a marketer can begin to develop a strong SEO content marketing campaign. The content should answer questions users have, speak to their pain points, and have a strong call to action to get the users further into the funnel.

Don Traxler – RevSpark.io

One of the most successful and most untapped B2B marketing techniques for 2024 and beyond is the *combination of Reverse IP Identification combined with LinkedIn Outreach*. This is still a very untapped method, and works like a charm. Imagine being able to identify the company name that has been visiting your client’s site, and then taking that information to reverse search for applicable people within the company on LinkedIn who could have possibly been the person visiting the site. Since this shows their intent for your services, connecting on LinkedIn with a quick hello can immediately start the sales process on these leads. It’s a win-win!

Linda Pophal – stratcommunications.com

I believe the best strategy for B2B companies would be the same as for any company, in any industry, of any size–and also the same for companies engaged in traditional marketing. Despite the advent of the Internet and various online social channels for companies and individuals to get the word out about their products and services, the basic fundamentals of marketing, or advertising, have not changed. You could literally pick up any textbook written on the subject, regardless of the publication date, and would still find the basic principles to be relevant today. One of my favorite books is Ogilvy on Advertising which was first published in 1983.

The steps in the development of the best strategy are:

– Select and learn everything you can about the target audience (those who are in a position to make a buy/no buy decision relative to your product/service) you hope to connect and compel to some desired action.

– Analyze the competitive landscape – what are the other alternatives to your product/service that your target audience has to choose from?

– Determine how you will position what you have to offer relative to your competitors – you don’t want to *copy*/be the same as your competitors, you want to find, and claim, a position that will be *better than* your competition in some way that is meaningful to your audience based on what you’ve determined (through your research) is important to them.

– Choose the channels you will use to reach your audience. In this case, we’re talking about digital channels so, generally, this will include your website which would be the hub of your activity. Everything else you do will be designed to drive traffic to your website to generate some desired action. The other channels should be selected based on both the audience they reach and the state of mind the audience is in when the message is presented. For instance, although Facebook has the largest audience of the social media channels, it sends to be a very social social media site.
When people engage with Facebook they’re generally in a personal, rather than professional, state of mind. Consequently, Facebook is generally not the best channel for B2B marketers. LinkedIn, on the other hand, despite its smaller audience, is a good place to reach business people who engage with this channel primarily from a professional standpoint. Pew Research has studied the various channels and offers very useful information on the demographics of their users.

– Finally, measure and monitor the success of your various efforts. There are a wide range of analytics, and analytics tools, you can use to do this. Make sure you’re using them and continually making adjustments to your marketing and advertising efforts to focus on what works best *for you*. There is no one size fits all strategy.

Thomas Wooldridge – thomaswooldridge.com

Sneaky trick: Here is a little trick that works extremely well. The major difference from B2C to B2B is your potential client is often mentioned on public media.. Look up your industry trade papers, blogs, social media, and read up on people or companies that are being featured. See if there is any information you can use as a way to communicate with them. Often times there is a call to action that can provide direct emails, phone, or even social media contact info. The most effective method is read on their particular pain point or any other difficult problems they are currently working. Then simply mention how you have the solution to their issues. This way your leads are not cold but warm. Knowing your leads and trying to build rapport without actually meeting them will greatly increase your chances of converting them into sales.

Allen Greer – fuzeinc.com

The founder and lead digital strategist at FUZE Digital -Miami-based full-service digital marketing agency serving clients around the globe.

One of my favorite B2B tactics for gaining new leads was brought to my attention by Gary Vaynerchuk. Surprisingly it’s a cold email tactic but if done correctly it really works. We’ve tested this approach with several of our B2B clients.

*Here’s the approach:*

Most cold emails make two key mistakes. 1) the content is self-centered and does too much boasting about the sender, instead of the value it brings to the prospect. 2) the target is often a busy person who will rarely open cold emails: CEO, Founder, etc.

Using Gary’s approach, it’s far more powerful to: 1) focus your content on value. for example, send a strong case study that shows how your product helped another company. 2) target lower level execs like marketing directors or managers who are eager to impress their CEOs by helping the company grow.

Lead off the email with a statement like, Does your CEO know… and fill in the blank with the value your product offers and link to a video or case study. Make the email short and sweet and close with a polite request for 15 minutes to discuss how your product or service can benefit your target.

David Hunter – epicwebstudios.com

Local search with Google My Business is the best price on the web, it’s free. For small, local businesses, this tool is essential and simple to setup but has great deal of impact. We mandate clients to use GMB and assist them with setup. Google Adwords is superb for return on investment. Google has been top boss in the Pay-Per-Click game for almost 20 years, now. They know how effective their flagship product is and they want you to pay for the privilege. Fortunately for everyone, every single detail can be tracked, measured and reported upon. If you have the knowledge of and stomach for real-time bidding, AdWords will kill it for your project and bring proven ROI in just a few days.

Additionally, email marketing is still working harder and racking up consistent wins. Other than GMB, email marketing is one of the best values on the internet: it can be targeted, timed and delivered to specific audiences with precise messaging to obtain stellar results.

Kyle Golding – thegoldinggroup.com

The best approach is to a successful digital marketing campaign today is Push/Pull Market Influence: Push your differentiation message out via digital/social marketing channels and then Pull in feedback, buy-in and loyalty from your audience by listening, engaging and creating relationships. This two-way conversation is much more relational and collaborative than transactional. Push/Pull Market Influence is a slower process but develops deeper, more loyal audiences who are more likely to become repeat consumers, brand influencers and ambassadors. When you reach that level of marketing relationship, the Push is less important (lower external cost) and the Pull (increased internal effort) becomes very powerful. The benefit to a business is you can control brand image by staying true what got you to this point: being authentically who you are and actively listening to/engaging with your audience. All factors you have complete control of.

Olga Kołodyńska – livechatinc.com

Marketing Specialist at LiveChat

SEO

We truly believe B2B SEO is one of the best online strategies when it comes to promoting your content and generating traffic for your website. Since we’ve decided to focus on SEO, our blog has reached 100,000 views. Some people may think that writing content with a specific keyword in mind is pointless, but I think it’s pointless to write a content that nobody will read. Choosing the right keywords, using related ones, describing pictures in your post and creating engaging titles are the basic principles to succeed in content marketing and rank high in Google.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most effective tools out there. Once your customers decide they want to get your emails, you’re halfway to winning their hearts and gaining their loyalty.

The biggest value in email marketing is that you can segment your subscribers and send them personalized campaigns. I remember one time when we wanted to share the results of Customer Service Report 2015 with our customers. It brought up to date on current customer service trends in different industries. But who wants to read the results from Automotive industry when they work in Education, right? That’s why we created a newsletter “Did you beat the Average Customer Service in 2015?” and segmented it to different industries. Each industry got the information that actually concerned them. We increased open rate from 11% to 25%.

William Gadea – idearocketanimation.com

William Gadea is the Founder and Creative Director of IdeaRocket, a maker of animated videos for business.

Video is highly impactful on paid social media, but many companies are still not realizing that because of mobile and open office environments, 85% of video views are without sound. When they put up their narration-heavy home page video without captions they wonder why it doesn’t get results. To really take advantage of your social media buy you need to use text to convey your message. Captions are of course one answer, but a better response is to really integrate text into your video by using a kinetic typography style where the animation of the text takes center stage, and characters or other elements are just playing a supporting role. If you do that, your Facebook video won’t need clicking or sound to really do its job for you.

Jennifer Winter – degree53.com

Marketing manager at Degree 53

B2B marketing needs a slightly different approach to B2C, as there may be less instant transactions and companies need to build trust with their clients, which takes some time. B2B requires more persuasion and building brand awareness.

It’s important to be clear on the business objectives, which will be the foundation for all marketing activities. These will depend on what stage the company is at – building brand awareness, lead generation, recruitment, forming partnerships or changing the company image. It could be a mix of a few goals, so it’s important to make sure each activity is relevant and will be suitable to achieve that goal.

As behind every business are real people, it’s important to keep your communication human and make sure they can relate to it. To make it easier for your team, you need to define your customer profiles and who your target audience is. Is it the CEO or the product manager? Is it the CIO or a marketing manager? Many companies fail to define the decision makers personae and make their messaging too generic. Smaller product issues won’t be important to CEOs, however how your products and services can solve bigger problems will. Make sure to tailor your messaging according to these profiles, highlighting the benefits of your services/products and how they address their challenges.

Email: Segment your audiences to make your activities more targeted and specific to the recipients. This will show higher open rate and conversion.

Paid advertising: choose the (trade) publications your clients read and also appear in (if similar industries). There are lots of industry-specific magazines and websites that can help with a range of advertising opportunities online and offline. Adverts and banners work well for brand awareness, but hosting reports or webinars with the help of those channels will help you with getting more targeted leads. Also, banner ads tend to perform better when they’re part of an email newsletter than on a website. They go directly to people’s inboxes and there’s a bigger chance of CTR.

Swapnil Bhagwat – orchestrate.com

Swapnil Bhagwat is Senior Manager – Design & Digital Media and implementing digital, social, marketing, design and web strategies for the group companies. He is an MBA graduate with work experience in the US, UK and Europe. Swapnil has worked for more than a decade across a range of businesses for the global markets.

The foremost task is to define a digital marketing mission which should fit into the grand marketing plan. The overriding objective that you want to accomplish through digital marketing should be defined which is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound (SMART). The realistic KPIs for achieving the predefined mission should be ascertained for them to be specific and measurable. Ascertain the methods to identify each KPIs. Assess the competitors’ strategies for content, SEO, and social media. Formulate a strategy that suits your mission and break it into short term goals.

The next task is to identify the target customers and to develop a customer persona. Understand their preferences, pain points, problems, and the questions they want to be answered from their age, gender, education, and location. Dig deeper through Audience Reports of Google Analytics to identify and understand the characteristics of the persona of your target customers. Define the total budget allocated to run the digital marketing campaign. Select the channels of communication you want to use for the fulfillment of your mission. Take the help of analytics to optimize the
KPIs. Run the digital marketing campaigns and analyze the results periodically and adjust your strategies to optimize results.

Keli Wells – verylargebits.com

Co-founder of Very Large Bits, a dynamic video rendering service for the marketing industry.

Dynamic video is especially effective for B2B businesses interested in adopting an account based marketing strategy because it empowers businesses to personalize their brand strategy by targeting individual customers and micro-segments with unique viewer-specific videos catered to each client’s needs and interests.

The dramatic increase in customer engagement shown through views, likes, clicks, and shares of personalized marketing campaigns has proven to be a very effective and cost-efficient tool for authentically connecting with clients and rapidly growing brand awareness. Marketers also avoid the latest ad blockers by integrating their creative content and brand placement directly into each dynamic video.

Nick Leffler – exprance.com

A comprehensive strategy is the best way to reach new clients for a B2B company. A comprehensive strategy means combining many different methods of digital marketing to achieve results. To reach B2B clients, you’ll have to reach the people who make decisions with content that’s valuable to them.

A blend of great content and lead magnets with landing pages, email, and social promotion can have a huge impact over time. Not only will they have a huge impact on how you reach clients but they will continue to work after the heavy lifting is done. By creating helpful content and building trust will help you with the final sale and understanding if the client is right for your product or service.

Joe Mulvihill – jna-advertising.com

User experience (UX) and conversion rate optimization (CRO) are two of the most important digital marketing strategies to maximize the value of your B2B efforts. Ensuring your website is easy to navigate and your information is engaging and easily digestible will lead to improved website performance, and will cut through the noise that often bombards your target audience. A/B testing is another great way to move the needle and identify ways to incrementally increase the output of your digital campaigns. I recommend always having a test active, whether it be landing page oriented, ad copy, or design element testing.

Content customization is an especially important digital marketing strategy in 2024 and beyond as you try to grow your traffic and reach. Content feeds into all your digital campaigns, so the messaging strategy is especially critical in B2B situations. Be cognizant that everyone is busy, so capturing attention is critical. This target is different from consumers–they are the subject-matter experts who can often see through flowery marketing gimmicks. It’s important to be succinct, save them time, and demonstrate how your product or service can directly benefit them. Carrying that messaging strategy into your social media promotion and landing page strategy for paid search is key. Keep it simple but balanced to arm them with enough information to make solid business decisions.

Adam White – seojet.net

The most effective way to do SEO in 2024 and beyond is to first make sure your business builds brand trust with Google. This means you need to build a lot of links to your homepage that use your brand name or some version of your URL as the anchor text. This is so critical because once Google trusts you as a brand, it is so much easier to get top rankings on your inner pages. Those that are stuck on page 2-4 of Google usually fail to move up to page one because they have not built enough brand trust. If you look at the big brands online (Amazon, Apple etc) they all have one very similar trait. 80%-95% of their homepage links have their brand or their URL as the anchor text. Google loves big brands and so your focus needs to be to copy the homepage backlink profile of the big brands and let Google know that your brand should be lumped in with them as well.

Deborah Sweeney – mycorporation.com

One of the most successful SEO strategies a company can implement is to create strong content for your website and beyond. Write content for your site, have others write content about your business, and write content about others that make you an expert in the industry. Link back to pages on your site so that you can generate interest to more than just the homepage. Build depth around your site and the content with deeper links to generate strong, natural traffic. Make sure you’re focusing on developing content that relates to keywords and search terms relevant to your industry and that a consumer would use to search for a company like yours. If you don’t already know what these words are, do some research to determine which words consumers are using to find you and then use those keywords in your content and social media strategy.

Charlotte O’Hara – charlotteohara.ca

In 2024 and beyond, businesses should ramp up their video content as part of their digital marketing strategies. Whether you run a lean, one-person business or are the head of a larger corporation, nearly every business will see better engagement from video content. We’re seeing more of this across social media through Instagram Stories (RIP SnapChat) and Facebook Lives, as these are a great way to connect with the business’ audience and humanize the brand. Another great way to incorporate wide content in digital marketing strategy is through live workshops and webinars. Whether you offer a service or a product, these live video events are a great way to promote your offerings and increase sales. You can promote these webinars to your email list, on social media, and through your website.

Bryan Koontz – guidefitter.com

Bryan has an extensive marketing background and has founded several successful companies over the past couple decades.

As digital marketing and SEO continues to grow, the mantra “content is king” is preached by marketers and agencies alike. However, this need to constantly produce can strain business workflow and diminish the end product. Because of this, I see digital marketing shifting towards a greater incorporation of user-generated content (UGC) over the next five years.

Here at Guidefitter we’ve created the Braggin’ Wall which allows our users to share their recent hunts and favorite photos with our online community of hunters and outfitters. We’ve found that when users post their photos to our Braggin’ Wall, or upvote someone else’s pictures, they often share these finds with their other social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. This has had an unprecedented expansion on our reach and organic visibility, both from social media and traditional search engines.

Michael Mignogna – minyona.com

CEO of Minyona, a digital marketing agency based in Baltimore, MD, but serving clients nationally. I specialize in SEO according to Google’s best practices, centered around strong content written for human beings. I pride myself on being able to communicate, in layman’s terms, what digital marketing is, what it isn’t, and whether or not it might be beneficial for businesses of all kinds.

This may seem completely counterproductive for a digital marketer to say, but the best digital marketing strategy is ridiculously amazing customer service. If you want to get business online, SEO and advertising may bring new clients to your website, but if, once they’re on your website, they don’t get that social validation that comes from having amazing reviews, you simply won’t experience amazing ROI. There are many companies out there that businesses can hire to help them obtain more reviews and showcase them beautifully on their websites. One of our clients uses Broadly, and it works very nicely and looks great too. The bottom line is this: Get good reviews and showcase them on your website. A good digital marketing agency can advise you in terms of how to make that happen.

Beth Adan – threegirlsmedia.com

Senior Publicist & Graphic Designer at Three Girls Media, a public relations and digital marketing firm.

Increase Local Engagement by Using Location Tags: *Instagram allows you to tag photos taken from a specific geographic area. When you use this, customers can see that you are a local business and you are more likely to be found when users are searching for images in their location. Create a hashtag to use with your images as you snap photos around your community.
If you already know of hashtags or are attending an event, make note of these to use with your Instagram images.Make a Connection by Showcasing Local Landmarks: *To show your local customers that you are part of their community, share photos that show landmarks that are easily recognizable in your area. Part of your marketing strategy should be community involvement, and Instagram goes hand in hand with this. Snap photos of your team doing community service projects, use hashtags and tag your location for maximum visibility.

James McCarthy – boldtask.com

CEO of Boldtask, a web design and marketing agency located in sunny Daytona Beach, Florida.

I believe that high quality SEO activities can generate improved rankings for keywords I care about, with increased traffic as a result. Now, SEO isn’t just one or two techniques, it is an interconnecting web of on-page improvements, and off-page link building, but when they are done well, the benefits can be larger than anything I’ve seen from social and paid ads. Some of the best actionable tips I can provide are as follows: download a high quality website audit tool (like Screaming Frog), regularly run site audits to see instances where your site is not in line with SEO best practices (pages missing meta data, images missing alt-text, posts missing H1 title tags, etc.), and then updating the site to include the missing items. Working to improve your website’s mobile load times, using a combination of image optimization, Accelerated Mobile Pages, and limiting the use of things like autoplay video can also improve your site’s ranking performance. And, of course, creating a HARO account to help generate high quality backlinks doesn’t hurt either.

Gwen Montoya – gwenmontoya.com

Look for ways to share more than you sell on social media and in email marketing. Don’t just tell your audience what you sell over and over, share news and tips that will improve their business and workflow.

If somone takes the time to read what you wrote on social media or allows you to take up space in their inbox, you owe it to them to be useful and helpful. By sharing and curating the best information, you’ll also build trust and improve your reputation with your clients and potential clients.

You can do this by finding and sharing articles from leaders in your field or create your own blog posts and videos.

Morea Pollet – piedmontave.com

Moréa Pollet is the Marketing Specialist at Piedmont Avenue Consulting. In addition to Marketing, Moréa advises business professionals and business owners on business operations, administration, business development, and event management.

Throughout the years strategies always change and evolve, however, one that never gets old is Networking. When it comes to B2B one of the best ways to generate new leads is getting out there, meet people, and create connection. Depending on how good you are at it, it can be a slow process but any real connection you make – not pushing for sales – will last and follow you, introduce and refer you to new client. Take a Marketing Agency for example; their biggest clients are not the one they send an email to thanks to a database they bought or because they googled you around. They get the project because they know someone or they meet the right person and created a relationship with them. Networking works today and will work for several years after that. People you are meeting today might be your customers in a couple of years.

Jake Knight – bayareasellmyhome.com

Real estate investor who markets nearly exclusively online.

We have found that combining two tools is the most effective digital marketing strategy right now.

The first example is using the results of your paid ads to formulate your content strategy. If you run a paid campaign for at least 4-6 months and regularly test, you should be able to pinpoint the highest performing keywords. Create content around those keywords, as you want to rank as high as possible for them.

The second example is leveraging social media promotions to compliment and enhance your SEO strategy. Each time we create content, whether it be a video or long blog post, we “boost” it on Facebook and Twitter to our demographic. Google recognizes the interaction on social media and knows that we are an important resources for users, therefore they will elevate our search rankings.

Minuca Elena – minucaelena.com

Minuca is a freelance writer specialized in creating expert roundups. Her value packed posts help websites draw traffic and earn backlinks and become trends on social media. She also helps bloggers connect with influencers.

‘ As Google’ algorithms become smarter every day, it’s best to stop trying to game the system. Forget PBNs and other black/gray hat SEO strategies. Follow these steps to increase your ROI:

1. Choose a quality hosting.  Amazon found that even one second of load-speed could cost them $1.6 billion in sales. Also, remove any unnecessary plugins and compress your images.

2. Come up with a nice professional design.  Free themes look cheap and ugly.

3. Focus on content marketing . Write in-depth content, and make it visually appealing. Create infographics, include videos and screenshots in your posts. Gone are the days when the only picture in the post is the top image. Write for people not for algorithms. Learn how to structure your articles correctly.

4. Include content upgrades in your posts.  This technique will help you convert more readers into subscribers.

Sid Bharath – thinkific.com

VP of Growth at Thinkific, a B2B online course platform.

We run multiple webinars every week and we attract attendees through various promotional methods – content marketing, advertising, email marketing, influencer marketing, software partners, and affiliates. Depending on the source and type of audience, we tweak our webinar content to match their requirements. At the end of the webinar, we offer a limited-time deal with a free trial of our software.

The reasons webinars work is because they’re highly engaging and interesting events. They allow us to actively interact with our audience and answer their specific questions, versus other forms of marketing which are more passive and don’t involve interactivity. More importantly, we can pack in way more value into a webinar than a blog post or a social media post and even if people don’t sign up for our product at the end, they still leave with a very favorable impression of us and are more likely to consider us in the future.

Sam Warren – rankpay.com

Manager of marketing and partnerships at RankPay, a top-rated SEO service that helps thousands of small businesses earn higher search rankings.

Instead of recommending a particular channel or tactic to pursue, I advise digital marketers to begin their journey with some serious research.

Getting to know your target audience is critical to building any marketing campaign. It’s no different with B2B.

Create a few customer persona’s. Give them names, business objectives, etc. Try to have some fun with it, this is the easy part.

Next, do some digging and figure out where these targets spend their time online. Is it on a particular subset of forums? Maybe they do a lot of paid promotion on Facebook? Or maybe they don’t use social at all but they frequently publish sponsored content in a handful of industry publications.

Once you know where you’ll find your audience, you can pick which channels (social, PPC, organic) will be the most effective way to reach them!

David Harouche – multimediaplus.com

One of the most important digital marketing strategies for retailers is to have social media integrated into your training and communications of associates. Especially since so much staff are mostly not at a desk or in an office, CEOs often think that their staff is following the company’s social media, but it’s often NOT the case. Customers know what’s going on on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc. but the associates don’t.

Next gen-apps, include a live feed of social media so that sales associates, who are being trained and communicated to via iPads and tablets, always know what’s going on. They are then more able to engage with customers and increase sales, loyalty, cross-promote and more. It’s also valuable in times of crisis. Staff can be communicated to and respond almost immediately.

Robert McGuire – mcguireeditorial.com

Among our clients whose B2B marketing strategy is built around SEO, it’s easy to get frustrated when content isn’t climbing to page 1 on Google search. We’ve had luck by turning our attention specifically to the content that has made it to pages 2-5 without any promotion or linkbuilding effort and then working to dramatically improve that content. It’s sort of like the skyscraper approach, where you create content that is at least one floor higher (i.e. more developed) than your competition, except it’s delayed a little. You look at what among your average blog posts get a little bit of ranking on its own, and then you build the skyscraper on top of those posts by greatly expanding what it includes, adding useful graphics, images, links, data and background. Those are much more likely to pop to page 1 than putting out another so-so blog post.

Kevin Sides – shipmonk.com

At ShipMonk we use advanced marketing automation to nurture leads. Timing is everything when it comes to winning business, so if we get a leads that’s not quite ready to get started we enter them into various journeys to keep ShipMonk top of mind and make it easy for them to get started when that time comes.

We don’t just drop leads into these journeys without setting expectations, so they understand they will be receiving touches from us in the form or emails, text, postcards and the occasional phone call.

All of our marketing automation journeys are tracked to see the response rate and how much business was won as a result of nurturing the lead.

We have automation journeys that have earned over $1,000,000 in business.

The biggest challenge with automation is timing and content. You want to make sure you’re providing leads with information relevant to your business and something they can benefit from whether they use your company or not.

MA fails when marketers forget than and try to sell too much along the way.

Lauren Fairbanks – stuntandgimmicks.com

Lauren runs a content marketing agency that works with B2B companies in the manufacturing, healthcare, technology, and transportation/logistics industries.

B2B companies have unique needs when it comes to marketing. The B2B sales cycle is usually 6-12 months, with some industries clocking in at a full 18 month sales cycle. Given those long sales cycles, B2B marketing needs to be able to provide multiple touchpoints to keep customers engaged with the brand and educated on company products and services.

That’s where content marketing comes into play. Content marketing is simply the best use of marketing spend for B2B companies. It helps improve search visibility and brand awareness. It provides an easy way for sales people to re-engage old customers or customers that haven’t made a purchase. And it helps build thought leadership, something that’s incredibly important for B2B companies – especially those in complex or highly regulated industries.

Liz Palm – dprgroup.com

Director of marketing for DPR Group, a high-tech PR and marketing agency. She advises B2B clients on best practices to not only drive sales, but also to create effective content marketing and public relations campaigns.

I’m a huge advocate of B2B companies using high-value content to drive any digital marketing campaign, especially those that will fill the top of the marketing funnel. From remarketing/retargeting ads and digital promotion through trade media websites and newsletters to social media posts and SEO, the common factor is the necessity to provide value.

It has been established that 70% of the buying cycle is complete before a prospect ever contacts a vendor. This is the ideal opportunity to use industry trends and research, wrapped in thought leadership from internal subject matter experts, to deliver insightful and helpful information to those prospects-targeted through the advertising parameters. The content can be in the form of tips sheets, white papers, webinars, case studies and more that are securely hidden behind a registration wall to capture your prospects’ contact information.

But do your due diligence to make sure the content is new and thought-provoking or you may take your company out of the running. If done properly, you will establish your company as experts in your respective field and likely secure a spot on the short list when it’s finally time to buy.

Nicole Delorme – tigriseventsinc.com

I’m a big fan of social media marketing because you get to have a two way conversation with your audience. It’s a great way to hear your customers and get their feedback in real time. In my experience, it’s best to choose 1-3 social media sites to focus your efforts on rather than trying to be active everywhere and spread yourself thin. For our company, Instagram and Facebook have been key, but it really depends on your industry and where your target customers are active.

We use Instagram Insights to determine our strategy for promoting pictures from our live events on Instagram. Insights is an analytics tools that helps us learn about our audience demographics and discover what time of the day is best to post in order to get the most engagement. All our posts include 30 hashtags, which is the maximum allowed. We write hashtags as a comment instead of within the photo description so it stays hidden to our audience but still allows us to take advantage of the increased visibility with hash tagging.

Olanrewaju Adeyemi Biodun

My focus is SEO. From technical SEO to On-page Optimization and Content Marketing. I have taken a website from online obscurity to being ranked #1 for certain keywords with little or no budget.

This is how I did it.

I started with Technical SEO. I crawled the website with Seocheckup.com, you could use MOZ site crawler as well. This helps you to first detect technical issues, crawling errors and On-page troubles. Unless these issues are fixed, you will struggle with visibility via organic seacrh. Trust me.

I crafted search optimised meta data info for the home page and all major categories. These info were not mere sales copy to advertise the business. They were short direct sentences optimised for keywords and they had call-to-action. That settled the On-page issues.

I then moved on to defining the brand’s audience which guided my content marketing strategy. They were a financial tech company, processing online payment for small businesses. So, I created SEO content stratefy that focused on solving problems for small businesses, especially tech-related small businesses.

I created the SEO content, shared with popular tech blogs, promoted on social media and the company’s email list which had been inactive before then. It was only one magic blog post a week. It worked!.

Whatever digital marketing strategy you want to deploy, think content, think relevance of the content to the audience and the business, think content promotion, think collaboration. It is not always fat budget for campaigns.

Nirav Dave – Capsicum Mediaworks

When it comes to B2B marketing, a combination of SEO, Content, Social Media and Email Marketing can help build brand awareness and attract targeted leads, especially, if you are just starting out.

1. SEO – Once you have clearly demarcated your niche and researched about your target audience, the next step involves on-page optimization through keyword research. Identifying and implementing targeted keywords on your website helps customers to find your site easily. Plus, to increase your site’s traffic, make use long tail keywords as they include phrases, which are generally used by customers when searching for a specific product or service online.

2. Content Marketing – One of the best ways to generate qualified leads, through content marketing you are able to better engage with your audience. Creating informative and relevant content that resonates with your readers can also help boost your SEO strategy and improve your site’s ranking on search engines. In addition, you can make use of different content types such as how-to guides, infographic, explainer videos etc, that will help boost conversion.

3. Social Media – Pick a social channel that works best for your business and leverage it to the fullest. For B2B marketing, Linkedin is considered the best option for building and maintaining relationships. However, it is important that you experiment with other social channels as well, in order to discern which works best for your business.

4. Email Marketing – An effective tactic that always seems to work, email marketing is yet another marketing channel that delivers the best results. Be it building trust and loyalty in customers or increasing the click-through-rate, with email marketing you can segment your audience and provide them with personalized content that will help garner leads and boost your sales, resulting in a higher ROI.

Marius Kiniulis – MARKINBLOG.com

I have discovered two methods that will generate more leads for your B2B business:

1. Search Engine Marketing.

I think that search marketing (both organic and PPC) is one of the most valuable long-term strategies for generating B2B business. Your target audience has to be able to find your site for it to be effective. That’s where search engine marketing comes in. Of course, it will take longer to get organic results than with PPC, but combining it both together we can have very positive ROI results.

2. Live Chat Integration.

It works just wonderfully. It helps to add a human factor to your website and effectively assigns your customer service agents to provide real-time answers and build confidence during when potential customer is visiting your site. It’s like having a real-time sales person available whenever you need them.

Vladimir Gendelman – companyfolders.com
Vladimir Gendelman is the founder and CEO of companyfolders.com. He is a thought leader in print design and digital marketing, and has published a variety of articles in major publications, including Forbes and Time.

It’s always better to be the best at one thing than good at a lot of different things. Focus on just one marketing channel at a time. Diversification is vital, but if you try to improve a lot of different areas at once, you’ll spread yourself too thin and none of them will truly flourish.

Instead, choose one channel and make it as cost-effective as you possibly can. This might seem limiting at first, but it allows you the freedom to be creative and experiment with several different approaches until you find one that works. Once that marketing strategy is fully optimized, you can move on to the next channel.

Marcus Svensson – albacross.com
Marcus Svensson is responsible for the Growth of Albacross with previous experience as a founder and background in Mathematics from Stanford. Albacross is one of the top lead generation tools in Europe today and growing with hundreds of new companies every day.

Did you know that out of every 1000 visitors that you get, only 20 people end up converting? That’s right, a huge amount of businesses are missing out on most of their potential customers. The thing is that not all your website visitors want or have time to read your content. What’s more, your prospects usually are up for something free. It can be a free trial, an ebook with tons of valuable information, etc.

Needless to say that free things attract people. That is why this strategy to generate leads with some sort of gifts or exclusive offers is definitely worth to try. In this way, if your audience like your freebie, you will get not only their contact details but their loyalty in the future.

Jimmy Rodriguez – 3dcart.com
COO & Co-founder of 3dcart, a leading shopping cart software. As an ecommerce authority, he’s focused on helping internet retailers succeed online by developing strategies, actionable plans and customer experiences that grow and improve performance.

An area were many B2B companies still fall short is taking advantage of ecommerce and optimizing their websites for conversions and mobile users.

B2B relationships really depend on the ability of the companies involved to mutually agree on business terms before placing orders or completing a transaction; and this represents the main reason why business steer to taking orders over the website instead of doing it on their websites. But once a relationship has been established, and the vendor has defined the buyer’s pricing structure, preferred method of payment, delivery details, etc., the transactions could be completed via an ecommerce website without necessarily needing any human assistance on the supplier’s end.

All that being said, the implications are clear: If your B2B ecommerce site doesn’t allow your potential buyers to take control of the purchasing process, you’re probably losing business.

Your B2B ecommerce website should be able to accommodate different types of customers, with their unique price levels, promotions, shipping and payment preferences. While making it easy and convenient to place a new order, from a desktop or mobile device; to re-order, or to establish and manage recurring orders and pre-established intervals.

The post 50 Experts Reveal the Best B2B Marketing Strategies appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

To compete in the overly competitive digital landscape of 2026, you’ll need to focus on twelve specific areas.

While you’ve probably heard about these, how many details do you really know to make each one effective? They’re all the standards for this year and into the coming decade.

Take a look at each one and see how much you really know. Then assess what elements of them you need to hone in on. These all range from SEO to landing pages. In-between, you may learn some new things about local search marketing and the ever-popular format of video.

1. SEO

There isn’t anything more important to digital marketing than SEO, something that might still mystify you in its ongoing complexity. While it’s true Google’s algorithms can still become confusing, you can better grasp how it works when you work more with the concept.

It’s always better to have an expert to manage SEO for you if you want to truly succeed. While you can learn some basics, you’ll want someone who’s worked in it a while to fully help you realize the best strategies.

One recent strategy involves new HTTPS requirements already impacting SEO results. If you’re used to using HTTP pages, Google now suggests you to switch to a HTTPS format. The reasoning behind this is many contact forms using HTTP pages aren’t deemed secure enough.

Now that Google is going to label these “non-secure”, it’s essential to update your website with the HTTPS designation. Otherwise, having a “non-secure” stamp on your site could become a new scarlet letter for your placement on search engines.

An expert B2B SEO services will help you make this change.

2. Search Engine Marketing

If you’re new to search engine marketing, you’ll usually see it abbreviated as SEM. It’s a form of Internet marketing where you increase your SERPs through paid advertising methods.

You’ll want an expert to help you in this field as well, especially one who’s worked with Google Ads and search/display ads. In the case of Google Ads, you’ll want to educate yourself first on how the process works.

What you’ll appreciate the most is Google makes its Google Ads easy to use through their attention to customization. They let you choose whether you want graphic display ads, YouTube video ads, text-based search ads, or in-app mobile ads. All of these are going to depend on your business style and the targeted customers you need to reach.

Google makes it even easier with localized ad capability, plus superior metrics to track how well your ads work.

Don’t forget about other paid ad opportunities, especially Facebook Ads. The latter gives you ample opportunity to customize to multiple ad formats.

3. Local Search Marketing

You’re seeing a lot more attention on local search marketing in the last few years. It’ll continue being important far into the coming decade as local businesses realize the value of being found by local consumers.

To get started with local search marketing, you can again utilize more gifts from Google. Through Google My Business, you’ll be able to have your listing turn up the second someone does a Google search based on the user’s keywords. This includes your business appearing on Google Maps.

Google makes it easy to update your listing as well so nothing becomes out of date.

Don’t forget about how important online reviews are, as well as your social reputation. You’ll want to inspire customers to write positive reviews on places like Yelp. On social media, starting conversations and posting targeted content helps you utilize inbound marketing. Inbound techniques attract customers to you rather than you seeking them.

4. Content Marketing

As a connective string to inbound marketing above, content marketing is a big part of attracting a targeted audience. What’s essential about content marketing is that you need to make your content valuable, relevant, and consistent to make it worth the time of those consuming it.

In today’s time, you need to focus on creating content that can solve pain points and stay evergreen. Using shortcuts or black hat SEO tactics just to move to the top of search engines won’t work thanks to Google’s all-seeing eye.

So always keep “content is king”, as many like to put it. To make content marketing work well, you need to focus on mobile content, native advertising, influencer marketing, and marketing automation.

Think seriously about mobile content because smartphones are already making up 50% of all global devices. This is going to affect digital advertising, and how influencers promote your brand.

Automation tools send content to prospects on their mobile devices at just the right times.

5. Remarketing

Another critical aspect of digital marketing is going after prospects again with marketing content if they didn’t respond to your site’s banner ads the first time. This works by tracking these visitors through cookies and creating new ads on related sites.

You can also create new ads on your site to better target your prospects. The information you get from your site visitors gives you valuable data to tweak your ads to their pain points.

Ultimately, remarketing helps you stay more engaged with prospects, aids in brand awareness, and increases conversions. You can also gain the customers of your competitors, helping pay back any investment you place in creating new ads.

6. Responsive Web Design

Reaching customers by mobile is more or less the standard now, and that’s going to go on into the coming decade. Making your website conform to mobile screens is one of the most essential parts of digital marketing. The only way you can make this work successfully is through responsive web design.

With responsive programming, you can make your website automatically conform to all mobile screens. This is going to mean more than one format, including tablets and increasing use of smartwatches.

While you’ll have to work with a web designer to make this work, you’ll want an SEO expert for another aspect of RWD. AMP (or Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a new open-source code helping to make mobile web pages load faster.

Google gives precedence to websites using this, so take it seriously. It’s especially useful if you have a publishing site or post content to your website on a regular basis.

7. Email Marketing

No doubt you’ve done some email marketing, but how effective is it in reaching your intended targets at the right times? Email marketing is already a great tool for generating more leads than possible through any other marketing method. You can also increase your sales and conversion rates.

If you’re already suffering from overspending on other digital marketing, email marketing is one of the most affordable methods out there. In some cases, it’s free, unless using outsourced services.

Since you can combine it with other media, it’s also one of the most integrated marketing methods. You can add social share icons, plus referral reward systems. Email marketing ultimately helps you shorten your sales cycles when using compelling content.

8. Social Media Marketing

No doubt you’ve posted content to social media already. Yet, what can you do to make it more effective this year and the next?

To capture today’s audiences, Forbes notes various things, including automation to post your content when you know your audience is reading. Using tools like Hootsuite for post scheduling helps immensely when reaching users in other time zones.

You’ll also want to curate some content if possible to prove your clout. Don’t be too proud to do this since it adds luster to your expertise and brand. When you curate content from others, they’ll likely reciprocate.

Plus, don’t forget about hiring influencers to post content for you on popular social media channels.

9. Marketing Automation

As you can see, marketing automation is an important element in a lot of digital marketing techniques. Knowing more about it, in general, should become a top priority as it becomes a standard for businesses around the globe.

With 91% of successful businesses now saying automation is very important to their success, you can get a vision of what the present and future of marketing is.

To become successful with this, try looking for a CRM platform with marketing automation built-in. These can work together well because your CRM already has contact information. Automating marketing content directly to your contact list helps you integrate your marketing all in one place rather than using disparate sources.

What’s most important with automation is to keep your content consistent across all channels to avoid brand confusion.

10. Influencer Marketing

Have you thought about how you can take on a digital marketing campaign without having to spend a fortune? While you can save money doing email marketing and inbound techniques, hiring influencers does the same.

If you think hiring influencers to promote your brand online is all about hiring celebrities, think again. An influential person on social media doesn’t always have to mean being a celebrity. It can simply be someone with a lot of followers and a good track record of promoting products.

Forbes notes you need to identify top influencers first, which is going to involve a little research. You can do this by doing hashtag searches on places like Twitter to see what people are saying about topics related to your industry.

Reach out to these influencers on social media and ask them if they’d be willing to promote your brand. Some may offer to do it in exchange for free products. However, most are going to demand a fee.

Be sure to track your results to assure your ROI. Keep in mind those with fewer followers can have just as much influence as those with ten times the amount of followers.

11. Video

Over the last decade, we became a more visual culture attracted to imagery in the digital realms. A lot of this comes in various forms, but there isn’t any question video rose to the top.

We’re at the point now where more consumers of content prefer video above any other visual medium. Recent statistics show 87% of all online marketers now use video content of some sort.

A lot of this comes from massive viewership on places like YouTube. Regardless, where you post videos isn’t going to matter without compelling content.

The personalized video has become a norm lately, or at least ones directly addressing pain points of targeted viewers. The same goes with making your business look more human.

Successful video marketing can mean behind-the-scenes tours of your business, or testimonials to show the human side of your brand.  This means paying attention to one major trend in video marketing: Storytelling.

When you can tell a compelling story about your business and prove you can solve the pain points of customers, you have a can’t-miss formula.

It’s also smart to keep your videos as short as possible, if not in a series. Attention spans are as short as ever, and you’ll need to tell your story in a compact way with a compelling hook.

12. Revisiting Your Landing Pages

If you’ve already created a landing page as part of your digital marketing campaign, are you sure prospects who visited before are going to come back?

This is a question that should become the central core of your digital marketing efforts. All marketing experts reiterate how landing page traffic is the nucleus of successful inbound marketing.

The problem is your landing page perhaps isn’t very enticing at the moment. Solving this (in part) comes down to web design, including where you place your Call to Action and advertising.

It goes beyond what you place on your website, though. You’ll want to invest in PPC advertising (pay-per-click) consulting services to place ads for your site on related digital channels.

Other options include buying sponsorships with other companies, or just simple email marketing. In the latter case, placing a link that takes the reader to your landing page for further content is a common strategy.

For CTA’s, be sure to include one on your homepage to avoid complications. Even a CTA at the end of your blog gives a connective string to your content to entice another visitation.

Plus, pay attention to the “above vs. below the fold” debates. Kissmetrics once noted that CTA placement depends on the length of your landing page. A shorter page means you should place the CTA above the folder.

Final Thoughts

Follow these twelve steps, and you’ll be off to a good start in digital marketing strategies for the rest of the year. Expect these to stay relatively the same well into 2026 as well.

Don’t be afraid to work with inbound marketing consultants (especially in SEO) so you don’t make mistakes after weeks or months of hard work.

The post 12 Effective Digital Marketing Tactics and Strategies appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Simply put, lead generation is the process of attracting, engaging, and converting website visitors into leads.

A lead, on the other hand, is basically anyone that has shown any signs of voluntary interest in your products and/or services. Since here we are mainly discussing B2B lead generation, then your leads—and target customers— are businesses and organizations that are in need of your product or service.

Another important factor that is unique for the B2B environment is that there can be several different stakeholders in a single target company.

For example, if your product is a B2B software, then the target company’s IT officer, IT manager, finance manager, and CEO might be involved in the purchase decision. Meaning, each of these individual stakeholders with different roles can be considered a unique lead, with each of them requiring different lead generation approach and targeting with SEO for SaaS and Software companies.

How B2B Lead Generation Works

How do we ‘convert’ a random website visitor into a lead?

The answer is to capture the visitor’s contact information (mainly email address) via an opt-in form so we can then send email content as a lead nurturing process. The typical steps would be similar to this:

• We attract
• We place CTA (Click-To-Action) buttons like “buy now” at optimized places on our web page, this will be closely related to the lead magnet, which will be discussed below.
• Visitors that clicked on the CTA button will be given a lead capture opt-in form so we can collect the necessary information from the consumer (their name, email address, physical location, etc.)
• Once the form is submitted, the visitor is effectively converted as your lead/prospect
• Now we can effectively connect with the said prospect and enter the lead nurturing stage as discussed above.

As we can see, the key here is the CTA button, its placement, and the offer we placed behind the CTA—the lead magnet—, which we will discuss above.

The Idea of Lead Magnet

A lead magnet, in essence, is something valuable we offer the website’s visitor for FREE, in exchange for their contact information.

It’s that simple. So, the key to offering an effective lead magnet is to understand our audience’s needs, pain points, problems, and what can interest them.

In general, there are three things that construct an effective lead magnet:

1. Instant Solution: the lead magnet can immediately—or almost immediately— provide a solution for the web visitor’s problem.
2. Perceived Value: the website visitor can perceive that the offer can provide value. Remember that the key here is the audience’s perception—and not yours—. Sometimes, something that is actually valuable is not perceived as such by the target audience.
3. Communicate Unique Selling Proposition: the lead magnet can communicate and convince your website visitor about your brand’s unique value proposition. This way, when the consumer signs up voluntarily to the email opt-in, they have a higher chance to convert as actual customers because they understood what your brand offers.

Effective Lead Generation Best Practices

Here, we will discuss some of the most effective tactics in implementing B2B lead generation.

1. Inbound Marketing: Blog Post+Gated Content as Lead Magnet

This is one of the most commonly practiced lead generation tactics today both in the B2C and B2B environments.

Gated content is, simply put, a downloadable content that is ‘gated’ behind a lead capture form. When the user provides their contact information in the opt-in form, they can now download the content.

The main idea is fairly simple:

• Publish valuable content to attract website visitors, promoted mainly through B2B SEO.
• Engage users through the content, and offer a related, more valuable (at least, perceived as more valuable) content in exchange for their contact information.
• The visitors are attracted to download the gated content and effectively converts as a lead/prospect

For example, let’s say the company is selling an SEO keyword research tool in a SaaS business model, so the ‘main’ content discusses something like “enterprise SEO strategy”. Then, the gated content can be something like “Step-by-Step SEO Strategy” in a 10,000-word long ebook.

2. Social Media Lead Generation

Social media is an effective lead generation channel due to one obvious reason: it is where the audience is nowadays, even in the B2B environment. In fact, influencer marketing—as an aspect of social media marketing is currently— very popular in B2B marketing.

There are over 3 billion social media active users all over the world. Nowadays, even B2B stakeholders consider social media as a valuable source of information.

There are three main approaches to using social media for lead generation:

• Organic: that is, growing your own social media followers and attract them organically with your content.
• Paid: using advertising and other paid promotional options offered by various social media platforms to generate leads. For B2B businesses, for example, LinkedIn offers a specific lead generation ad campaign.
• Influencers: working with influencers to promote your brand, product, and/or service. In essence, a mix of organic and paid approaches.

In practice, you can use social media to direct your audience to a content (which will offer a lead magnet, as discussed above), or straight to a landing page with an opt-in form, among other methods.

Social media is among the quickest, easiest to implement, and most cost-efficient B2B lead generation channels available, and it’s also highly versatile.

3. Effective CTAs

The design of the CTA and how we place it will significantly affect the conversion rate. However, creating a highly effective CTA can be easier said than done: on the one hand, it has to be simple and clear enough for our audience. On the other hand, it has to effectively attract and engage.

So, how can we develop highly effective CTAs? Here are a few pointers:

1. The offer: a CTA can only be as powerful as the offer behind it (see point one above), the other
2. Text/Copywriting: this is about how you communicate the offer. This guide by Hubspot on CTA copywriting might help you in this aspect.
3. Visuals: a CTa can come in the form of a visual button (or even a banner) or a text-based hyperlink. In general, however, well-designed buttons tend to catch more attention.
4. Contrast: the CTA has to stand out from its surrounding ‘environment’. Use different colors than the rest of the page, use typography that sticks out, and so on.
5. Size: fairly obvious—the bigger, generally the better. Yet, it’s important to maintain the balance of the overall context.

Make sure the CTA is clear and communicate the right message about the role of the user. For example, if the user is going to download something after they click on the button, then say “download”. Similarly, if the CTA is about free-trial sign-up, say “sign-up for a free trial here” or something similar. Keep it specific and don’t mislead the user.

4. Slide-In Scroll CTA

The idea here is fairly simple, and also one of the most effective ways to generate leads.

Here, we ‘slide-in’ a scroll box—technically a contact capture form as a CTA— after the user scrolls through a certain percentage of the entire content, for example, we can slide in the opt-in box after the user scrolls through 70% of the entire page.

You can use tools like OptinMonster to create this type of CTA.

5. Effective Use of Pop-Up Forms

A pop-up box is also effective in collecting direct leads.

Simply adding a pop-up box at the end of your content can significantly improve lead conversion rate. Why at the end? Because placement is very important, and most users decide whether they’d want to commit with your brand—or not— when they reach the end of your content. So, placing your CTA here will translate to asking them to make the decision right away.

In short, timing is important.

Also, this might convert visitors that are originally unwilling to at the start of the content.

6. Create a Quiz

An interesting and interactive quiz can be an effective method to generate more leads, and you can use tools like Interact Quiz Maker or Bucket.io to create this lead-generation quizzes.

The idea is quite similar to ‘traditional’ CTA and lead magnet: provide value with your quiz, and communicate this value as best as possible.

For example, tell them that this quiz will provide insights into how they can grow their website traffic, and don’t forget to deliver on this promise.

Keep in simple: ask around 6 to 12 question, and only include three or four options for each question.

End Words

Lead generation is—in its purest essence—, an art of understanding your target audience, provide value according to their needs and/or problems, and find out opportunities to capture their contact information.

Don’t annoy your site visitors, and always aim to provide value to your audience. Also, timing is key.

The post 6 B2B Lead Generation Ideas To Implement appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Online marketing, in particular, is fluid and constantly changing, and you need to constantly update and adjust your strategy.

It’s important to read blogs, news updates, articles, and newsletters that focus on marketing trends so that you aren’t left behind. To start you off, here a few big ways marketing will be different in 2026.

Content Comes In Many Forms

Content marketing is mostly driven by having a successful blog and rolling out email newsletters but there are other forms of content which are becoming increasingly popular with consumers, especially the younger crowd.

Video and live video content are just two examples of how you can use different forms of content to reach consumers.

However, it goes a lot deeper than that. Take memes and GIFs as examples.

They are extremely popular with millennials. If used correctly, they can be an effective tool for creating a connection with your target audience, especially on social media.

Quick surveys and quizzes, how-to guides, whitepapers, ebooks, cartoons, and webinars are some additional ideas of types of content you may want to use.

Vlogs can be used to create a personal connection with your audience, and podcasts are useful for reaching those who love to consume new information on-the-go.

Of course, not all of the above forms of content will be applicable to your business. Everything will depend on your industry and target demographic; for example, if you are targeting professionals, whitepapers would be a better choice than memes and GIFs.

Voice Search and Voice SEO

Google users are using voice commands to conduct online searches. By 2026, it is estimated that 50 percent of all searches will be voice searches.

This will affect, among other things, how marketing professionals will need to approach SEO.

Instead of simply targeting keywords, you will need to target search terms that are likely to be used by people conducting voice searches. Not only it has the capacity to generate quick traffic but also signifies a strong on-page designing of the website.

As such, try incorporating questions and “natural language” keyword phrases in your content.

In addition, if you operate an ecommerce site, you should allow users to search for products through a voice search. Make sure that your search engine can detect and interpret natural language and is optimized for bringing up the best-match products.

The Rise of the Chatbots

Chatbots, that are AI driven application, offer consumers many benefits, such as 24/7 customer service, quick answers and solutions, ease of approach, and convenience.

Having a chatbot option on your website can increase customer satisfaction and retention rates.

Many businesses are starting to incorporate a small chatbot popup in the bottom right corners of their site. Ecommerce businesses especially are already leveraging on AI potential. Customers can interact with the bots and get answers to questions; if needed, they can be connected with a live representative

Chatbots are more for just customer service. In an age when getting a good opening rate on your emails can seem like a difficult task, Facebook messenger chatbots may offer a solution.

The average email open rate is around 24 percent. For ecommerce businesses, it’s around 78 percent. Facebook Messenger chatbots, on the other hand, can get you an open rate of 88 percent.

Keeping Up With the Platforms

Facebook is still King of the Social Media. However, that doesn’t mean it will always stay that way.

According to Pew Research, many young Americans are changing the nature of their relationships with Facebook.

As many as 44 percent of millennials have deleted the Facebook app from their phone over the past year, while 42 percent of all adult users said that they had taken a break from checking Facebook for several weeks or more.

Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Quora, Kik, and Vimeo are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to alternative social networks. It’s important to continually pay attention to new and emerging social apps.

Remarketing and Customer Lifecycles

Remarketing and retargeting are becoming increasingly popular among marketing professionals. The click-through-rate of a retargeted ad is 10x more, on average, than regular ads.

Remarketing is available on many platforms, including Facebook and Google Adwords. You can target people who have already visited your site, signed up to your list, or clicked on one of your previous ads.

It’s also important to put more focus on customer retention. The acquisition cost of new customers is five times that of retaining existing customers.

More Social Contact

It’s time to up your social game.

Social media should be personal. Your profile shouldn’t just be a brand pushing its products and website links, but rather it should have a personal tone to it.

You can connect with your customers by adapting a fun tone, posting interesting and/or humorous content such as memes or GIFs, giving followers behind-the-scene peeks into your business, and using live video.

Having the management or even the CEO active on social media will also help increase trust.

Of course, make sure to actively reply to customers who reach out to you or tweet to you with problems or complaints. Many millennials prefer to use social media as their preferred customer service channel.

You should also try to encourage engagement by posting questions and asking for opinions.

Secure Data and Privacy

With more and more large companies and platforms facing scrutiny over their privacy policies and what they do with users’ data, it’s important that you take steps to protect your customer data.

This ties into a previous point, where we mentioned that many Facebook users have deleted the app from their phones or taken a break from using it.

One of the things that may have led to this was the news of the massive data breach that affected nearly 50 million Facebook users in September.

Wrapping It Up

Marketing professionals need to constantly be on top of the game and be ready to go with the flow.

By adjusting your marketing strategy in 2026 to take into account the above-mentioned trends, you will stay one step ahead of your competition.

The post Will 2026 Be Any Different For Marketing Professionals? Know What to Expect appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

SEO, on the other hand, is one of the most effective channels in generating organic traffic and building online awareness, making it a very important aspect of a company’s digital marketing strategy.

In this guide, we will learn about how we can use SEO strategy to improve organic traffic, generate leads, and ultimately, drive revenue. But first, let us discuss some key facts of why SEO might be relatively unique compared to other niches.

Whether it’s a B2B company selling SaaS (Software as a Service) solution or you are a direct-to-consumer company, ensuring you have a proper online presence can either make or break your business.

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 SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is essentially a series of optimizations made inside and outside our website, so the site can rank higher in Google’s and the other search engines’ SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

SERP ranking, however, isn’t and shouldn’t be the end goal of SEO strategy. Instead, it’s just a means of an end in increasing organic traffic. More website traffic, in turn, will help us in achieving other objectives like generating more leads, building digital awareness, and getting more conversions.

Google, as the biggest and most popular search engine, is obviously the main focus of most SEO strategies, but we can also target other search engines like Bing or Yahoo!

We can divide SEO into two different categories: off-page SEO and on-page SEO.

On-Page SEO refers to optimizations that are done inside your website, which can include optimizing your content, the website’s technical (coding) performance, and other aspects.

Off-page SEO is optimizations done outside the website, which mainly involves building the site’s credibility, trust signals, and authority by getting more backlinks/inbound links (more on this later) and social signals.

To be clear, we need to implement both types of optimizations to achieve the desired SEO results.

How exactly? We will discuss it below.

How SEO Actually Works

To really understand how SEO works, we have to discuss several different elements:

The SERP

SERP stands for Search Engines Results Page, which is, the page displayed by the search engine when we search for a specific query.

For example, when we search for “SERP” query, this is the SERP page:

The objective of SEO strategy is to achieve a higher organic search ranking, and if possible, the #1 ranking spot. In the above example, that is the spot right below the “People also ask” box.

It’s very important to consider the fact that 95% of users won’t go past the first page of SERPs. So, getting on the first page of Google SERP is the most important priority of SEO strategy.

However, Google’s SERP has significantly evolved since its actual launch back in 1996, more than two decades ago. Back then, it was pretty simple: paid search ads on top and organic results right below them.

Here is how the SERP for the query “when is the 2025 election” is today:

As you can see, it’s way more complicated. On the above example, there are several different elements included in the SERP:

1. Featured snippet box to inform us about the Date (the direct answer to the search query)
2. Knowledge panel on the sidebar. In this example, a result from Wikipedia
3. The “People Also Ask” box featuring 4 questions
4. The “Top Stories” section featuring video results

Only after all of these elements, we are presented with the organic search result.

What will this mean? Organic ranking is now not the only available objective/priority for SEO strategy. We can also aim to get ranked as a featured snippet or to be featured on the “People Also Ask” questions.

The Anatomy of the Ranking Process

How does Google (and the other search engines) actually rank the websites as the search results?

Understanding the answer to this question can significantly help in really understanding the concept of SEO.

First, according to Google’s own statement, its mission is to deliver the most relevant and reliable information for the human audience. SEO strategy is, to put simply, a way to optimize our website and our content to align with this mission.

So, Google rank content based on its relevance and reliability in meeting the user’s search intent, and here is how the ranking process basically works:

1. Google and other search engines involve the use of web crawlers or search bots, essentially an automated software that will visit all the different websites on the internet. Thus, we often refer to this process as “crawling the page/web”.
2. Google then add the crawled pages to its index. This process is called the indexation process.
3. Based on its algorithm  (more on this later), Google considers all the different ranking factors and shows the most reliable and relevant results from its index when the user enters a search query.

We will have a more in-depth discussion on the ranking algorithms and especially ranking factors/ranking signals below.

Top SEO Ranking Factors in 2025

To be clear, Google features a very complex ranking algorithm and will take account of more than 200 different SEO ranking factors. However, back in 2016, so quite recently, Google basically confirmed its top three ranking factors: Link Profile, Content quality, and User Experience metrics.

1. Link Profile

It’s important to understand that a website’s link profile is not only about backlinks, although backlinks are indeed the most important element of the link profile. Instead, there are three different types of links that will affect your site’s SEO performance:

• Internal links: links from one page of your site to another page(s).
• Outbound links: also called outgoing links, which are links from your pages to third-party websites
• Inbound links: more commonly known as backlinks, links coming to your page(s) from third-party sources

As established above, inbound links are the most important of the three in determining your site’s ranking.

We can think of inbound links or backlinks as the vote of confidence in the digital world. When a website links to your content, they are saying that your page is reliable, credible, and trustworthy. When the link is coming from a relevant, high-quality website, it’s like getting a recommendation letter from a famous person in your industry (read: it’s very valuable).

Nowadays the quality of the backlinks is significantly more important than quantity. In fact, getting too many low-quality backlinks at any given time might get your site penalized by Google.

While inbound links are the most important of the three, that’s not saying outbound links and internal links are not important:

• Outbound links and proper internal linking structure can help improve your site’s relevance. Linking to an authoritative site, for example, can tell Google that you are a legitimate content creator for a specific topic. A proper internal linking practice can also help Google with the indexation process.
• Proper external links essentially tell Google about the niche/industry you are in, the topic you are covering, the potential competitors, and so on. In short, you are helping the search engines to index and structure the whole internet.
• Linking to relevant content (that is already ranking) can provide additional value for your audience (which can indirectly affect ranking).
• When you link to others, you let the other party notice your site and your content. In the future, they might return the favor and link your content. In short, this can be the start of a fruitful relationship.

2. Content Quality

The quality of your content is the center of your SaaS SEO strategy, period. No amount of SEO optimizations and state-of-the-art strategy can help low-quality content. Think of SEO strategy as a way to amplify the performance of high-quality and relevant content and not the other way around.

In the past, SEO content is solely about optimizing the content for the target keywords, and thus we aim for a certain keyword density. It’s very important to understand that today, SEO strategy is no longer solely about keyword optimization.

Instead, the most important thing to focus on is whether your content can meet the user’s search intent. In general, there are four different types of search intent:

• Informational intent. The user is simply looking for information. For example, a user might look for information about SEO by using the “what is SEO” search query. In this case, we can provide educational or informational content to meet this user’s needs.
• Transactional intent. Here, the user is searching for a product/service with the intention to buy. Nowadays, however,  people might search directly on Amazon when they have transactional intent. This intent is usually identified when the user uses “buy” in their query.
• Comparison and Investigation. The user has the intention to buy in the future or is considering to make the purchase by comparing different products/services, check for online reviews, etc. When a user uses queries like “compare” or “review”, it is a strong sign they are having this intent.
• Navigational intent. Users with this intent are trying to get to a specific website. For example, we might type “Instagram” in the search bar for convenience’s sake.

In a software company environment, the user can have all four of these search intents with various queries, so it’s very important to develop a wide variety of content to cover all of these intents.

Google is getting better and better at recognizing how content can cater to a specific intent. Google BERT, the latest algorithm update, allows Google to better understand the context of long-tail, complex queries.

Content optimization for SEO is a very complex subject, but in general, it’s about being better than the other ranking content. Do a quick Google search of your target keyword (more on this later), and analyze the top-ranking pages (if possible, analyze all pages featured on the first page of the SERP). We generally have two options:

• Develop better, longer, more in-depth content than these competitors.
• Be different, and cover the keyword from a unique angle.

Which one is easier? In most cases—if the opportunity presents itself—, being unique is relatively easier, but not saying it’s easy.

Content quality and relevance are extremely related to backlinks (as discussed above). Good content will always get linked, sooner or later. On the other hand, no amount of promotion can help low-quality content that is not relevant to get authoritative backlinks.

3. User Experience Metrics

To reiterate, Google search’s mission is to provide relevant and reliable search results for its user, and the Google search algorithm is constantly being improved to achieve this mission.

One of Google’s major improvements in accordance with this objective is the introduction of Google RankBrain. RankBrain is Google’s first AI-based algorithm that is launched in 2016, and with its machine learning capability, Google is now getting better at measuring and recognizing these user-experience metrics in real-time:

• Bounce rate: the percentage of visitors that leave your site after viewing just one page (single page visit). It can be after one second or one hour, what matters is they leave after just a single page.
• Dwell time: that is, how long a visitor spends on your site. They can view just one page or 100 pages, but this metric is about the total time spent.
• Click-through rate (CTR): the percentage of users that click on SERP results and visit the website

These three metrics combined, essentially provide Google with the information whether your site is relevant for the user, according to the user’s search query and search intent.

Summary: It’s All About Content

To summarize, all three metrics above are centered on one thing: your content quality and relevance. As we will discuss in the rest of this guide, content optimization will be the center of B2B SEO strategy.

Step By Step Guide To SEO Strategy

Step 1: Define SEO Objective

It’s very important to remember that SEO is not a cheat engine or holy-grail tactic to beat the search engine algorithm, but as established above, it’s a series of optimization to align our site and our content with the search engine’s mission to provide more relevant information for the users.

On the other hand, we have also mentioned that SERP ranking shouldn’t be the end goal of SEO strategy, but just a means to an end for objectives like:

• Organic traffic: referring to unpaid website traffic coming from clicks on SERP results. Even if organic traffic is not your end goal, you simply can’t get anything on your site without any traffic. So, in most cases, organic traffic should be one of your main SEO objectives.
• Brand presence: with more people visiting your website and consuming your content, you can improve brand awareness and (perceived) credibility.
• Generate more leads: the website is still the most important lead generation device. The main idea is to convert some of the organic traffic into qualified prospects.
• Sales conversion: pretty self-explanatory, generate more sales on the website. Especially important for eCommerce sites or sites with an affiliate marketing objective.
• Online reputation management (ORM): maintain a positive online presence, mainly by ranking well on branded keywords.
• Customer support and education: publish and promote informational content that can help educate your audience about your product/service or your niche/industry.

You can chase more than one SEO objectives, but make sure that all your goals follow these important principles:

• Specific: the objective must be clear and comprehensive, and can be communicated easily with your team members
• Realistic: that is, attainable. If necessary, break down big goals into smaller milestones to give yourself (and your team members) a sense of achievement with each milestone
• Measurable: define KPIs and measurable metrics for each objective. We should be able to measure the SEO campaign’s performance and progress in accordance with the target objectives.

Make sure to define and list proper objectives that align well with your marketing goals and overall business objectives. For example, if your company’s marketing objective is to generate 30% more leads, then your SEO campaign should aim to help this objective.

Step 2: Site Audit For SEO

The next step is to assess the site’s current state in relation to SEO performance.

We do this by performing an SEO site audit to figure out current on-site and off-site optimizations, as well as technical SEO factors.

Site audit for SEO is a very broad subject on its own, and we won’t give it much justice discussing it here.

However, here are some of the important areas to check in this step:

1. Check Your Site’s Crawlability and Indexability

As we’ve established above, not indexed by Google=your site won’t rank at all, period.

So, make sure Google can crawl your site properly, recognize all of your content pages, and index all of the pages properly. Here are some important things to focus on:

• A proper XML sitemap that lists all your pages
• Make sure your URL is accessible and use HTTPS/ SSL security
• Proper optimization of your robots.txt file
• Use Google Se0arch Console and check your site for possible crawl errors

2. Proper URL Optimizations

We have briefly discussed the importance of enabling HTTPS above, and a secure website URL is now an important SEO ranking factor. Also, pay attention to potential issues like:

• Linking to insecure pages
• Make sure to use canonical URL on your original content to avoid duplication issues
• Make sure your URL is readable, short and to the point. Ensure both the search engines and the human audience can properly understand the URL. Include your target keyword when you can, but do it naturally
• Make sure your SSL security certificate is valid
• Check all your pages and your content, and make sure they are all secure

3. Title Tags and META Descriptions

Title tags and META descriptions are the information displayed on the SERP search result.

For example, for the query “what is software company”, here is the top result

“Software company – Wikipedia” is the Title Tag of the page, and below the URL we can see the META description of the website as the snippet.

As you can see, this information will ultimately determine whether or not the user will visit your site (click-through rate). As discussed, CTR is now an important ranking factor. Various SEO tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Screaming Frog, among others, can help us analyze all the various page titles and META descriptions.

The main principle in optimizing these titles and descriptions is to include your keyword(s) as naturally as possible and focus on delivering comprehensive, valuable, and engaging information for the human audience.

4. Content Structure and Optimization

Use proper header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc. ) to ensure easier indexation by Google. A proper structure will let Google know which aspect of the content is the most important or least important.

Check whether embedded images are properly optimized, such as:

• A comprehensive, descriptive filename
• Properly compressed so they don’t slow down the page
• Have proper alt texts or alt tags, to provide information about the image to the search engine
• Links to the images should work as intended

Again, SEO tools with audit features like SEMrush or Ahrefs can help find and troubleshoot image optimization issues.

5. Mobile-Friendliness

It’s no secret that since 2015, Google only prioritizes mobile-friendly sites to rank. If your site is not yet mobile-responsive or mobile-friendly, it will significantly hurt your chance to get ranked and featured as a rich snippet.

Use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to assess whether your site is already mobile-friendly. We will discuss how to ensure your site is mobile-responsive further below as we discuss on-site optimizations.

6. Load Speed

Your page’s load speed will affect dwell time and bounce rate (as discussed above, both are ranking factors). According to Google, if your site loads longer than 3 seconds, more than half of mobile visitors will bounce.

There are various factors that can affect your site’s load times, from image sizes and compressions, proper usage and amount of scripts, server response time, and so on. Again, we will further discuss how to improve our site’s load speed in the on-site optimizations section below.

You can use various tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix to help assess your page’s current load speed and identify potential issues.

7. Structured Data Markup

Structured data or schema.org markup is essentially a practice of assigning properties and attributes to all the different elements in our page/content, to provide Google with the relevant information about your site’s content.

The main advantage of implementing structured data markup is that your site is now eligible to be ranked as a featured snippet. However, proper structured data markup implementation can also help with crawling and indexing purposes.

Again, you can use Google’s structured data testing tool to check your site’s current state regarding structured data markup.

Again, SEO site audit is a very broad subject, and this shouldn’t be an all-inclusive list. The main idea is to figure out our site’s current state in relation to SEO performance, so we can plan our SEO strategy ahead.

Step 3: Keyword Research and Keyword Optimization Plan

One of the key aspects of SEO strategy is finding the right keyword(s) to target. Although we have mentioned that SEO today is no longer solely about keyword optimization, the right keyword research is still very important.

With that being said, here are some important considerations for proper keyword research:

• Understanding your target audience: their needs, behaviors, pain points, and especially, the search intent. The better you can understand your audience, the better you can find your target keywords.
• Always refer back to your SEO objectives and goals. That is, these keywords must help you achieve the objectives and not the other way around. For example, if your SEO objective is to generate more leads, then, in general, you’d want to aim for keywords targeting informative intent to attract potential prospects.
• When trying to find your keyword opportunities, here are the important principles:
  • The keyword must be relevant and valuable for your target audience, according to their search intent(s). We can usually evaluate the monthly search volume for the keyword to measure this aspect.
  • The keyword, no matter how popular/relevant for the target audience, must also be relevant for your business/industry.
  • Based on the available resources and your objective’s timeline, the competition for the target keyword must be manageable. Some SEO tools might be able to measure this aspect via metrics like keyword difficulty or similar ones.

There are various keyword research tools that can help you in this aspect, from free ones like Google Keyword Planner and UberSuggests to premium, all-in-one SEO tools like Moz Pro, Ahrefs, and SEMrush, among others.

Make a list of all the possible target keywords and set your priorities. If required, divide them by your SEO objectives and possible search intents.

Step 4: SERP Analysis

More than 40% of search queries now involve a featured snippet in their SERPs, positioned above the top organic spot. There’s also the “People Also Ask” box just below it, and the knowledge panel on the side.

In short, it’s quite possible that the top organic spot is not the only available ‘target’ for your keywords: while being featured as a rich snippet might not guarantee organic traffic (zero-click search), it might provide various benefits in achieving your SEO objectives. For example, being featured as a rich snippet for key questions and definitions related to your niche can be a really good branding opportunity.

On the other hand, it’s also important to find keywords with a high potential organic click-through rate (CTR)s. They should be your main priority in generating organic traffic to achieve your SEO objectives.

So, do a Google search for your target keywords and analyze the SERPs (or you can use various tools to help you). This practice will be related to the next step.

Step 5: Competitive Analysis

SEO is, by nature, a competition where you try to rank higher than your competitors, so competitive analysis should be an important part of the whole SEO strategy.

The most basic thing to do here is to Google your target keywords, as discussed in the previous step and check the ranking competitors. Check at least the top 3 competitors for each keyword, but if you can, check for all the sites featured on the first page of the SERP.

Check how the content pieces are structured, how optimized (SEO-wise) the content is, their approach for the keywords, and so on. Imitate and improve upon what they already did well, and fix what they did wrong. Our job is to beat these competitors, and there are generally two different ways to do it:

1. Create a (significantly) better content: more in-depth, longer, and better than all of these competitors’.
2. Be different: take a unique stance and cover the keyword from a different angle.

Being unique—when the opportunity presents itself—, is generally an easier approach (but that’s not saying it’s easy).  When you are targeting a very popular and competitive keyword, creating just a slightly better content simply won’t do the job.

For example, when the target keyword is “best software company in India”, the first page of SERP might be filled with pages with lists covering the top 10 to 30 software companies in India. In this case, would creating another “top 10” list cut it? Probably not. Your list must be significantly better, or you might need to create a really big list covering 50 or even 100 different companies. Pretty hard? In most cases, yes.

On the other hand, if you can find an opportunity to use a unique angle to cover the keyword, you might get more attention, get more backlinks in the process, and climb the SERP faster.

Step 6: Content Strategy and Planning

Content is the core of SEO strategy, period.

This statement is even more relevant today: Google’s ranking algorithm is getting better in understanding the quality of your content, and its relevance to the target keyword and the search intent.

To be frank, there’s no shortcut in getting the desired SEO results besides actually having high-quality and relevant content. SEO optimizations will only amplify the performance of an already performing content and on the other hand, no amount of tactics and optimizations can help a low-quality content.

So, a proper content marketing plan will significantly help your whole SEO effort. Here are some important areas to consider when planning your content strategy:

1. If you have a content development team, decide the PIC for each content (for example, writer A for content A, etc.)
2. Refer back to your target keywords, and plan how you’ll expand each of them into actual topics.
3. Plan the channels where you are going to distribute the content:
   1. Your own blog
   2. Guest post opportunity on third-party sites
   3. Publication platforms like Medium and other sites
   4. Video streaming platforms like YouTube for video content
   5. Email newsletter
4. Plan a schedule of when you are going to publish the content (and how frequent).
5. Develop a content calendar that lists:
   1. Date of content publication
   2. Content creator (author)
   3. The topic or working title
   4. Target keyword
   5. Description of the content
   6. Content objective
   7. Publication/distribution channel
   8. CTA and lead magnet plan (if any)
   9. Ideas/references/mood board
   10. Working status (WIP, published, etc.)
6. Execute and evaluate the content plan:
   1. The overall tone of the content, its quality, how it compares against the competition
   2. The content’s performance according to the objective(s)
   3. The overall execution of the editorial calendar

Depending on the performance, you might want to adjust your content plan according to your SEO objective.

Also, remember that it’s about your content quality and relevance to your human audience. Include your target keywords naturally, but don’t focus on keyword density. Focus on delivering comprehensive content with good readability.

Step 7: Link Building

It’s no secret that backlinks are the most important ranking factor in SEO. As we have established above, the quality of these backlinks is more important than quantity.

The quality of your backlinks, in general, directly proportionate to the source site’s authority. You can use various tools like Moz’s Domain Authority checker to check the authority of the source sites.

Again, the secret of getting high-quality backlinks is the quality of your content. If your content is good and contains relevant information, you will get linked sooner or later. On the other hand, no amount of effort can help low-quality content without substance—at least, without getting penalized—.

There are, however, tactics and methods we can use to amplify the performance of your quality content, such as:

1. Promoting Your Content

Yes, the quality of your content is extremely important in getting these backlinks. However, no matter how good your content is, it won’t bring any value—SEO or otherwise— when nobody actually knows about it.

Content promotion is arguably even more important than the content creation process:

1. It obviously helps in generating organic traffic to your website, which can help in achieving your SEO strategy goals and marketing objectives.
2. Proper promotion can also help in generating more backlinks in the process. More backlinks will improve SERP ranking, which in turn, will also generate more organic traffic.

Thus, promote your content via all the available channels, and whenever you can, aim to get inbound links or backlinks in the process. For example, when you work with influencers to promote your content via influencer marketing, you might also ask them for a backlink from their website.

To summarize, use all potential channels to get high-quality backlinks.

2. Create Linkable Content

Think about it, what’s the reason to provide a backlink to another site? Typically, here are the most common reasons:

• Citing a source site when we make an informational claim (i.e. 30% of surveyed users are…..)
• When we use a term that is related to the content but might not be understood by all of your visitors. For example, in this content covering SEO, we might need to provide a link to another site when we first mention “ranking factor” or “backlink”
• When we include images, infographics, etc.

So, we can simply include these types of information and data in our content:

1. Original, previously unpublished information like an original research report, datasheet, case study, etc. is very linkable
2. Visually aesthetic images, infographics, and photos
3. Data roundup content, when done properly, can generate a lot of backlinks

Remember that you don’t need to be too aggressive in getting these backlinks. Focus on quality, not quantity, and in general, you’d only need to build 3 to 5 high-quality backlinks for each page.

Step 8: Social Media and SEO

While social signals are not a direct ranking factor for SEO, they can indirectly affect your SEO performance.

As we have discussed, link profile, content quality, and UX metrics are the most important ranking factors, and social media performance can help in all three:

1. Social media is where the audience is with more than 3 billion daily active users. More social media exposure will translate to more opportunities to get backlinks
2. Social media is a great place to conduct market research so you can better understand your audience. Meaning, it can help you in developing better content.
3. Social media can allow you to promote your content directly to those who have developed an interest, so it can improve dwell time and minimize bounce rate.

So, how should we optimize our social media content to help your SEO, here are a few tips:

• Post regularly and maintain the quality of your content. Make sure your social media profiles are active.
• Maintain a consistent image/tone for your profile. When opportunities present themselves, include a link to your content.
• Use relevant bio for your profiles.
• Make sure your posts are engaging. Use attractive images when you can.
• Proper, appropriate hashtags.
• Make sure your content is shareable and social media-friendly

Step 7: On-Site Optimizations

In general, there are three important aspects of achieving SEO success:

• Making sure your content is valuable so it can get high-quality backlinks and get a lot of engagement from the audience
• Making sure your site is performing as intended to improve user experience, keeping your site visitors as long as possible (higher average dwell time.)
• Ensuring Google can crawl and index your site. When your site is not indexed, it won’t rank, period.

The first aspect regarding content is mainly covered in the previous steps. This step, on the other hand, is about the second and third aspects.

While on-site website optimizations are very broad subject on its own, here are some of the most important things to focus on:

• Your site’s load speed:
  • Use a website template that is optimized for speed
  • Leverage browser caching
  • Make sure to use proper image and file compression
  • Reduce the use of redirects
  • Improve server response time (might involve changing to a better hosting service or a dedicated server.)
  • Minify CSS and remove render-blocking sprit
• Make sure your site is mobile-responsive.
• Ensure your site is indexed faster and properly by Google. You might want to follow this guide.
• Implement proper structured data markup. This can provide Google with more information to index your site and allow your site to be viable for a featured snippet.
• Optimize the content structure
• Optimize your site’s structure and interface (layout, navigation menus, etc.)
• Test everything regularly on as many devices as possible.

Optimize your site so both Google and the human audience can recognize the contained information properly, and also make sure to maintain content quality.

Step 8: Evaluation and Re-Optimization

The last but not least step is to evaluate and monitor your SEO campaign’s progress.

It’s very important to understand that SEO is a long-term game and not a get-rich quick scheme. In general, it would take 6 to 18 months of continuous efforts before we can see any significant result (i.e. featured on the first page of SERP).

Thus, it’s very important to monitor your SEO performance by evaluating these key areas:

• SERP ranking for each keyword. It should climb progressively overtime. If there’s a sudden decline, you should adjust your strategy.
• Organic traffic. Should also increase steadily according to ranking performance.
• Impressions and organic reach.
• Conversion rate, especially when the page involves lead magnets or CTAs.
• User experience metrics: dwell time, bounce rate, organic CTR
• Page load speed
• Mobile responsiveness
• Link profile, especially backlinks profile, but also outbound links and internal linking structure
• Content structure, layout, readability

Evaluate your site and your pages according to these key metrics (and more, depending on your SEO objective), and adjust your strategy accordingly.

SEO FAQs and Tips

What Is SEO

Stands for Search Engine Optimization, is essentially a series of optimization of your website (both on-site and off-site) to rank higher on organic SERP by optimizing three key areas:

• Making sure your page’s content is valuable and relevant for your human audience
• Optimizing user experience and engagement, to keep site visitors for as long as possible
• Ensuring Google can properly crawl and index your site by optimizing the technical factors of your site

The main objective of SEO strategy is to improve organic traffic to the website.

What is SERP

Stands for Search Engine Results Page. The page displayed by Google and the other search engines after you enter a search query.

SEO VS SEM

SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing, which includes both SEO and PPC (Pay-Per-Click) search advertising.

PPC VS SEO

PPC advertising is paid ads displayed on the top of SERP for a certain keyword/search query. The term PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click, referring to the pricing model for the advertising where the user only needs to pay for the ad each time someone clicks on it.

Why SEO is Important?

Getting more website traffic remains one of the most important goals to pursue for any business, and SEO remains one of the most effective approaches in generating more (organic/unpaid) website traffic. You might want to check this article on the importance of SEO for a more concise answer.

Are SERPs Personalized?

In some cases, yes. Google does track various things related to your online activity from your device’s location to your search history to browsing and purchase history, and can provide a personalized search result for the user. You can search in a private browser window or incognito window to get the ‘original’ SERP.

Is SEO Dead?

Seemingly every year, there are always news and articles proclaiming the death of SEO, but in truth, SEO is alive and well.

It’s true, however, that SEO has significantly changed over the years, and some SEO strategies, tactics and practices are really ‘dead’, that is, used to work but don’t work anymore. For example, keyword stuffing used to be the common practice in pre-2011 SEO, but can get us penalized nowadays.

There are, however, SEO practices that still work effectively, including those we have discussed above.

End Words

Whether you are a B2B company targeting professionals from other companies, or a direct-to-consumer B2C company, SEO should be the core of your digital marketing strategy.

Getting website traffic is very important in a tech-embedded software environment, and hiring an SEO expert remains one of the most effective ways of generating organic traffic. In turn, more organic traffic can translate to more converted prospects and ultimately, more sales conversions for your website product.

The post How To Create a Successful SEO Strategy appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.