The 5 Most Important Steps in Building a Digital Marketing Strategy for B2B

Marketing is changing every day—especially as it relates to buyer behaviors. Now more than ever, buyers are spending critical time during their decision-making process online rather than talking to a salesperson. As a result, it’s imperative that B2B companies diversify their traditional marketing tactics to adopt digital marketing best practices to meet buyers where they are online. 

Creating a digital marketing strategy for a B2B company can oftentimes feel like an incredibly daunting task. Without a roadmap to follow, many marketers will turn to a “whack-a-mole” marketing approach, leading to weak results and wasted time. You may find yourself asking questions like: 

• How do I incorporate digital marketing tactics into my existing marketing strategy?
• How do I measure success? 
• Is creating a digital marketing strategy even worth it? 
• How do I show others in my company that what I am doing is working?

In order to point you in the right direction, we’ve condensed the process into five fool-proof steps:

• Define your target audience
• Establish goals and metrics to track against
• Identify and implement the right digital marketing tactics
• Analyze your data
• Continuously improve your strategy based on findings to drive ROI

1. Define Your Target Audience

Successful B2B digital marketing strategies all start with one thing: identifying your company’s target audience or buyer. Chances are you already have your target audience(s) mapped out, but are they up to date or channeling the right people? 

Ask yourself these questions:

• Of my existing customers, who would I like to get more of? 
• Industry
• Size of company
• Services offered
• Geographic reach
• What is our main point of contact’s job title? 
• What are their pain points? 
• How is my company uniquely positioned to help them overcome these challenges? 

Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll be able to build an example of target audiences to tailor your digital marketing strategy to.

Creating Your Target Audience ‘Bible’

Now that you have a better understanding of who your target audience and buyers are, it’s time to document your findings so you can refer back as you craft your strategy. Typically, target audience documents have the following sections defined: 

• Demographics: 
• Name
• Job title
• Gender
• Age
• Family information (i.e., married with one child)
• Salary
• Biographical information (a short paragraph describing your target audience)
• General background information
• Identifiers and skills
• Goal and objectives (that are pertinent to YOUR business and how you can help them achieve these items)
• Pain points (again, need to be relevant to your business)

At SyncShow, we favor visual layouts like the example below:

2. Establish Goals & Metrics to Track Your ROI

Next, you need to determine exactly what you’re trying to achieve with your marketing strategy. Is it to simply drive more traffic to your website? Is it to generate more sales-ready leads by improving your website conversion rate? Is it to become a thought leader in your industry? 

After you’ve determined your overarching goal, you can then establish the metrics you’d like to track against over time to hit that goal.

My Goal Is Lead Generation (i.e., Drive More Revenue)

Focusing on website metrics is paramount when it comes to lead generation success. Chances are that if your website isn’t performing well, then neither are your other digital marketing efforts. 

Focus on improving the following metrics to help increase revenue generated from digital efforts:

• Organic traffic
• Average time on page/time on site
• Conversion rate
• Bounce rate
• Number of sessions
• Leads
• Marketing qualified leads 
• Sales qualified leads
• Closed customers
• Return on investment

My Goal Is Brand Awareness

Brand awareness campaigns can range from growing brand recognition in your industry to improving your brand reputation. As a result, you’ll want to focus on metrics related to your ‘owned’ assets and ‘earned’ assets. 

Owned media metrics:

• Direct traffic to your website
• Social engagement and reach
• Blog engagement
• Branded search volume

Earned media metrics: 

• Referral traffic
• Press mentions
• Backlinks
• Employee advocacy

3. Identify & Implement the Right Digital Marketing Tactics

Now that you have your target audience defined and goals established, you can begin to identify the right digital marketing tactics to implement to start working toward your goal. Common tactics include: 

• Content Marketing
• Conversion Rate Optimization
• Email Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Search Engine Optimization
• Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Another must-have is a website built to convert website traffic into leads—without this, all of your hard work to drive potential buyers to your site will be for naught. 

4. Analyze Your Data

Making data-driven decisions is high on the list of digital marketing best practices to follow post-implementation for any strategy. Without this crucial step, you could wind up spending marketing dollars in all the wrong places—leading to a lower return on investment than originally anticipated.

Check out these recommended tools to start tracking your performance today:

• Google Analytics
• HubSpot, or a similar marketing automation tool
• Heat mapping tools, like Lucky Orange
• Ahrefs

Reassess the performance of your marketing strategy every 30-90 days. Is it performing the way you want it to? What is the data telling you about user behavior on your website? 

By evaluating your marketing tactics, you’ll be able to identify what b2b digital marketing strategies are moving you forward as it relates to hitting your goals vs. what’s not working and needs to be adjusted.

Putting the Data Together

Now that you have the right tools in place, it’s time to put the data together so you can review it holistically. Tools such as Databox or Google Data Studio allow you to pull in metrics from different platforms with ease.

5. Continuously Improve Your Strategy Based on Findings

Once you’ve assessed your current performance, you’re ready to make changes to your digital marketing strategy to accommodate what the data is telling you. Create a plan for the next quarter to determine what tactics you’re going to use, put on hold or update and the metrics you’re going to track based on your findings. 

Check out this example of a 90-day game plan to get started on your own initiatives:

In some cases, you might need to go back to step one to ensure that you’re still targeting the proper audience. 

Are you ready to take the next steps in integrating digital marketing best practices into your strategy? Get in touch with one of our digital marketing experts to get started.