So, you’ve built a great product or service that is helping business professionals out. You’ve put in the time, energy, and effort to establish a loyal customer base, but your business growth has grown somewhat stagnant. What’s next? How can you continue to grow your business?
Logically, the best way to grow your market is to implement marketing best practices. But you don’t have the time or capital to learn and implement everything in-house. So you’re looking for some B2B marketing services to help your business continue to grow.
In this resource, we’ll walk you through the best B2B marketing services to use to help your business grow. We’ll cover what they are, how they work, and how a B2B marketing agency can help you implement them.
The first step in determining which marketing services to implement for your business is to find a consultant who can point you in the right direction. And there is no shortage of self-proclaimed “marketing consultants” flooding your LinkedIn inbox, begging for your money and attention.
Here’s a tip, if you don’t know someone you can personally trust, ask a trusted business friend if they know someone who has worked for them and served them well. If that person doesn’t exist, then try to find someone with relevant business-world experience in the B2B space. Preferably, look for someone with a proven track record working with individuals like you in your industry.
If they have them, request whitepapers and case studies that prove they know what they’re doing and have generated real results. If they have references, give them a call as well.
The cost of marketing consultants varies greatly, but generally speaking, you get what you pay for. If the consultant can generate results, they’re going to be worth it. As mentioned earlier, there is no shortage of tares among the wheat. Do your homework before choosing a consultant.
Read More – How to Choose the Right B2B Marketing Consultant for Your Business
Before implementing any sort of marketing project or campaign, you need to have a brand strategy. A successful brand strategy will help you determine:
From here, you can begin to determine your buyer personas. What story are they living and how do your products and services give them what they want, provide for their needs, and demonstrate value?
By answering these questions, you can really begin to talk about your brand in a meaningful way that gets at the heart of your customers’ desires and motivations. It’s how you can determine the value you bring and overcome common objections to making a sale.
Read More – How to Craft a Successful B2B Brand Strategy
A marketing framework is an accounting of all your marketing assets and a determination of your competition. It’s how you determine what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and how you can improve. If your brand strategy is what you’ll do, your marketing framework is how you’ll do it.
Think of your B2B marketing framework as insight from your marketing audit put into practice. Having a marketing framework is a great way to set your budget trajectory and help you focus on the projects and campaigns that will impact your business.
A complete marketing framework pulls together insights from your technical growth audit, digital positioning plan, and aligns your sales, services, and marketing teams.
Read More – How to Craft a Successful B2B Brand Strategy
At the heart of modern digital marketing is your company’s website. It’s the official hub for knowledge, resources, and expertise of your brand, products and services, and the industry as a whole.
At a high level, your website should serve three primary purposes: attract, engage, and delight.
This is a strategy that focuses on engaging copy through website copy such as blogs, publications, and eBooks. But it also includes the utilization of engaging Call-to-Actions (CTAs) that convert website visitors into website leads.
Additionally, it’s a strategy with a deep understanding of your ideal customer’s buyer’s journey; that is, the three stages of problem/opportunity awareness, consideration of resolutions, and decision to purchase.
In order to effectively implement your website strategy, you’re going to need to have a combination of both engaging content and aesthetics, with a keen understanding of who you’re marketing to.
Read More – Unlocking Your B2B Website Strategy: A Roadmap to Success
When designing a website you want to build one with a clear message, a clean and consistent visual hierarchy, and an easy-to-follow navigational structure. This includes great copy, beautiful graphics, and in-depth understanding of the buyer’s journey.
A great website design isn’t just about the visuals on the page. It’s also about what goes on behind the scenes. Oftentimes, a website that may look appealing at first glance, may be plagued with technical errors, security issues, and inefficiencies underneath.
At Open Path, we’ve come across this many times. A business will show us their website – and it looks great! – but it’s still getting virtually no organic traffic. Why?
The reason is because of poor technical and content search engine optimization (SEO).
Read More – Searching for a B2B Web Design Agency that Drives Results?
At a high-level, SEO essentially refers to how well your website communicates with web browsers and search engines. A great website must be engaging, not only to the humans who visit it, but the robots who probe it as well.
Technical SEO includes aspects of how secure pages are, errors from broken links, too much coding and not enough content, among many things. These are the errors search engines are looking at to make sure your website looks as good on the inside as it does the outside.
Content SEO refers to how keywords are used on your website and where they are placed and what other keywords are included with them.
By “keywords”, we are referring to search terms that get plugged into a search engine like Google or Bing. Once that search is imputed, the search engine looks for which website has the best SEO and gives the search results in that order.
Partnering with a B2B SEO company can help determine how your website is performing with these metrics and identify other content opportunities that attract new customers that you weren't aware of.
Read More – B2B SEO: How Companies Use Search Engines to Grow Their Business
Now that you have a digital marketing strategy and a website that looks good (both inside and out) that attracts, engages, and delights visitors, you’re going to want to make sure everything you produce looks professional and engaging.
Humans are visual creatures. Our eyes perceive things before anything else does. That’s why it’s so crucial to have everything your business puts out there look good. If it doesn’t delight the eyes, it will never reach the mind.
Be sure that all your resources look good to an impartial eye before publishing them.
Additionally, the B2B space is unique in its graphic design needs. Unlike standard consumer advertising, less is more in the business to business space. That’s why, as a best practice, a minimalist approach is becoming more of the long-term trend. Your graphic design should help focus the reader’s attention on the content, not distract them from it.
When hiring someone to do your graphic designs, find someone who will represent your company well.
Read More – B2B Graphic Design: More Important Than You Think
Engagement marketing is all about establishing an open line of communication with your brand. It’s a two-way street where your customers are also your representatives. It’s not only about giving them ownership of your products and services, but also in the life and promotion of your brand as well.
This means sharing what you're passionate about with your customers. Not only in the things that are relevant to your industry, but also relevant to their world and personal life. It’s why you see so many companies focus on environmental, social, and governance issues (ESG).
Identify the ESG issues that you value and give your buyers an opportunity to contribute to that conversation. Go beyond products and services and into what matters at a higher and more personal level.
Read More – B2B Engagement Marketing: The ESG Approach
Now that you know of all the services that are out there for you to implement, the next step is to talk with a B2B marketing consultant to see how these best practices can work for your business.
At Open Path, we primarily work with B2B companies, meaning we’re only focused on what you do. Our entire team has worked for B2B companies in the past, meaning we’re uniquely positioned to understand what works best for your business. If you’re ready to jumpstart business growth, schedule a time to talk with us today.
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