7 B2B Digital Marketing Tips To Boost ROI

As a business to business (B2B) company the web has many opportunities to acquire new sales and leads, increase awareness for products or services and increase ROI and profitability.
So, to boost ROI for your business, here are 7 essential B2B digital marketing tips:

1. Know your target markets

Advertising and targeting businesses on the web is different from targeting consumers. For one, business customers tend to be fewer in number and they also tend to have a lengthy decision process before they purchase, so targeting them requires understanding how they use the internet to acquire product or services.

Business products and services also tend to be more expensive and it’s unlikely that the internet alone will be sufficient to sell to them. It’s more likely that the web can act as an introduction and awareness raising channel that leads to personal selling through your salespeople.

So, make sure you research your market and industry and know how business customers use the internet for acquisition.

2. Which online channels?

Knowing who your target customers are also helps to identify which online channels will be effective at reaching them. For example, many B2B businesses will not use social media channels to acquire products or services so it may not be a viable option for your business to pour a lot of time and financial resources into social media.

They may be more likely to use search engines to look for business products or services and this is where you need to be advertising.

Display advertising can prove to be effective at raising awareness for a B2B business especially for a new product or service that the market isn’t aware of.

3. Which online tools?

If you’ve determined that pay per click (PPC) advertising is a suitable channel to advertise your business, then you now need to choose the available tools to help you achieve your goals. Two main PPC platforms or tools are Google Adwords and Bing Ads and both are effective at reaching businesses that are looking for your products and services.

If social media is an online channel that is effective for you, then you can choose tools like LinkedIn and Twitter to reach your prospects.

4. Budgets

An online marketing budget is crucial to achieving your marketing objectives. This helps you to implement your digital strategy and put sufficient money for online promotional tools that are important to you achieving your goals. Setting a budget is not easy, however there are a few strategies you can use including matching competitor budgets or a percentage of sales or even costing all tactics you will implement and then adding these up to arrive at your total budget.

5. Goal Conversions

This will be one of the most important metrics to measure and track as part of your B2B digital marketing strategy. You can track all downloads, contacts, registrations and purchases on your website, that are important to your business. B2B businesses often do not take orders on their website and usually whitepaper downloads, contacts, phone leads are more important conversions to track.

6. Devices

Desktop is still more important for businesses that are looking for products or services on the web. That’s because many searches are done during working hours from business locations and desktop still rules here compared to mobile. Mobile searches for consumers has now surpassed desktop but for B2B, it still lags behind. So it’s important to understand the percentages of devices accessing your websites and then target the most important devices.

7. Analytics Reporting

Reporting with tools like Google Analytics is important to understand your visitors, customers and actions that are taking place on your site and also how effective your online promotion is. As a B2B business, some metrics will be more important than others and you should assess which are your most important pages with low exit rate and bounce rates and which traffic sources are leading to conversions. You also need to understand the channel paths that people take to converting on your website and then focus on the most important for your business.

Summary

B2B marketing on the web can be complex and it is a relatively new customer acquisition channel for many businesses. So it’s important to begin any campaigns with research into the market and industry to understand how companies seek products or services like yours.