B2B Web Marketing Strategy - A Comprehensive Guide for 2020

B2B web marketing is the ideal way of attracting more traffic to your website, generating more leads, and acquiring more customers. Today, there are more ways of attracting these customers online than ever before. 

But, the most crucial aspect of it all is knowing the most profitable B2B web marketing campaigns you can run to fulfill marketing goals. In the end, it’s not about running as many different marketing campaigns as possible. The goal is to find a handful of marketing campaigns that bring in the most traffic, leads, and new customers.

Due to the wide variety of platforms, paid campaigns, organic campaigns and types of media that will generate more traffic, leads, and customers, it’s important to understand the different benefits of each type and how they can be effectively utilized. 

Understanding the underlying benefits of each type of marketing will help you find the right media to bring in these new customers and to do this with a positive ROI. This will allow you to expand your campaigns into different audiences and grow your company through all these different campaigns.

The landscape of B2B web marketing is big and not every platform is perfectly suited for your specific audience. But, in the end, you want to find just a few of the right platforms that allow you to increase your brand awareness. You will be able to attract more traffic to your website, and you will see that new customers will be trickling in as well. From there, you can optimize the campaigns and get higher results while decreasing the average cost per new customer. 

In this article, we will cover:

1. How to properly use content in your B2B web marketing campaigns

2. The different platforms to advertise to your potential customers

3. How you can get traffic through free-to-use platforms

Using Content in B2B Internet Marketing

In recent years, content marketing has become one of the most valuable assets within digital marketing for companies that want to get more customers in the B2B space. Content marketing is all about providing value to your potential customers and then using that content to reach them in the right places. 

Most people believe that when you create great content, people will eventually come to your website. But, even though great content will draw in tons of traffic, it will only happen if that content speaks to your audience and if you promote it in the right way. 

Picking the Right Content Assets

Content assets can help you generate new leads. These leads, if qualified, can then be turned into customers by your sales team or by including them in your lead nurturing campaigns. 

Several types of content assets can be used to attract traffic to your website, which can then be combined with an opt-in form. The opt-in forms ask visitors for specific details about themselves or their company to download these content assets. And these opt-in forms allow you to collect email addresses and, if required, phone numbers, so you can reach out to these new leads. 

The following media are often used to turn visitors on your website into leads:

• Whitepapers - Usually a PDF guide that shows marketing trends, ways of skill improvement, or methods of learning. Whitepapers are a great way to generate more leads from people that are already visiting your website. These whitepapers are often offered at the end of a page so that people can learn more about a specific topic. Let’s say you write a blog post on how to do B2B web marketing. At the end of the blog post, you can then add a link to a whitepaper with the current marketing trends. 

• Videos - Videos can often explain topics better because they include more visuals than text. Creating videos can be time-consuming, but they usually have a more significant reach than most content pieces. 

• Webinars - Companies often invite an expert in a specific market, or let their own employees host the webinar to give more information about a trending topic. A great example is a B2B cybersecurity company that hosts a webinar on how to protect your company’s website and servers against hackers. Users have to sign up for a webinar with their personal and company information, allowing you and your team to follow up after the webinar to promote your product or service.

• Blog posts - Blog posts can be incredibly in-depth about a specific topic, and provide readers with a lot of valuable information. Blog posts are an extremely effective way to draw in your target audience, show your company’s expertise, and connect all that content with the product or service you are offering. Blog posts are often combined with whitepapers, so readers can learn even more about that specific topic while your company collects their details so you can follow up on them. If you want to know how to write great blog posts, feel free to check out our B2B Marketing blog writing techniques.

The Benefits of Paid Advertising in B2B Web Marketing

Paid advertising campaigns are incredibly successful in attracting a specific target audience to your website. Most advertising platforms allow you to show your ads to a small target audience, which means you are more likely to turn the users of that platform into traffic, leads, or customers based on how well your ads perform on that platform. B2B Advertising can help you bring in new business on a daily basis. Paid advertising can be a part of your B2B marketing plans and templates you use to grow your company and generate more leads than the competition.

Facebook

Facebook has trackers all around the Internet, which they combine with the personal information people already provide on the platform. All their interests, locations, and often even their jobs are included within that profile information. Companies can tap into that by creating audiences that align with personal information, interests, and locations, to drive traffic to their website and convert visitors into users or customers on their website. 

The advertising platform Facebook has created is very valuable when you want to advertise to specific B2B audiences. Though the professional profiles of each user aren’t as broad as LinkedIn’s information, it can still be a great way of driving traffic and conversions. 

More importantly, you can create audiences based on the visitors that already visit your website by creating lookalike audiences, which allow you to advertise your product or service through ads that are shown to people who are similar to the people that are already interested. So, if most of your visitors are small business owners running a barbershop in California between the age of 30 and 55, Facebook will use that information to show your ads to people who fit this same profile.

Your ad copy and image will determine how well your ads are performing. Facebook’s advertising platform provides easy solutions to launch A/B tests with different copy and images, meaning you can split-test your way to high conversion rates on your landing page. In a nutshell, Facebook B2B ads can be set up and optimized very quickly.

Facebook allows you to select audiences based on:

• Job title

• Company

• Job seniority

• Location

• Country

Twitter

Though Twitter is mostly well-known for microblogging, a lot of companies are also using it in their B2B web marketing campaigns. Twitter has its own advertising platform where companies can create ads and advertise based on not just location and specific keywords but also certain interests. For example, if someone follows a lot of companies related to cybersecurity, the odds are they are interested in this topic, so Twitter can show your ads to that person. 

When it comes to Twitter’s data about people, it falls behind on what Facebook can offer. But, when you’re trying to capture a B2B audience, Twitter can often be a better choice than Facebook as it seems more professional for most people.

As with other advertising platforms, Twitter allows you to upload images or videos about your product, and include a short message that can attract the attention of your audience. These ads are then shown on people’s news feed, along with the organic tweets liked or retweeted by the people they follow. Another way to advertise on Twitter is by promoting your own Twitter account, though this can often be a pretty costly campaign and doesn’t always bring the expected results. 

LinkedIn

Today, especially in the B2B web marketing space, LinkedIn is the holy grail when it comes to reaching the perfect audience for your product or service. LinkedIn has a massive amount of data about people’s professional life, including the companies they work for, their role within the company, the size of that company, and tons of other interesting demographics about that person. 

This means that, when you already know your target audience, you can easily set up a LinkedIn ad campaign and drive traffic to your website. Apart from that, LinkedIn also provides ways of generating leads on the platform itself by creating lead generation forms that can be promoted through LinkedIn ads.

LinkedIn has three cost tiers when it comes to advertising:

1. CPC - Cost per Click

2. CPM - Cost per 1000 impressions

3. CPS - Cost per send

Through the advertising platform, you can set up ads that show up on people’s news feed, but also create special messages that can be sent as sponsored InMail (LinkedIn’s messaging service). This allows you to reach the LinkedIn audience in different parts of LinkedIn’s platform. Launching an A/B test for your ads to figure out what kind of image and text works best is rather easy and can be done within several minutes. 

It’s recommended that you launch several ad campaigns at once to split-test the different elements of the ad, so you can work towards the best performing ad with the highest conversion rate and the lowest cost per acquisition (CPA). 

Some of the personal details LinkedIn allows you to use in order to advertise to its users are:

• Job function

• Job title

• Company

• Company industry

• Job seniority

• Company size

• Location

• Country

Google Adwords

It has a lot of value for companies that are looking to include a very specific marketing campaign. Google Adwords provides advertising through Google’s search engine itself and through banner ads shown on millions of websites worldwide. 

Google’s search engine ads are shown next to related keywords. For example, if you are trying to attract more customers for your marketing automation tool, you can advertise on that specific keyword. 

To ensure that you are advertising on keywords that people actually use within Google, its advertising platform also provides valuable data regarding the monthly searches for that keyword. It also shows you related keywords to use within your advertising campaigns. It often takes a while before you find the best keywords to drive the right type of customers but once you have figured out those keywords, it’s simply a matter of writing the best ad copy and optimizing your own website from there on out.

Then there’s Google’s Display Network, which is a network of millions of websites around the world that host Google’s banners. Advertisers can bid to be shown within those banners, which means they can drive traffic from whatever site they want. 

Within the Display Network, you have several options, including showing your ads on websites related to your target audience or showing ads to visitors that were previously on your website and are now on another website. To use Google’s Display Network, you will need to create banners using either images or HTML 5. Google may also design these ads for you, but you’re usually better off by having a designer create them.

Some of the most important metrics to track:

Target Specific Websites

Another great strategy is advertising on market-specific websites. These are news websites, forums, blogs or other types of sites where your target audience is likely to hang out. This can best be compared to magazines for specific niches that used to be printed and sent out to the magazine subscribers. Today, most of this happens online, allowing advertisers all around the world to reach that specific target audience. 

These websites often provide banner spots on their platform, may include you in the daily/weekly/monthly newsletter they send out or allow you to post an advertorial on their website. Most of the rates for this type of marketing can be on the higher end, as the target audience is very specific, and there’s a limited number of advertising spots per day or week. But, at the same time, these websites usually bring in a ton of very targeted traffic if you manage to write an attractive ad. 

You can find these websites through Google or link portals (yes, these do still exist). If you’re running a company that offers marketing automation tools, keywords such as “Online magazine marketing automation”, “marketing automation blog” or “marketing automation forum” can show you a list of interesting websites to advertise on. These websites have a separate page called “Advertise with us” or “Contact us” where you can find out more about their rates to advertise on their website, in their newsletter or through their social media channels. 

The Importance of Organic Traffic in B2B Web Marketing

Another way to increase traffic to your website and attract new customers is by utilizing organic traffic. Although we call it organic traffic, you should know that this is another paid strategy, which means that it requires a budget. 

B2B web marketing through organic traffic is mostly based on getting traffic outside of ads. Lots of B2B marketing examples we see today are based on this organic traffic framework.

Search Engines

Billions of searches are done through Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo every single day. These searches show specific web pages optimized for the keyword that the user has typed into the search engine. By optimizing your web pages, you can tap into the users of that specific search engine, but it does require a bit of knowledge on the algorithms that these companies use to rank search results for a specific keyword. 

This is called Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO. It is the practice of optimizing your entire website to get to the top of the search page for a specific keyword. Searchers are more likely to click on a page that ranks high on Google and other search engines.

Search engines can bring in thousands of visitors a day, and that’s why so many companies include SEO in their B2B web marketing strategy. Though it may take a while to rank on these search result pages, the traffic that comes in through these search engines is free. After all, you are not paying for every click that brings a visitor to your website. It also allows you to rank for dozens of important keywords related to your product or service and thousands of longtail keywords that may bring in visitors every single day. 

Social Media

Another way of getting organic traffic to your website is by using social media platforms. These platforms are used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, including your target audience. 

If you do not have a big budget to run paid marketing campaigns, it can often be very useful to include organic social media campaigns into your strategy. You can create a big following by writing interesting updates around your target market. 

A lot of companies within the space of email marketing tools run social media accounts with thousands of followers, allowing them to draw in traffic to their website with every update they post on social media.

The biggest factor in the organic social media strategy is engagement. The more engagement your post has, the higher the odds that your post will show up on a lot of people’s feeds. 

You get free brand awareness through this strategy, including visitors that can turn into paid customers once they visit your website. Social media platforms often require a specific strategy, so it’s important to brainstorm ideas with your team in order to tap into this huge market. 

LinkedIn

As mentioned before, LinkedIn is a huge platform where hundreds of millions of professionals login at least once a week. LinkedIn also provides its own way of getting your target audience to your website. 

By expanding your LinkedIn network by adding new connections, you can get a lot of engagement on the posts that you publish on this platform. For example, if you want to sell a product to CTOs that are located in San Francisco with a company size of 500+ employees, you should use these exact search terms and filters on LinkedIn and send a connection request to any CTO that fulfills these criteria. After you have connected with these CTOs, they are more likely to see any updates that you post on your personal LinkedIn feed.

Along with that, you can send messages to your connections to start a conversation about the product or service you provide. Though it may be time-consuming to do so, and start conversations with dozens - if not hundreds - of people, this is very easy to implement the strategy that doesn’t require a high budget. 

Investing in LinkedIn’s premium subscription will cost you around $80 a month, but this is cheap compared to paid advertising campaigns. Most companies, especially during their early stage, use LinkedIn’s user base to get in touch with potential customers, as it’s one of the easiest campaigns to add to your B2B web marketing strategy.

Other ways to find new potential customers on LinkedIn:

1. Check out LinkedIn groups within your potential customers’ niches

2. Follow influencers within that market and engage with their content

3. Follow your competitors to get new content ideas that work