Why Our Three Steps To B2B Digital Marketing Strategy Works
For many marketing managers and SMEs in the B2B space, digital marketing is one of the most important things you can add to your toolkit. We don’t need to tell you that finding ways to gain a competitive advantage is all-important to brand success. But when it comes to digital marketing specialist skills and knowledge are the most reliable way to do this.
Where do you start?
If you look up digital marketing strategy online there’s a lot of talk around inbound marketing. There are also great tips on lead generating channels and apps, which give you a clearer idea of what you’re playing with.
And while it’s all well and good to know that avenues like social media advertising and SEO are there to help you power forward with your digital marketing, you still may be left wondering what to do with this information. How do you implement it to best effect?
Why hire an agency?
Because let’s face it, unless you’re a dab hand at digital marketing, chances are you’ll need some support to get your strategy in this particular field off the ground and soaring high. As a brand and digital agency, we offer the sort of advice and guidance you need to do this.
Again, sounds great in theory, we know. But what does that look like? This is the part that interests us too, so we decided to write a short guide on our approach. Of course, we tailor it to each client, but this gives you important insight into the broader strokes.
1. Define
Like anything in the marketing world, being methodical is the best way to tackle your digital marketing strategy. B2B marketing requires a different approach in terms of audience targeting. Naturally, it’s about building relationships. It’s also about proving you’re worth investing in.
To define the strategy, we start by looking closely at these four key elements:
- Audience
- Content strategy
- Channels
- Budget
That means that nothing is left to chance. We know exactly who we’re talking to, the best platforms to find them, what to say to them, and all within your budget.
We’ll talk more about the kinds of tools we use to deliver this “define” stage of the strategy in later blogs, but they include:
- Marketing SWOT analysis – we align problems with solutions using a variation of a SWOT, called a TOWS approach
- Competitor SWOT analysis – checking out the competition
- Keyword research – to finetune all your SEO campaigns
- Competitor research – to get a deeper look at what your competitors are doing and find ways to leverage your market position
2. Develop
Once we have a clear path forward, we start filling in the blanks. For example, having an overarching idea of your content strategy is great, but from there we need to flesh out the details, so we know what steps are involved and how they align with your KPIs. The same goes for your SEO strategy and so on.
In the “develop” stage we focus on the following:
- Content plan – filling in a comprehensive content plan of titles, topics, and target audiences
- Researching keywords – which will be used in content and campaigns
- Campaign messaging – develop clear, meaningful, cohesive campaign messaging
- Content creation – we develop stellar content that will gain attention
- SEO – running through all our digital activity, your SEO will be honed across content and campaigns
3. Distribute
Now you have an all-singing, all-dancing digital marketing strategy, you have to get it out into the world. And this part requires just as much care and attention as the first two stages. Without this, your beautifully planned, expertly crafted campaigns and content won’t give you the returns you’re hoping for.
In this phase, we take a close look at the nuts and bolts of your activity to ensure they are performing in the way you need them to. This includes:
- Advertising campaign management – exploring options, testing them, and finding strategies that give you the best return is all part of our approach to campaign management.
- Analytics – chewing over the numbers from things like organic website visits and email open rates enable us to see what’s landing well, what isn’t, and adapting accordingly.
- Reporting and monitoring – data can reveal lots of useful clues into your target audiences. With the right approach to reporting and monitoring your B2B digital activity, we can discover more about your customers and develop campaigns to fit.
Find out more about our three-step approach
We’re genuinely passionate about what we do. We love nothing better than getting into the intricacies of B2B digital marketing strategies, and we’ve been doing just that for years. But although we’re proud of our three-step approach, nothing beats finding out what that looks like for individual businesses. If you want to find out how we’d work with you, get in touch with us now.
