In the Digital Age, no B2B company can survive without marketing themselves online.
Even organizations with reputations that go back generations or those that serve the most niche of audiences will struggle without a winning B2B online marketing plan. Many have even gone out of business without this essential strategy.
And yet, the vast majority of B2B companies’ online marketing plans are missing some very important features.
3 Elements Every B2B Online Marketing Plan Must Include
Don’t just settle for coming up with a B2B online marketing plan. If yours doesn’t align with the following essentials, it won’t fare well against any competitor that has invested in each of the following.
1. A Document B2B Online Marketing Plan
According to the Content Marketing Institute, only 37% of B2B marketers actually document their plans. That means more than half of your competitors probably don’t have a formal B2B online marketing plan that’s written down or otherwise documented.
Think about how that limits its results (or maybe you don’t need to).
Without a documented plan, you can’t share it with others in an effective way. Word of mouth is not effective.
You also can’t reference it if team members dispute what the actual plan was. You’ll have a hard time holding people accountable when nothing actually documented what they were supposed to be doing.
Lastly, there will be no formal record of what worked well and what you should avoid investing in going forward. In B2B, many of the best strategies require a long-term perspective. That’s almost impossible without a documented plan.
Don’t be one of the 63% of B2B companies that don’t have a documented plan for their online marketing efforts. Write down what your plan is, what tools it will entail, who owns which activities, what your goals are, and how you’re using your budget. Keep it in a secure place where authorized team members can see it and revise the strategy as necessary.
2. Lead Magnets for Capturing Leads’ Information
There are all kinds of ways to bring potential clients to your company’s website. SEO and paid ads are two of the most common among B2B companies, though social media is picking up speed, too.
The problem for most B2B companies isn’t necessarily getting traffic to their sites, though. It’s that once those leads show up, the companies have no way of reaching out to them later. They go to all the trouble of creating great content to attract and engage, but then they’re left simply hoping the lead will contact them to become a client.
Don’t be so passive.
Instead, invest in lead magnets. As the name suggests, lead magnets draw-in your visitors by offering them the promise of your absolute best content in return for their contact information.
For example, if your B2B company offers IT audits, you might have a blog post that discusses the best possible servers on the market for small businesses working in finance. Then, at the end of the post, you can offer your readers a case study that shows how a small finance company was able to increase their profits by 10% after making just one change to their IT setup.
If you don’t have lead magnets, you will always struggle to generate leads from your site. Good blog posts are no longer enough.
3. A Regular Content Audit to Keep Site’s on Google’s Good Side
Finally, if your company doesn’t currently have a content audit on the calendar, that needs to change.
This is when you literally go through every page on your website and decide if it’s legitimately contributing to your bottom line or not. If it’s not, delete those pages until all you have left is high-quality, high-converting content.
The first time you do a content audit, it will probably take a while. The more pages on your site, the more work you’ll have to do.
That’s why, going forward, it’s so important that you make content audits a regular practice. Consider doing them twice a year or even more often if your company is posting every single day.
Aside from the fact that this will make each audit much easier, it will also make them much more effective, ensuring you benefit from their effects ASAP.
Is Your B2B Online Marketing Plan Set Up to Convert?
At the end of the day, the ultimate test of any B2B online marketing is whether or not it adds to your profits. No matter what you add or do differently, it doesn’t matter if your plan doesn’t increase conversions.
That’s why so many B2B companies rely on Hushly. Our platform is guaranteed to increase your lead generation and ABM conversions by no less than 51%.
Would you like to know how?
Then, contact us today to schedule a demo.
