If asked to imagine some of the best integrated marketing campaigns in B2C, you’d have no problem thinking of several.
Old Spice, Always, Taco Bell – just to name a few.
What about B2B integrated marketing campaigns? You’d have a little more trouble, right?
Integrated marketing in B2B doesn’t have to be super stressful. Use these tips to nail down a unique strategy for your target audience.
7 Ideas for an Effective B2B Integrated Marketing Strategy
Integrated marketing has turned into a huge buzzword over the past ten years as social media and digital marketing has reached new heights.
However, it really just refers to creating a holistic marketing strategy that targets your prospects and leads on multiple platforms.
20 years ago, your strategy may have involved billboards, direct mail, and radio advertising. Today, it includes sponsored social media posts, automated email marketing, and possibly still some direct mail or well-placed billboards!
1. Embrace Different Types of Media for Your B2B Integrated Marketing
Integrated marketing is only effective if you create the type of content your leads actually want to consume.
If you create blog posts and whitepapers but your leads prefer podcasts and videos, then your content marketing won’t deliver results, will it?
You can’t know for sure what your leads want until you do your research. Using automation to track leads and monitor their behavior can help you nail down a content strategy.
However, some types of content are pretty safe bets. For example, 49% of B2Bs consume video as part of the buying process. Unlike consumers, B2Bs watch videos for long periods of time: over 5 minutes in most cases. Meanwhile, a whopping 91% of B2Bs prefer webinars while some 64% like podcasts and 75% enjoy infographics.
2. Segment Your Audience for B2B Integrated Marketing Campaigns
Not sure how to pick and choose which leads receive podcasts in their emails and which ones get infographics? Break your subscriber list up into segments.
It helps to segment your audience on two levels:
- Which types of content they prefer
- Firmographic data
Firmographics are the demographics of B2B. They include different pieces of information like:
- Company name
- Job title
- Buying power
- Company size
- How long they’d worked for the company
As you can imagine, the type of content you create for C-level executives should be drastically different than the type of content you make for an end-user. However, both are equally important.
3. Stretch Your B2B Integrated Marketing Budget with Retargeting
Retargeting is an effective and affordable integrated marketing tool if you strategize properly.
LinkedIn makes it easy to target your leads with relevant content and a cohesive message at the perfect time. You can plug in a specific URL from your website and LinkedIn will target everyone who’s visited that web page with your personalized message.
You can follow a similar strategy with your PPC campaigns.
You shouldn’t neglect the versatility of email marketing either. Email service providers have come a long way over the past ten years – or even five – with advanced automation and personalization capabilities. Only 53% of B2Bs say they personalize some of their website but a majority (75%) say they personalize email communications.
In fact, email is the top channel among B2B marketers.
4. Develop a B2B Integrated Marketing Social Selling Strategy
23% of leads reportedly go dark not because a business didn’t offer the right products, but because they failed to keep a lead engaged. Integrated marketing is vital for nurturing leads wherever they hang out online.
Yes, social selling involves posting your content on social media and building a following. However, it’s also much more than that.
Social selling also involves building relationships with your current customers by replying to their conversations. It involves asking and answering questions.
Not only is this important for converting leads, but integrated marketing can also help you maintain loyalty among customers you’ve already converted.
5. Create a Website That Encourages Your Leads to Research and Self-Nurture
As mentioned above, only about 53% of B2Bs personalize content on their website.
That’s a sad state of affairs when you consider that leads complete up to 90% of the buying process through internet research before they ever speak to someone at your company.
It’s important to create a website that allows your leads to self-nurture at their own pace. Getting rid of forms and ungating your content can help tremendously.
Considering that 70% of all B2B searches happen on mobile devices, forms are doing nothing but holding you back by scaring away your potential leads.
Instead, use gentle personalization tactics to give your leads personalized recommendations and collect behavioral data in one fell swoop.
6. Clean Up Your Data for Effective B2B Integrated Marketing
While 86% of B2Bs admit they should be as focused on the customer experience as their consumer sector colleagues, about 25% say they’re still lagging in this respect.
Why? Data.
For over a third of B2Bs, leveraging data is the biggest hurdle towards creating personalized experiences across multiple platforms.
Start by cleaning up your list and ONLY collecting information from high-quality leads. Use features like human lead verification to make sure your leads are from real businesses.
7. Look to Your Competition for Inspiration
No, you shouldn’t copy what they do. In some cases, you shouldn’t even mimic their B2B integrated marketing strategy if you want to stand out!
However, you can look to your competitors to see what works for them and what doesn’t. You can use this information to tweak your own integrated strategy and even identify some gaps where your competitors fall short.
Create a Personalized Strategy and Generate More Leads Today
An effective integrated marketing strategy starts with your website. Once you have the pieces of personalization in order, you can use that data to reach your leads and prospects in all corners of the internet.
Hushly can help you create the personalized website your leads expect. From formless self-nurturing landing pages to adaptive content hubs, Hushly makes it easy to personalize each visitor’s experience with highly relevant content. It’s so effective that we guarantee you’ll boost lead conversions by 51%.
Interested in ditching your forms and setting your gated content free? Learn more about how Hushly’s lead collection and verification work!