Long gone are the days of endless cold calls, email pitches, and door-to-door outreach.
Today, inbound marketing in B2B reigns supreme.
Inbound marketing is much more effective for generating leads and conversions but many B2Bs haven’t nailed down a solid strategy that truly works for them.
While companies relying on inbound marketing are more likely to say that their strategy is effective, 32% of businesses using inbound marketing say it’s not.
That means over a third of businesses aren’t happy with their marketing efforts!
Obviously, that needs to change – and it can. Here’s why it’s so important to bring a human touch your B2B marketing strategy and how to do it.
It’s Time to Accept that the B2B Landscape and Expectations Have Changed
B2B buyers aren’t who they were 10 or even 5 years ago.
Today, a wide range of team members influence purchase decisions – from around the world. It’s important to create content not only for decision-makers, but also for people who take part in product research, your product’s end users, and current customers.
Let’s look at some fast facts:
- 70% of full-time professionals (not freelancers) work remotely at least one day each week with over 53% work from home or while traveling at least half of each week.
- By 2020, 70% of all B2B searches will happen on mobile devices.
- B2B buyers will spend at least three hours each day conducting research from their smartphone by 2020.
- 90% of buyers say that they’re more likely to continue doing business with a company that provides a seamless mobile experience.
Team members of all influence levels are browsing your website and if your content doesn’t speak to them, they won’t choose to do business with you. 65% of businesses say that they’ll switch vendors if a company doesn’t provide personalized content.
Source: Think with Google
6 Tips to Give Your Inbound Marketing B2B Strategy a Human Face
To create an effective inbound marketing B2B strategy, you need to provide an experience that appeals to people at every stage of the sales process – including end-users and current customers.
1. Get Your Data in Check So AI Can Do Its Job
62% of organizations rely on data that is up to 40% incorrect. That’s unwelcome news for your personalization efforts which need accurate data to succeed.
Without data from your lead magnets and blog posts, AI technology can’t learn about your website visitors and provide them with relevant content.
It doesn’t help that about 40% of all leads you collect include bad data – so you’re starting on a bad note to begin with – and job roles change all the time.
Using tools like human verification can help you drop any poor leads that sneak their way into your system, so your data is always accurate.
2. Segment Your Audience
If you haven’t already, now’s the time to break your audience up into segments based on factors like:
- Job role
- Purchase influence
- Stage of the buying cycle
- Engagement level
- Preferred types of content (eBooks, podcasts, videos, blogs, case studies, etc.)
- Location
Segmenting your data is the best way to learn about your leads and even discover new markets. Not only can you use segmentation to create high-quality content, but you’ll also save money by narrowing your marketing efforts.
3. Level-Up Your Account-Based Marketing
To personalize your inbound marketing B2B strategy even further, develop an account-based marketing strategy as well.
ABM typically involves marketing to key decision-makers rather than other lower-level team members.
While it’s important to develop a standalone ABM strategy for decision-makers who hold the keys, it’s equally important to create account-based strategies for others who influence purchase decisions – like end-users.
Most employees don’t work in a vacuum.
4. Ditch the Clunky Forms and Ungate Your Content
Here’s a not-so-secret about forms: no one wants to fill them out.
With 70% of all B2B Google research happening on mobile devices, forms can seriously hold you back.
Let’s say you click on a link and notice that you must fill out a form before you can read the blog post. You’re on your phone and you don’t want to fiddle with a mobile screen to type your information, so you hit the back button and head over to the next article.
Instead, set your content free and get rid of your forms. The real people visiting your website will appreciate it and you’ll generate more leads – not less.
5. Let Your Leads Self-Nurture and Educate Themselves at Their Own Pace
If you’re not using forms, how will you attract and collect leads?
Your answer is self-nurturing landing pages and adaptive content hubs.
Since your website visitors can freely browse your website without filling out a form, they’ll stick around researching your content much longer.
Instead of forms, use endless streams of personalized content. An adaptive content hub will use information about the posts a visitor likes and continue showing them similar content.
If website visitors want to read your content offline then make sure you’re marketing technology only allows them to do that after they’ve filled in a business email address. In essence let them read what they want online but when they want to download that content then ask for a single piece of information.
6. Integrate a Seamless Inbound Marketing B2B Campaign Across All Channels
Retargeting campaigns through email and social media are effective – if you use them properly.
To give your inbound marketing B2B strategy a human touch, make sure to personalize them.
Use information about website visitors who read specific blog posts to target them on LinkedIn with relevant content. Send out a triggered email campaign when a lead visits a specific case study or white paper.
Treat the entire experience like a one-on-one conversation rather than communication between a computer and buyer.
Drop Your Forms and Set Your Content Free
Hushly’s innovative software platform makes it easy to instantly level-up your inbound marketing B2B strategy with personalized and adaptive content hubs, self-nurturing landing pages, and content bingeing features. Along with that you can rest assured that your leads will be enriched and human-verified against a public LinkedIn profile which increases data match rates to 85%
With Hushly software, your leads can educate themselves at their own pace. Not only will you generate at least 51% more lead conversions, but your leads will be much higher quality and further along in the sales cycle by the time they reach out to you. Plus, you’ll only pay for the genuine business leads you generate – not regular emails and spam.
Want to see how Hushly works? Check out the demo to see it in action now!
