Tag: account-based marketing

How to Make Your Inbound Marketing B2B Strategy More Human

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!

3 B2B Marketing Campaign Ideas That Will Pay Off Before 2020

Most B2B marketing companies face stiff competition simply because they’re in smaller industries that can only support so many competitors. Unfortunately, this means one bad idea can often be enough to set your company back years or even put you out-of-business altogether.

It’s why it’s so important that you only invest your company’s time and money into B2B marketing campaign ideas that are proven to work.

3 B2B Marketing Campaign Ideas to Implement Immediately

As a B2B marketer, there is plenty you can do in the short-term to start seeing positive results right away.

We’ve covered before how you can immediately increase your conversion rate or quickly drop your cost-per-lead.

Still, there are other B2B marketing campaign ideas that take a bit longer to find their footing and start producing the results you want. So, while it’s great to have goals you can execute in the near future, consider how these three ideas could set you up for success by 2020 if you start enacting them ASAP.

1. Segmenting Your Audience by Using Intent Data

One of the biggest trends to hit B2B marketing in recent years has been the easy accessibility of intent data. Thanks to companies like Bombora, you can now leverage “signals and data about prospective buyers or businesses actively researching products or services.”

In other words, as the name suggests, intent data tells you not just what your prospects are after but why they’re after it.

This kind of data could be powerful for a number of different reasons. For example, you may want to modify the copy on your main webpages to reflect the dominant intentions of your market.

However, the reason intent data is on our list of B2B marketing campaign ideas is that you can also use it to segment your entire funnel. You’ll probably find that segmenting by intention is far better than using other metrics like company size or the prospect’s job title.

2. Becoming an Influencer in Your Industry

Of all the B2B marketing campaign ideas that have proven to be successful in the long-term, one of the most surprising in recent years has been influencer marketing. This was a purely B2C strategy that seemed to work best on social media sites like Instagram and Snapchat. Nonetheless, it has shown impressive results for numerous B2B companies.

There’s no reason to think this will change in 2020. B2B decision-makers will still look for guidance from reliable sources, so it won’t hurt if you have a trusted influencer on your side.

That said, why pay a third-party for that kind of clout? Start building up your network now, and you could become that trusted resource in 2020. Imagine what that would do for your B2B company’s profile.

Between now and 2020, look for every opportunity to guest post, give interviews, host interviews, conduct webinars, etc. If it will get your name and company on other sites and in front of people in your industry – even if they’re not necessarily prospects – go for it.

3. Adopting Account-Based Marketing

Finally, no B2B-marketing trend of the last 10 years can hold a candle to the potential of account-based marketing (ABM). Every day, another company takes the plunge and starts going after accounts on an individual basis.

Has yours?

If not, start making the transition now, so you’ll be ready to unleash ABM campaigns come 2020.

If your company couldn’t possibly survive on a strictly ABM strategy, implement as much of one as you can. For example, score your leads, and then dedicate personnel to those deemed the most valuable. Aside from increasing leads, this modified approach will also teach your marketing team a lot about them.

Once you have a process in place, you could be extremely effective in 2020.

How to Supercharge All of Your B2B Marketing Campaign Ideas

The time to start executing the threeB2B marketing campaign ideas described above is right now. The sooner you do, the sooner you’ll see success and be able to further optimize your strategies in time to take over your market once 2020 comes around.

Of course, you don’t have to wait to start generating more leads immediately. No matter what kind of strategies you’re currently using, if they bring traffic to your website or a landing page, we can turn those visitors into qualified leads right away.

In fact, we guarantee that our platform will increase your ABM and lead-generation conversions by at least 51%.

Want to see how?

Just contact us today for your free demo.

account-based marketing audience segmentation B2B marketing campaign ideas data segmentation influencer marketing

Is Your Website Ready to Support an ABM Campaign?

Is your B2B company considering its first-ever ABM campaign?

There are countless reasons to give it a try.

While numerous trends come-and-go every year in the world of B2B marketing, account-based marketing (ABM) has proven it has staying power. Though it was a topic-of-conversation for years in many B2B circles, it only began finding adherents in the last five. However, those adherents quickly became impassioned devotees.

It’s not because ABM is a silver bullet, though. It’s because those marketers understand what it takes for ABM to succeed again and again.

4 Signs Your Website Is Ready for a Successful ABM Campaign

In some ways, one of the biggest draws to running an ABM campaign is that it’s so much simpler than the more-involved alternatives. You’re marketing to just one company with each campaign, as opposed to several, dozens, or even hundreds.

Nonetheless, you still have plenty to do before your campaigns will be set up for success. For example, those marketers that succeed again and again know not to launch a campaign until their sites are ready. Even with ABM, it’s likely your leads will come to your site, so it better be prepared to support conversions.

Here are four signs its ready to do so.

1. Your Website Is Set Up for Personalization

The biggest strength of ABM is that it provides each lead with a completely customized experience. You never have to worry about losing leads because they didn’t have the information they needed to make the right decisions.

It’s why personalization is so important for your website. Even if you’re taking a more traditional approach, it will increase your conversions, but an ABM lead is already accustomed to having information tailored to them. If they then decide to visit your site and struggle to find other information they want, that interruption could hurt your chances of converting.

2. Social Proof Abounds

Case studies are great for ABM because you can show a lead exactly what they have to look forward to if they accept your business.

Still, there are only so many case studies you can send them. As powerful as they are, your leads will most likely want other types of content before making a decision.

If they visit your site in search of them, an easy way to remind them of what’s around the corner if they become a client is with social proof. For example, include brief testimonials throughout your entire sites and the logos of any clients that are especially impressive (below a “Trusted By” header).

3. You Have Retargeting in Place

Just like personalization, every B2B website should have retargeting in place, even if the company has no interest in ever running an ABM campaign. Retargeting has too much potential to ignore.

That said, if a lead has proven valuable enough that it’s worth running an ABM campaign to convert them, you definitely want retargeting set up on your site in case they visit. Not only will it ensure they are regularly reminded of what your company has to offer – even when they’re not on your site – but it will also give them with more opportunities to interact with your site. Provided it is outfitted with personalization, that could be a massive advantage.

4. You’re Able to Track Your ABM Leads

Those extra visits will be even more helpful if you’re able to track your ABM leads when they stop by your site.

One way to do this is with reverse-IP-lookups. Numerous different titles exist to help you with this. By tracking what ABM leads are doing on your site, you’ll have an easier time nurturing them further by supporting their interests.

Another option for tracking them is with UTM codes. In short, you add them to the end of a URL. Then, send the URL to your lead. Obviously, you want to make sure the URL is for content on your site that is relevant to their company.

After that, you can then use Google Analytics to watch where your lead visited once they were on your website.

Again, while tracking all traffic is a good way to improve your site, you want to track the specific lead for your ABM campaign, so you can better tailor your future engagements with them.

The Easiest Ways to Generate a Lead for Your Next ABM Campaign

Of course, even if your website is ready for an ABM campaign, you can’t launch one until you have a lead.

At Hushly, we’ve pioneered one of the easiest ways to constantly keep your lead-nurturing funnel full. Just by adding our platform to your current site – and doing nothing else – we guarantee that your lead-gen and ABM conversions will increase by at least 51%.

Contact us today to schedule a free demo.

ABM campaign ABM lead account-based marketing Google Analytics personalization retargeting reverse-IP-lookups social proof UTM codes

Use These B2B Lead Generation Tactics to Immediately Supercharge Your Results

In many industries, B2B lead generation tactics have become the difference between the companies at the top and those that constantly struggle to hold on for another year.

Obviously, the better you’re able to generate leads, the more sales your company is likely to make.

That’s not all, though.

Each new lead also represents an opportunity to test the rest of your funnel. More leads mean more opportunities, so lead-generation is also about being able to improve every last aspect of the funnel you rely on to increase your bottom line.

4 B2B Lead Generation Tactics to Improve Your Results

It’s why you always need to be on the lookout for new B2B lead generation tactics. If you’re currently underwhelmed with your funnel’s results, new tactics may help to change that.

However, even if you are seeing sufficient leads at the moment, you can always use new tactics to conduct A/B testing and look for opportunities to improve.

Here are four such tactics – laid out in a step-by-step approach – you can put to work right away to immediately generate more leads.

1. Increase the Traffic to Your Site

The first step is to bring leads to your site.

Ideally, you want to use B2B content marketing for this because each asset you create is a one-time investment that will produce results for years to come.

However, depending on how competitive your industry is, it could also be a while before those results arrive.

So, if you currently aren’t enjoying any visitors to your site, divide your budget between content marketing and paid traffic. No B2B lead generation tactics will ever work if you aren’t someone able to generate traffic first. Over time, you can reallocate your budget in organic’s favor, but for now, start paying for those visitors until you’re regularly seeing sufficient amounts.

2. Use Lead Magnets to Capture Your Emails

Every B2B marketing strategy should include lead magnets. They’re the most reliable way to gain your prospects’ email addresses, which the vast majority of B2B companies need in order to eventually earn a conversion. Even when your organic-traffic strategy is paying off, it’s horribly inefficient to simply hope that a lead returns again and again before finally becoming a customer someday.

Furthermore, strong lead magnets will improve the ROI on your paid traffic. Most of your leads probably won’t be ready to buy right away after clicking on just one ad, but they’ll give you their email addresses for an enticing lead magnet.

3. Utilize Social-Media Matching

Another reason to love lead magnets: you can use leads’ emails to find them on social media platforms.

Then, you can create custom audiences and run ads to these qualified groups. Even better, on Facebook, you can create lookalike audiences for these groups. Now, you’re able to run ads to leads who may have never heard of your company or been to your site but are still qualified prospects.

This one step alone will dramatically increase your list of leads and the insights you have to effectively market your company to them.

4. Take an ABM Approach to Lead-Nurturing

Finally, not enough good things can be said about the power of account-based marketing (ABM) for B2B companies. Even if you could never completely convert your business to an ABM approach, you’ll see remarkable benefits by scoring your leads and then marketing directly to those that represent the most value.

That’s exactly what you’ll do with this last step. Identify those valuable leads, find them on LinkedIn, and then do your research on them, so you understand what to say when you cold email or direct message them.

While the aforementioned social-media ads are helping you develop your other prospects, this kind of customized approach will increase your chances with the kinds of leads who could change your company’s entire outlook.

Use These B2B Lead Generation Tactics to Gain More Conversions – Immediately

If you begin implementing the three B2B lead generation tactics we described above, it’s only a matter of time – a very short matter of time – before you’ll see the ROI you want. Again, this is true whether you currently aren’t seeing much of one at all or you’re just looking for a way to improve on already-impressive returns.

That said, we can help you skyrocket your conversions right away. You don’t even have to change your landing pages. Plug in our platform and we guarantee you’ll see a 51% increase to your ABM and lead-gen conversions. In fact, we guarantee it.

Contact us today and we’ll show you how we’re able to do it.

account-based marketing B2B lead generation tactics lead magnet lead nurturing social media matching

3 Opportunities to Improve Your B2B Marketing Strategies

In the Digital Age, it’s never been more apparent which companies are using B2B marketing strategies that earn results and which are struggling with plans that don’t work.

The former is constantly able to chase new initiatives, often breaking ground on channels the rest of their industry hasn’t leveraged quite yet (e.g. social media). At best, the latter is forced into playing catch-up.

Even if you’ve seen some positive feedback from your current strategy – say, an uptick in traffic – that’s no reason to assume your plan couldn’t use a review. Instead, look for opportunities to improve.

3 Ways to Improve B2B Marketing Strategies

While B2B content audits are one of the most important ways to improve your organic traffic and convert the leads who come to your site, it’s not the only opportunity you have to improve your company’s online presence.

1. Add Some Element of Account-Based Marketing

More and more, B2B marketing strategies that don’t take an account-based approach are going to lose to those that do.

After all, as the name indicates, account-based marketing (ABM) zeroes in on the specific needs of each prospect. Blog posts, social media posts, webinars – these are all great forms of content, but they can’t compete with the kind of tailored-approach that account-based marketing represents.

Now, maybe you’ve already considered ABM but concluded it just wasn’t a good fit. Maybe your company requires far too many leads every month to make ABM a realistic option.

Then, consider only applying ABM to your most valuable leads.

You could use lead-scoring to immediately make this evaluation the moment you’re able to get any feedback from a prospect. Chatbots will give you this opportunity, but you could also email any new leads a quick questionnaire to find out what kind of returns they might represent.

Then, anytime it becomes clear that you’re speaking with one of these high-value prospects, you dispatch your team of trained ABM specialists to reach out and start nurturing them, bypassing the rest of your normal funnel and accelerating their path to converting.

2. Get into “the Media Business”

In a now-famous interview Gary Vaynerchuk gave back in 2013, he told the story about how Guinness Beer invented The Guinness Book of World Records because research showed that when their demographic went to pubs, they largely talked about two things: soccer and trivia.

By starting their own media company dedicated to the latter, they enjoyed a direct connection with their market, which included the opportunity to advertise their product.

Interestingly, Vaynerchuk told this story to a lawyer who asked about the kind of content she could publish to grab the attention of her prospects. He recommended she take Guinness’ approach by first thinking about what her market is already interested in.

Now, does that mean you need to start your own media company to generate more leads?

No.

However, it does mean that you should be generating traffic from every possible source – including those that may not be dedicated to your industry.

Even though this advice is almost seven years old, very few B2B marketing strategies utilize it. Sure, plenty of B2B companies invest in paid traffic, but they tend not to stray too far from social media, Google Ads, and industry sites. Those are good opportunities, but competition is high.

Where else does media provide you with opportunities to connect with your audience uncontested? That’s where you should go looking for leads.

3. Add Another “Content-Type” to Your Social Media

Speaking of social media, there’s probably a lot of room on your current platforms to diversify the kind of content you post.

There are all kinds of social media content-types you could post to mix things up and stand out from the crowd. For example, if none of your competitors are posting videos, that would be an excellent opportunity. Similarly, if they never post testimonials, think how good that will make your company look if you start doing so regularly.

If your current B2B social media strategy is just industry news and little more, you have plenty of room to grow. Adopt a type of content you don’t see competitors using and start implementing it.

Using These B2B Marketing Strategies to Increase Conversions Right Away

As we mentioned at the beginning, you should always audit your approach to look for where new opportunities lie. Long after you surpass your competition, it’s worth considering other B2B marketing strategies that may help to increase that distance.

At Hushly, we’ve created a platform that is able to take any strategy and immediately improve its results. Contact us today and we’ll show you how all you need to do is add our software to your site to immediately enjoy an increase in your ABM and lead-gen conversions of 51% – guaranteed.

account-based marketing b2b marketing strategies social media marketing