3 Essentials Most B2B Online Marketing Plans Are Missing

B2B online marketing

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.

How to Use Content to Lower Your Cost of Leads

cost of leads

Launching a lead generation strategy can be exciting, but there’s no better feeling than when it pays off and your B2B company actually has the number of leads it needs to be successful.

Sadly, for many marketers, this ecstasy is short-lived when they find out what their average cost-for-leads is. It becomes clear that, if something isn’t changed quickly, the strategy that seemed so promising may actually turn into a major problem.

3 Ways You Can Use Content to Cut the Cost of Your Leads

There’s a lot to be said about the importance of publishing high-quality content to your B2B company’s website. Sharing it on social media can be extremely helpful, as well. The right content doesn’t just help to bring in organic traffic. It can help you build authority and qualify your company to prospects, as well.

Content can also go a long way toward dropping your cost-of-leads. Whether it’s currently out-of-control or you’re just worried it may be heading in that direction, here are three ways content can efficiently clip those costs.

1. Invest in Intent Data

At Hushly, we’re big advocates for the power of intent data. As the name suggests, this is data that reflects how someone behaves online with the goal of linking individuals to particular topics of interest.

So, if you sell CRM software, it would help to know if a prospect is reading your content because they’re trying to more effectively follow-up with leads or simply increase their lifetime value. Intent data would show you this, making it easy to deliver them the most relevant content.

Without this advantage, it will not only be difficult to keep your cost of leads down, but to convert them, as well. Imagine the prospect who wants to learn about how CRM can increase lifetime-customer-value who is shown several pieces of content on other topics instead.

They might stick around.

But they may also just go back to Google to see what the rest of their options are.

2. Switch to PPC Until You Have a Better Handle on Your Prospects

Every B2B company should have a plan for securing a reliable stream of organic traffic. It’s not just a high-ROI strategy, it can also be one of the most effective methods of increasing conversions, especially with long buying cycles.

These benefits are only reserved for those companies that know how to create the kind of content their most qualified leads want.

Again, intent data will help with this.

Until it does, though, you should consider focusing more of your marketing budget on paid ads that target those prospects directly. This will help cut your cost of leads and give you a reliable ROI while you take some time to better understand what kind of content works best for your market.

3. Conduct a Content Audit

Finally, one of the simplest steps you can take toward cutting the cost of your leads is by actually looking at the effectiveness of the content you create.

Even if you were to create all of your own content, there would still be a cost involved. That’s a lot of time spent away from other important priorities.

Of course, most B2B executives are paying others – either employees or contractors – to handle content creation for them.

That’s why it’s so important that you go back and see what’s actually working and to what degree. Otherwise, you may continue to invest in content types that offer little-to-no ROI. Your client acquisition costs will always remain inflated, then, because you’re paying for content that doesn’t move the needle.

There are a number of benefits to conducting a content audit, not the least of which is that it will help increase organic traffic, something that should then help you drop your costs significantly.

However, a detailed audit will also show you what kind of content to quit creating, what kind to double-down on, and even what kind may have potential but deserves further consideration.

Cut Your Cost of Leads by Converting More of Them

Implement the above advice and you’ll quickly find your company’s average cost of leads drop. Even just switching to PPC can give you some valuable breathing room while you consider the other two.

That said, we are also very proud to offer a platform that will increase your conversions immediately. Nothing will make your leads cost less than being able to convert them quickly and we guarantee that your lead generation and ABM conversions will increase by at least 51%.

Sound too good to be true?

We know.

That’s why we would be more than happy to prove it. Contact us today to set up a free demo.

How to Audit B2B Marketing Strategies

B2B Marketing Strategies

Nothing is quite as frustrating as putting lots of time and money into your B2B marketing strategies only to be disappointed by their results.

However, before you go investing even more into improving your funnels, take a step back and conduct an audit first, so you can be sure of what’s wrong.

3 Ways to Audit B2B Marketing Strategies

The only way to consistently improve the ROI on your B2B marketing strategies is to continuously audit them.

Here are the three best ways to do it.

1. Audit Individual Marketing Assets

Today’s B2B marketing strategies may use any number of different assets to generate leads and nurture them towards conversions. Even social media platforms have become extremely popular in B2B industries.

That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re all equally effective, though, which is why you should audit your company’s individual marketing assets regularly.

This seems obvious enough when you have, say, blog posts with no social shares, comments, or clicks. Clearly, that needs to be addressed ASAP, either deleted completely or updated.

A simple content audit could be all it takes to improve your conversion rates, even when it involves getting rid of whole pages on your site.

Where most B2B marketers struggle is assuming that, as long as a piece of content is bringing in leads – no matter how few – it’s doing its job. Marketers put a lot of work into creating these pieces, so they just assume that it’s doing as well as it possibly can.

Even if that was true when it was first published, its effectiveness may drop over the years for countless reasons. If there’s not a way you can improve it now, you may need to replace it with something better.

We recently talked about one of these misconceptions. It used to be that time spent on an asset led to higher sales. This was taken for granted for years until it became impossible to ignore it was no longer the case. Companies that haven’t adjusted or replaced assets designed to increase the time that leads spent on them are going to continue to see funnel problems until they do.

2. Actually Speak – and Listen – to Your Sales Department

It should come as no surprise that one of the most common ways to judge if B2B marketing strategies are working or not is to look at their conversion rate. If you know you’re generating leads, but you’re not seeing new clients, that’s a logical place to look.

Usually, this “audit” involves looking at the sales teams’ numbers relative to the amount of leads the marketing team is generating for them. If there’s a costly disparity, it’s usually assumed that the marketing department needs to be more careful about focusing on qualified leads.

The problem is that the sales department is rarely consulted for specifics. Maybe the leads are qualified, but they’re getting sent to the sales team far too early. They still need some nurturing before they’ll convert.

Maybe the problem is fraudulent contact information, an extremely common problem that often ruins the potential ROI on otherwise valuable lead magnets.

Of course, there could be a number of different issues at play, too. The only way to know for sure is to sit down with the sales department and find out what their experience is with trying to convert the leads your marketing team generates.

3. Understand Sales Velocity

Finally, this next method is absolutely essential to auditing B2B marketing strategies if for no other reason than because most marketers don’t even know what sales velocity is.

Simply put, sales velocity measures the efficiency of your marketing funnel. In other words, not just how many sales your funnel nets you, but what kind of timeframe is involved. This concept is absolutely essential for effectively auditing your funnel because it provides you the most comprehensive view of its performance.

For example, without this kind of perspective, you might think the problem is an insufficient number of leads. So, you start investing in lead-generation without realizing that it’s the average ROI and the conversion rate that’s killing you.

Fortunately, the equation for sales velocity is extremely simple. It’s:

Number of Leads x Average Deal Size x Conversion Rate Percentage

Then, take that number and divide by the average amount of time it takes to get a conversion.

This equation – not just its product – will help you better understand why your results aren’t satisfactory.

Are B2B Marketing Strategies Falling Apart Right at the End?

Finally, if you’ve checked every other box on your B2B marketing strategies but are still losing qualified leads after they visit your site, it’s time to start using Hushly.

We are so confident in our platform that we actually guarantee a 51% increase in lead-generation and ABM conversions. Contact us today to find out why.

3 Simple Ways to Conduct a Content Audit

content audit

In B2B marketers’ never-ending quest to boost their websites’ rankings, attract leads, and earn conversions, a number of different tactics have been discovered.

Everything from keyword optimization, link-building, and schema markups have been revealed as powerful techniques for earning Google’s affection.

Yet, many B2B marketers shy away from – or don’t even know about – one of the most powerful methods available for improving SEO. In fact, withoutrunning a content audit, your site could continue suffering no matter what you do.

3 Ways to Execute a Content Audit Quickly

The idea behind a content audit is simple: you need to audityour content to find out what has to go.

After spending so much time and money on creating your B2B company’s content, why would you ever want to go back and start permanently deleting some of it?

Simple: it appears to help boost your rankings.

That’s because, if your B2B company is like most, you’ve probably posted a lot of content to your site over the years. Looking back, not all of that content probably hit the mark, either. You most likely have a number of webpages that have never even been visited. You have blog posts that didn’t gain any traction on social media or receive comments.

According to Google’s own analysis, “having many low-value-add URLs can negatively affect a site’s crawling and indexing.”

In other words, unpopular pages are hurting your chances with Google.

Here’s how to change that – fast – with a content audit.

1. Find Your “Bad” Posts

The first step of your content audit is to check your analytics to see which blog posts have done absolutely nothing for you. In other words, which ones haven’t brought in any organic traffic or social media views?

If they’re older than a year, we’re considering them “bad” posts.

Anything that hasproduced results – no matter how little – can stay for now.  

Go a little easier on your webpages. If they’re service/product pages that may improve conversions once you finish your content audit and start seeing more traffic, consider leaving them in place by now.

2. Decide Which Posts Can Be Improved

This will most likely take a while, but the next step is to look through those bad posts and decide which should be permanently deleted and which have the potential to be improved.

Some will probably be completely outdated. For example, if your blog post was about predictions for the coming year and it didn’t get any attention, delete it. There’s no point to trying to revamp that one. If you wrote a blog about a product, service, or methodology that’s no longer available, that can go, as well.

On the other hand, if you realize that some of your content was a bit thin, but you think the topic was a good one, you’ve found opportunities for improvement. Simply adding to the word-count of a post can often do a lot for increasing its rankings. Could some of your posts use new subsections?

Linking out to external sources can go a long way toward improving your content’s rankings, as well. Look for opportunities to cite sources to high-authority sites.

Speaking of which, you want to go through everylink on everypage of your site to check and make sure it’s not leading to a dead end. Sending your visitors to “error 404” pages because of broken links will hurt your chances with Google.

Fortunately, platforms like Screaming Frog will make this mucheasier and quicker to do.

3. Check Your Conversion Funnels

A good content audit shouldn’t just be about increasing your traffic, either. Now would be a great time to look through your various conversion funnels, as well.

Are parts of your funnel dropping the ball? Maybe it’s at the very top simply because it’s not bringing in any traffic. Maybe the middle of your funnel is leaking because prospects aren’t getting the information they need.

Whatever the case, look for opportunities to improve your results. It might mean adding more content or even taking some of it away. You could find that entire pages need to be replaced to fix the problem.

A Content Audit + Hushly = More Conversions

After a single content audit, you shouldsee improved traffic. It’s not like eliminating pages that weren’t helping could ever hurt.

However, make content audits something you do twice a year, and you’ll keep seeing your results improve.

For even better results, let Hushly help. Our platform works with the content you already have – the good content, anyway – to increase conversions by at least 51% – guarantee. Contact us today to see how.