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 Improve Your PPC Lead Generation Quality

PPC lead generation

Every B2B company should be actively investing in PPC lead generation.

While there’s a lot to be said for organic traffic and building a following on social media, PPC often offers the best possible ROI. If nothing else, it’s a great way to generate leads while you’re working on that social media following and impressive Google ranking.

Of course, even if you’ve already been investing in PPC, there’s always something more you can do.

3 Ways to Improve Your B2B Company’s PPC Lead Generation

It’s tempting to rest on your laurels when your PPC lead generation strategy is returning impressive results, but if you implement the three tips below, you may be surprised by how much better you’ll do in a very short period of time.

1. Try LinkedIn Ads

Despite the fact that LinkedIn is an absolutely essential social media channel for B2B companies, in the past, its advertising platform left a lot to be desired. While B2B marketers would use LinkedIn to share posts and build their network, they would generally take their budgets to Google Ads.

LinkedIn used to lack custom audiences, had almost no metrics whatsoever, and didn’t offer goal-based pricing. Twitter and Facebook’s advertising platforms have offered these for years.

And, on top of all that, LinkedIn ads used to cost a small fortune.

Fortunately, LinkedIn Ads have improved a lot over the last year. Now, they do feature account-, web-, and contact-targeting, and sponsored InMail campaigns.

Of course, these features are made all the better by the fact that LinkedIn is a social media platform dedicated solely to business. No matter what industry you’re in, your leads are most likely on LinkedIn.

So, if your PPC lead generation budget isn’t producing the ROI you want, one easy solution may be simply reallocating some of your funds to the new paid advertising powerhouse that is LinkedIn.

2. Focus Your Ads on Securing Email Addresses

B2B and B2C ads don’t work the same way.

If your company was B2C, you could probably just run paid ads right to your product, service, or landing page. In fact, you may not even need to invest in a PPC lead generation strategy. Your buying cycle would be so short that you could simply sell someone right from an ad.

This is almost never going to work in B2B. For one thing, B2B buying cycles have actually increased in length over the past five years. Then, there’s the fact that the average B2B company has to convince 6.8 decision-makers before they can close a sale.

All that is to say that if you’re trying to close deals with a PPC ad, you’re probably not seeing success. Instead, use those ads to secure leads’ email addresses. Bring them to a page where they can download the advertised lead magnet in exchange for their email address, and then use that address to continue your marketing efforts.

3. Pay Attention to Your Most Successful Times

There is no shortage of metrics you can monitor in order to improve the success of your B2B company’s PPC ads.

Unfortunately, most marketers miss one of the most important, especially in the world of B2B: the time-parameters when your ads will be displayed.

In Google Ads, this is known as “ad scheduling.” Facebook offers scheduling-by-time, too. Unfortunately, as far as LinkedIn has come, it doesn’t offer time-specific parameters for ads, but hopefully, that will change soon.

The reason this metric matters so much is that your prospects are probably most susceptible to your ads’ offers during certain times of the day. For many of you, this will mean 9-5, Monday through Friday, when they’re at work. During their personal lives, they might not care as much.

On the other hand, your market may be so busy that the only time they can ever consider their options is when things slow down outside of normal business hours.

More likely than not, you’ll find that your openings are even more specific. For example, Mondays and Fridays might be busy, and mornings may not be good. So, you’ll find that your PPC lead generation efforts work best Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays in the afternoon.

Always check back to see during which times your ads are most successful and then schedule them accordingly. 

Turning PPC Lead Generation into Easy Conversions

Implement those above strategies ASAP and your PPC lead generation strategies will begin paying off more than ever before.

Of course, many of your fellow B2B marketers have discovered another shortcut to the results they want. Our platform is so good at earning conversions, that we actually guarantee a 51% increase in lead-generation and ABM conversions.

Want to see how?

Contact us today for a free demo.