B2B marketing teams are often guilty of concentrating their strategy on promoting their own company: the content is ’product centric’ and focuses on topics like best practices, or the top reasons why their service can help you.
This is especially true for marketers creating content that is expected to reach new customers or help with brand perception. When awareness and extending your brand’s influence is the end goal, focusing on your own company can have an adverse effect on people before they know anything about you.
1. Measuring and utilising social media leads
Many organisations in the B2B sector have been slow to embrace social media due to reticence about the value it can provide, but the opportunities for organisations to benefit from this (not so new) channel continue to grow and prove their worth. The main tenet of social media is the notion that you’re creating a community, not just an echo chamber of sales pitches. So be mindful of the tone and messages you’re promoting.
Recognising the worth of a dedicated social media focus is only part of the battle though, being able to track and measure these channels is the part that many forget. Simply tweeting and posting will only get you so far without thoughtful analysis to improve your campaign. Lots of missed opportunities, such as social media brand mentions, with the intent to purchase, that weren’t followed up on by the brands mentioned can account for money not being shown in your end of month budgets.
This reinforces the importance of having an efficient social media monitoring system in place.
Even if social media isn’t a core part of your strategy maintaining a basic presence on social media, and ensuring that someone is monitoring any mentions of your brand, is crucial. Not doing so may mean you’re overlooking valuable opportunities to increase brand visibility and engage with your community and customers. More worryingly, you might miss the chance to make a sale with a motivated prospect.
To drive home the point, if you aren’t monitoring your social presence or if you don’t have one at all, you risk the chance that one of your competitors will target those leads that you are neglecting and steal a potential customer.
There are many tools and platforms online, some are even free, that allow you to monitor and schedule your social media posts more efficiently and easily than using each one individually. A quick scroll through Google will throw up several options of varying quality that you can utilise, just pick the one that works for you.
2. Optimised landing pages
Another major cause of missed opportunities are poorly optimised landing pages, and in particular, forms. Forms separate the quality leads from non-motivated leads and have an affect on your conversion rates and lead generation results. Optimising your online forms, or using a tool to ensure that you’re not leaving leads behind from your marketing campaigns, will have a huge knock on effect for your lead generation results. Making sure you have clear calls to action, and not over complicating the requirement on a page is essential if you want to benefit from potential customers visiting your site.
If you want your prospective lead to fill in a form to contact you it’s best not to give them several other options that take them to other areas of your website, or conversely try not to confuse your message. One form or call to action per page (reserve a room or table, but not both)
For example, 1,000 visits to your landing page at a cost of £3 per visit for advertising means that converting only 1% of those leads means you’ll get 10 leads at a cost per lead of £300. If, instead you optimise your form and it converted at 3% (still a very reasonable goal conversion), you’d receive 30 leads at a cost per lead of £100.
That’s 3 times as many leads for a third of the cost per lead without spending a penny extra – just by improving your lead generation form.
3. Tracking which marketing is generating leads
So, you’ve optimised your social media accounts, your paid ads and your landing pages, what do you do when customers want to actually talk to a human? Well, you’re going to need to use something to track which of those leads is generated by which marketing campaign: call tracking can show which activity is truly getting those important and profitable enquiries.
As a B2B marketer you’re probably dealing with multiple global locations for advertising, working out which of your campaigns is returning the best results and in which country – this is no small task, but not doing so can mean wasting a lot of money on strategies that just aren’t showing a high enough ROI.
Some companies, like Mediahawk, provide global call tracking software which can actually reveal the keywords that drive phone conversions. This enables you to track which PPC ads, digital marketing or even offline marketing campaigns generate phone calls. It also helps you work out which country is returning the best leads, the highest percentage of ROI and the best channels to market through.
Couple this with an ability to integrate call tracking with Google Analytics and track phone calls as conversions and you have an extremely powerful marketing tool that many businesses just aren’t utilising to its fullest.
4. Properly utilised SEO link building
A powerful tool that often isn’t fully understood, or at least recognised as effective in B2B markets, is SEO link building. Being able to produce fantastic content and then use that as a link building tool will vastly improve your ranking on search engines and put your brand in front of more potential leads.
But, and here’s the rub, writing good SEO content isn’t as easy as hammering out 600 words and firing it off to a blogger. Each piece of content you or your company creates should have a clear purpose, and no, ’going viral’ or ’to produce a million pounds worth of new business’ is not realistic. Make the purpose of your content clear and measurable, such as improving a page ranking or channelling people to (your newly optimised) landing page forms.
Supposedly the four main content types are: content to entertain, educate, persuade or convert. If you can identify one of these types as appropriate then you’re on the right track.
Ask yourself four key questions when you write content:
- Who is the content meant for? Which demographic are you targeting?
- What pain point are they suffering from and are you addressing that?
- What stage of their buying journey are they at?
- What action would you expect someone to take after reading?
Answering these key questions whilst writing your piece should improve not only the interest in publishing your article but also the results you get from those reading it.
