You’re on this page because you want to craft and implement a digital marketing plan that helps your B2B company capture more qualified leads and convert those leads into lucrative, long-term business.
So let’s cut to the chase.
Here’s our agency’s entire B2B digital marketing game plan.
This is a “how to” for getting started on all core B2B digital marketing activities, including SEO, content, and marketing automation.
Let’s Identify Your B2B Marketing Objectives
Let’s start by identifying your B2B marketing goals.
To do this, you have to be brutally honest about the problems you’re facing in your marketing efforts.
For example, only 22% of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates (HubSpot) and 69% of marketers want to convert more leads into customers.
We also know that 61% of marketers want to grow their SEO (search engine optimization) work and, in turn, drive more organic traffic to their websites.
However, roughly a third of marketers will spend less than $25,000 on their marketing activities, and 21% will spend between $25,001 and $100,000 (HubSpot).
So you have lots of stuff you want to do, but funding is tight.
So, let’s take those insights and convert them into actionable priorities.
If you’re like the average B2B company, you need to…
- Increase Organic Traffic
- Convert Readers into Leads
- Nurture More Leads into Sales
Prioritizing B2B Marketing Activities
How to Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to Increase Traffic
By now, you should be aware of how SEO helps increase organic traffic to your website. While a lot of websites and ‘how to’ guides will list SEO, very few get in-depth on the ‘how’ part.
So, how do you use SEO to increase traffic to your website?
Firstly, if you’re trying to keep your marketing spend under control, you’ll want to avoid throwing all of your content-writing resources to short-tail keywords.
Wait a minute, what are ‘short-tail keywords?’
The term ‘short-tail’ (and ‘long-tail’, which we’ll describe later) come from statistics.
Basically, in SEO, ‘short-tail’ keywords are individually popular search terms. But they’re very competitive — and as a result, very expensive to A) produce (content is usually longer, and much higher quality) and B) rank (the most competitive terms only rank sites with hundreds or thousands of backlinks).
For example, “B2B Marketing” is a short-tail keyword with 35,000 monthly searches.
But according to Ahrefs, you’ll need at least 63 backlinks to your content if you want to rank in the Top 10. Plus, the average length of the content ranking for this term is 2,700 words.
You’ll need to invest in writing a large, high-quality, well-researched pillar piece, and do enough backlink outreach to gain 63~ links (this can take months of concerted, full-time work).
And PPC doesn’t fare much better.
At a CPC (Cost-Per-Click) of $8.24, you might spend tens of thousands of dollars without closing a sale. If, for example, you generate one lead for every 100 clicks, it’ll cost you $824 just to have someone fill out a form on your website. If you close 10% of all of your leads, it’ll cost you roughly $8,240 to make a single sale.
So if you’re one of those companies with a marketing spend of $25,000 for the entire year, you’ll blow your entire budget on PPC — and only have three sales to show for it.
But there’s another way. That’s where SEO knowledge makes a huge difference.
Take a look below:
While long-tail keywords aren’t as individually popular as short-tail keywords, there are many more of them.
In fact, 92.42% of Google’s search queries have less than 10 searches a month.
In other words, the vast majority of people don’t search for something in the same exact way. Everyone has their own way of searching, and their own specific problem they’re trying to address.
The interesting thing about these keywords is that they’re very specific. Many of them are questions posed by people in the industries or markets you’re targeting.
Sure, they’re not always sales-ready leads.
But they’re relevant — and much, much easier (and cheaper) to get.
The good thing about long-tail keywords is that they’re also much less competitive.
If your SEO team does a deep-dive into finding the search intent behind each of these terms, you’ll find readers who could — with a bit of lead nurturing — become clients.
As noted above, you’ll need an SEO team to look into each term — check out our b2b seo ultimate guide.
It isn’t wise to take a shot at all long-tail keywords. You want the attention of managers or directors, not students who are writing an essay, or job-seekers looking for an answer key to an online certification course.
It’s imperative that you find out where that term is being used — and by whom — before you invest your resources into it.
But choosing keywords and finding the right readers isn’t enough.
You must also have a strategy in place to keep those readers on your website and convert them into promising leads.
How to Convert Traffic into Good Leads With Content
Awesome, people are now visiting your site!
But how do you keep them there — and more importantly — convert them into leads?
More directly: how do you convince people to give you their contact info?
Before you can answer, you need to really understand who you’re speaking to.
For example, if you find that a certain long-tail keyword is being used by a senior manager in charge of customer service delivery, then you need an offer that resonates with that person’s problems, concerns, beliefs, and aspirations.
But to know these things, you need detailed buyer personas for each target you’re trying to reach with your content.
This is where your understanding of your industry and prospective clients is absolutely critical. You should know your prospective contact inside and out — and the content you publish on your website must reflect these insights.
Assuming you know exactly who you’re targeting, and what problems they’re trying to solve, converting them into leads requires two things:
- You need content — i.e., blogs, eBooks, whitepapers, videos, podcasts, etc. — that offer your readers actual answers to their problems and concerns. When it comes to long-tail keywords, you must remember that the people searching them are looking for specific answers to their questions, not a sales pitch! In fact, 90% of searchers haven’t made up their minds — they’re just doing research, and if your website doesn’t provide what they’re looking for, they’ll move on to someone who does.
- However, compelling content isn’t enough. If you have readers visiting your website, then you should have mechanisms in place to convert those readers into leads. This is where calls-to-action (CTAs) are essential.
CTAs — such as offers towards your eBooks or other programs — serve as triggers for your readers to give you their contact.
How to Nurture Leads and Convert them into Sales
Phew, we have traffic, we have leads. How do we turn that into money?
If you’ve followed the blueprint so far, many of your leads will be in earlier (or less qualified) stages of your sales funnel. This is by design — because we targeted low-competition long-tail keywords to answer very specific questions.
Now it’s time to prospect, qualify, nurture, and close these leads.
When we’re talking hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of contacts, sorting through them manually is a very bad idea.
According to HubSpot, 35% of sales representatives spend 31-60 minutes per day doing data entry work instead of prospecting. And 27% are spending at least 61 minutes per day on data entry work.
That’s definitely not a good use of sales time.
So you need marketing automation software to scale properly.
You can segment leads according to their company size and type, align leads with the right buyer persona (so you can create custom content for them) and score them based on where they were converted (a top-of-funnel middle-funnel blog, or a sales landing page).
Marketing automation is a key aspect of account-based marketing (ABM).
Your automation suite will help you identify notably large or promising accounts. Your sales team can then devote most of their efforts towards nurturing those leads.
As part of that process, your sales team can offer useful content, such as blogs, eBooks, and case studies to those key accounts.
In fact, 63% of buyers said that they used case studies as part of their selection process. Interestingly, relevant content is as much of a factor for ABM as it is for b2b SEO and increasing organic traffic — that’s why a single, high-quality content investment is highly scalable.
Develop Content That Will Get Other Businesses to Consider Your Products and Services
Next Steps to Getting Started on Your B2B Marketing Framework
Now, it’s time to get started with your digital marketing efforts.
It’s clear that no one person can do everything noted above. This requires the input of several full-time specialists. You can get a start on building that team by referring to our post on how to build a rockstar inbound marketing team.
But it could take months to hire, onboard, and bring a full-service inbound marketing team running.
Maintaining a team will add to your overhead — and potentially draw resources from attracting, prospecting and nurturing leads.
If you would like to dedicate most (or all) of your marketing budget towards lead generation and nurturing, then you ought to consider working with an external digital marketing agency instead.
You can leverage a fully-built and experienced team right off the bat and, in turn, begin acquiring and nurturing leads right away.
Jumpfactor is a full-service digital marketing agency specializing in increasing lead generation for our clients. Our expert SEO, PPC, ABM, and content teams consistently help our B2B clients increase revenue 5X faster than their competition. Talk to us to get started today!
