B2B Link building is a critical part of any B2B seo agency‘s arsenal which is going to drive results. However, link building has become one of the most-automated processes in the digital marketing industry. When it comes to standing out from your competitors you need to leverage your lowest hanging opportunities and your advantages.
Inboxes now are overly-saturated with emails telling them how awesome their recent blog post is and how they just wrote about a similar topic. It’s been done for too long! So what now? Well here are some of the most overlooked B2B link building strategies that will actually get you results.
1. Industry Forums, Websites, Social Media Blogs
Our human nature is to be socially active. Although it might be a lot to ask for to go to the coffee shops where these professionals hang out, it’s a lot easier and less time consuming to visit the places they hang out on the internet!
A great place to start would be Industry forums where B2B marketing industry professionals go to seek advice on business decisions and unique ideas. For example if you are within the IT space, you may connect with a lot of industry professionals on sites like Spiceworks.com, or Channele2e.com
Taking the time to like, comment and even post new questions on these Forums will help you establish your persona in the industry and increase the likeliness for your emails to be responded to. Additionally often you can post content and comments in these sites wherein you can also generate links for your own site.
Another trendy way is using social media blogs that are specific to that industry niche and target audience. According to Hootsuite, over an eighth of the 7.6 billion people on the planet are Instagram users.
An even larger fraction of the world’s population is using Facebook! This concludes that social media is now a part of almost every human’s daily life and might be one of the most efficient ways to connect to a stranger or a colleague.
The key to these platforms is to stay active and continuously like, comment, and message fellow users in the same industry.
Some ways to stay active on Social Media platforms:
- Liking Pictures of possible clients, fellow industry professionals, etc.
- Following their accounts or liking their business pages
- Sharing relevant content that will interest them
- Formulating your persona and voicing that strongly across your platform
- Commenting on posts that they have shared or others have shared on their page or wall
The more engaged you are on these social media platforms, the more the people and blogs you are trying to reach will recognize your name. This will increase the response rate of your emails and possibly bring blogs to you instead of you going to them.
2. Industry publications
Industry publications are another great resource to find prospects that you can reach out to.
A great example of this would be Hubspot Blog. Everyone from agencies to individuals have heard about Hubspot.
In the digital marketing world, it has built its platform as a go-to blog for all topics from different facets. Therefore, Hubspot has become one of the best “hangout spots” for the industry professionals you might be trying to reach!
Not only are Industry Publication blogs a good place to search for prospects, but it is also a great place to start reaching out and get Guest-Posts up.
It is likely that they will allow you to insert a link in your bio and will also help you get your name out there so other readers are familiar with who you are.
Although getting these guest blog posts up might not result in a backlink, it will build more trust with prospects and give your name a higher authority. Some examples of industry publications are or Channelfuture.com or Engineering.com
3. Vendors (i.e. your suppliers or distributors)
One advantage many B2B verticals have is that there are vendors, and re-sellers. If you are in this category, you probably have dozens if not hundreds of vendors in your space. Google sees these firms as strong authorities typically. Therefore if you are able to collaborate with the vendors on content published on their websites, you can generate high quality and very relevant back-links for your site.
Since you have already established a relationship with them and have their contact details, it is important to leverage this partnership that you already have. These could be one of the most efficient low hanging fruits on your prospect list.
In the It space your vendors could include Cisco, Netapp, Miscrosoft or even Connectwise. For engineering or AEC firms you may work with vendors like Johnson Controls or many other mid sized and smaller players.
4. Create Strong Content
When I say create strong content, I don’t mean when you land a guest post.
When B2B Industry professionals receive that email from you and hop on your website to see the content you’ve written. It is very important to impress your readers with your writing skills.
You may already have a lot of content which can be improved. The first step here would be to conduct an SEO content audit.
They need to see that you have the capability to write content that they won’t be able to write themselves. Not only that, but a strong, good content will eventually get linked back to on its own because it’s a good read.
This content can be in any form, from Infographics to Blogs to EBooks!
Don’t Get Fooled By How Easy it Sounds
One thing to remember is that results won’t happen instantly. To grab someone’s attention or a publication’s attention, you will have to consistently be active on their social media as well as their blogs.
This will also require some time to be allocated to cold calling, finding contact info and connecting on LinkedIn.
The most important aspect is to connect on a personal level and make them feel like they are also human. If you do that you’ll be able to build a long-term relationship with these publications.
Some time allocations to keep in mind while doing outreach include:
- Spend 2-3 hours a day to just follow-up on phone calls and emails to stay in touch
- In total it will take around 60-80 hrs a month to run a proper digital campaign for B2B link building
- Since guest-posting is a considerable part of link building, you will need a full-time content team, which, these typically will rely on full-time strategists and business experts to identify the pain points of your market.
Outreach might seem like an intimidating, time-consuming process.
It also might be very tempting to automate it, but the best way to get results is to make the person you’re reaching out to feel human.
It’s always a better idea to get an already equipped agency such as Jumpfactor to do your outreach for you!
As a part of our wide variety of services, Jumpfactor does outreach and content marketing in a time efficient and result driven way.
Hiring an agency will inevitably save you time, effort, money and also allow you to focus on the fun part of your job!
