Tag Archive for: B2B Marketing

Leveraging LinkedIn: A Comprehensive Guide for B2B Marketers

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Marketers have a vast landscape of social media platforms to navigate, and each platform presents unique opportunities. But when it comes to B2B marketing, LinkedIn stands out as the ideal channel for more reasons than you may realize. Let’s take a deeper look.

From optimizing your business profile to generating engaging content and executing successful ad campaigns, today, we explore how to effectively leverage LinkedIn for B2B marketing. 

Understanding LinkedIn’s Potential for B2B Marketing

Have you ever asked yourself why LinkedIn is the go-to platform for B2B marketers? The reason is twofold: LinkedIn’s robust user base and rich, business-focused content. LinkedIn is a professional networking powerhouse, boasting over 774 million users and spanning 200 countries. 

It is a platform where business decision-makers, influencers, and executives converge. This offers B2B marketers an invaluable opportunity to reach a unique targeted audience. LinkedIn is a hub for insightful business content. It’s where professionals share industry trends, insights, and thought leadership, making it an ideal platform for B2B brands to establish a strong voice.

The Magic of LinkedIn for B2B: Strategies and Tactics

First impressions matter. That’s why having a compelling company page that clearly articulates your value proposition is crucial. Ensure your banner image, logo, and ‘About Us’ section accurately and professionally represent your brand.

Like Google, LinkedIn has its search algorithm. Thus, incorporating relevant keywords into your company page and personal profiles is essential for visibility. Consider the terms your audience might use to find your business and weave these keywords naturally into your descriptions.

Connections are the backbone of LinkedIn. Contact relevant industry professionals and join groups to foster a meaningful network. Remember, the goal isn’t just to grow your numbers and create a value network where meaningful interactions occur.

LinkedIn is an excellent platform to share thought leadership content. Write articles, share blog posts, and engage with others’ content to demonstrate your industry expertise and build trust with your audience. Use LinkedIn’s native publishing platform to produce articles directly on the site. This will help increase your visibility and present your brand as a leading voice in your industry.

Best Practices for LinkedIn B2B Marketing

  • Be Consistent: Consistency is key to maintaining an active and engaging presence. Regularly post content, interact with your audience, and respond to comments or messages.
  • Use Visuals: Posts with visuals tend to have a higher engagement rate. Use images, infographics, or videos to make your posts more appealing.
  • Leverage Hashtags: Use relevant hashtags to increase the visibility of your posts. It will help users interested in those topics to discover your content.
  • Personalize Connection Requests: When sending connection requests, always personalize your message to increase acceptance rates.
  • Stay Up-to-Date: LinkedIn often rolls out new features and updates. Stay informed and leverage these updates to enhance your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
  • Learn from Others: Follow other successful companies and influencers in your industry. Analyze their strategy, content, and engagement tactics to glean insights that can be applied to your strategy.

LinkedIn Advertising

Leverage LinkedIn’s paid advertising to amplify your reach. You can use sponsored content, InMail, text ads, or dynamic ads depending on your objectives. LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities allow you to narrow your audience to industry, job function, seniority, and more, ensuring your content reaches the right people. 

These pay-per-click (PPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) ads appear on the sidebar of LinkedIn. They’re an affordable and effective way to increase brand awareness and generate leads.

LinkedIn’s Sponsored InMail allows marketers to deliver personalized messages directly to users’ inboxes, offering higher open rates than traditional email marketing.

LinkedIn Stories and Live: New Ways to Engage

Embrace the latest LinkedIn features like Stories and Live to stay ahead of the curve. LinkedIn Stories allows for sharing short-lived content, a perfect way to share behind-the-scenes looks into your business, brief updates, or quick tips. On the other hand, LinkedIn Live lets you host real-time broadcasts to your network, ideal for Q&A sessions, product launches, or webinars.

Measuring Success on LinkedIn

LinkedIn offers robust analytics tools to measure the success of your efforts. Regularly track and analyze your metrics to understand what’s working and where improvements are needed. Implementing a successful LinkedIn strategy requires time, effort, and a keen understanding of the platform. The potential rewards for lead generation, leadership, and brand awareness are immense.

Final Thoughts

LinkedIn’s potential for B2B marketing is immense, from its robust user base to rich, business-focused content. Leveraging it effectively, from profile optimization to creating engaging content and executing successful ad campaigns, can help B2B marketers tap into this potential and drive their business growth.

At Onimod Global, we deliver digital marketing strategies that achieve results. Whether you’re looking to boost your LinkedIn presence or improve your overall digital marketing strategy, we’re here to help. 

Reach out to us today to learn how we can help elevate your B2B marketing efforts.

B2B Marketing Trends To Look Out For

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As the second quarter of 2023 is underway, it’s a great time to reflect on the B2B marketing trends that have emerged and evolved over the past few months. The digital landscape is constantly changing, and marketers need to stay on top of the latest trends to remain competitive and drive growth.

Here are some B2B marketing trends to try in Q2 and beyond.

Personalization at Scale

Personalization has been a buzzword in marketing for years, and for good reason. It’s a critical component of any successful B2B marketing strategy. AI boosts personalization by using data from various sources like geolocation, recent purchases, and browser history. Marketers can leverage AI analytics to improve practices and achieve better results. In fact, 71% of B2B customers like the idea of AI for personalization, and 63% would use it for trend and pattern identification. 

Advancements in AI and ML have made it possible for B2B marketers to scale personalization to a level that was previously impossible. By leveraging data from customer interactions and online behavior, B2B marketers can create highly personalized experiences that drive engagement and conversions.

Video Marketing

Video Marketing has been on the rise for years, and it’s not slowing down anytime soon. In fact, video is projected to account for 82.5% of all internet traffic by 2023. There are so many options when it comes to creating video content. Here are some of the benefits of incorporating video into your B2B marketing strategy:

  1. Increased brand awareness: Videos are shareable, which means they can help increase your brand’s visibility across social media and other digital channels. By creating valuable and interesting videos, you can attract more potential customers to your business.
  2. Better retention: By creating videos that provide valuable information, you can improve your audience’s retention of your brand’s message. Viewers retain 95% of messages when they watch them in video format.
  3. Improved SEO: Video content can help improve your search engine rankings. By optimizing your video content for SEO, you can increase your chances of appearing at the top of search engine results on pages.

Voice search optimization

Voice search is becoming increasingly popular, thanks to the widespread adoption of smart speakers and virtual assistants. B2B marketers need to optimize their content for voice search to ensure they’re not missing out on potential customers. Here are some tips for optimizing your content for voice search:

  1. Long-tail keywords: Voice search is more conversational, use long-tail keywords that match the way people actually speak.
  2. Local search: Voice search is often used for local searches, such as finding nearby businesses or services. Optimize your content for local search queries by including location-specific keywords and information.
  3. Clear Answers: Voice searches tend to generate more direct questions than text searches. Provide clear and concise answers to common questions related to your business or industry.

Social media advertising

Social media platforms are constantly evolving, and this presents new advertising options for B2B marketers. LinkedIn, in particular, has emerged as a go-to platform for B2B advertising due to its highly targeted features. LinkedIn allows marketers to target specific companies and industries, making it an ideal platform for B2B marketers to connect with their target audience.

Other social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook also offer advertising options that can help marketers reach their target audience. On Twitter, B2B marketers can use promoted tweets and promoted accounts to reach their target audience. Facebook offers similar advertising options, including targeted ads and sponsored posts.

By leveraging social media advertising options, B2B marketers can connect with their target audience, generate leads, and drive growth for their business.

Final Thoughts

B2B marketing trends are constantly evolving, and it’s important for marketers to stay on top of trends to remain competitive. By incorporating some of these trends into your strategies, B2B marketers can drive growth in Q2 and beyond.

With over 20 years of experience, Onimod Global is an expert in B2B digital marketing. From content creation to SEO and more, we understand the need to keep up with technology trends in the digital marketing space.

If you’re interested in learning more about the future of digital marketing, contact us here.

B2B Marketing: Paid Search Edition

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Effective paid search strategies are difficult to get right. You may have problems with budget, creative content, channel decisions and more. However, one of the biggest problems marketing departments have with the effective search engine advertising is your audience. Paid search is an excellent tool to capture your leads in a fast and efficient way.

An important note on B2B in general is that the sales cycle is generally much longer. It can take up to three to six months or more to see the benefits of your strategy. Be prepared for this and to see PPC return on investment farther down the road than what you would potentially expect for B2C.

At the core of the strategy, a B2B PPC campaign is just like a B2C one. You have campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and so on, just like B2C—but the important note is to keep the market characteristics in mind.

1. Research

For really any B2B PPC situation, you’ll have to dig in and conduct some serious research to run a top-notch B2B campaign. Why, you may ask? Because even though you might understand your market inside and out, applying it to the PPC channel is a different matter, one that’s full of risk areas in terms of targeting.

The important key takeaway is even though you understand your market, be aware that Google and Bing do not. Their platform will try to match you to as many types of keywords as possible. So stay on top of your search query report and keyword research.

2. Keywords

Keyword research are essentially the same for B2B as they are for B2C. One difference, however, is the preponderance of acronym searches in B2B. Whatever your industry, find out what words the customers are using. For example, an acronym such as “GPR” gets four times the search volume of “ground penetrating radar.” It’s all about understanding the search behavior of your potential customers.

When it comes to bidding and CPCs, they can be all over the board, just as in B2C. Without a doubt, though, there’s more room for “loose” bidding when you’re talking about high-dollar items and services. In other words, B2B typically has higher profit margins, so small increases in CPC isn’t really as big of a deal.

3. Tracking & attribution

If you have any experience with B2B, you know that tracking and lead attribution is a very challenging task. Different from an e-commerce B2C strategy, a lead generation strategy will need to be able to collect data from multiple sources and bring it back together to get a clear picture of performance. There are many ways you can track your paid search performance, Onimod Global experts prefer to use the UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) information onto URLs. If you are unsure of how to set this up, first check out Google’s URL Builder Tool as a solid starting point.

Contact Onimod Global

Looking for an agency to completely transform your B2B strategy and skyrocket your lead generation? Reach out to us here!

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B2B Paid Search Tips

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The B2B conversion funnel can be very different than that of B2C. The purchasing decision and sales cycle as a whole can take much longer. First, because there is more than one decision maker. When purchases are made, they’re usually signed off by multiple stakeholders. Once they do sign off, contracts need to get sent through legal departments as well. The average B2B sales cycle is  84 days, meaning it could be a long time before the company is actually using your product or service. B2B marketing can seem a little more complicated than B2C at first, but with the right strategies and tactics in place, it can easily be simplified. 

B2B Paid Search Tips:

Multiple messaging points across the funnel

Because there are usually multiple people that have to approve the purchase decision, it’s important to have relevant messages for the appropriate audience at each stage of the funnel. Those that are in the early exploring stages are likely to respond to upper-funnel messaging, that don’t require a strong push to sell. As they get further into the funnel and are looking for specific reviews or comparing costs, they are usually more inclined to convert when presented with a strong CTA. 

Branded and competitor keywords 

If you don’t organically rank number one for your brand searches or aren’t well-known in your industry, bidding on your branded keywords is a must. Even if you are, bidding on branded keywords can have many benefits, especially when targeting B2B searchers. It gives you full control over your message and allows you to direct users to the ideal landing page. 

It’s expected to have generic keywords relevant to your services, but you might want to drop in competitor-based keywords as well. CPCs may be higher than branded keywords, but they are often cheaper than generic. When a user searches for a competitor, they’re likely just looking for what they have to offer. Bidding on their keywords gives users more results and alternatives. This can be especially beneficial if you’re not well-known organically. Since your target market may not be aware of you yet, bidding on competitors they are searching for will get you immediate visibility. 

It’s important to keep a close eye on your keyword performance. If CPCs for competitor phrases are getting too high, or soaking up all your budget without producing conversions, you may no longer want to bid on those phrases. A/B test many sets of keywords, find which perform best, and allocate your budget appropriately. 

Tracking and attribution 

The most difficult part of running B2B paid search can be tracking and attributing your leads, clients, and sales back to specific campaigns, audiences, keywords, etc. Identifying where sales and revenue come should be clear with an ecommerce strategy, as long as tracking is set up correctly. Tracking and attribution for lead generation campaigns can get a bit more complicated. They key is collecting data from multiple sources, then bringing it back together to get a clear picture of performance. 

There are many different tools and strategies to track and attribute paid search performance. A simple way to track performance is by directly dropping UTM data into a URL. If you’re unfamiliar with this practice, Google’s URL Builder Tool is a good place to start. This strategy allows developers to pull the data through the website form completions, pull that into your CRM, then complete the attribution process separately. 

There are many attribution models. The most popular used on Google are data-drive, time-decay, and position-based. Data-driven uses the publisher’s machine learning algorithms to precisely calculate and assign partial credit to different touch points in your funnel. While this is an effective strategy, there are volume requirements. Those Being 15,000 clicks and 600 conversions over the past 30 days and 10,000 clicks and 400 conversions per month. The other models may be better for businesses that have smaller volume. 

Time decay assigns credit to different touch points through the funnel, giving more weight to the most recent touch points, and less for the older ones. This may be most beneficial for highly competitive B2B spaces, as closed deals hold more importance than initial leads. Position-based attribution assigns 40% credit to the top of the funnel, 40% to the bottom, and 20% to the middle of the funnel for a conversion. Since this strongly emphasizes top and bottom funnel interactions, it makes sense for businesses where initial leads are just as important as closed deals. 

Re-Marketing 

In B2B, it’s especially important to nurture leads once they have entered into the sales funnel, but with relevant messages. You don’t want to serve these prospects with top-funnel messages that are no longer apply to them. That’s why you should create re-marketing lists for every stage of your sales funnel. The messages should differ slightly based on where the prospect left off in the sales funnel. It can be beneficial to create separate landing pages for re-marketing campaigns as well. This allows you to craft your message and specifically target those that have seen the original ad, but didn’t initially convert. These strategies can be used for post-purchase marketing as well. It’s always more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. There are plenty of opportunities to turn first-time purchasers into long-term, loyal clients. Consider cross-selling, up-selling, renewing, limited offers, etc. 

Conclusion 

At first glance, B2B marketing can seem much more complex than B2C. Longer sales cycles and multiple purchase decision makers can seem intimidating, but it just requires a different outlook. Take a holistic look at your firm’s entire sales journey. Collate the relevant data for every touchpoint and start crafting the campaigns that will fit best, ultimately driving more leads and sales. 

Sometimes, even B2B companies need outside help. At Onimod Global we are experts in all aspects of SEM. With our expertise and unique cross-channel digital marketing campaign strategies, we can power entire corporate marketing departments, or provide custom solutions for local businesses. If you’re struggling with paid search, SEO, social media, automation, web dev, or any other aspects of digital marketing, Onimod Global is here to help. 

Learn more about what we do, take a look at some of our work, or start your conversation with us today!