Does Digital Marketing Work For B2B?

Platforms have been making it easier than ever for brands to run display, search, and programmatic ads. But often it feels this microcosm of digital advertising is engineered to meet consumer industries’ needs. What results can B2B (business-to-business) marketers expect with digital campaigns, and what kind of tools can help them succeed with digital?

Many of our clients don’t sell “widgets” or consumer items. As B2B companies, they are trying to reach more specific – often niche – audiences and are often driving more significant purchase decisions. It’s understandable they want to know whether investing in digital marketing actually moves the needle.

As always, the response is that every case will vary, and every strategy will need to be specific to the client, the product, the target audience, and the business goals. But, let’s take a look at two of the strategies B2B companies have used to run successful digital campaigns.

Marketing Strategy Using Digital Tools

While concerns around digital privacy and tracking are getting a lot of media coverage, B2B companies can still leverage certain kinds of digital tools for making decisions about marketing. Tools that aggregate data or provide non-personally-identifying information about website visitors help organizations learn whether they are reaching the right businesses with their outreach campaigns.

Scheffey had recommended one such tool for one of our clients. This client wanted to be able to identify which companies were coming to their website, even if the company didn’t identify themselves by filling out a web form. The tool we recommended is an IP and website visitor tracking platform that helps identify companies that come to their website. With this tool, they can start looking at the visiting company as a whole, and develop account-based touchpoints to engage the visiting company’s contacts.

Using a tool like this can help your B2B company do any of the following:

• • Monitor responses to campaigns (Do the companies coming to your campaign pages match your ideal client profile?)
  • Build touchpoints focused on interactions (Does a company keep returning to specific pages on your site, and do you have a strategy to deliver targeted information to that company as a result?)
  • Respond promptly (Do you reach out to companies before your competition can?)

Rather than hope your ideal clients are journeying down the sales funnel, watch it happen with tools that monitor interactions. The goal with this monitoring is to decrease the number of touchpoints it takes to bring a business in for a sale, ultimately improving effectiveness while decreasing your cost of acquisition.

This strategy works best when it is paired with a robust Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and a nimble marketing or sales team. For more strategies that help guide businesses toward a sale, consider Scheffey’s marketing strategy services. 

Marketing Strategy Using Insights

B2B companies are a unique group when it comes to digital marketing. Where B2C companies tend to be more inclined to try trendy or flashy campaigns, B2B clients tend to focus less on what’s new in marketing. Instead, they want to improve their existing marketing and generate more results from platforms they know work.

As marketers, we stay on top of the emerging trends for both B2C and B2B industries, and sometimes it’s energizing to think through how we can use a flashy new platform to benefit our clients. Ultimately, we agree with our clients that sometimes refining processes that you know perform works better for your team and brand than chasing something new and trendy.

While we help our clients do this by providing in-depth metrics on all of the campaigns we run, any B2B company can use insights to create smarter campaigns. Sometimes the best way to move the needle is to dig in and quantify the results you’re currently seeing with your digital marketing campaigns.

The most complete data yields the best results, so we recommend gathering information from everyone involved with client interactions, including sales, marketing, and client management teams. Bringing all of the data sets together helps you create a more robust ideal client profile for targeting, map a more consistent buyer journey, and highlight areas of friction in the purchase process that you can improve. The data can also be used to help create “look-alike” audiences that your marketing team can use to reach into various platforms to find additional clients that look similar to your current client lists.

Gathering data from across multiple departments can seem like a daunting task, but it is well worth the effort. For example, Scheffey is able to give significant metrics surrounding a Google Ads campaign we are running for one of our B2B clients. We can report on the success of the Google Ads we manage – from keywords to ad copy – and how people interact with the landing page once they click through the website. While some might consider it enough to track an ad click through to form completion, we know getting a new lead isn’t their final business goal. We take things a step further by providing the client with a list of everyone who completed a form (which falls within their privacy policy), and we ask which leads became a final sale. We use that information to tweak our Google Ad campaigns to better target more companies who are similar to those who became a sale.

Digital Marketing Strategy

You’ll notice that in both examples we’ve given, we didn’t start by talking about individual digital marketing platforms. This is because when it comes to moving the needle with digital marketing, having a platform-first strategy will leave you scrambling to understand every option out there, and guessing which platform(s) your audience might be using. Instead, our approach starts with doing everything we can to understand who you are, who your audience is, who your market is, and how we can use all of the resources available to us to create a digital marketing strategy that will make an impact.

If you are feeling the pressure of proving ROI or adding more digital tactics to your marketing portfolio, give us a call or contact us to start building a strategy to move the needle for your business.