65% of businesses say that generating traffic and leads is their biggest challenge. But 96% of the visitors who come to the website, are not ready to buy. And this is even more worrisome: 80% of the new leads never translate into sales. So, what’s the solution? Well, the answer is lead nurturing. Many businesses pour their heart and soul into generating leads, but it is astonishing to know that a lot of them still have not adopted lead nurturing practices in 2024. So, I decided to write the first blog series in my blog: lead nurturing meaning. In the second part of this blog series, I will cover the benefits of lead nurturing. In the concluding part of the 3 part blog series, I will cover the winning lead nurturing strategies.
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Saurav, One of my good friends, who has recently set up his own startup, called me last Friday evening and asked me “Hey, I have started working on my 2024 marketing plan. We have a robust email marketing plan ready. Can you quickly tell me what are the other ways to generate B2B leads”. My answer to him was “It Depends. It all starts with your products, target customers, what are the problems they are facing, what kind of problems are solved by your products, and also, the price points of your products. Based on that you will need to create multiple touchpoints for your target customers to influence their purchase decisions and create your B2B lead generation strategies”.
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Unlike traditional or outbound marketing, inbound marketing does not require your business to reach out to potential customers. Instead, inbound marketing strategies enable your business to attract, influence, and convert prospects by delivering valuable content and experiences. In addition to curtailing customer acquisition costs, inbound marketing strategies help you increase website traffic and generate more leads.
According to the inbound marketing statistics compiled by Thrive,
“Inbound marketing strategies reduce customer acquisition costs by about 67% in comparison to outbound marketing strategies. At the same time, a business can generate 126% more leads and increase the close rate to 14.6% by switching from outbound marketing to inbound marketing.”
In 2024, your business must abandon outbound marketing and leverage the benefits of inbound marketing. In addition to reducing customer acquisition costs, inbound marketing strategies will help your business increase its online presence, generate more qualified leads, and build long-term relationships with customers. But you must remember that inbound creates opportunities to guide prospects to your business through multiple communication and marketing channels.
You can increase website traffic consistently and convert more website visitors into customers in 2024 only by implementing multiple inbound marketing strategies. However, inbound marketing strategies differ from each other in many aspects, including outcomes. Hence, you must spend some time evaluating and comparing some of the inbound marketing strategies that will help you generate more leads and grow sales in 2024.
15 Inbound Marketing Strategies to Increase Your Customer Base in 2024
1. Buyer Persona Development
The inbound marketing strategies achieve preset goals by engaging and influencing prospects during three important stages in a buyer’s journey – awareness, consideration, and decision. You need to guide a prospect or potential customer throughout the inbound marketing process by delivering targeted and personalized content according to her current position in the buyer’s journey.
You can deliver the right content to a prospect at the right time only by understanding her needs and addressing her pain points. As a fictional representation of the ideal customer, buyer personas describe your target customers elaborately. They define the buyer’s age, gender, and location as well as identify her goals, needs, behaviors, pain points, and challenges.
While planning inbound marketing strategies, you can create multiple buyer personas based on real-time customer data collected from various sources. The buyer personas will help your inbound marketing team to create the right kind of content and influence the prospects by delivering the right information or message at every stage in the buyer’s journey.
2. User Experience Optimization
The inbound marketing strategies will boost your business’s online presence and increase your website traffic. You cannot make any inbound marketing campaign successful in 2024 if your website does not deliver an optimal user experience. While optimizing the website, you must focus on the key factors affecting its user experience.
For instance, you can boost the website’s user experience by making it load in less than 2 seconds. Likewise, you need to ensure that a prospect can access your business website seamlessly on desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. At the same time, you must focus on protecting customer data during storage and transportation from various cybercrimes.
It is always important to assess your website’s user experience from time to time using a slew of KPIs. As a powerful inbound marketing strategy, website optimization will help you achieve present marketing goals by keeping the website visitors engaged and conveying the desired message. However, you must keep in mind the latest search engine guidelines while optimizing your website.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The online experience of 67% of netizens begins with search engines. Hence, both B2B and B2C companies increase website traffic and generate leads organically by implementing organic search marketing or search engine optimization (SEO) strategies.
You can make SEO strategies effective in 2024 only by boosting a website’s user experience and search experience. In addition to implementing the latest search engine guidelines, your strategy must combine the right on-page and off-page SEO techniques.
The on-page SEO activities will optimize the web page content for both search engines and searchers. At the same time, you can boost your website’s popularity, authority, credibility, and reliability by implementing off-page SEO techniques.
4. Paid Search Ads
Leading search engines display paid search results before organic search results. Hence, businesses invest in paid search marketing to diver search engine traffic to their websites quickly. Paid search ads are more effective than SEO tactics in increasing the average conversion rate.
While implementing this inbound marketing strategy, you can increase website traffic by displaying a variety of paid search ads – pay-per-click (PPC), native ads, display ads, and retargeting/remarketing.
The marketing campaign costs will vary according to your choice of paid search ads. You can convert more website visitors into leads and customers by complementing paid search ads with various SEO techniques.
5. Organic Social Media Marketing
The average time netizens spend every day on social media platforms has crossed 144 minutes in 2024. Hence, your business can connect, influence, and engage prospects by adopting organic social media marketing as one of the tried-and-tested digital marketing strategies. Your business can run organic social media marketing campaigns without escalating upfront and ongoing costs. You can generate and convert leads by posting a variety of content – stories, posts, videos, images, and memes – on popular social networking platforms.
However, you can build and sustain relationships with prospects by posting informative, interesting, and inspiring content regularly. Also, you can influence them at various stages of the buyer’s journey by providing relevant and targeted content. Your social media marketing strategy must focus on making the content popular by getting more likes and shares.
6. Paid Social Media Marketing
Most social networking platforms allow users to promote their organic content to a relevant audience by running paid ads. The paid ads require your business to incur ongoing expenses. However, paid social media ads create opportunities for your business to target new users and convert them into customers.
In addition to sharing information about your brands, you can run social ads to increase brand awareness and drive lead generation and conversion. The social ads further create opportunities for you to increase sales revenue by promoting upcoming events, new deals, and fresh content.
7. Content Marketing
Buyers these days evaluate a product or service by gathering a variety of information and asking a slew of questions. Content marketing helps your business generate, nurture, and convert leads by providing relevant content. Many businesses these days run content marketing campaigns with the aim of increasing trust, credibility, and reputation.
You can make content marketing strategies successful in 2024 only by creating, sharing, and promoting a variety of content – articles, blogs, newsletters, whitepapers, videos, and infographics. Also, the strategies must enable every lead or customer to consume the content through her choice of communication channels. However, you can attract and retain buyers only by publishing relevant and useful content regularly and consistently.
8. Video Marketing
Over 91.4% of internet users, these days spend most of their digital media time watching online videos. Many internet users choose and product by watching product review videos. At the same time, many netizens prefer gathering information by watching educational, tutorials, and how-to videos.
Your business can generate, nurture, and convert leads by leveraging the massive popularity of online videos. Your video marketing strategy in 2024 should focus on creating brand awareness and promoting products/services by publishing online videos regularly. Also, you must promote the videos on social networks and video-sharing platforms aggressively to increase views, likes, and shares consistently.
9. User-Generated Content Generation
While conducting pre-purchase research, most buyers trust the content created by consumers using the brand. Your business can influence and nurture prospects at various stages of the buyer’s journey using a variety of user-generated content – comments, reviews, testimonials, photos, videos, and social media posts.
You must make user-generated or consumer-generated content creation one of the inbound marketing strategies in 2024. In addition to using the brand-related content generated by consumers organically, your strategy should encourage and incentivize buyers to post product reviews and testimonials. You can further boost a brand’s online presence by using user-generated content in content marketing campaigns.
10. Landing Page Optimization
As single and standalone web pages, landing pages drive inbound marketing campaigns and lead generation activities. They act as an entry point for buyers to access a specific or relevant section of the website. You must consider landing page optimization in 2024 as one of the most effective inbound marketing strategies and conversion rate optimization (CRO) tactics.
You must conduct elaborate A/B testing to optimize key elements of a landing page – design, layout, copy, and graphics. Also, you must refine the landing pages using buyer personas and include straightforward call-to-action buttons. However, you must monitor the performance of landing pages to know what is working and what is not.
11. Email Marketing
Emails are used by 89% of marketers as the primary channel for generating leads. Your business can adopt email marketing in 2024 either as an inbound marketing strategy or an outbound marketing strategy. As the name suggests, this inbound marketing strategy focuses on creating brand awareness and building customer relationships by sending emails.
Your business can engage both customers and prospects by sending a wide variety of emails – product announcements, product updates, event invitations, and offers/deals. However, you can engage and influence the recipient by choosing the perfect subject line, content, and sign-off. It is also important to send personalized and targeted emails by adopting several email marketing best practices.
12. Influencer Marketing
The massive popularity of social media creates opportunities for businesses to endorse and promote products/services by adopting influence marketing. Unlike conventional inbound marketing strategy, influence marketing emphasizes delivering your brand’s message through influencers or external content creators.
Hence, your business has to partner with individuals or organizations that users love and trust on various social networking platforms. But you can make the inbound marketing strategy successful only by connecting and partnering with the right influencers according to your product/service and targeted customers.
13. Customer Service
In addition to driving sales, inbound marketing tactics focus on building long-term customer relationships. A study conducted by Microsoft suggests that 90% of customers in the USA use customer service as a key parameter while choosing a brand.
Likewise, 58% of customers switch companies due to poor customer service experience. In addition to reducing acquisition costs, a positive customer service experience helps businesses boost sales by promoting customer loyalty. Your business must make customer service experience optimization an inbound marketing strategy in 2024.
14. Customer Loyalty Programs
While implementing inbound marketing strategies, you must not forget that customer acquisition is more expensive than customer retention. Customers these days love to earn rewards and loyalty points while shopping online. Also, many customers recommend brands with good customer loyalty programs.
Your business can increase customer retention and customer loyalty using customer loyalty programs as an inbound marketing strategy. The loyalty programs will encourage customers to repurchase and recommend your brand regularly by recognizing and rewarding them in a variety of ways.
15. Monitoring, Testing, and Automation
The performance of inbound marketing will vary based on a variety of factors. You can boost the performance of inbound marketing campaigns only by understanding what is working and what is not. It is always important to refine your inbound marketing strategies through regular testing and evaluation.
Likewise, you must invest in marketing automation tools to run multiple inbound marketing campaigns without putting in extra time and effort. In addition to automating recurring marketing activities, the automation will help you monitor and measure the performance of individual campaigns using a set of KPIs.
Conclusion
In addition to reducing customer acquisition costs, inbound marketing strategies help your business generate more leads and increase conversion rates. But you can make the inbound marketing campaigns successful in 2024 only by identifying the right channels, understanding customer needs, addressing customer pain points, and building long-term customer relationships.
You can get higher returns only by implementing multiple strategies. Also, you need to track and measure the performance of individual strategies using the right digital marketing KPIs. It is also a great idea to automate inbound marketing campaign management by adopting several marketing software and tools.
This article has been republished in June 2024.
While planning various marketing campaigns, enterprises target both existing and new customers. However, businesses focus on promoting their products or services to new consumers while planning acquisition marketing campaigns. They promote a product or service to a new customer base through multiple customer acquisition channels.
However, they always target new customers who are either in the consideration or the decision stage in the buyer’s journey. While planning acquisition marketing strategies, decision-makers do not focus on making new customers aware of the brand, product, or service. Instead, they target customers who are considering the product/service or showing interest in the product/service.
The emphasis on a new customer base makes the acquisition marketing strategy different from other inbound and outbound marketing approaches. Also, businesses have to make the marketing team and customer support team work together to make the acquisition marketing campaigns successful.
Acquisition Marketing Channels
Like inbound marketing strategies, acquisition marketing strategies attract, engage, and convert new consumers through multiple marketing channels and platforms. However, marketers often select acquisition marketing channels according to the business type and target audience. Also, they boost the performance of acquisition marketing campaigns by combining multiple channels and platforms.
Blogs
While conducting pre-purchase research, consumers these days gather up-to-date information from various online sources. Many marketers provide relevant content to new consumers by publishing blogs regularly. In addition to educating and engaging consumers, blogs help brands showcase their knowledge, experience, and expertise. Also, businesses can use blogs as a tool to establish authority.
Visual Media
While planning acquisition marketing campaigns, many marketers these days prefer video blogs or vlogs to blogs. They showcase and promote products/services to new consumers by publishing a variety of visual content – images, infographics, and videos. The visual content conveys the desired message to the target audience in an interesting and engaging way. Also, the target audience can gather relevant information in seconds.
Search Engine
Both B2B and B2C consumers these days rely on search engines to gather relevant information about a product or service. Hence, enterprises attract and engage new consumers by running both search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search marketing campaigns.
SEO campaigns help businesses attract and influence customers organically by targeting different types of search queries. On the other hand, businesses have to incur additional expenses to influence new customers by running pay-per-click (PPC) ads.
Social Media
Many consumers these days prefer social networking platforms to search engines while selecting and comparing products/services. The massive popularity of social media creates both free and paid opportunities for businesses to attract and engage new customers.
Social media creates opportunities for businesses to showcase a product or service organically by sharing updated information, answering questions, organizing polls, and showcasing testimonials and reviews. At the same time, businesses can run acquisition marketing campaigns using paid social media advertising options.
Emails
Email remains one of the popular acquisition marketing channels despite the massive popularity of search engines and social networks. Many businesses still convey important information about a product/service to new consumers by sending emails.
In addition to sharing quality content and up-to-date information, emails seduce new customers through discounts and promotional offers. However, enterprises must adopt a slew of email marketing best practices to leverage this customer acquisition channel fully.
Premium Content
Many businesses these days boost acquisition marketing campaigns by complementing blogs and visual content with premium content. They deliver higher value to new consumers by allowing them to download a variety of premium or gated content – ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, and training resources. In addition to establishing authority and expertise, the premium content helps marketers draw new consumers into the sales funnel.
Acquisition Marketing Tactics and Best Practices
No business can make acquisition marketing strategies drive revenue growth only by defining the target audience and combining multiple channels. The decision-makers must keep the acquisition marketing flexible and sustainable. Also, they must make the strategies more effective by adopting a slew of acquisition marketing tactics and best practices.
Define the Target Audience
The acquisition marketing campaigns draw new consumers into the marketing funnel by delivering a variety of content. The content can attract, engage, and influence new customers only by meeting their desires, addressing their issues, and reducing their pain points. That is why; marketers must define the target audience by creating buyer personas. The buyer personas will help them deliver the right content through the right customer acquisition channel at the right time.
Leverage Customer Stories While Creating Content
Like digital marketing strategies, acquisition marketing strategies can leverage user-generated content and customer stories. While creating content, writers must explore ways to present new customers with reviews, testimonials, case studies, and customer stories. The customer stories will add credibility to the content as well as get new customers influenced by existing customers. Hence, customer stories must become an integral part of content delivered to new customers.
Monitor Changes in Consumer Behavior
In the digital age, customers’ preferences and behaviors change constantly. The acquisition marketing campaigns can achieve the preset goals only by meeting their changing behaviors. Marketers must keep their strategies flexible to accommodate changes and make adjustments proactively. Also, they must measure the performance of campaigns across acquisition marketing channels.
Keep Strategies Sustainable
A business can adopt acquisition marketing to achieve long-term marketing goals. For instance, it has to publish multi-format content over a period of time to attract quality leads. Likewise, it can engage and influence more leads only by posting content on social networks regularly. Decision-makers must keep the acquisition marketing strategies sustainable to run campaigns successfully and get higher ROI.
Explore Partnership and Networking Opportunities
Many businesses these days drive acquisition marketing by collaborating with influencers and celebrities. Similarly, many businesses acquire new customers through customers and other businesses. Businesses acquire customers by requesting their customers and other influencers promote and recommend the product/service to new customers. Also, many businesses use affiliate marketing as one of the marketing tools to boost acquisition marketing strategies.
Acquisition Marketing KPIs and Metrics
Acquisition marketing strategies focus on attracting and engaging new consumers through multiple customer acquisition channels. Hence, decision-makers must monitor and measure the performance of individual campaigns to know which strategies are working and which are not.
Decision-makers often measure the performance of acquisition marketing campaigns using various customer acquisition metrics. However, many managers these days use specific acquisition marketing KPIs like prospects, visits, impressions, new sales/offers, revenue increase, visit rate, lead rate, and offer rate.
Conclusion
Many businesses these days adopt acquisition marketing to increase revenue by attracting and converting new consumers. However, decision-makers have to unify marketing and customer service activities to engage and convert new customers. Also, they must adopt a slew of best practices and use the right KPIs to boost the performance of acquisition marketing campaigns.
The term “buyer journey” refers to the process through which a prospective customer makes the decision to purchase a product or service. The buyers differ from each other in several aspects. They make similar journeys to make the purchase decision. For instance, business-to-business (B2B) buyers are different from business-to-consumer (B2C) buyers. But a B2B SaaS buyer journey is identical to a B2C buyer’s journey.
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Email marketing has been one of the most trusted arsenals for B2B marketers all around the world. Though we have seen a lot of new-age communication tools like search engine optimization, social media marketing, instant messaging, and intelligent chatbots, the popularity of email marketing has always been on the rise. Today, in this blog post, we would like to understand more about the B2B email marketing best practices that can be followed in 2024 and beyond.
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Like traditional inbound marketing, account based marketing also uses content to drive sales conversion. But account based marketing, unlike traditional inbound marketing, focuses on personalizing the buying experience of every high-ticket customer. In addition to synchronizing marketing and sales activities, the approach influences the purchase decisions of customers using highly personalized content and interactions.
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Unlike traditional marketing techniques, intent marketing helps businesses personalize marketing efforts to meet a buyer’s current intent. The term “buyer intent” refers to a customer’s or prospect’s requirements or needs during a specific period of time.
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Your business can easily collect leads from various sources by running inbound marketing campaigns. But you must nurture the leads effectively by sending the right information at the right time to drive sales conversion. As a key step in the lead nurturing process, lead scoring helps you determine the worthiness of prospective customers by assigning a numeric score to every lead. In addition to assessing the worthiness of individual leads, lead scoring helps you to identify and segregate the highly qualified or sales-ready leads.
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As an integrated marketing approach, demand generation campaigns help you create a need or demand for B2B products/services. While planning B2B demand generation campaign campaigns, you need to focus on finding and capturing corporate customers currently at the top of the B2B sales funnel.
Hence, your strategy must focus on making more corporate customers interested in a B2B solution by delivering the right content to the right people. You should initiate the process by identifying the corporate customers who need your solution and understanding their demographics and behavior.
Hence, you can make demand-generation campaigns successful only by leveraging real-time customer and marketing data. At the same time, you need to create brand awareness and increase lead generation by running multichannel campaigns. We are making it easier for you to plan B2B demand generation campaigns by discussing several tried-and-tested tactics.
7 Tactics You Should Combine While Planning B2B Demand Generation Campaigns
Targeted Content Marketing
In addition to showcasing your B2B solution, content marketing helps you create a buzz about it. You can create and distribute targeted content to introduce your product to the target audience and explain how it will benefit them.
Your strategy should focus on creating and distributing various forms of content – articles, blogs, tutorials, whitepapers, podcasts, videos, and infographics. At the same time, you need to ensure that the content prepares the target audience to pay for your B2B solution by creating the perfect first impression.
However, you need to ensure the content is delivered to the target audience across marketing and communication channels. Also, the message delivered to prospective corporate customers remains consistent across channels.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) drives your B2B lead generation campaigns by creating brand awareness and increasing brand recognition. You can run targeted SEO campaigns to divert searchers to your website organically.
The increase in website traffic will create opportunities for you to impress potential B2B customers by showcasing your knowledge, skills, and expertise. While optimizing your website for search engines, you must focus on on-page, off-page, and technical SEO.
At the same time, your SEO strategy should focus on providing educational and informative content to the visitors. The educational content will impress the B2B prospect by establishing your expertise in solving problems and erasing pain points.
Customer Case Studies
While making purchase decisions, most B2B customers compare case studies published by vendors. Some decision-makers read textual case studies, while others watch video case studies. You can create case studies to explain how your B2B solution has helped a company similar to your target audience.
Hence, potential corporate customers will consider your B2B product, service, or solution while looking for solutions to similar products. Also, you can make the case studies more impactful by involving happy customers who are already using your B2B solution.
Your strategy should deliver case studies to the target audience in a variety of ways – publishing on your own website, posting on social media, and sending emails. In addition to boosting demand generation campaigns, case study distribution will result in the generation of high-quality leads.
User-Generated Content Creation
Both B2B and B2C customers these days trust user-generated content (UGC) more than brand-generated content. The positive reviews posted by existing customers persuade B2B prospects to opt for a specific brand.
At the same time, corporate customers abandon a brand due to negative reviews posted by customers who use its products or services. You can boost B2B demand generation campaigns using customer reviews as a powerful marketing tool. You should request your existing customers to post reviews on social networks and online forums.
Also, you must appreciate and incentivize the customers who post positive reviews. You can add a testimonial page to your website by gathering online reviews. Also, you can win the trust of corporate customers by using testimonials in various forms of content.
Retargeting Ad Campaigns
While planning demand generation campaigns, you target corporate customers who are at the top of the B2B sales funnel. Such B2B prospects visit your website but they are not yet ready to place an order. Your strategy should focus on increasing brand awareness by reminding B2B prospects about your brand after they leave your website.
Remarketing or retargeting ads create opportunities for you to remind prospective customers about your B2B solution after they leave your website. The B2B prospects will see textual or visual retargeting ads when they visit other websites or access social networks.
You can run retargeted ad campaigns to keep reminding potential customers about your B2B solution across the sales funnel. The visibility and reminders will make them consider your B2B solution while making the purchase decision.
Webinar Hosting
B2B marketers rate webinars or online events as one of the top strategies to engage corporate prospects in the early stages of the sales cycle. The engagement helps them generate high-quality leads and shorten sales cycles.
While planning B2B demand generation campaigns, you can showcase your brand’s expertise by hosting webinars. The webinar will create opportunities for you to promote the B2B solution while discussing an industry-related topic or answering frequently asked questions.
However, you can add credibility to the webinar by inviting industry leaders and influencers to join the discussion. Likewise, you can join webinars or live events hosted by others to establish yourself as an industry thought leader and promote the B2B solution.
Here are some webinar promotion strategies for interested readers.
Live Chat
Decision-makers ask a variety of questions to understand important aspects of a B2B solution. You can impress and engage the B2B prospects visiting your website by answering their questions and clearing their doubts by facilitating live chat. There are many love chat solutions that communicate with website visitors in real time.
You can embed AI-powered chatbots that function just like live agents. Website visitors can interact with the chatbot to understand how your B2B solution will benefit their company. However, you must enable website visitors to talk to someone in your lead generation or sales team to convert them into leads more effectively.
Conclusion
You can run B2B demand generation campaigns to accomplish multiple marketing goals – generate high-quality leads, enhance brand awareness, and drive sales conversions. However, you can make the campaigns successful only by identifying and understanding the corporate customers who need the B2B solution provided by your company or startups.
Hence, you must leverage demographic and behavioral data to understand how your target audiences look and behave. At the same time, you should combine multiple marketing tactics to increase brand awareness, trust, and authority. However, it is also important to measure and monitor the performance of each B2B demand generation campaign using the appropriate marketing metrics.
As a strategic communication process, public relations (PR) helps a business make and protect its image by forming mutually beneficial relationships with the public. Digital tools, techniques, and channels have transformed conventional PR by facilitating a faster and wider spread of information and news.
Companies and startups have been switching from conventional PR to digital PR to increase brand awareness, enhance brand reputation, and establish online authority without partnering with PR agencies.
They leverage top digital marketing channels to build and sustain long-term relationships with the public through direct interactions. Also, they manage their online presence and image using several digital PR strategies and tools.
Your business can grow website traffic, generate leads, and increase sales using a slew of digital PR strategies. Likewise, you can announce news or share information with the public using a variety of digital PR tools.
Common Digital PR Strategies
While planning PR campaigns, you can spread the news and announce events through many digital communication channels. Hence, your digital PR strategies must adopt a multichannel approach. Also, you should focus on quality instead of quantity while using some of these tried and trusted digital PR strategies.
Press Releases
This commonly used digital PR strategy emphasizes providing information to members of the news media by issuing official statements in the form of press releases. You can circulate press releases to share information about your products, services, projects, partnerships, and events. You can create digital press releases in many formats using online templates. Also, you can circulate the press release to various members of the press using press release distribution services.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is one of the simple digital PR strategies. You can increase brand awareness and influence readers by writing blogs for reputable websites. But you cannot make the strategy successful by writing guest posts regularly. You should focus on projecting yourself as an industry leader by sharing original insights on a topic.
Content Marketing
Many organizations these days drive PR campaigns by publishing and promoting a variety of digital content. While planning content marketing campaigns, you should focus on building trusting relationships with readers. The content created for PR campaigns must establish you as a thought leader and enhance your brand’s trustworthiness. Also, you should create content that highlights the achievements of your company and the awards won by it. Here is a blog on how to plan your content strategy along with PR.
Unlinked Mentions
While discussing your brand online, people often do not provide links back to your website. But brand mentions enhance your brand’s online presence and increase brand awareness. You can make your PR campaigns more impactful by monitoring these unlinked mentions on social networks and other online platforms. The monitoring will help you understand what impacts the perception of your products or services negatively. Also, you can generate high-quality backlinks by converting these unlinked brand mentions into hyperlinks.
Business Directory Inclusions
This digital PR strategy makes you leverage business directories just like digital phone books. The directories make it easier for the public to find important information about your business and visit your website. Popular directories categorize businesses using a variety of parameters – location, size, turnover, industry, and activities. But you should focus on getting your business listed in niche and reputable directories.
Community Panels
This digital PR strategy helps you showcase your expertise by fostering community. Community panels provide relevant information and assistance to members through open conversations. You can leverage the strategy simply by answering questions asked by members briefly. But your answer will appear on the community panel only if it is considered one of the best answers by the editors.
Community Spotlight
Many video bloggers and journalists these days interview experts across industries and regions. They gather relevant information from experts with the aim to help viewers solve common problems. Also, they highlight the interviewee as an industry expert by mentioning her achievements, biography, and professional journey. You can implement the digital PR strategy by answering questions asked by the interviewer.
Customer Reviews
91% of customers these days trust online reviews and personalized recommendations. Also, major search engines like Google use review sentiment as one of the key local search ranking factors. Your digital PR strategies can increase website traffic and influence website visitors by increasing customer reviews. But you must focus on generating authentic customer reviews on Google My Business and other online platforms.
Essential Digital PR Tools
While planning PR campaigns, you have the option to choose from many digital PR tools and platforms. Some of these digital PR tools help you announce news and events, while others make it easier for you to build and maintain public relationships. Hence, your business needs different categories of digital PR tools to achieve preset campaign goals.
Press Release Distribution Services
Your PR campaigns must focus on announcing news and events by targeting bloggers, journalists, and other media professionals. You can share the right information with the right people by distributing press releases over the internet. There are many press release distribution services that make it easier for you to share press releases with the right people through multiple digital communication channels.
Social Media Monitoring Tools
Tracking social media conversations about your product, service, or brand is an essential aspect of digital PR. You can track ongoing conversations on popular social networks using a slew of social media monitoring tools. In addition to tracking brand-related conversations, these tools create opportunities for you to find the right influencers and engage with potential brand ambassadors.
Content Marketing Tools
We have highlighted the importance of adding PR to your content marketing strategy in a previous blog. Your business should make digital PR a key part of content marketing to expand content outreach, sustain customer relationships, and boost SEO campaigns. You can simplify the creation, publication, and promotion of multi-format digital content using several content marketing tools.
Website Analytics Tools
In addition to running PR campaigns, you must track and evaluate their performance using the right metrics. Website analytics tools help you measure the performance of PR campaigns by analyzing website data. You can use these digital tools to know if the PR campaigns are increasing website visitors, generating leads, or driving sales conversions.
Conclusion
Your business can spread news and information using several types of digital PR – press releases, online publications, blogging, social media, and viral marketing. Hence, you must combine digital PR strategies and tools according to the target audience and campaign goals. Also, it is important to refine PR strategies and use new PR tools regularly to boost the performance of PR campaigns.
According to the B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Insights for 2022 report,
“62% of organizations have documented content marketing strategies, 75% of organizations are expected to increase their content marketing budgets, and 30% of organizations spend more than 49% of their marketing budgets on content marketing.”
In 2023, B2B companies and startups will invest in content marketing campaigns to generate leads, drive sales, and promote customer loyalty. Also, they will nurture leads and subscribers by creating, distributing, and promoting a variety of digital content – blog posts, infographics, videos, podcasts, webinars, whitepapers, and case studies.
But your B2B company or startup can increase B2B content marketing ROI in 2023 only by understanding what is working and what is not working. Also, you need to track the existing and emerging trends that will shape content marketing in 2023. We are making it easier for you to refine your organization’s content marketing strategy by highlighting some of the major B2B content marketing trends for 2023.
Identifying 17 B2B Content Marketing Trends for 2023
1. Omnichannel Approach
In 2022, 59% of content marketers consider blogs as the most valuable channel. B2B companies generate, nurture, and convert leads by distributing and promoting digital content through owned, paid, and shared media. They will continue to distribute content through multiple content marketing channels in 2023.
The omnichannel approach will help them reach a wider target audience. But they will focus on keeping the messaging consistent across distribution channels. Also, they will make the multi-format content deliver a reliable experience by focusing on the expectations and interests of prospective and existing customers.
2. Customer-Centric Content
60% of B2B organizations use SEO as a tried-and-tested content marketing strategy. They optimize the content for major search engines like Google and Bing by applying many on-page and off-page SEO techniques. But no business can increase conversion rates only by focusing on search engine optimization.
In addition to boosting the content’s search visibility, marketers have to focus on the needs and expectations of searchers. Content creators will keep readers engaged by creating informative content. Also, they will explore ways to create content that is original and unique. Hence, SEO strategies in 2023 will focus on both search engines and searchers.
3. Brand Personalization
Leading brands influence customers and prospects by creating unique and personalized experiences. They switch from a mass marketing approach to brand personalization to influence the target audience by delivering relevant offers and messages. In 2023, B2B companies will make their brands stand out from competitors by focusing on brand personalization.
They will collect real-time information from various communication and marketing channels to identify the needs, interests, preferences, and expectations of B2B customers. Marketers will deliver personalized and targeted content to a prospect according to her current position in a buyer’s journey. Also, they will generate more leads and drive sales conversions by offering exclusive perks to each buyer across the sales funnel.
4. Content Remarketing
Remarketing is one of the hottest B2B marketing trends for 2022. B2B companies run remarketing campaigns to influence prospective customers when they access competitor websites. B2B marketers target and reengage website visitors using a variety of content.
Creators have to keep in mind the offering in which the prospect has shown interest. Also, they will personalize the content according to the prospect’s purchase history, purchase intent, and position in the buyer’s journey. B2B companies will continue to create data-driven and customer-driven to persuade website visitors to take the desired action.
5. Influencer Content Marketing
Influencer marketing will remain one of the important trends in B2B and B2C content marketing. Companies will partner with B2B influencers to create and distribute content that prospects will trust. They will further pay B2B influencers to promote their products or services by writing a blog or posting videos.
However, B2B influence content marketing strategies will help businesses achieve long-term marketing goals. Also, companies will look for B2B influencers whom the target audience reads, follow, watch, and listen to. In 2022, 86% of B2B companies find success with influencer marketing. The number of companies leveraging B2B influencer content marketing will increase in 2023.
6. Sales and Marketing Alignment
In 2022, 49% of B2B companies find it challenging to align content creation, distribution, and promotion across marketing and sales teams. The sales team does not utilize a significant percentage of content created for marketing campaigns. The misalignment makes it difficult for them to create content that influences a prospect in different stages in a buyer’s journey.
In 2023, most companies will focus on integrating content activities across marketing and sales teams. They will make marketing and sales professionals work as a single team. The unification will result in the creation of content that meets the needs of salespeople and marketing professionals. Professionals can share information and suggestions to boost the value of cross-functional content.
7. Interactive Content Experience
Unlike static content, interactive content engages target audiences by focusing on personalization and participation. Consumers these days love content that they can interact and engage with in their own way. In 2023, B2B companies will boost content marketing campaigns by producing a variety of interactive content.
The interactive content will deliver relevant information and desired messages while providing readers or viewers with options. For instance, B2B companies will allow customers to access information by reading an article or watching a video. Also, they will create infographics to make B2B professionals get the information in seconds.
8. Strategic Video Integration
In 2022, 67% of B2B marketers create and upload videos on a weekly or monthly basis. They will continue to create short and long videos in 2020 to convey information to the target audience in a captivating way. But they will explore ways to make the most out of the video assets by focusing on integrating videos into content marketing strategies strategically.
B2B companies will create videos according to predefined strategies. Also, they will mix and match different types of B2B marketing videos according to specific goals. At the same time, creators will focus on making the video clicks deliver additional information in a faster and more captivating way while standing out from the crowd.
9. Data-Driven Stories
B2B companies make customer data collection a continuous process. They analyze data collected from real-time sources to identify the needs, expectations, and pain points of customers. In 2023, many B2B companies will boost content marketing campaigns by humanizing real-time data.
Content creators will leverage the data to understand the real problems faced by a customer. They will create content that highlights the effectiveness of a product/service in solving specific problems. Hence, content creators will humanize data by creating case studies that will promote a brand by connecting with B2B customers emotionally.
10. Industry Expert Positioning
In 2023, content marketing strategies will focus on projecting brands and entrepreneurs as industry experts. B2B companies will continue to produce content and create ads that help the target audience access the latest industry information, detect emerging industry trends, and finetune their strategies.
Businesses will conduct original research to create content that wins the trust of readers and outperform competitors. Content creators will leverage the original research to create business case studies that summarize real-life business scenarios and help B2B customers solve real-time problems.
11. Shoppable Content
Shoppable content is one of the emerging content marketing trends for 2023. Most B2C companies post shoppable content on various digital platforms to enable readers to purchase the product directly. Shoppable content marketing strategies focus on creating direct shopping opportunities for readers while producing articles, blogs, images, and videos.
Unlike the B2C buying process, the B2B buying process is complex and involves multiple decision-makers. But B2B companies can publish shoppable content to enable buyers to place an order when they are in the last stages of the buying process. However, B2B businesses have to keep the shoppable content personalized and targeted to increase conversion rates.
12. Content Shortening
In 2022, long-form content is more effective than short-form content for B2B companies to increase organic website traffic from search engines. They will continue to create and publish long-form content in 2023 to get more backlinks and social shares. But bit-sized content is currently one of the hottest B2B social media trends for 2023.
B2B companies will publish short-form content to provide the information required by the target audience quickly and exactly. However, they will encourage readers to gather additional information by accessing long-form content. Many companies will repurpose and shorten existing content to leverage the emerging B2B social media trend.
13. No Controversies
B2B companies have been enhancing brand reputation by supporting many social causes. In addition to meeting the needs of target audiences, B2B content marketing strategies these days focus on covering relevant social causes. But there are many instances when brands become controversial by publishing content on controversial or sensitive topics.
In 2023, brands will avoid controversies by publishing content that fosters inclusivity and supports diversity. Content creators will create content on sensitive issues thoughtfully and empathically to create content that makes readers respect the B2B company without hurting their sentiments.
14. AI-Generated Content Humanization
Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms enable machines to create a variety of content based on specific keywords and key phrases. Many companies already invest in AI content generators to write long-form and short-form B2B marketing content without increasing time and cost. But robotic messaging and lack of creativity often affect the quality of AI-generated content. Hence, they do not leave a long-lasting impact on readers like human-created content.
In 2023, digital marketers will explore ways to humanize AI-generated content. They will deploy content writers to alter and finetune the content created by machines. The writers will use AI-generated content as the first draft of an article or blog. They will replace many lines to engage readers by expressing a brand’s personality and voice.
15. Content Audits
A significant percentage of organizations are yet to make content audits an ongoing process. But a surge is being noted in the number of organizations making content audit an integral part of content marketing strategies. In addition to assessing content quality, content audits help businesses to measure content gaps, facilitate content repurposing, and remove outdated content.
In 2023, many companies will audit the performance of published content to find opportunities to improve and alter. They will measure the performance of various forms of digital content – blogs, infographics, case studies, whitepapers, videos, podcasts, and ebooks – using relevant metrics. Also, many companies simply content performance analysis by investing in content audit tools.
16. Emerging Content Marketing Metrics
In 2023, businesses will measure and track the performance of each B2B content marketing strategy using distinct metrics. For instance, they will track the performance of SEO campaigns using metrics like search engine ranking, overall search traffic, traffic sources, and backlinks. Likewise, they will track the performance of the content on social networks based on the number of likes, shares, comments, and mentions.
But these metrics make it challenging for decision-makers to measure the performance of individual pieces of content and all content distributed. Hence, they will mix and match multiple content marketing strategies to know what is working and what is not. They will focus on combinations of metrics that help them informed decisions by providing actionable insights.
17. Content Marketing Outsourcing
The report published by the Content Management Institute suggests that 75% of large companies outsource content work. Also, the companies outsourcing content marketing are more successful than the companies doing content marketing work in-house.
Hence, companies will continue to outsource content marketing work in 2023. But they will look for partners who have adequate topical expertise and understanding of the target audience. Also, businesses will expect partners to provide strategic advice.
Conclusion
In 2023, your B2B company or startup can attract, generate, nurture, and convert leads by running omnichannel content marketing campaigns. But you must understand what is working and what is not working to make content marketing strategies achieve preset goals. At the same time, you must keep the strategies relevant and competitive by considering both existing and emerging B2B content marketing trends for 2023.
