Business to Business (B2B) inbound marketing strategies work well for all organizations. They attract and retain users and other business prospects to engage with your business by providing them with the right resources. The benefits of inbound marketing strategies are that they eliminate your need to hunt down your target audience continually. They come to you for advice, help, and solutions in the form of a product or service.
B2B inbound marketing strategies do not require cold emails, ads, or anything else that B2B clients ignore. It is a polite way to promote your services online. Marketers use inbound marketing to bring customers to their business instead of aggressively seeking customers.
1. Blogging
All B2B companies and startups have a robust content marketing strategy where businesses have a website of their own with a blog. According to Hubspot, B2B marketers who use blogs receive 67% more leads than those who don’t.
Start blogging to create consistent and quality content with SEO elements. Your blogs must educate your audience. Blogs help lead generation, keep your customers informed, and help the customer through their sales journey. When you produce more blogs, your business is considered trustworthy, and your brand gets noticed by everyone.
When you want consistent leads, put the blogging strategy first, as it ensures long-term results. Blogging doesn’t produce results overnight. You will get results using the B2B marketing strategies depending on your blogs’ consistency, volume, and quality.
When you produce consistent results, google rewards you with visibility. Your audience rewards you with trust, and prospects reward you with becoming customers. Blogs have different types of content. There are the core buckets of your content strategy.
Solutions
Generally, your landing page serves as a solution for users. Your landing page must include information about your services and products. Your landing page must contain features about the products you offer or use cases for a SaaS content marketing strategy. If you are a business consultant, your page must list your services.
Company Information
Most B2B buyers wish to see the hierarchy of the leadership and history of your company. The about us pages and employee pages help them to make decisions. The information you put on your website has value and helps you claim a unique market position.
Resource
Resource pages on a website list helpful links and resources for a particular topic. When a prospect lands on your website looking for an answer, they normally hit the resource page to help them solve a problem or answer a question they have. These include blog posts, whitepapers, guides, infographics, FAQs, slides, forms, brochures, warranty information, and spreadsheet templates.
Case Study
This content is proof that you are who you claim to be. It builds confidence in B2B prospects that you have already done great work in the past and are more likely to repeat that. Exhibit all your case studies with different prospects and different projects.
2. Email Marketing
According to Hubspot, over 93% of B2B inbound marketers use email marketing as one of their go-to strategies. You can nurture prospects with educational and informational content with an email list. Email marketing gives you added value when you include your blog content. You can send your newsletter where you can share your latest blog posts with your email list.
B2B inbound marketing is about building trust with your audience and converting them. Trust building is a time-consuming process. When you rely on email marketing, don’t just flood your buyer’s inbox. Include a compelling subject line. Speak like a buyer and write about your expertise in your niche. Don’t make it another marketing mail and promote your brand.
3. Gated Content
One proven way to generate leads is to build long-form content that you can “gate” behind a form on your website. When prospects find valuable content on your site, they don’t hesitate to give their email address in exchange for full access to the article. You can have sales representatives follow up or nurture new leads through email marketing.
Gated content is content assets that include how-to guides, whitepapers, checklists, research papers, or ebooks. You should have content that is more detailed than your blog articles. When you have long-form content, you can promote it near the end of the blog post as a call to action (CTA).
Your prospects have contacted you already and are in the buying stage. Concentrate on the marketing funnel that lets you establish a relationship with prospects before buying. When they want to, have a proper CTA, design your webpage to include a CTA, and don’t make the prospects enter through the “contact us” or “demo request” page.
Email marketing helps people remember you. Even if they are not in the buying stage, your high-quality content might interest them, and they will leave their email address. You can nurture these prospects via high-value email marketing, and you will be remembered when they decide to buy your product.
Another way of capturing leads is through paid ads. Have a great piece of gated content to capture leads at all stages of your buyer’s sales journey so you stay well within your ad budget.
4. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing brings more prospects to your business. Blogs are valuable and educational, but social media is shareable. You must pitch the right social media platform depending on your brand and target audience. Make your social media presence where your audience can engage with your brand without feeling pressured to buy from you.
Post articles that have value on social media to give your audience some statistics about your industry. Give people a reason to follow and engage with you on social media. You can share your experiences and discuss the challenges that you face in your industry. LinkedIn is a perfect platform for professional networking. You can share relevant and professional content with your prospects to build trust and relationships.
5. Podcast, Videos, and Infographics
Apart from blogging, there are other B2B inbound marketing strategies that you must consider. Research says 82% of internet traffic in 2022 will be from videos. Now is the right time to make video a part of your B2B inbound marketing strategies.
Post podcasts on your social media page. People like to listen to small-sized podcasts while they commute or do other jobs. Release videos of you sharing your thoughts on your industry. Make sure to keep it short. Include high-value educational videos, testimonials, product demo videos, and case studies.
These strategies aim to educate the audience about your products and services. These types of videos can also be repurposed in other media. When you post a video or podcast on social media platforms, search engines index your content easily, giving you an extra boost from your content efforts.
There’s another way, too. You can convert some of your content into creative and informative infographics. When you have some statistics or visually compelling content, make it into an infographic because they are shareable pieces of content that can spread awareness of your brand. If you have some incredible information, there’s a good chance it will be shared among other people and competitors.
Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing
| Inbound Marketing | Outbound Marketing |
| Attracts prospects towards your website | Reaching out to the target audience and seeking them out |
| Gently pushing a targeted group to CTAs | Dynamically driving a large audience so that at least a percentage will go for CTAs |
| Spotlights a targeted group | Spotlights a wide set of audience withholding the targeted prospects |
Inbound Marketing
- Inbound marketing attracts users, prospects, and customers to your website or business.
- It is a subtle approach where you convince a particular group of individuals to purchase over time.
- It is informative content targeted at a specific audience.
- The marketing approach is designed to target a specific group.
- It encompasses all strategies across multiple content marketing channels.
- Uses digital marketing software to measure the effectiveness of the marketing effort.
Outbound Marketing
- Outbound marketing is going to where your target audience is and actively seeking them out.
- It is an aggressive, wider approach with the expectation that at least some people will convert. Use different content types, such as social media posts, blogs, and reports.
FAQs
What is B2B inbound marketing?
B2B inbound marketing strategies attract other businesses, users, and prospects using your products and services. They engage with your business when you provide them a solution through your content such as blogs, videos, and reviews.
What is an inbound marketing strategy?
Inbound marketing strategy is creating content that provides solutions to your target audiences while aligning with your business goals and also inspires your target audiences to establish long-term relationships.
It helps you plan how you will pull prospects towards your website and make them take action, thereby entering the sales funnel on their own.
What is an outbound strategy?
Outbound marketing strategy is utilizing different marketing strategies to target your target audience. It includes traditional marketing, digital marketing, and search engine marketing. It uses cold marketing, campaigns, and cold email marketing.
What are the stages in inbound marketing?
The inbound strategy divides the buyer’s journey into four stages to create a seamless sales journey for your prospects. They attract, convert, close, and delight. Create content that attracts your target audience and converts them into customers by effectively addressing their pain points.
What are inbound leads?
An inbound lead is a B2B prospect who takes action after reading a piece of content that is part of an inbound lead generation strategy. Generally, a call to action can be filing a form, downloading an eBook, or contacting the sales team.
Closing Thoughts
The options are overwhelming when you look for the best B2B inbound marketing strategies. Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence tools and machine learning algorithms have made it easy to choose and implement the content strategy that suits best for your business. There are plenty of content marketing tools and strategies available, and If you are unsure of figuring out which ones are the most appropriate, contact us, and we will help you with the content strategy process.
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