5 Inbound Marketing Activities for B2B Companies

When it comes to inbound business-to-business marketing, everything revolves around establishing credibility and building trust. It enables marketers to create strong relationships with people who have already shown an interest in their products or services when it is done well, and it allows them to do so more permanently.

Increasing brand awareness, as well as generating leads and sales, can be accomplished in a measurable and highly cost-effective manner through the utilisation of B2B inbound marketing strategies.

However, because developing and implementing an effective B2B inbound marketing strategy takes time, marketers need to be certain that the activities they engage in will result in a return on investment (ROI), increase brand visibility, and drive conversions.

From determining which actions are appropriate for your company to providing top tips for nurturing leads throughout the buyer journey, this article will walk you through everything you need to know about inbound marketing activities for B2B companies. As a HubSpot Certified Solutions partner, we know our thing when it comes to marketing.

Develop buyer personas for your business.

Buyer personas are fictionalised representations of the type of customers you want to attract. They assist brands in concentrating on the qualities, difficulties, objectives, and aspirations of the people they wish to attract to their products and services.

You will need to develop a buyer persona for each of the markets that you are targeting, and you will need to regularly review these personas to ensure that they accurately reflect the shifting requirements and profiles of your customers.

Blogging

The most successful business-to-business (B2B) companies and startup businesses all have robust blogging strategies in place. 

B2B marketers who use blogs receive 67 percent more leads than their counterparts who do not use blogs, according to Hubspot's blog. 

Maintaining consistency is essential, as well as producing high-quality, helpful and original content, optimised for SEO. 

A blog is an excellent way to keep your customers informed and can assist your sales team in increasing their win rates, in addition to the lead generation benefits it offers.

If you consistently produce high-quality content, there is a greater chance that your brand will become a reliable source that your potential customers will recall when they have a problem that can be solved by your product or service.

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

Creating content of a high quality is essential, but if you don't also have a solid search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy, you might as well be doing nothing more than twiddling your thumbs  It is imperative that you check to see that both your website and its content can be located using search engines. 

If the content of your website isn't properly optimised, even the most entertaining, educational, insightful, and ground-breaking product will be ignored by potential customers. 

Effective search engine optimisation (SEO) starts with thorough keyword research that zeroes in on the terms and expressions that members of your ideal audience are most likely to be looking for. It may make sense to conduct research on keywords that people may search for when they are in the buying cycle.

This can help you better serve your customers. Because of this, it is essential that you conduct thorough research before making any decisions regarding the content strategy you will implement. Stay true to the data. 

In addition to this, you need to make sure that your content adheres to the best practices for SEO. This includes ensuring that your site's meta, title tags, alt text, and page descriptions are all in order on each page as well as the site as a whole. Examine the website for problems with redirects and duplicate content.

You should optimise your website for mobile devices as well as the speed at which pages load.

Social Media

It is important to promote your content on various social media channels. Utilising social media platforms to share your content can not only bring in new leads but also improve your SEO by constructing backlinks to your website.

LinkedIn and YouTube are two of the most successful social media channels for business-to-business (B2B) technical companies. We recommend that you promote your technical content on LinkedIn up to three times per week, and that you upload new videos to YouTube as soon as they are created.

While the number of visitors coming from social media may be low at first, the quality of these visits is high, resulting in an average of five minutes spent on the website by each visitor. 

Paid ads

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a method that enables businesses to bring their content and brand in front of new audiences through the use of search engines and other advertising platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. This method enables B2B inbound marketers to complete their efforts in demand generation and branding with the assistance of PPC advertising.

You can approach getting paid in a few different ways. You could target customers who are looking for a specific solution, such as your own solution or a solution offered by a competitor. Prospects who are already quite far along in the sales process are the focus of this strategy. As a result, there is a better chance that they will make a purchase.

Another strategy is to produce a piece of high-quality gated content, design a landing page, and then use advertisements to drive traffic to the landing page. When people opt in to view your content, you have the opportunity to nurture them using your email marketing strategy until they are ready to make a purchase or talk to you further.

In addition to email marketing, creating helpful content that is then promoted via advertisements can be an effective strategy for generating leads for your sales team to follow up with, particularly if you have a complicated B2B buying process that involves decision-makers at the executive level.

If your product has a more transactional sales cycle, you may be able to lean more toward advertisements that promote your specific solution.

This is because transactional sales cycles tend to be more straightforward. When you have the funds and the content ready, the next step is to consider investing in multiple paid channels that promote a wide range of content available on your website.

Final thoughts

When there are already a thousand day-to-day tasks on the list of things that need to be done, it can feel like too much to take on. However, if executed correctly, a well-researched and well-thought-out inbound marketing strategy has the potential to deliver astonishing outcomes for B2B brands.

After you have put your plans into action, you should make it a habit to check in with your analytics on a regular basis to ensure that you are proceeding in the appropriate direction.

Checking your engagement metrics for just a quarter of an hour each day every now and then can help you identify simple improvements that can boost your engagement, simplify the customer journey, and improve the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy.

B2B inbound marketing generates qualified leads and a return on investment that can be measured. Therefore, allocating time and resources to your B2B inbound marketing strategy is a sound investment if you want to attract new customers and drive valuable prospects through your sales funnel.

For more tips on B2B inbound marketing, download our FREE CHECKLIST on How to Run an Inbound Marketing Campaign