When it comes to online B2B marketing, too many people fancy themselves an internet guru. They all claim to have the magic formula for optimizing leads, lead scoring and sales. And some of their techniques can get pretty complicated.
Online B2B marketing efforts don’t have to be convoluted and complicated. When it comes down to it, some of the ideas behind website marketing are actually really simple. So simple, they can be explained in a series of “math” problems that we have depicted below. Do you know the answers? Make sure you check your work to see if your answers match the ones below.
You have a website and it is search engine optimized. This is a good place to start because you have a base. However, it doesn’t help much because a website with SEO is static: It doesn’t do anything, so people and search engines will likely have a hard time finding it.
- Website + SEO + Content Marketing = Better
The trifecta. As the equation demonstrates, having a search engine optimized website while utilizing content is a better strategy when it comes to lead generation. Content marketing can occur through blogs, online articles, forums, e-mail marketing campaigns and more. This strategy is more active because adding new information to your website tells search engines to crawl it more often, update records as to what can be found there and increase its placement in the search rankings. The higher up it ranks, the easier it is for customers to find you.
- Website + SEO + Content Marketing + Analytic Analysis = Even Better
When you have the three items listed in the previous equation, you’re really cooking, but there is room for improvement yet. Analytic analysis added to the calculation can not only improve lead generation, it helps with lead scoring. Website analytics track where users entered the site, what pages they visited, what products or services they spent the most time looking at and when they left the site, with or without making a purchase. Knowing all of this information can help funnel that prospect into a sales lead with real potential.
- Website + SEO + Content Marketing + Analytic Analysis + Social Media = Best
The best we saved for last. The first three equations laid a great foundation. Social media is like the icing on the cake that can help all of your web-related b2b marketing efforts. Messages sent via social media platforms can be used to direct people to your website, are indexed by search engines based on their key words, contribute to your library of content marketing, and can be tracked through analytic analysis to discover what posts were the most successful. Each social media account opens up a whole new world of prospective leads that could be funneled to your website and through your sales process.
Again, B2B marketing online doesn’t have to be complicated. But as displayed here, there is more to a successful campaign than simply developing a webpage with excellent SEO properties. The equations above are obviously quite simplified, but could apply to any business seeking to increase awareness of their brand online. The percentages of how much time you apply to each element of the equations are up to you, though. Some brands find using social media more gives them a better uptick in business, while others find regularly uploading new content is their ticket to success. Its up to you to find the individual calculations that works best for your brand.
What is your formula for B2B online marketing success? Share in a comment below!
