We could write a library worth of books on strategies for digital marketing B2B and Industrial Businesses, but today we’ll cover the basics on why you would use digital marketing, how you can plan a digital marketing strategy and some suggestions and links on where to start.

Let’s get into it

The Benefits of Digital Marketing for B2B Businesses.

Digital marketing offers a number of benefits for manufacturers. Here are a few of the most important ones:

1. Reach a global audience: With digital marketing, you can reach potential customers all over the world. This allows you to expand your customer base and increase sales.
2. Increased visibility: Digital marketing campaigns can help you increase your visibility online. This can help you build brand awareness, attract new customers, and boost sales.
3. Scales your existing sales team’s capacity:  Digital marketing compliments your existing sales efforts and allows you to reach more potential customers and partners and qualify them before speaking to your team like no other channel can.
4. Cost-effective: Digital marketing is a cost-effective way to reach potential customers. You can reach a wide audience without breaking the bank.
5. Measurable results: With digital marketing, you can measure the success of your campaigns. This allows you to track the performance of your campaigns and make adjustments as needed.

Developing a Digital Marketing Plan

Before you dive into the world of digital marketing, it’s important to develop a plan. This plan should include your goals, target audience, budget, and timeline.

We typically use the SMART goals systems here at Hydra Digital.  Here are some examples of how a B2B business could develop a digital marketing plan using SMART goals:

Objective: Increase website traffic by 25% in the next six months

• Specific: Increase website traffic by 25%
• Measurable: Use Google Analytics to track website traffic on a monthly basis
• Achievable: Develop a content marketing strategy that includes blog posts, e-books, and case studies that target our buyer personas
• Relevant: Increasing website traffic will lead to increased brand awareness and lead generation
• Time-bound: Achieve the 25% increase in website traffic within the next six months

Objective: Generate 100 new leads through LinkedIn advertising in the next three months

• Specific: Generate 100 new leads through LinkedIn advertising
• Measurable: Use LinkedIn Ads Manager to track leads generated through the advertising campaign
• Achievable: Develop a targeted advertising campaign that reaches our ideal customer profiles and includes a clear call to action
• Relevant: Generating new leads will increase our sales pipeline and revenue
• Time-bound: Achieve the 100 new leads within the next three months

Objective: Increase email open rates by 20% in the next quarter

• Specific: Increase email open rates by 20%
• Measurable: Use email marketing software to track open rates on a weekly basis
• Achievable: Develop a segmented email list and create personalised, engaging email content
• Relevant: Increasing email open rates will improve our customer engagement and lead to increased sales
• Time-bound: Achieve the 20% increase in email open rates within the next quarter

Your target audience should be well-defined so you know who you’re targeting with your campaigns. Your budget should include both your advertising budget and the resources you need to execute your campaigns. Finally, your timeline should include when you plan to launch each campaign.

Select Your Digital Marketing Channels

Selecting the right platforms to invest in online is one of the most important parts of planning a digital marketing strategy.  Getting it wrong can lead to lost time, money and effort.

If you’re struggling with what channels to use for digital marketing your B2B business, a digital marketing professional will be the best person to ask, but it should strop you from starting your plan.  

Follow this process to start with:

1. Set your goals
2. Set your budget (with your goals in mind)
3. Find where your audience is online e.g.
   1. Google for people searching for your product or service
   2. Facebook for people in groups relevant to your business
   3. Linkedin for people active in your business community
   4. News and industry websites
4. Select the places your audience is online and prioritise them in terms of their intent when using that platform.  

   1. PRO TIP: The intent of the person when using a platform will directly influence how they will enage with your brand and offer.  E.g. people searching for your product or service on Google have very high intent & people browsing Tiktok for cute cats show low intent.

5. Once your channels are selected, prioritise your budgets and efforts on the highest intent channels first without forgetting that brand building activities are very important.

   1. PRO TIP: Think about how you can balance these priorities and reach more people with your brand, while driving results like new partnerships and sales.

Targeting the Right Audience

Once you’ve developed your plan, it’s time to start targeting the right audience. This means identifying the characteristics of your ideal customer.

• Who are they? 
• What are their interests? 
• Where are they located?

Once you’ve identified your ideal customer, you can start targeting them with your campaigns. This can be done through a variety of digital marketing strategies, such as social media advertising, content marketing, and search engine optimisation.

Crafting Engaging Content for Manufacturers

Content is an essential component of any digital marketing campaign. You must create content that resonates with your target audience and encourages them to take action.

For manufacturers, it’s important to create content that educates and informs. 

You should focus on topics such as: 

• industry trends, 
• new products, 
• and case studies. 

You can also create content that highlights your expertise and experience.

Content is a key pillar of our B2B client’s strategies and if planned correctly it can be leveraged across your whole communication strategy allowing you to get more out of your investment, also allowing you to test and adapt quicker to what is working.

Optimise Your Website for B2B

Your website is the cornerstone of your digital marketing efforts. It’s important to ensure that your website is optimised for search engines, mobile devices, and your target audience.

To optimise your website, you should focus on SEO (Search Engine Optimization). 

This includes optimising your content for relevant keywords, improving your site’s speed, and creating a user-friendly design. You should also focus on content marketing, creating content that is relevant to your target audience and optimised for search engines.

SEO Optimisation ideally starts at the beginning of your website creation process.  Here’s a basic workflow to set solid SEO foundations:

Setting SEO Foundations for your B2B website

1. Research the words people use to find your products and services online
2. Reserach your top online competitors, those ranking for your keywords and direct competitors offering the same or substitute products and services
3. Plan the structure of your website based on your keyword findings in step 1
4. Plan the URLs, structure, metadata & objectives of each page on your website
5. Once you have your objectives, gather your source materials and write SEO optimised content.
6. Build your website
7. Track your rankings.  Start with Google Search Console
8. Track your competitors using an advanced SEO tool with the help of a Digital Marketing Professional.
9. Maintain your website to high SEO standards.  Don’t let all that effort go to waste, websites need maintaining and updating regularly to perform at their best.

Email Marketing

Once you’ve optimised your website, it’s time to move on to other digital marketing strategies. One of the most effective strategies is email marketing. Email marketing allows you to target specific customers with personalised messages. 

You can also use email to promote new products and services, offer discounts, and increase engagement.

To start with, regularly communicate with your existing customers and prospects with relevant and timely information.  You can then reformat and repurpose this information to approach new customers.

Building relevant email lists and copy writing for cold email is highly specifilised, but nothing is stopping you from improving your customer retention and lifetime value now through better email engagement.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is an effective way to reach a wide audience, build relationships, and engage with potential customers. To maximise your success, you should create content that is relevant to your target audience and engage with users in a meaningful way.

More B2B representatives are online than ever at the moment.  It’s a great time to polish your Linkedin profile and start connecting with relevant people and networks.

Automation and Tracking of Campaigns

To maximise the success of your digital marketing campaigns, it’s important to automate and track them. This includes setting up automated emails, tracking website visits, and tracking social media engagement.

Automation is a great way to save time and ensure that your campaigns are running smoothly. Tracking is important to measure the success of your campaigns and make adjustments as needed.

Measuring the Success of Your Digital Marketing Campaigns

The final step in your digital marketing plan is to measure the success of your campaigns. This includes tracking website visits, conversions, and sales. You should also track engagement on social media and the performance of your emails.

Every platform reports some metrics to you, but you to get better insights you may want to use more advanced tracking and dashboard products.  We recommend a professionally installed version of GA4 for your website and Google’s Looker Studio for better data visualisation and reporting.  

You can combine all of your website, socials and advertising into one place here.

By tracking the success of your campaigns, you can identify areas where you can improve and make adjustments. This will help you maximise the success of your campaigns and reach your goals.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is fast becoming an essential tool for manufacturers wanting to grow and compete for new business. 

It allows you to reach a global audience, increase sales, and boost brand awareness. To maximise your success, you need to develop a plan, target the right audience, create engaging content, optimise your website, and track the success of your campaigns.

By following these strategies, you can maximise the success of your digital marketing campaigns and reach your goals.

If you’re looking for help with your digital marketing efforts, our team of B2B Digital Marketing experts, can help you develop a comprehensive digital marketing plan and maximise your success. Contact us today to get started.