The internet and digital have become so much integrated in our daily lives that living without it is unimaginable. General population in Dubai and anywhere else in UAE is very much connected to the internet and digital media channels. In fact the government itself is focusing on digitalization and going paperless which is a strong evidence of the futuristic approach of the government in moving forward. The entire UAE is considered to be much ahead from other MENA regions in terms of technology and digital integration. Almost 99% of the population have easy access to the internet and digital media channels. Local and regional businesses have realized it very early, and since more than a decade now, businesses are heavily investing in digital media channels and communication methods. This has also impacted the way businesses were used to communicate with their B2B audiences. The B2B business model means that a business who sells to other businesses rather individual consumers. That is why B2B communication and marketing is very different than B2C where businesses sell to individual consumers.
The B2B audience is much more experienced and they are professional in their respective fields, so their expectations would be much higher and they would always need more. Which means the messaging you should use with your B2B marketing strategy should be extremely clear and subjective. The communication message should be able to clearly tell your audience why they should chose you over others. There are several ways to persuade your audience and have them convinced that you are the best solution to their problems or needs with your communication and marketing strategy. The B2B purchase cycle is always longer than the B2C it is crucial to plan the entire journey from creating awareness, building interests, igniting desire, gaining trust and all the way to decision making. In this blog we will cover most of the digital marketing aspects of a B2B marketing campaign. The B2B audience is usually smaller and much more concentrated, that is why it is also important that you are targeting the right customer persona. Here is how to do that:
Digital Marketing Channels & Tools Help Building High ROI Yielding Marketing Strategies
The B2B marketing also starts with learning and understanding your targeted audience and customer persona. This information can be gathered from all traditional and digital sources. Such as a business can take suggestions and inputs from its sales staff or customer support teams, they can also look into the analytical data of their website and social media channels. Moreover the demographic and geographic targeting tools coupled with almost all digital marketing channels can help businesses in precisely targeting the audience at any stage of customer journey. For example a business could start comparing its sales with the web pages that got most clicks/traffic, social media pages and posts who are more popular than others.The demographic data and geographic data is also available in thoseanalytical tools that comes with Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. and other digital channels and it is absolutely free.
Businesses can use the analytical data to understand their customer persona and then they can prioritize the channels that can produce better results. The keyword research is also important, it can be done using free Google tools. Businesses can create content as per the relevant and popular keywords and can attract more traffic to their website, landing pages and blogs, which is also a good way to reach out to the B2B audiences. Collectively all this research will lay the foundation of your digital marketing strategy and it could also provide you the rough projections of what to expect from each channel. A digital marketing strategy is not a rigid rule book, it is always subjected to changes, modifications and tweaks. When a business starts executing a digital marketing strategy it should keep monitoring it closely to analyze the results and stats and accordingly the changes can be made to further magnify the outcome of the campaign. The success of a digital marketing strategy for B2B audience is always based on the targeted audience and selection of right marketing channels.
Convert Your Corporate Website into a Powerful Marketing Channel
A corporate or business website can easily be transformed into a powerful marketing tool. Most B2B based businesses in Dubai and all around UAE doesn’t utilize their corporate website effectively. In fact most marketers and business owners think that their business website is just an online brochure, however, that is not the case. Your corporate website is a power house of online leads and conversions. In order to make your website effective you must have to understand that a corporate website requires continuous nurturing, monitoring and efforts. The website is more like a knowledge-base which should be updated on regular bases, new content should be added, information should be up-to-date and it should be able to aid the customer journey. The corporate website should act as an online reception, where your customers should be able to easily access to the information they need. Moreover for generating online leads and sales a website must have relevant information and capability to offer a solution to the problems that your customers might be looking for.
There should be a reason why your visitors should come to your website and why they should stay. And that is very important. You should offer something to your visitors to make them stay on your website. If the visitors feels that the website has no benefit to offer they will immediately leave. If the information is too complex, or the design is not good, or any other reason which induce negative feelings, they will leave. That is why it is extremely important that your business website offer them something. In B2B case the audience is interested in stats, logical conclusions and precise details. Hence the website should be able to provide them that.
Here are some basic features that a B2B corporate website must have:
- Provide precise, relevant and up-to-date information
- Content should be designed specifically for the targeted audience
- Effectively implement call to action (CTA) button to increase leads and conversions
- Provide information about your business structure, processes and standards
- A clear company profile with mission and vision statement
- Team members details, their accomplishments, expertise and professional qualifications
- Business Partners’ Names/Logos and Customer’s Name/Logos
- Trust Markers such as Client Testimonials, Case Studies, Ratings, Business Accomplishments, etc.
- A professional blog or PR section to provide additional relevant content and industry news
- Integrate social media pages and profiles
- Responsive and Mobile Friendly Web Design to welcome visitors from mobile devices
- Robust loading and flawless user experience
- Intuitive User Interface, Simple Navigation and Shorter Customer Journey
- Contact Details, Branches Lists and Direct Contacts for Relevant Departments/Personals
Generating online leads from a corporate website is not an easy task. It is not only about bringing the most traffic to your website, obviously more website traffic will result in more online leads, but the actual conversion rate depends on the quality of the website and the user experience. That is why a corporate website has to be continuously updated, more pages and information should be added. The customer journey play a key role in the online lead generation. However, the first impression to the visitor, the web design, content, pictures/videos, navigation, the entire UI, color schemes and the trust markers and information that you provide all contributes to online leads, and help taking your customers to the next step of the customer journey.
Leverage Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to Boost Website Traffic
Your business website is the foundation of all your digital marketing campaigns. It dictates the entire online branding all other channels follow the website. Having a wonderful website that have all the features to maximize your online conversions is not enough. The website must have traffic in order to convert the visitors into online leads or sales. For that various methods and techniques are used, some are organic (free) and some are paid such as social media adverts, referral channels, search ads, etc. However, several studies and statistical data have shown us that the SEO is the most effective long term digital marketing campaign. For some businesses the SEO can be accounted for almost 70% of the entire website traffic regardless of the industry or business category. The SEO is equally effective for both B2C and B2B business models.
The SEO is divided into two major sections one is called on-page SEO and the other is off-page SEO. The on-page SEO is to make your website search engine friendly, for that we usually follow Google, as it is the most popular search engine in the world and in UAE it is the largest search engine having 97% market share. The Google has its own guidelines and criteria which we should follow to design and develop our websites. If a business website is as per the guidelines by Google, it would be easier to find by the search engine and the search engine algorithms would be able to identify its subject easily. It will help businesses to rank higher in the search engine results. The statistical data shows that the top websites in the search engine result page can grab almost 70% of the traffic and the users are very less likely to go to the second or third page. So, it is important to stay in the first page. Rest of all search engines such as MSN/Bing, Yahoo, AOL, etc. follow almost the same guidelines as Google.
The off-page SEO involves building links, expanding social media platforms and getting endorsements from other websites. The B2B marketing is very different from the B2C marketing and the typical customer journey is also longer. The content marketing can play a crucial role in grabbing user’s attention at any point of the journey. An active and professional blog could be a great boost to your SEO. It is important that you publish blogs and post content that appeal your audience and could also help them finding a solution to their problems. Your experience, skills and knowledge could add value to a lot of existing customers as well as it can help you grab attentions from a lot many new visitors. The guest blogging is a very cost-efficient tactics to increase your blog’s and website’s visibility. Publishing blogs on popular forums, websites, and relevant online channels could help you boosting your website traffic which eventually help you to increase your ranks in the search engine. The Google and other search engines always regard quality content, if the content get endorsements, traffic and shares, the Google will mark it as a high quality content and will raise your ranks in the search.
Embrace Social Media to Establish Online Brand Image
Most of the times businesses avoid using social media for their B2B digital marketing strategies. The social media is labor-intensive, it needs creativity with a slight touch of entertainment, however, the B2B communication is mainly professional, based on facts, stats, data, information and such content. That is the reason the social media is not so popular among the B2B businesses in Dubai or anywhere else in UAE. The same perception was dominating the global landscape as well, but since past few years, we have noticed some big brands making a huge impact by embracing social media. The social media is a very vibrant and fast-paced ecosystem. New platforms are rising and some are even defeating the already established social media platforms, such as Tiktok and WhatsApp have made a huge splash and are still growing rapidly all around the world.
Even though the social media platforms are still not so popular among B2B marketers, when a marketer is setting up a strategy for B2B marketing campaign, the very first social media platform they consider is LinkedIn. The biggest mistake that most of the marketers and business owners make is to make assumption rather than doing research. People might assume the TikTok could be the most popular platform for videos, however, it doesn’t even reached to the fraction of traffic and time people spend on YouTube. That is why it is important to choose social media platforms very wisely and do proper research and only choose those platform which are aligned with your customer persona. For social media platforms the customer engagement is an essential part, whether it is LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or any other social media channel the most important thing is that you should be able to engage your audience by offering them the content that interests them.
Here are some common content types that can perform well for the B2B marketing over social media platforms to boost your audience’s engagement:
- Tips, Tutorials, and How to Guides
- News, Press Releases and What’s Happening in the Industry
- Common Problems and their Solutions
- Product/Services Updates, Promotional Content, etc.
- Case Studies, Whitepapers, Blogs and Landing Pages
- Client Testimonials, Achievements, and Company Mission/Vision
It is important to be open and welcoming on your social media platforms. The customer engagements and communication can lift up your brand’s image and it will add value to your reputation and credibility. Actively posting content on social media channels and optimizing it for better search is a key to success on social media platforms. For example, these days’ hashtags are a common sighting on almost every popular social media. Using proper hashtags can boost your social media visibility and can bring tremendous amount of traffic to your social media posts. This traffic can be funneled down to your blogs, website, landing pages, product/service pages and other important content to drive online leads and conversions.
Execute Paid Digital Marketing Campaigns to Instantly Boost Leads
The biggest drawback of organic (free) digital marketing tactics is that they are all long term strategies, for example if you want to meet a sales target by then end of current quarter, you won’t be able to achieve it with optimizing your website for search engines (SEO), or publishing twice the number of posts on your social media and anything of that sort. For such needs, the paid digital marketing campaigns are your best bet. Not only for a short term gain, in fact businesses tend to run ads all the time, and they also keep their organic tactics in parallel. That is the best approach, it always help to gain quicker leads from the paid sources and channels. According to Google89% of the customer use the internet during their B2B research, and 71% of these researchers use generic search terms. It means they are not looking for a specific business in fact they search for a problem, solution or product/service. That is why most of the marketers prefer to utilize paid digital marketing channels as well along with their SEO, content marketing, social media and other online efforts.
When it comes to the paid digital marketing channels the Google both search and display ads have the highest conversion rate. It is due to the fact that most of the customers and prospects no matter what kind of product or service they need, they include Google search in their research process. A B2B marketer can easily leverage Google Search Ads and Display Ads, the search ads are simple, they appear in the search result pages at the very top with a small marker identifying them as “Ads”. However, the display ads are the ads that Google strategically places on YoutTube, Gmail, Websites, News & Blogs, etc. The Google Display Ads also allow you to create text, image, animation, videos and interactive ads. These ads are displayed only on the channels which are highly relevant to your topic or subject hence they can yield higher conversion rates.
Optimizing the Google Ads, both search and display ads is extremely important to achieve better ROI, that is why the Google provide a very comprehensive control dashboard which also allow you to target specific audience on the bases of keywords, demographics and location and it also allow you to exclude the audiences that are not relevant to you. This could significantly increase your ROI for the paid digital marketing campaign. The LinkedIn is ranked as the number one platform for B2B lead generations by the marketers and it is the world’s largest professional network or social media channel. Having a great paid marketing strategy for LinkedIn could provide you great results both short term and long term. There are three main types of LinkedIn Ads are Sponsored Content, Text Ads and Sponsored Messages. The LinkedIn users majorly use it only for business related activities and networking so getting access to their personal messages or pushing your content to their news feed could be really boost your B2B marketing. The text ads are also very useful and can help generating quality leads.
Over the years, Facebook have evolved a lot and its advertising platform have done remarkable improvements. The Facebook have a massive user base with 2.4 Billion monthly active users. This means that you can gain access to a huge amount of audience. Huge user base also means bigger competition. However, the Facebook advertisement tool allow you to exactly pinpoint the audience you want to target. However, the biggest challenge is that the audience on Facebook, might not always looking for a solution or business enquiry, so they are difficult to get engaged with. That is why Facebook also provide an Audience Network, this feature allow B2B marketers and business owners to push their content to the other networks and applications that are connected with Facebook and can increase the conversion rate a lot. There are several ad types on Facebook, businesses can hunt for leads as well as they can utilize the massive user base to spread awareness about their brand and their products/services. The intelligent algorithms at Facebook also help pushing your ads to the right audience at the right time and at the right place, which help you bring more traffic to your website and landing pages and it is also very helpful in generating good quality leads.
Email Marketing – The Old is Still Gold
The email marketing is a relic of digital marketing. It is the oldest digital marketing technique, yet it is still very effective and useful. No matter you are a B2C or B2B business, the Email Marketing is equally effective. Businesses can use Email communication achieve a variety of goals and objectives. In terms of B2B marketing the emails can produce great results. They are very cost-effective and with the modern email marketing tools business can also gather insights and business intelligence which can later be used for strategy building and decision making processes. The studies have shown that a successful email marketing campaign can return up to 44 USD against every 1 USD spend on it. Those numbers are staggering, there is no other traditional marketing technique that can compete those numbers. That is why it is crucial to utilize email marketing to achieve better ROI over your digital marketing campaign.
For B2B lead generation or sales the message that you communicate with your emails matters the most. The B2B audience knows very well what they need so it is crucial to convey them the right message and tell them that you can provide them the solution to their problem or how your products/services can be helpful in making their situation better. A business usually have a variety of different products and services, for that it is important to segment your email database accordingly. Share the right message with the right audience is the key to success of email marketing. These days the marketing emails are a bit more visually rich and dynamic and a lot of links can be embedded in the emails. That is why the first impression is very important which can be improved by the appealing visuals. The short and to the point messages perform well comparing to the long details. In short the email marketing can be a very effective tool for bringing traffic to your website and landing pages and to generate online leads.
Bridge Your Offline and Digital Marketing
The dominance and superiority of digital marketing doesn’t mean the offline or traditional marketing is dead. In fact for the B2B businesses the offline marketing is still very good. That is why it is important to bridge your offline and online or digital marketing strategies by integrating them with one another. The most common use of offline marketing to enhance your digital marketing is to collect email addresses from events, exhibitions or conferences that you held or participate to reach out to more prospects and customers. Furthermore businesses can use coupons, brochures and other materials to promote your landing page or product/service page and offer value (discount, free consultation, etc.) to convince people to use those coupons or referral codes. Promote your social media handles and links in your offline marketing activities. Create customized URLs for your offline marketing efforts and analyze the response. The integration between offline and online marketing efforts can provide you a better and deeper understanding of your audience which is very helpful in improving your marketing strategies.
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Conclusion
The marketing landscape for the B2B businesses have drastically changed during past two – three years. The digital marketing have become more important and the general consumers and customers have also become more inclined towards digital marketing and communication channels. Especially in Dubai and all across the UAE the usage of internet, digital mediums and social media platforms have increased significantly. The B2B marketers and business owners must have to focus on their digital marketing efforts as well in order to be able to beat the tough competition. The primary reasons of this blog was to highlight the importance of the digital marketing for the B2B businesses and to provide our audience with the basic information and understanding of various digital marketing techniques and channels that are proven to be the best for B2B digital marketing campaigns. If you need more information about the subject or want us to help you with your B2B digital marketing needs, please feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.
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