The Inbound Marketing Strategies Your B2B Competitors Are Using

You’re not looking to attract the general public to your product. You have a specific business niche you want to penetrate, but how do you do it? You know that your product or service could improve their business, but they first must know about it.

Inbound marketing strategies are vital to your success not only because of the leads they bring in, but also the authority and leadership it creates in your industry. It’s time to enhance your marketing game and bring in the best strategies for your business.

What is an Inbound Marketing Strategy?

Traditional outbound marketing requires businesses to go after customers, but with inbound marketing customers come to you.

Outbound marketing strategies are still valuable, but you need to extend your marketing dollars to methods that drive customers to your site. 

When a customer wants information about a specific problem, service or business, they head to Google. They seek information and the goal is to find a product or service that fixes their issues.

Inbound marketing is the effort used to provide that information for the customer, so they seek your business instead of the business seeking the customer.

Know Your Customers Before Creating a Strategy

You want more traffic, leads, and sales, but do you know who your customers are? The business to business market is vast and includes numerous niches that might benefit from your service or product.

Create buyer personas to properly target your digital marketing strategies. You want specific types of businesses. Who are you targeting? Do you want the head of sales, CEO, head of engineering or customer service?

Know who your customer is and tailor content to them. 

Inbound Marketing Strategies Begin with SEO

If you’ve done research into digital marketing, you’ve heard of search engine optimization. It’s the effort made to improve keyword ranking for your site in organic search listings. 

Organic search includes Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines where people can get information without making a payment. When people want information to help fix a problem or specifically search for information about your product or service, they go to a search engine and see what they can find.

They do this by using search queries. Google uses both a complex algorithm and artificial intelligence to choose the best websites for the queries.

There was a time when you could spam your site with keywords and rank well. Those days a long over. Google’s algorithm has advanced to where where you need a mix of keyword strategy and amazing content to rank well.

It’s estimated that more than 100 factors determine your rankings, but we know keywords, backlinks, and content are some of the most important.

Pay Per Click Advertising Directs People to Your Site

Some websites have amazing results with Pay Per Click advertising and others spend bags of money and end up with nothing. Google Ads is the primary platform for PPC advertising, but social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have their version.

You can create an account and develop a PPC campaign that uses keywords, advertising copy, and a budget to get your ads seen by customers. Google Ads has search ads that appear above and below the organic search results, video ads you’ll see on YouTube, display ads on websites and shopping ads that show products on organic search results pages.

Once you choose your keywords and ad copy, you decide how much you want to spend on the keywords. Your budget depends on several factors. You will need to calculate how many leads you need in a month and your conversion rate. For example, if you need 250 qualified leads in a month and you know about 15 percent of your conversions create qualified leads, then you need 1667 conversions in a month to meet that goal.

You also need to understand your average cost per lead. If a keyword has a high search volume and is highly competitive, then your cost per conversion will be higher because you'll need a higher bid for the keywords. You can determine your overall monthly budget by taking your average cost per conversion and multiplying it by the number of conversions you need for the month.

So, if you want 250 leads at $25 per conversion, then you'll need a monthly budget of $41,600. Your budget can be a few thousands a month or less if your cost per conversion is small. 

A well-developed ad campaign can have an amazing return on investment if ran correctly. If done haphazardly, you can lose your budget with little traffic. The ad platforms are known for their complexity, so it’s best to become familiar with it before making large budget investments.

Content Marketing Builds Authority

You want to show customers that you’re the best at what you do. When people have a question, you want them to think of your and seek the answer on the website. Google loves a website that has expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.

The best way to earn customers’ and Google’s trust is by creating and distributing great content. Every website should have a blog where they can create articles that answer the questions people ask and provide an encyclopedic knowledge of your business niche.

You’re not only creating content that ranks well on Google and bringing customers to your site, but also showing them you’re the best choice.

Your site receives potential customers in all areas of the buying cycle. Some don’t know they need your product until they read your articles, and others are on the verge of buying. The more content you have shows why people need your service and product and your business must provide it.

Once you have the content, share it on social media. Break it up into snippets and create infographics for Instagram and Pinterest. Other sites will link to your articles because it’s the best, and you’ll earn backlinks.

Content is the cornerstone of good inbound marketing.

Bring Customers to You

Don’t let your fear or lack of knowledge of inbound marketing strategies keep you from growing and expanding your business. In today's world, you need to take advantage of Google and other digital sources to bring customers to you.

If you want to learn more about inbound marketing or B2B marketing, please explore our site for more information.