4. Literature Review
In order to understand why B2B companies are attracted to digital marketing and how they could utilise digital channels, this literature review section will discuss the following matters: defining terms, digital marketing attractiveness towards B2B, utilisation of digital channels in B2B, and impact of digital channels towards the role of marketing.
4.1 Defining Terms
4.1.1 Digital Marketing
Today, the world is moving towards digital marketing, people are utilising the internet more than other methods of communication (Alan, 2014). Digital marketing has an impactful role in connecting to the consumers for all business sizes, in order for the companies to generate marketing leads that are successful (Social HQ, 2016). Chaffey et al (2009) defines ‘digital marketing’ as ‘marketing using electronic media such as the web, email, interactive TV and wireless media in conjunction with digital data about customers’ characteristics and behaviour’ (p.10).
4.1.2 Business-to-Business (B2B)
B2B is ‘a type of transaction that exists between businesses, such as involving a manufacturer and wholesaler, or a wholesaler and a retailer’ (Investopedia, 2017). Lilien and Grewal (2012) further explains that B2B digital marketing consists of activities that will help companies build mutually value-generating relationships among firms and employees within the company. In contrast, business-to-consumers (B2C) focuses on ‘transactions conducted directly between a company and consumers who are the end-users of its products or services (Investopedia, 2017).’ (see Figure 1)
Figure 1: Differences Between B2B and B2C Marketing
Adapted from (Lilien and Grewal, 2012: pg.4)
4.3 Digital Marketing Attractiveness towards B2B Companies (Reasons)
4.3.1. Significance of Digital Marketing in B2B
In the globalisation era, more companies and people are quicker at adopting social media each year, which led to more effective ways to engage interactively with the targeted audiences through utilising digital marketing tools (Gregorio, 2016). Furthermore, the digitalisation has brought new alternatives and possibilities for organisations to establish relationships, to create value, and to market their product/service offerings through digital channels (Kotler et al., 2013). Thus, it is crucial for businesses, especially the marketing departments to adjust rapidly to the new and growing digital environment. According to Wang et al., (2016), studies of social media usage for digital marketing purposes showed that there was favourable outcome regarding the business performance.
4.3.2 Digital Marketing Attractiveness Reasons
1. Easier follow-up with customer
Digital marketing makes the follow-up with the consumers easier for B2B companies (Storti, 2016). It helps companies to stay up-to-date with market and consumers’ feedback. Gregorio (2017) further states that digital marketing tools are overtaking traditional media, as it can help companies better interact with their target consumers in real-time. The various approaches via digital marketing, such as AdWords retargeting ads, personalised deals, and pre-scheduled emails can help trigger leads and possibly get them through the beginning stage of the firms’ buying cycle (Wang, 2016). Follow-up digitally is more fluent and less intrusive, as a traditional way of cold calling is not as effective as it used to be (Porter, 2017).
2. Better customise content according to user interaction
The sales cycle of B2B products and services is mostly complex, as there are likely to have many influencers and decision-makers. Digital marketing can help assist in content preparation during each stage of the buying cycles; thus, when there is a prospect at a certain stage, targeted content will be sent out based on the user-interaction with the previous post (Wang, 2016). Stylianou (2017) further regards that digital marketing content either paid, free or sponsored enables B2B companies to connect with target audiences more effectively than traditional marketing (e.g. PR campaigns and billboards), as the strength of the company's’ online presence is now related to the firm’s success.
3. Quicker and easier to measure and optimise results to generate better revenues
Most digital marketing activities can be measured, tracked, and optimized more effectively. Through data collection and analysis, the marketing team can better manage their online marketing, such as designing content-driven strategies that could publish content according to the targets’ online usage (Andersson and Jensen, 2015). A study by Estopace (2013) regards that companies’ revenue growth expectancy is better when they integrate digital marketing by 2.8 times. Nevertheless, the cost of traditional marketing may be too expensive for small and medium firms to utilise and leverage on. Andersson and Jensen (2015) also states that online marketing, like social media, is easier to measure than offline through the use of analytics tools (e.g. Google Analytics). For the firms to be successful in digital marketing, there should be a high sales conversion rate from the targeted traffic because the more leads generated the quicker ROI firms earn (Gregorio, 2017).
4. Gain Access to Global Market and Help Reduce Cost
The Internet is giving more chances for B2B firms to digitally gain access to a larger customers base globally, and also to reduce marketing cost (Poblete and El-Tahan, 2017).
It is cheaper to test online marketing campaigns in various geographic markets to find prospects and results are also generated quicker (Wang, 2016). Firms now search for online dealers even from different continent to find the most cost effective offers (Storti, 2016). Gartner survey results showed that 28 percent of B2B investors will shift and allocate more budget to digital marketing tools and channels instead of traditional marketing.
5. Enhance Brand Awareness and Reputation for B2B Firms
Adoption of digital marketing can provide more advantages to B2B firms as it doesn’t only increase sales, but also enhance the brand awareness and reputation (Poblete and El-Tahan, 2017;). Andersson and Jensen (2015) further regards that social media helps companies to better interact with customers, thus leads to establishing a stronger relationship with target audiences. While investing in customers’ relationship, the company’s ultimate goal should still be to be profitable.
4.4 Utilisation of Digital Channels for B2B Companies
Today, it is not about finding the customers, but about being found in places that customers look for information related to the company, especially at the evaluation and purchasing stages (Porter, 2017) (see salesfunnelofPorterpg4) (appendix formarketingtransformationpg7). Lead generation strategies can help B2B companies attract prospects, provide solutions to problems, and establish trust before contacting salespeople (Marketo, 2017). Furthermore, there are various digital directions that B2B can focus on, but without leads, companies would have no clients and revenue (Porter, 2017; Smith, 2015). Therefore, this section will focus on four main digital marketing channels that can help generate leads for B2B companies.
4.3.1 Email Marketing
Email marketing is the oldest online strategy that is still effective today; over 66 percent companies rated that emails are a significant tool, which generated high ROI (Taylor, 2015). Companies can utilise it to collect potential customer's contact information (e.g. email, address and phone numbers). Moreover, the current email marketing trend for B2B firms is marketing automation (Lam, 2017). This tool allows companies to automatically send more relevant and personalised emails to targeted leads, as well as scoring and grading them for future remarketing (Allen, 2017). Furthermore, lead nurturing strategies can be optimised to leverage customers relationships with those who showed interest in the product/service, as sales opportunities are 20 percent higher when leads are nurtured with targeted content (Mawhinney, 2017). There are free email marketing websites for B2B marketers to utilise that could assist in creating an integrated email campaign system that is cost-efficient (MailChimp.com, 2017).
4.3.2 Search Marketing
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) can be divided into organic (e.g. Search Engine Optimisation ‘SEO’) and paid search (e.g. Google AdWords). However, an organic (free) search is being applied more by B2B marketers to grow leads with 70 percent and 55 percent, respectively (Nanji, 2017). SEO is considered to be a long-term strategy for the B2B lead generation, as to be number 1 or even on the first page of Google search takes times (Taylor, 2015). While paid search, such as Pay-Per-Click advertising is a short-term targeted traffic of prospects, traffic depends on how much the company is investing in bidding and placing the ad (Gregorio, 2016). Additionally, organic search is mostly utilised by B2B marketers in the ‘consideration phase’ of the consumer’s sales funnel. This stage is when customers consider various brands that would best solve their problem to plant ideas in consumers’ mind that would lead them to make a purchase decision (Carillo, 2017).
4.3.3 Social Media Marketing
Social media usage is increasing each day and it is being integrated into many B2B firms, especially small ones, as it helps promote content freely and improve SEO rankings (Gregorio, 2016). There is more flexibility to respond to online information and adapt to it accordingly, to provide them with a better customer service through social media (Devlin, 2014; Carillo, 2017). This help B2B companies better engage with their customers and enable relationships, as social media helps increase the customer database. Moreover, the social channels that drive the most leads for B2B companies are LinkedIn (62 percent), Facebook (37 percent) and Twitter (36 percent) (Nanji, 2017; Huotari et al., 2015). LinkedIn is a reliable platforms to help the company find the key decision maker at the right mindset (Fontein, 2016).
4.3.4 Content Marketing
Over 70 percent of B2B marketers are increasing the budget for content marketing, as the content is the major element that will be used to integrate all the marketing channels (Gregorio, 2016). Successful content published should be high-quality, relevant, and short because it can likely help generate more inbound traffic from B2B prospects. Marketers can utilise the 4Cs of marketing to guide in creating customer-oriented contents, which are consumer, cost, communication and convenience. This strategy helps companies nurture leads and alter them to become brand advocates (Wang, 2014) (figure 4Cs). A great content marketing strategy should be diverse, so marketers can test on content that provides the highest growth opportunities. Furthermore, B2B marketers saw the advantages of utilising video, as 64 percent of customers will likely purchase an item after viewing a video about it online (Bowman, 2017). This is a good opportunity to incorporate interactive in-depth content that creates customers engagement through infographics, videos and other materials that interest prospects. Companies should publish content on their social media channels 16 times month, as it would generate over 350 percent traffic (Carillo, 2017).
Therefore, in order to create an effective digital marketing campaign, all the content should be integrated throughout the various digital channels.
4.4 Impact of the Digital Channels towards the Role of Marketing
Since digital media is playing a bigger role, it is crucial for companies to adapt in order to be successful. However, it is not easy for companies to adapt immediately, as this change is likely to have either less or more impact towards the role of marketing.
The process of buyer’s purchasing behaviour is transforming, as the contact point with the vendor through the sales funnel is being delayed (Marketo, 2017; Porter, 2017) (appendix salesfunnelpicture). While digital marketing makes the follow-up with consumers easier for B2B marketers, social media could affect B2B consumers depending on the information they found about the firm, as 28 percent of consumers follow firm’s social media (Wade, 2017; Storti, 2016). The research behaviour of B2B investors and consumers have altered, they now prefer to do research on their own prior to arranging a meeting with the company (Wang, 2016). Marketers should ensure that targeted content will be sent out to prospects based on the user-interaction with the previous post (Wong, 2016).
There are many changes in the digital marketing, it is now about the company being found in the right place and time as customers are overwhelmed with countless information each day (Marketo, 2017). The marketing team should focus on targeting audience more specifically through behavioural segmentation and not just broad demographics to help respond to them better (Porter, 2017). Figurex summarisesthenewrulesofdigitalmarketing.
More importantly, digital transformation impacted the B2B organisations, in terms of the relationship established between the marketing and sales department (Clapuad, 2016) and firm’s business model (Kohler, 2017). Porter (2017) stated that the significance of companies’ sales and marketing team being integrated either physically or virtually, in order to adapt to the fast changes of customer decision cycle in the digital world (Court et al., 2009).
5. Research Approach and Results
After researching and analysing in-depth literature review, B2B firms have seen the importance of digital marketing channels that it could help them be more successful. In this part, the research would be analysed by using secondary approach (Garger, 2013), as case study allows the researcher to learn from characteristics of real-life and empirical events (Hattangadi, 2015). The case studies further explored in this report are to better understand how B2B companies utilise multiple digital marketing channels effectively in real-life events. The companies that were selected are global, well-known firms in the industry. Most importantly, they have successfully integrated digital marketing channels in their marketing strategies or campaigns. The chosen companies are “Maersk Line,” container shipping company; “American Express,” financial services company; and “Optum,” healthcare software and technology services company. The findings of these case studies are taken from various academic journals, company reports and website, industry reports, online articles, and social media accounts.
5.2 Case Study
5.2.1 Case Study 1: Maersk Line
5.2.1.1 Background
Based in Copenhagen, Maersk Line (Maersk), a part of Maersk Group, is a global container shipping company operating in over 100 countries with 30,000 employees (Maersk Line, 2017). In the past decades, Maersk has been faced with a general perception within the company of being boring and conservative, which led them to believe that social media is not the right approach for them. Later in 2011, Jonathan Wichmann, Head of Social Media, breakthrough this perception by receiving an approval of his social media proposal from the management to launch Maersk social media platforms (Sundeber, 2013). Within 11 months, Maersk social media strategy have garnered success for the company, with over 400,000 Facebook likes. They now publish and control their 10 social media accounts on the hub called “Maersk Line Social” (Parek, 2014).
5.2.1.2 Digital Marketing Strategies
Maersk social media channels are segmented into four groups from ranking least to most corporate as follows: fans, customers, experts, and employees (Katona and Sarvary, 2014). (See figureSmplatforms). The development of social media content strategy focuses on four main areas, which are communications, customer service, sales and internal usage. By categorising content, it is easier to control that users receive engaging and personalised content throughout all platforms (Maishe, 2015).
The goal is to “get closer to the customers,” and try to gain positive press coverage, establish stronger employee engagement, and increase brand awareness (Parek, 2014).
As Wichmann states, “Social media is about communication, not marketing. It’s about engaging, not pushing,” as cited from O'Rourke (2014).
For the social media content, it focuses on storytelling from the inside (Whitney, 2015). The posts are very visual-oriented and conversational (e.g. images and videos) mostly through their fans and customers platforms, which some content are generated from customers and employees. For example, the company started a hashtag — #maersk, to engage people to take pictures of their ships and post it on Instagram, which is usually linked to Facebook, Twitter, and etc (Klor, 2013) (see figureabtsmexamplepost). This could ensure that content is being integrated across all channels. Fieler (2016) states that visual content gives more effective results than other communication tactics, such as more followers. Additionally, Maersk utilises glocal approach by encouraging country communication managers to post local news on the global page for content authenticity (Sundberg, 2013).
Moreover, for Maersk, storytelling is more than just about the positive side, but negative ones too. For instance, they posted about an incident when the ship struck and killed a whale — “Maersk Norwich Whale Strike” — on their Facebook page. Normally, companies would hide this kind of environmental problems, but Maersk made an unusual move that turned out to receive positive responses from fans, with a ratio of liking and sharing of 1:1 (BeDell, 2013) (See appendixwhale). Consequently, Maersk is viewed as more trustworthy and socially responsible. Malshe (2015) states that true stories could humanise the company and customers could better relate to them. They constantly update about their shipping industry and current news to engage with customers interests, such as posting a video about how they deal with Hurricane Sandy (see figurehurricane).
Furthermore, they created a LinkedIn group called, “The Shipping Circle,” as a platform where shipping experts were globally invited to join the group to discuss opportunities and challenges in the industry (Parek, 2014). Klor (2013) states that this channel allows companies to gain more knowledge from experts that they are unlikely to encounter.
Maersk social media channels are proven to have success metrics when compared to companies within the same industry (seefigure comparesmchannels). Some of the key reasons for success are because Maersk took the first-mover advantage in being the first shipping company to utilise different social media platforms and publishing authentic and moving content to engage with customers (Su et al., 2015).
Shipping Company
Maersk Line
1,120,880 Likes
131,562 Followers
67.1K Followers
Mediterranean Shipping Company (2nd Largest)
11,227 Likes
220 Followers
Not Active
CMA CGM
107,201 Likes
17,339 Followers
26.9K
Figure X: Comparison of Social Media Metrics within the Shipping Industry (Facebook, 2017; Twitter, 2017; and Instagram, 2017)
5.2.2 Case Study 2: American Express OPEN Forum
5.2.2.1 Background
American Express (AmEx) is a financial services company founded in 1850, which is known for credit card and charge card businesses (Amex, 2017). Interbrand (2016) ranked Amex as the world’s 25th most valuable brand. In 2007, AmEx OPEN Forum (OPEN) website tailored for the B2B sector was launched with the purpose to help small businesses succeed, as within one year almost 60 percent of them failed (Perek, 2014). Their mission statement is, “Insights and resources dedicated exclusively for small business owners” (Amex, 2017). OPEN is created to be more customer-focused and less about AmEx (Leggio, 2009).
5.2.2.2 Digital Marketing Strategy
OPEN main content marketing strategy aims to be “the online community that helps small business owners connect, share ideas, and make smart business decisions,” (Griffis, 2014).
The website content focuses on providing knowledge and support to customers through telling tips and insights, such as ‘Planning for Growth and ‘Managing Money,’ rather than focusing to sell credit cards (Leggio, 2009) (figure screenshotsofcontentabttipsorweb).
Commonly, companies would let their employees write content related to the brand; nevertheless, it is seen to be less credible as customers are inclined to trust content that is written by experts in the field/industry (Niesser, 2010). Thus, OPEN build authority by getting outside experts to write content for them. As a result, they showed that they are transparent and could leverage on trust factors as customers do not feel mislead by the brand (Bedor, 2015) (figure screenshotsofexpertarticles).
Additionally, content marketing tactics for OPEN is utilised beyond just growing brand awareness, but marketing that provides valuable content for the business that could ultimately generate ROI (Griffis, 2014). OPEN provides different types of content to get readers to become customers and lastly convert to brand loyalists, through the buyer journey stages as follows: awareness, evaluation, and purchase (figure makesalesfunnelwiththiscontent).
Around 70 percent of the top funnel content is created to grasp readers’ attention without relating about AmEx (Bedor, 2015). Stephenson (2015) further explains that consumers are not ready for sales pitching content, as it is the early stage where people come to better educate themselves. While the content at the evaluation stage focuses on information potential customers wants to know, thus, AmEx could capture qualified leads here as prospects need to provide contact details for access. The goal is to make customers identify that the company is the right choice for them (Stephenson, 2015). In the final stage, OPEN content aims to convert prospects into their customers by letting successful business owners tell the stories of how AmEx helped them (Bedor, 2015). Siu (2017) states that case studies of current customers should be used at this stage to make the customers feel confident that their purchase decision is right.
Moreover, OPEN, value email subscriptions as a channel to keep them on users’ top-of-mind by sending a brief weekly top stories content for readers to either skim through or click-through to the core site. By delivering only the best content that matters to the audience, it saves readers time and cut down the noises (Bedor, 2015). (supportingstatement)
OPENForum.com incorporates clear feedback call-to-action, as their strategy revolves around users feedback (Bedor, 2015) (see figurefeedbackput2images). The feedback form is categorised into main topics, such as ‘General feedback’ and ‘Suggest an idea,’ for quick and responsive feedback action (Amex, 2017). By improving upon customers feedback, it showed how much value OPEN place on its members’ opinion. Beards (2014) states that customer feedback is important, as it allows companies to evaluate customer satisfaction and make better customer experience.
Furthermore, OPEN decided to integrate social channels as part of their marketing strategy, to foster new experience and facilitate business owners to share and discuss their experience (Leggio, 2009). For example, they embraced LinkedIn as the channel to expand OPEN’s community experience and more importantly, to keep the conversation going on within their reach (Bedor, 2015) (figure screenshotsfrlinkedin).
By exploiting a strong content marketing strategy, OPENForum.com has generated more than 1 million traffic per month (Niesser, 2010).
5.2.3 Case Study 3: Optum
5.2.3.1 Background
Optum is a B2B healthcare software and technology services company that specialises in areas, such as data analytics and population health management (Optum, 2017). In the past, Optum provider marketing was called, “one-and-done” campaigns, which are mainly executed through the traditional channel, aiming to get big sales. Although this was effective, new content perspective and different channels to communicate is required for continual information sharing (Anderson, 2015). The provider marketing is transformed to be a content-led marketing that integrated thought leadership, called “#5in5 — Industry Experts Answer Five Questions in Five Minutes” campaign. This is Optum’s first large-scale and long-term campaign that integrated social media as their primary channel (Eckerle, 2016). They invested $1 million to create this integrated marketing campaign by utilising social marketing, content marketing, display ads, email marketing, campaign websites, etc. (Taylor, 2015).
5.2.3.2 Digital Marketing Strategy
The #5in5 campaign aims to engage with the target audiences by publishing relevant content/topic, sharing it in a timely manner, and joining the conversations to find out their interests (Hendricks, 2016). Additionally, this integrated campaign is created to support sales and build thought leadership (Odden, 2017).
The content creation for Optum is based on what target personas value, which in this case the content needs to be geared towards the understanding C-suite level (Hendricks, 2016). As from the research, they found out that their discussions are occurring mostly with CMO, CFO, CEO, and CMO in organisational groups, such as large hospital and physician groups. As a result, Optum provider marketing focuses on content related to analytics, risk enablement and value-based care as seen in #5in5 main page (see figure5in5).
Also, their social intelligence research showed that information delivery lies under the power of social media, thus, they decided to integrate social media reach with their thought leadership content previously garnered (Eckerle, 2016). Ruffolo (2017) states that when the content is created to talk to the audiences, they are more inclined to engage with the content and company.
Moreover, they utilise data from their previous lead nurturing campaign with 9,500 prospects contact information to understand and find accounts of key thought-leading or look-alike prospects, which shared similar content to 5in5. Then, Optum looked at these account databases, in order to extract new potential leads to further analyse their social media accounts, such as Twitter and LinkedIn to discover their topics of interests, key influencers, conversation share, etc (Anderson, 2015).
To attract both existing and potential prospects, Optum executed a weekly content on #5in5 main page by creating episodes videos on relevant topics, where internal or external experts would be interviewed (see figurescreenshotofinterviewandwriteegtopic). It is published every Tuesday in various forms, such as videos or articles with at least three published online related topics, links to new articles written by experts and thought-leadership content (see figureinterviewarticle) (Eckerle, 2016).
5in5 contents are ungated, but there are also links to gated content, where Optum could collect leads. It is effective to utilise video content, as Perkin (2017) states that video content will represent 74 percent of internet traffic.
Additionally, Optum followed their promotional schedule to post contents on their primary delivery platforms (see figureexampleofschedule), which are social channels (LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter) and Optum’s blog, “Health Care Conversation,” every post on social media linked back to the 5in5 main landing page (see figureoftheblogscreenshotandsocialmedia. They also optimised paid and organic search to drive traffic to 5in5 site, from the keywords they discovered from the data of thought-leadership content library where (Cozatt, 2016).
Optum has continuously monitored their marketing channels through different metrics (e.g.customer acquisition cost, ROI, and leads from social media), to determine the most effective strategies on how to target prospects and nurture leads. For instance, they added tracking links to collect customers data to their dashboards for in-depth analysis (Hendricks, 2016). Parmelee (2016) states that checking analytics regularly would help the company better understand their customers and improve their experience.
Optum has executed an effective integrated content-led and thought leadership marketing by being in the customer’s top-of-mind for healthcare industry by truly understanding the customers’ problems. As a result, 5in5 has influenced marketing sales-pipeline, that is worth more than $50million within the first seven months, for the social media results see figuretwitterlinkdedemail (Eckerle, 2016).
5.2.4 Discussion of Results
The three global B2B companies case studies previously discussed illustrates how large firms successfully integrated different digital channels into their marketing plan. These successful companies broke through the barrier that digital marketing adoption is not for B2B companies and showed the management level that it is significant, especially for Maersk as being a container shipping company, internal employees felt that no one would be interested to follow their social media accounts.
Moreover, within the three companies, the content creation is based on what the customers are interested in and wanted to engage with, and not what the company wanted to communicate. As discussed in the case studies, getting external experts in the field to publish the content about certain topics is more effective, transparent and trustworthy. Maersk and OPEN focus on a more storytelling format to create the content by allowing customers and employees to be the content generators. This makes the reader feel that the content is more authentic and humanised. OPEN and Optum did a great job in using a mixture of gated and ungated content, as a means to attract prospects and acquire more contact information. Then, both companies sent weekly updates via emails to their prospects as a way to nurture leads and link them to the main site for more detailed content.
The social media channels that are utilised for all are LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, as these channels are used to share and integrate all the content in order to build strong SEO, and linking it to the main primary channel. LinkedIn groups are used by companies to connect with experts, so they discussed challenges and opportunities within the industry. Additionally, Maersk also utilises Instagram in a creative way that even non-customers followed them. What they did was encouraged people to take pictures of their shipping container wherever they see it and hashtag it. The posts that are ‘interesting’ will be reposted.
These companies are a great example of how to integrate various digital marketing channels to build positive relationships with customers, and at the same time, leveraging the brand to be more well-known without having to actively and directly sell their products or services.
6. Conclusion
This report discussed the importance of digital marketing towards the B2B organisation. In the first part, literature review defines the terms that is related to the topic, which iw digital marketing and business-to-business. It further analyses the significance of digital marketing attractiveness and its reasons, and also the digital channels B2B could utilise. Literature review ended with discussing the impacts that these changes have towards the role of marketing. Next, three successful B2B companies that integrated digital marketing in real-life events were chosen to be investigated in more detail on how they implemented it, which are Maersk Line, American Express OPEN, and Optum. Additionally, the literature review and case studies showed the significant for B2B companies to utilise digital marketing channels, as it could leverage on the customer engagement and improve company’s performance. To conclude, several recommendations were suggested for B2B companies on factors they should consider when utilising digital marketing.
7. Recommendations
A detailed research on three case studies analysed earlier represents successful B2B companies that incorporate digital into their marketing strategy. Thus, in this last section, the recommendations are derived from previously discussed literature review on factors that B2B firms should keep-in-mind when utilising digital channels … to effectively execute digital marketing strategies.
Understanding Target Audience(s) and Catering Contents Accordingly
Companies should conduct an in-depth research about the target buyer because it is crucial for companies to develop the buyer’s persona that is being targeted, focusing on behavioural segmentation (e.g. demographics and psychographics). This can help them categorise the prospects according to the customer’s buying journey (Ironpaper, 2016). Moreover, learning about customer’s pain points and tackling on these problems could improve customers’ experience and foster their happiness that would ultimately convert into sales (Wasserman, 2016).
Additionally, creating various content to send out to different targets that match their interests. By understanding customers’ needs and wants, marketers could identify the topics that prospects wanted to gain more knowledge and cater the contents accordingly (Sorenson, 2017). Customers will value content that guides them in solving their problems more than those companies who advertises only about their company products or services.
Be Consistent with Quality of Contents Creation
Publishing many contents that are not related to prospects interests, but focuses on improving only SEO is not an effective way. Wasserman (2016) states that it is important for content to be clear and convincing that audience could easily understand and search for. This way it can assist in maintaining the relationship with the current targets and gaining more leads at the same time. Therefore, it is essential to track content to see which one is the most effective, in order to convert these efforts of publishing quality contents into sales.
Monitoring Digital Channels and Integrating Everything All Together
Monitoring, tracking and analysing the results of digital channels is essential, as it could determine the effectiveness level of the online activities and discover which channels best engage with the content and company (Newby, 2016). Significantly, without content integration throughout all the digital marketing channels, the marketing strategy will be less effective as there is no connection between the content shared on various platforms (Taylor, 2015). The information that the company acquired from detailed research of potential target audiences and creation of relevant content would not be fully utilised.