Build Your Web Presence For B2B Leads

B2B buyer behaviour continues to evolve, and one thing is very clear: research and decisions are being made online. Digital optimized content marketing is now more important than ever. This is a startling reality for the 49% of companies that don’t have a digital marketing strategy in sight. If you’re one of them, you are essentially handing business over to your competitors.

So how can you step ahead in the B2B market?

Taking the time to develop an optimized web presence is key to generating leads and conversions. Your web presence is the sum of your company’s presence online. This encompasses all original content and wherever anyone is talking about your brand or products online. The good news: if you’re armed with the right tools and information, this can be easier than you think.

If you want your business to be the first result in a prospective customer’s search engine, you’ll need to implement three core digital marketing strategies that will optimize your web presence. Let’s take a deeper look into each of these:

Search Engine Marketing

Approximately 80% of B2B buyers begin their path to purchase with an online search engine. Search engine marketing is all about positioning your company’s content in plain view of customers when they begin looking for answers to their most pressing problems. This is your chance to capture the awareness and imagination of a potential customer and draw them to the top of your marketing funnel.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an effective piece of the puzzle in preparing your site for lead generation. To get started, follow these (simplified) steps:

1. Conduct keyword research and choose a handful of keywords that best represent your company, products, and services

2. Track these keywords and benchmark your current ranking online to serve as a guide as you move forward

3. Search optimize a campaign landing page for each target keyword

4. Set up goals in Google Analytics to track conversions

5. Review analytics to identify your best-converting keywords

Implementing paid search or pay-per-click advertising is an effective way to enhance your search marketing efforts and drive more qualified traffic to your website.  Online paid advertising on Google or LinkedIn plays a role in your web presence.

Content Marketing

Well-planned, well-structured, keyword-optimized content is instrumental in getting found in search engine results. However, getting found is only the first step in each B2B customer’s path to purchase. Optimized content marketing is all about planning, producing, publishing and sharing content that is the answer to each potential customer’s problems. The content you create should bring each visitor one step closer to solving pressing business problems — essentially, their pain points!

So, try getting inside the head of your target customer to understand the questions they might have at each stage of the buying process. Knowing these details means you will be able to develop content to answer their most-asked questions, making your site the only place a potential customer needs to search on their quest for fulfillment.

Start creating and sharing content by:

1. Developing an editorial calendar to plan your content. Outline the content, streams, and keywords you will be using as part of your strategy

2. Developing content that takes several forms (blog posts, infographics, eBooks, videos and more)

3. Repurposing existing content to suit different needs and various forms of media. Today, visual content tends to drive the most engagement

4. Ensuring content is optimized for mobile devices and that social sharing is easy and encouraged

Social Media Marketing

Today’s word-of-mouth conversations are all online. More than just a conversational tool, social media has transformed the way businesses engage with their customers, clients and other businesses. Social media marketing has become key to developing an online presence and building content authority and credibility with your customers.

From a B2B standpoint, social media marketing is best understood by its uses:

• – Content distribution and customer engagement
• – Customer relationship management, including customer service
• – Sales lead initiation and opportunity advancement (social selling)
• – Networking and influence marketing
• – Gathering customer, competitor and market intelligence

Some of the most popular social media channels to consider are LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Instagram. This can be a little overwhelming, but pick the channels where your customers are most active online. Wherever there is activity, there is potential opportunity.

Social media is one of the most effective ways to interact with customers and prospects in real time. Get started by:

1. Using social media as a listening tool: set up a listening post to monitor social channels for mentions of your company/brand, primary competitors, and target keywords

2. Identifying and following thought leaders in your industry and target markets. Read their content, share it and add value or insight whenever possible

3. Optimizing your profiles on LinkedIn and Twitter

4. Optimizing your profile and claiming your authorship on Google+

Use these forums to share your own quality content, or curate and contribute content from your industry. Social media marketing can allow you to promote your networks by sharing their content.

Get found: Start driving qualified leads today

Now that you know the strategy behind developing an optimized web presence, generating leads is all about precision. If you’ve taken the time to plan a pathway to conversion with the right search strategy, it’s likely your customers and prospects will find themselves on one or more of your landing pages. If you’ve provided insightful, educational and helpful content, you will build trust and credibility with your audience. If you’ve aided customers and prospects to discover, engage with and share your content, your brand will start to become top of mind.

And remember: keep your eye on the end goal and understand that as with all business challenges, periods of change can lead to opportunity. The end result will be an optimized web presence that has successfully prepared your site for lead generation.

Get started today.