Unlike their B2C counterparts, your business customers have more questions.

Way more questions.

They want to bring in some colleagues to help them understand if your product or service is the right one for their business.

They want testimonials, personalized demos, and lots more—

And that's super important to understand before starting any digital marketing strategies for B2B. It takes time to achieve your goals, but it'll take even longer if you don't plan accordingly.

Keep reading to know where to start with and use B2B digital marketing strategies the right way.

In this post:

• Digital marketing for B2B: best practices

• Digital marketing strategies for B2B businesses

Digital marketing for B2B: best practices

To enhance the effectiveness of your B2B digital marketing strategies, consider these must-do practices.

Create a website conversion funnel

A website conversion funnel is a way to visualize the different paths your visitors take before becoming leads. It shows all the pages someone has visited before converting, which might help you understand what marketing messages work best for your audience.

Creating a B2B website conversion funnel involves these steps:

1. Set up website analytics to track customers behavior

2. Define conversion goals (eg., generate X email leads, get X demo signups, etc.)

3. Create ICP (the ideal customer profile) to target

4. Find your last touch conversion page (the page where most of you conversions happen)

5. Create expert-level content (case studies, interviews, guides, reports)

6. Drive most as you can of the traffic from the whole website to your best converting pages

7. Improve page conversion rate with onsite marketing strategies (personalized landing pages, live chat, popups, etc) and A/B testing

To get started, use this guide to website conversion funnel with more details on all these steps.

For an example, here's one path a visitor can take on your website before becoming a client:

Use B2B marketing automation

B2B marketing automation means using software to automate repetitive tasks, save time and increase effectiveness of marketing campaigns and projects. Automation is must-do for B2B businesses of any size.

Examples:

• Automated lead management. Leads fill out popup forms and their data goes to appropriate customer segments in your ESP or CRM

• Automated user onboarding with emails. A few sequences introducing your tool, specific features, and case studies, sent a few days apart

• Automated event promotion. Email sequences for pre-event promos, during event news, and post-event follow-ups)

For an example of the first point, here's how we integrated our website forms with Zapier to manage inbound leads: How we're using Wisepops and Zapier for lead management

Personalize your onsite messaging with targeting

Using targeting means setting up your onsite campaigns to be seen by specific visitor groups or after a visitor meets a certain criteria. Thanks to that, you can ensure that your marketing messages will be shown to visitors who are likely to find them relevant.

In fact, research shows that using targeting with custom properties (such as customer age, location, and past shopping history) in website popups improves conversions by 49%.

Examples of targeted onsite campaigns in B2B:

• A software company could display a popup with an offer tailored to the industry described on a specific landing page

• A digital marketing agency can show a popup with a link to a case study or a video presentation on the same topic as the blog post a visitor is reading

• A stuffing agency can use geographical targeting to offer a free consultation for visitors from specific countries or cities

Learn more about Display rules or check out email capture software with targeting (also, here are audience targeting you can do with top tools):

B2B digital marketing strategies

Click to choose the category:

• Onsite marketing

• Email marketing

• Social media marketing

• Mobile marketing

• Retention marketing

Onsite marketing

This category includes digital marketing strategies you can use onsite (on your website).

Get more client meetings with with popups and bars

Popup forms and sticky bars can be added to any page, feature targeting, and are customizable, which makes them perfect lead capture tools. Our research says popup convert 4.01% of visitors on average, so they can give you more signups for your product or service demonstrations.

Like here, Tebra, a digital healthcare management platform, gets more signups for the demo meeting:

Next—

Mailmodo, a SaaS business, invites their visitors to sign up for a demo with this sticky bar on its homepage:

Here's a closer look (note that there's also a button to try Mailmodo for free, which is another way to drive signups for B2B businesses):

Drive traffic to new products with onsite notifications

Onsite notifications are social media-inspired feed for websites designed to help businesses increase visitor engagement. They appear in the website header as a bell, and, if clicked, open a feed with personalized marketing messages.

Onsite notifications are designed to promote product launches, new features, blog content, announcements, and newsletter and demo signups. In the below image, Yespark used the notifications to drive hundreds of visitors to the new service in just two weeks:

See how you can grow your B2B business: 10+ ways to use onsite notifications

Promote your webinars and events on your homepage

If your B2B marketing strategy includes webinars, you can promote them on your high-traffic pages, such as the homepage.

You can do so with bars, banners, and popup boxes (like in the example below). Doing so will improve the visibility of webinar promotion campaigns.

Personalize landing pages for every target customer

Creating a dedicated landing page for each major product benefit, client type, or key factor personalizes your marketing. This involves highlighting benefits based on the user, showing client logos that fit the industry, or listing case studies and testimonials to suit various objectives.

Grammarly, for example, has landing pages based on the client team size and team function:

Engage visitors with interactive tools

Interactive tools are a great way to generate quality B2B leads while providing them with some value like personalized answers.

Ideas for interactive tools for B2B businesses:

• Product quizzes

• Strategy assessments

• ROI calculators

• Report generators

• Marketing budget planner

Let's see some examples.

Next Insurance lets website visitors calculate the approximate cost of their services with this simple calculator:

Next—

Tabra, a healthcare marketing agency, invites to take this quiz to evaluate the overall efficiency and automation across businesses:

Email marketing

Consider these tactics to achieve your marketing objectives with emails.

Start an industry newsletter

Create your own newsletter to share your unique expertise and insights with your potential and current clients. It's a low-cost B2B marketing strategy that can establish your authority in your niche, raise business awareness, and nurture your leads.

For a good example, consider Springly, a management software for non-profits and its Spring into Step newsletter for nonprofits:

Create multiple automated workflows

To introduce the new subscribers to their product or services, a few specific automated email workflows should be made.

They are:

• Welcome series. In two or three emails, introduce your or product or service, highlight the main features, share a case study

• Product or service updates. Raise awareness of new features, services, and other changes in the product or service to promote engagement

• Upsell and re-engagement. Encourage active clients to upgrade their plans or give your business a try with a special, limited-time offer to passive email subscribers

Example: Klevu, a product recommendation tool, uses this email as a part of the welcome series to encourage Shopify store owners to use their product:

Send email invitations and updates on your events

Let your subscribers know about all the events you organize or participate in, both offline and online. This will be your way to build your reputation and nurture leads, and emails are a great way to reach them directly.

Example: we sent this email to our subscribers (online business owners) to remind them about a webinar on Black Friday marketing:

Social media marketing

Use these B2B Social media platforms to grow your business.

Run Facebook and Linkedin ads

You know your ideal client, so go after them with paid ads on social media. Many B2B businesses create industry-focused ads, but you can go as far as targeting folks from a specific company (even starting the ad copy with questions like "Does your CFO/CEO/CTO know that..." to appeal to the target audience.

Share your sales enablement content

Your B2B company creates content that facilitates and nurtures leads: case studies, webinars, industry reports, blog posts, interviews, videos, you name it. Promote all of these on social media, whether through your company profile or individual employees'.

Take a look at this section from Linkedin page of Minuttia, a content marketing agency. There are posts made by both company and employees' accounts as well as events—lot to build credibility and authority in their market:

Tip:

If you'd like to take your content and social media marketing game to the next level, start a podcast.

Podcasts are a great fit for every (yes, every!) B2B industry, and a great way to show your expertise (especially if you invite you clients once in a while). Many of your competitors might already be doing just that.

For example, "healthcare marketing" might not seem like a super hit at first, but a Spotify search for that phrase returns hundreds of options:

Try B2B influencer marketing

B2B influencer marketing is a tactic where a B2B company collaborates with an influencer with a professional audience to promote its product or service to other businesses with content they're likely to find relevant.

Some best practices for this B2B influencer marketing include:

• Set a clear campaign goal (more sales, more website visits, more app trials, etc.)

• Decide on how to track campaign performance (like UTM links)

• Choose an influencer with an engaged audience (check the views on their videos, for example)

Many B2B companies are using this marketing strategy.

Take Hallow for example—

This SaaS business integrated their social media ads and influencer marketing into onsite campaigns like this exit popup:

This campaign significantly contributed to Hallow's omnichannel marketing strategy, acting as a crucial onsite conversion tool.

Its design featuring Mark Wahlberg and Jonathan Roumie (who were featured in social media ads in the Super Bowl ad) improved the campaign's overall cohesion.

This popup campaign performed beautifully, driving a total of 32,533 visitors to Hallow's app signup page.

Learn more: Hallow case study

Mobile marketing

Marketing campaigns created for mobile often perform better than desktop ones (here's a B2C example), so it's important to target this important segment.

Create dedicated lead capture campaigns for mobile

Many products such as software, work better on desktop. So, targeting mobile visitors with "start a free trial now" type popups and forms might not be a good idea (just imagine how using a tool like Salesforce on iPhone 13's 6-inch screen).

So, a better idea would be to create a mobile campaign to collect demo signups or share content instead of offering to use the product right away.

Here's an example—

Zendesk, a customer support software, offers to view a video demo of their product for me when I visited from a desktop (which is a good idea, of course):

But—

When I visited on mobile, there was a bar promoting an upcoming webinar at the top of their website (see below). Signing up for a webinar is no problem on a small screen (compared to watching a video featuring detailed dashboards for sure).

Design mobile-responsive emails

Many of your email subscribers will open your messages on their smartphones. Ensure that your emails look great by using mobile optimization settings in your email marketing software.

Remember that Klevu email you saw earlier? Here's its mobile version—super readable!

Ensure your B2B website is mobile-friendly

Just like emails, websites also need to be optimized for mobile viewing. Make sure your B2B site is responsive and easy to navigate on a smaller screen—that'll make it easy to learn about your business, download case studies, see your clients.

For example, check out Hootsuite's mobile website—easily readable, be it text or images:

Retention marketing

Most of your income will (probably) come from your dedicated clients, so it's important to have a few tactics in place to keep all them them happy.

Collect feedbacks with surveys and forms

Knowing what your clients think about your product or service will help you find out if there's something they're missing.

One way to do so is collect feedback with:

• Popup surveys inside your digital product

• Website surveys that appear only to registered visitors

• One-on-one video interviews with clients

If you're interested, this tutorial will show you how to create an NPS (net promoter score) popup in under three minutes:

Use ABM (Account-Based Marketing)

ABM is a B2B marketing strategy that involves using personalized marketing messages and content to the most valuable clients to retain and increase their satisfaction with your business.

Here are a few ABM tactics to consider:

• Offer customized product demonstrations to specific accounts

• Share relevant content (like case studies from the same industry or niche)

• Make personalized marketing offers, such as loyalty perks and discounted upsells

Summary

By integrating these retention marketing strategies, your business can ensure higher levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty, translating to sustained revenue over time.

If you'd like to learn more about marketing, consider these resources:

• Examples of lead magnets

• How to create a video popup

• How to get more email subscribers

• How to lower customer acquisition costs

• How to promote new products and services [guide]