Getting your B2B organization to the top of the charts is less about razzle-dazzle and more about digital marketing solutions that help internal teams act as one clear, cohesive force.
The fact of the matter is that marketing is not a simple endeavor. I could tell you it was simple as 1-2-3, but that would inevitably set you up for failure. Fortunately, the problems marketers often suffer from—poorly performing content, misalignment, ad hoc request driving strategy, and so on—aren’t too unusual.
Which, lucky for us, means that there’s quite a bit of insight into how to solve these common problems.
Start with the Digital Marketing Fundamentals
First thing’s first: Successful digital marketing means a positive customer experience. The ultimate goal of your digital efforts are to deliver the right content to the right customer at the right time.
To make sure you build an experience that customers will enjoy, think about how you’re currently creating awareness through digital marketing, and its overall impact. Better yet, think of strategies that enable each team to be more aligned with the overall brand messaging, while doing what they’re most skilled to do.
Here are five digital marketing solutions that will help you evolve your content marketing to be a robust operation that delivers an outstanding digital experience.
1. Review Your Current Digital Marketing Strategies
Before you implement changes, you need a clear picture of the criteria you use to measure success. Is success defined by hits, shares, likes, or downloads?
What are the most relevant social channels, and what type of content gets consistent conversions? Are you answering customer questions in a helpful way? Most importantly, are you using the social channels that resonate with target buyers? For more in-depth tips, get the Kapost B2B Marketing Playbook.
Taking a good, hard look at where content is going—and its conversion rates—offers the insight you need to pare down or power up certain approaches. Then you can use the best of the best across all digital channels, and in a consistent way.
For a great example of how to drill down and get the most out of organizing your content, check out SolidFire and how they reworked their content system to make the Kapost Top 50.
2. Use a Central Content Repository
Do members of your organization have a clear, easy way to access research, social media stats, and current marketing campaigns? Are resources tagged and labeled using terms that make sense?
Or is content only accessed on a team-by-team basis? Without unity among teams, it’s very difficult to build consistent messaging that clearly touches on key points along the buyer’s journey. It also makes conversion rates tricky to optimize.
The easier it is to find and repurpose approved content (especially when it’s highly technical) for distribution to multiple digital channels, the better you can meet customer needs and stick to a single core message in every language. SCIEX is an example of a company that simplified, collaborated on and repurposed content, standing out as a rock star by creating a highly successful integrated digital marketing solution.
3. Cultivate Internal Collaboration
One of the fastest ways to improve your company’s overall digital marketing awesomeness is to cultivate more internal collaboration.
For example, your sales team is constantly connecting with customers and learning about their desires and needs. This team has key insights that can help shape marketing content and influence digital marketing solutions for the whole organization. Why not leverage that knowledge?
Give employees a way to share knowledge with people who are creating content and managing social media campaign development. Encouraging collaboration allows everyone to bring their unique perspective to shape more finely tuned customer content.
4. Anticipate, Meet, and Surpass Customer Needs, Every Step of the Way
Creating a successful marketing-driven customer experience is about truly understanding how each stakeholder works through your sales process. Then, and only then, can you provide content that supports each step of the buyer’s journey.
With so many stakeholders involved in a sale, optimizing your internal process is worth its weight in gold. When each team operates in a silo, it’s much more difficult to provide a clear buyer’s journey that moves customers to purchase with confidence.
In fact, in a recent CMSWire webinar, “Implement a CX Health Check,” MaritzCX reported that while 34% of companies have undertaken customer journey mapping, only 2% of companies reported success from their customer journey mapping efforts.
By actively getting teams to contribute content that clearly maps out your customer journey, you’re already a rock star!
5. Get Creative, in a Smart Way
While you may feel an urge to go for the shock factor to garner attention, getting cleverly creative is a much smarter tactic.
Using a game, sweepstakes, or contests built around key messaging is a great way to inspire interest and provide small, simple bites to keep customers engaged as you dribble them through social media.
Datavail is a perfect example of a company that did this successfully. They found a way to build a Monopoly-style game to help connect with their core target market: database administrators. Datavail leveraged data-driven marketing to create and position the game, while collaborating with all departments to ensure they were hitting realistic scenarios and pain points.
Key Takeaways
No matter what your goals are for this year, the first step is to get clear on your processes. The more alignment you can create among internal teams—and the more you can craft a clear buyer’s journey with supportive content—the easier it will be to create impactful experiences across the journey.
