What is B2B inbound marketing and how to do it.

Inbound marketing for B2B (i.e. business to business) is a fundamental strategy for obtaining concrete results. Companies need clear techniques to intercept new potential customers. Who are not moved by emotions.

Or rather, those in charge of purchasing for a corporate office cannot ignore the useful solutions for intercepting new leads to be transformed into prospects and finally into customers. What are the principles of this process?

The definition of B2B inbound marketing: content management techniques to intercept potential customers interested in a company product. While the B2C market refers to the end consumer sector, the B2B is aimed at corporate customers.

B2B inbound marketing funnels

The substantial difference between B2B and B2C inbound marketing: the latter has direct, simpler processes. While the business to business is more complex . Complex. But the phases are similar. Here are the inbound B2B marketing phases:

• Stranger.
• Visitor.
• Leads.
• Customer.
• ambassadors.

It's the typical process of inbound marketing : the person who doesn't know you visits the site, then a sales page, finally there's a contact. The difference with B2C? An email marketing workflow is often established that can transform the lead into a prospect.

Once the sale is complete, the customer becomes a promoter , an individual capable of speaking well of your product and your business. This result is achieved by investing in content, maintaining an engagement relationship through social networks and newsletters.

B2B inbound marketing strategies

Research by the Content Marketing Institute highlights some interesting points. The content is at the head of every inbound marketing activity and if you want to work in the business to business circuit there are choices to make to intercept possible corporate customers.

For example, the tactics used in B2B content marketing see the blog in fourth place . The infographic is seeing significant momentum: from 51% last year to 62% now. Then there are minor solutions to create quality content:

• Branded Content Tools (38%)
• eBooks (37%)
• Printed magazines (32%)
• Books (30%)
• Mobile Apps (30%)
• digital magazine (27%)
• Podcasts (22%)
• Gamification (12%).

This is to give you a taste of the ways to articulate a B2B inbound marketing strategy. But once the path has been defined, what are the useful objectives ?

How to do inbound marketing for B2B

What are the useful techniques to obtain good results in terms of inbound marketing for B2B ? Here are the key steps for you to reference today.

Brand analysis

The first step of your blog content strategy involves working on who you are and how you decided to approach the market . To understand which tone of voice to give to my content, I must first understand who I am, what my strengths and skills are.

SWOT analysis gives me access to this group of news. The work is divided into four blocks dedicated to internal and external information. Which ones are they? Here they are:

• Strengths.
• Weaknesses.
• Opportunity.
• Threats.

To write online content , in general to work on any web marketing activity or strategy, you need to have a clear idea of the brand to bring out.

That's why I prefer to start from this data to subsequently develop the tone of voice of the contents . How to discover the needs of the target? Keep reading.

Target analysis

This step is essential to organize the contents to be published on the blog. Do you want to create a good editorial business and understand how to do content marketing with a blog? Perfect, you need to find out what the people you want to reach are looking for.

Keyword research helps you understand what the people you want to reach with your content want. In this phase it may be useful to hypothesize reader personas, ideal types that summarize the characteristics and needs of interested groups.

Why is keyword research important? So you can start testing by researching keywords that will reference your writing activity .

The queries describe the audience's needs, wants, dreams , fears, and needs. You need to understand search intent and organize your keywords to figure out whether to develop:

• Cornerstone content (defines what you want your business to be known for).
• Pillar article (long in-depth articles that teach something).
• Long tail posts (posts that exploit long tail keywords).

This applies to informational queries. Transactional searches, those that hide a search intent devoted to conversion, must be controlled by landing pages. That is, publications designed to get something done.

Objective? Transport the reader into the funnel to follow a customer journey devoted to the purchase of the good or service. Until you achieve brand loyalty.

Set goals

According to the research, the increase in sales is one of the main items compared to what are the objectives to be achieved. But it is not the only one and, above all, it is not the most important . Industry experts put brand awareness first.

Brand awareness, the ability of the public to recognize a brand, is the first objective of anyone who creates content. Then come lead generation and engagement. In fourth place you find sales, it is the natural evolution of content creation.

Continuing to publish to drive sales directly means exploiting the strength of content only partially. And, above all, it means ignoring the consumer as a person who can buy a second or third time.

Organize the techniques

These are the goals. But how are they achieved? In the previous point I gave space to alternatives to blogging, but creating a good variety of content is not the only way to get results from your B2B content strategy:

Creating new quality content is the immediate choice, but future investments also point towards a website capable of creating greater conversions and an efficiency study. An alternative way to emphasize the importance of content.

Manage the blog editorial calendar

At this point you have to arrive at the long-awaited solution: the definition of titles to enrich the blog with your content. To do this you must have a file or document available that allows you to organize the posts to be published.

In this case I recommend PostPickr to create and manage the editorial calendar. In this way I organize the publications over time. Some useful details:

• Maintain a steady posting pace.
• Update old articles and improve them.
• Don't forget to invest in promotion.
• Tackle posts to submit in all categories.

Remember that a lot of content makes a difference when it's updated over time. The relationship between freshness and SEO becomes decisive when you can really add something extra to the update. Do you need a grant for this job? Contact us .