B2B Digital Marketing: What New Trends Can We Expect?

B2B digital marketing isn’t easy. Marketers are expected to be fully in sync with the sales team to understand both branding and performance, stick to a comprehensive data-driven approach, as well as run reliable tests using a range of tools and technologies. Still, the B2B digital marketing space is a lot more exciting today than ever before.

With the rise of technology, there are even more possibilities for engagements between B2B businesses and their potential prospects. Therefore, the best way to prepare is to anticipate upcoming trends and incorporate them into new, more effective strategies.

Awareness of the latest trends means that B2B businesses can embrace changes early, stay ahead of the competition and reap the attached benefits. Here are some of the new trends we can expect in B2B digital marketing.

Account-Based Marketing and Sales Strategies

For the past few years, Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has generated a lot of interest in B2B marketing, growing steadily all the while. Studies show that the value of ABM is recognised by 92% of firms as a ‘must have’ in B2B marketing. ABM represents a more effective way to generate new business, instead of relying only on ‘inbound’ methods of lead generation. This is especially true for B2B companies with lengthy, complex cycles that often involve different transactions and stakeholders that are generally high-value in nature.

Account-Based Marketing requires a close collaboration and alignment with business development, but companies are also beginning to see the importance of a transfer to an account-centric model for marketing and sales purposes.

Marketing Automation

As a consequence of the simplicity and affordability of the web/cloud based marketing automation platforms, the B2B industry is seeing a fast-paced growth in the adoption of marketing automation. It’s therefore the perfect time to understand customer needs, break down and classify the customer database, and prepare need-based or seasonal email marketing campaigns.

Such campaigns target a highly customised audience and use trigger-behaviour-based emails / drip email marketing methods. To achieve a seamless outcome, businesses need to integrate email marketing with their content marketing strategy.

The full potential of marketing automation systems (to create comprehensive customer engagement throughout the purchase process) is yet to be realised. Still, more businesses can be expected to adopt automation, with email marketing being the easiest place to start.

LinkedIn Marketing

If your B2B business is yet to invest in LinkedIn marketing, you still have a lot to do. Social selling has grown to become a lot more than an experimental marketing strategy. It is the new standard as far as B2B sales is concerned.

Generally, social media was regarded as a better fit for B2C lead generation and marketing, with B2B marketers choosing trusted hosting companies to handle Domain Names space and other online advertising methods.

However, more B2B marketers are changing their focus to social media as a means to communicate with and educate their potential prospects. In addition, LinkedIn – once regarded as a hub hosting sketchy recruiters and hungry job applicants – is now one of the most widely recognised advertising giants for B2B marketers.

Following their 2016 acquisition by Microsoft, LinkedIn has released a number of features, all working towards cementing the site as the most cost-effective and efficient platform companies can use to reach a B2B audience. Now, targeting for ads using this network are incomparable for reaching specific subsectors of potential customers in a range of industries and job roles. Therefore, just as in the previous years, the platform can be expected to outshine other social channels for B2B businesses.

We can therefore expect to see an increase in the use of LinkedIn’s social lead generation forms – InMail Analytics. This is one of the recently released features that works to improve the performance of your entire team, and help attract greater response. B2B marketers are making use of LinkedIn to make more data-driven decisions than ever before, and this trend is expected to continue in the future.

Improved Thought Leadership

Well-written content will always have a place online – despite the rise of video and other types of media content. B2B content marketing therefore needs more focus placed on genuine thought leadership, instead of concentrating solely on sales and self-promotion. There is an important role which thought leadership generated content (with valuable insight) plays throughout the buying process.

Such content follows the buyer from awareness of the product to consideration and then selection. We can expect content marketing to return to its original form, where the main aim was to create and share relevant, valuable and consistent content to attract and hold on to a specific audience. We can also expect an increasing demand for thought leaders creating their own content on LinkedIn and other social networks.

The new trend in B2B digital marketing calls for content that looks to inform, educate and demonstrate the thought process and expertise of a company to a prospective buyer. Such content will be characterised by less focus on sheer quantity, and more emphasis on quality thought leadership.

How can B2B businesses take advantage of this trend to improve marketing?

More demand should be placed on business leaders’ experience to create insightful pieces that can be accessed on the network. If a network shows interest and connects with you, it’s an opportunity to further showcase your expertise, creating content that provides a window into the level of thinking your company is positioned to deliver. A more obvious benefit is that prospects will have a more personalised channel to engage with your business.

In addition, alternative content formats should also be explored. Different forms such as infographics, whitepapers, videos and whitepapers should be used appropriately across the network. Backlinks can also be created to give your intended B2B audience (researchers and decision makers) the impression that your brand’s products and/or services are everywhere.

10 web design mistakes hurting your Google search ranking

For established websites with ample traffic and fantastic search engine rankings, the major challenge is updating site design to meet the latest algorithm without losing visitors. Google is now on a mission to rid the internet of poor content and design. Therefore, it’s essential your website displays content from the finest writers and incorporates SEO savvy designers if you want to avoid a Google penalty.

Regardless of niche, your website design should be stunning and visually appealing to online users. Google tweaks its’ algorithm on an almost daily basis, so it’s hard to keep up with SEO best practices when designing a website. Sadly, these mistakes will cost you traffic, site authority, page ranking, conversion and revenue.

Which web design mistake is affecting your site performance and ranking?

• Poor technical SEO

The first step to conversion is attracting traffic to your website. Next, your site performance should be excellent if you want visitors to enjoy a positive user experience. This involves testing your site for mobile-friendliness, ease of navigation, page load speed and removal of all broken links. Your SEO will suffer if your site isn’t optimised for these features.

• 404 pages and missing H1 tags

Imagine taking the time to build a sumptuous website even the best designers would be impressed with. There’s a beautiful background, user-friendly font and colour scheme. Meanwhile, the browsing is simple and it all looks great , except that it’s not showing up
on search engines.

Somehow, you’ve forgotten about H1 tags, a vital element for SEO. Google bots use the H1 tag to understand a webpage. Include this tag on your homepage and across your website if you want higher rankings. In addition to the H1 tag, add a target keyword for better clarity.

• Using too much flash or frames on your site

Flash is attractive on a website, but not SEO friendly. Creating a homepage based on flash is a huge SEO blunder, as search engines index them poorly. When people see flash content, they can read the text within, but the only thing search engines see is a headline and nothing more.

Results from a recent poll show that 78% of respondents don’t like flash either, so why do you need to flood your site with flash ads? Chrome no longer auto-plays flash ads after finding it had a negative impact on users’ browsing experience.

• Failing to optimise on-page elements and including important text in images

The most easily understood content for search engines is text. Videos, infographics and podcasts might gain more engagement, but when search engine spiders crawl your site, they’re looking for specific keywords in key locations.

Google’s official webmaster advises site owners to use text instead of images when displaying essential content, names or links. Google crawlers can’t identify text-in-images. This factor accounts for about 15% of Google’s Ranking algorithm. Where images are absolutely necessary, use ALT to add few words of descriptive text.

• Infinite scroll

When incorrectly implemented, infinite scroll can hurt SEO performance.  Content keeps loading as the user scrolls to the end of the page. Set up your pagination correctly or search engines can’t crawl your web pages.

For example, you have 200 pages on your blog, which is enabled for infinite scrolling. By default, if you only display 20 recent posts, that’s all search engines bots will see. They crawl links, so there’s no way to see past the top 20 articles. Thankfully, Google’s Webmaster Blog offers a few insights for making infinite scroll pages more search-friendly.

• Intrusive and irrelevant pop-up ads

Pop-ups aren’t indexed by search engines, nor should they be part of your web design. In fact, Chrome blocks them from appearing. Most online users also find pop-ups annoying. If one appears on the screen while you’re browsing, you’ll probably close it before reading the content. However, digital marketers say they’re great tools for increasing subscriber base and email lists.

It’s possible to display popups, increase sales and followers without hurting your SEO. Dan Zarrella and Entrepreneur.com are two successful examples. The key is to ensure the popup is relevant and unobstructed. Offer your visitor a mouth-watering offer that makes them forget the intrusion. Don’t be pushy, but always provide value to the user when displaying pop-ups. Examples include a product discount or free ebook.

• Thin content

Your product and service pages are the most essential on your site. You’ll drive more business sales if you rank higher for keywords from your services and product pages. A few mistakes web owners make include:

• No product or service page on their website: when you fail to include these pages, you lose the unique opportunity for organic ranking, related to your target keywords.

• One-page listing for multiple products: as a thumb of SEO rule, only have one keyword on each page. This helps search engines properly understand the page and how to rank it. Your website becomes confusing when you pack several services or products on the same page, which causes you to lose ranking points.
• Small text on your product/service pages: When you’ve chosen product/services pages to include on your site, create content or copies to accompany them. Descriptive content that highlights the benefits of buying the product from you helps the pages to rank higher and increases the chances of visitors shopping from your online store.

Other SEO factors that cause Google to penalise you include:

• Keyword domains: domain names aren’t risky on their own, but using keywords in your domain name might be dangerous. If you repeatedly link to the anchor text, Google sees it as a manipulation.  To prevent this, ensure you have quality content on your site when using exact match domains. There are sites like Domain Names NZ offering services that won’t cost you SEO points.
• Neglecting Hreflang: This is a tool designed to notify Google when you intentionally publish duplicate content for different languages.
• Renting links
• Overpopulating your web page with every design element you can find
• Redesigning you site without updating SEO
• Failing to upgrade to HTTPS

Conclusion

Your web development, design and SEO experts should work together to create an outstanding experience for the user, because that’s all Google really wants. When upgrading your site or performing a major redesign, don’t focus on deadlines, but think about how to maintain your engagement levels, traffic and site rankings.

How to Create Amazing Infographics

Infographics are a highly popular and effective content marketing tool. While plenty of brands are sharing generic blog content to gain visibility, infographics combine eye-catching graphics with understandable text, to help educate and engage consumers. Thanks to the current surge of internet content and these past few years of technological advancement, average humans now have an attention span shorter than that of a goldfish. This is making visual content even more essential for capturing people’s attention.

It should not come as a shock that high-quality infographics are shared more than any other type of content. So if your goal is to provide quality and value to your audience, rather than generic clickbait, creating infographics might be the way to go.

To successfully market using infographics, you must first come up with a good topic. You can then begin your research, finding the right facts and statistics. Once you’ve gathered a variety of compelling facts and stats, you’re ready to craft them into a powerful narrative. Your text is there to support the visual elements without distracting from them. Once you’ve created a compelling narrative, you can then move onto your design style. It’s important for the design to be clear while still getting the data across.

If you want to get started creating your own amazing infographics, check out the information below and get working!

Visit Copypress to learn more about infographics.