Generating high-quality leads is crucial, but can be a real challenge. That’s where B2B marketing agencies come in.

These agencies take care of all your B2B company’s marketing needs (plus all the challenges!), thereby more efficiently increasing your reach and customers.

We’ve put together a list of the top 10 B2B marketing agencies to help you discover the perfect agency to take your business to the next level.

Top B2B Marketing Agencies

Here is our curated list of the best B2B agencies to help promote your B2B brand’s products and services.

1) Single Grain

Overview:

• Single Grain is a leading B2B digital marketing agency that offers customized marketing plans to grow your business.
• They offer a wide range of organic B2B SEO services such as SEO Campaign Management, Link Prospecting Recommendations, Site Crawl Review and Web Analytics Setup.
• They’re also a creative agency that does extensive keyword research for your specific industry and perform ongoing analysis of your competitors to discover potential gaps.
• They create stage-appropriate content that sends qualified leads into your marketing funnel for additional growth marketing.
• Their SEO and SEM professionals can elevate your online revenue by cutting down your ads spending and increasing your ROI.

Why Choose Single Grain?

• They have an experienced, qualified and certified marketing team, and have been a thriving, reputable business for over a decade.
• They always offer customized strategies that works to upscale your profits.
• Single Grain digital marketers always perform regular research and testing to constantly increase your ROAS (Return on Marketing Investment).
• They have worked with leading brands such as Amazon, Airbnb and Uber.
• They provide their clients with regular insights to ensure that the campaigns are delivering the best results.

Achievements:

• Single Grain designed a customized digital solution to help Twenty 20 reduce their cost per MQL by 72.49%.
• They decreased Nextiva’s cost per lead by 41.37% year-over-year on paid ads leading to reduction in their ad spend for the same number of leads.
• They helped Intuit boost visibility across a range of common search terms by creating a lot of high-quality content on their site to reinforce Intuit’s positioning as a powerful solution as well as implemented a link-building strategy.

Key B2B Services:

• Search Engine Optimization
• Inbound Marketing
• Google Ads and Facebook Ads Marketing
• Content Marketing
• NFT and Web3 Marketing
• Email Marketing
• E-commerce Marketing
• Influencer Marketing
• Blockchain and ICO Marketing
• Crypto Public Relations Marketing

Top Clients:

• Amazon
• Airbnb
• Uber
• Lyft
• Salesforce
• Semrush

Get My Free B2B Marketing Plan

2) Disruptive Advertising

Overview:

• Disruptive Advertising is a business-to-business marketing agency that helps organizations grow and achieve their campaign goals by strategizing and executing dynamic advertising techniques.

• They leverage paid search marketing, e-commerce management, Google Ads audit, display advertising, and LinkedIn Advertising to promote your business.

• They work on the principle of longevity and sustainable growth and believe in delivering solutions rather than vanity metrics.

Why Choose Disruptive Advertising?

• They focus on minimizing cost per lead and cost per order to deliver the highest ROI on your B2B marketing campaigns.

• They elevate your paid promotion strategy with exceptional PPC management skills.
• Disruptive Advertising creates transparency by providing timely audit reports to minimize ad spending wastage.
• They serve different business sectors, such as education, healthcare, e-commerce, finance, B2B, and legal.
• Disruptive Advertising also provides crucial campaign audit and analytics reports indicating your company’s progress and engagements.

Achievements:

• Disruptive Advertising helped Sound Approach increase its average monthly revenue by approximately $20,000.
• H&W Machine Repair saw a hike of 62% in annual revenue, crossing their year-over-year growth goal of 20% with the help of innovative ad strategies.

Key Services:

• Paid Advertising
• Lead Nurture Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Video and Motion Ads Creation
• Landing Page Designing
• Landing Page Testing
• Conversion Rate Optimization
• Website Optimization

Top Clients:

• DAVINCI
• Tigerpaw
• SlickText
• Americas Best Franchises
• KPMG

Related Content: 15 Fast and Easy Ways to Improve Your Site’s Conversion Rate

3) Sociallyin

Overview:

• Sociallyin is a social media advertising agency that helps with content production, community management and influencer marketing for B2B companies.
• They devise strategies to build connections that engage maximum prospects.

Why Choose Sociallyin?

• Sociallyin provides tailored solutions based on your campaign goals to reach the right prospects at the right time.
• Experts from their marketing department are assigned to your firm to create marketing strategies that help you meet your target KPIs.
• They create a baseline for current paid media performance based on analytics, campaign statistics and landing page data to get a good idea of your returns on investment.

• Sociallyin offers exceptional paid digital marketing services such as ad copy creation, remarketing, PPC advertising, and social media advertising to manage and optimize your ads efficiently.

Achievements:

• Sociallyin started a brand awareness campaign by ads promotion for SGK Landscaping which received 470K impressions, 5K+ engagements, and a 955% follower increase.
• They helped UAM increase its engagement by 64,784%, a 3,154% increase in link clicks, and a fan increase of 565% on Facebook.

Key Services:

• Web Development
• E-Commerce Development
• Mobile App Development
• Custom Software Development
• Web Design and Branding
• UX/UI Designing
• Search Engine Optimization
• Social Media Marketing
• Conversion Optimization

Top Clients:

• Toyota
• Mosaic Solutions Group
• SGK Landscapes
• A3C
• TGI Fridays
• Beef O’ Brady’s

Related Content: How Remarketing Can Help Increase Conversions

4) Cleverly

Overview:

• Cleverly is a B2B marketing agency specializing in LinkedIn marketing through paid advertisements and sales outreach. They manage your business’s entire campaigning process to maximize your reach, such as targeting your audience, web designing, email follow-ups, lead generation, etc.
• In addition to providing LinkedIn Ads service, they also help increase organic outreach on LinkedIn for faster lead generation.

Why Choose Cleverly?

• Cleverly writes and publishes SEO blog articles for B2B businesses based on detailed research to attract prospects with high-intent searches.
• They have served 5,000+ clients with 10+ million new page view content, 150K+ client leads generation, $37+ million client revenue creation, and $229+ million client pipeline generation.

Achievements:

• Cleverly helped Auxilia increase their average monthly replies/response by 70% and reply rate by 35%.

• For LeaseLock, Cleverly generated 386 new leads and $1 million in revenue with 1 million apartment enrollment in a year.

Key Services:

• LinkedIn Lead Generation
• LinkedIn Paid Advertising
• LinkedIn Recruiting
• SEO Content and Blog Writing
• White-Label Lead Generation

Top Clients:

• Uber
• PayPal
• Google
• Amazon
• WeWork
• Unilever

Related Content: LinkedIn Ads for Enterprise B2B SaaS: The Only Guide You’ll Need

5) Sculpt

Overview:

• Sculpt is a social media marketing agency that helps you grow your audience reach and brand advocates.
• They optimize your campaign process, generate qualified leads and help in web page development.

Why Choose Sculpt?

• Sculpt can help you grow your audience and brand value on different social media platforms, thereby maximizing lead generation and conversion rate.
• They provide B2B marketing strategies that combine human chat and artificial intelligence, making it easy for consumers to interact with you 24×7.
• Sculpt’s social media strategy includes attractive video creation, innovative copywriting, and pictorial and digital asset creation on different interactive platforms to attract more customers.

Achievements:

• With their innovative marketing strategies, Sculpt has helped Livability gain 200+ leads at an average $47.19 cost per lead, 61% less than the desired cost per lead.

• Sculpt helped Pearson increase its Instagram followers by 209% in 9 months, with an 88% increase in average engagements per post.

Key Services:

• B2B Chatbot Services
• Paid Social Media Advertising Services
• B2B Social Media Advertising
• Social Media Content Creation

Top Clients:

• Pearson
• Livability
• Goodwill
• Collective Data
• Bonalaw

Get My Free B2B Marketing Plan

6) Jellyfish

Overview:

• Jellyfish is a Salesforce, Google, Meta and Amazon Ads consulting partner. They have a team of 50+ Amazon ad experts to grow your B2B brand.
• They have offices in Baltimore, London, Durban, Boston, Dubai, Madrid, Mumbai, Singapore, Los Angeles, and several other top locations worldwide.
• They offer full-service marketing services coupled with a deep platform understanding of tech, media, creativity and data expertise.

Why Choose Jellyfish?

• The agency offers a tried-and-true portfolio of advertising solutions that simplify engagement across their capabilities.
• The Jellyfish team consists of 50+ experts certified by Amazon Advertising who help you build your brand on Amazon globally.
• Their feature Jellyfish IQ gives you a comprehensive understanding of your business performance along 12 key industry metrics.
• The agency has partnered with Meta Business, enabling you to unlock your full potential with all the Meta technologies.

Achievements:

• Aviva Investors grew their returning investors by 39%, new users by 18%, and sessions increased by 26% with Jellyfish’s help.

• Jellyfish helped Rackspace improve bookings revenue by 11%, average sales by 91%, and cost-per-lead decreased by 16%.

Key Services:

• Creative Production
• E-Commerce Content Creation
• Creative Campaigning
• Asset Optimization
• Web and App Measurement
• Data Management
• Customer Segmentation
• Search Engine Optimization
• Amazon performance
• Paid Search

Top Clients:

• Netflix
• Puig
• Deckers Brands
• Willowton Group
• Aviva Investors

Related Content: Tips for Creating a Data-Driven B2B Customer Journey Map

7) Skona

Overview:

• Skona is a B2B marketing agency that offers various services like strategizing, brand development, website and digital experiences, event designing and campaign development.
• The agency amplifies your brand value by giving an experiential experience driving business success.
• Skona develops marketing strategies through detailed insights and business-to-business expertise, creating a pathway for creativity and exposure for prospective customers.

Why Choose Skona?

• Skona promises to deliver its customers the best creative ideas using more than fifteen technology products, including HTML5 and Google Analytics.
• They are a full-service marketing agency specially designed for B2B tech companies across the world, giving you the possibility to connect with people globally.

Achievements:

• Since its launch in December 2021, Skona has helped Coinme reach over 573,000 engaging viewers through ads and strategic planning.

Key Services:

• Brand Development
• Event Designing
• Campaign Development
• Logo Designing
• UI/UX Designing
• Front- and Back-End Development
• Event and Video Activation

Top Clients:

• Snowflake
• Findity
• Omada
• Telavox
• Alteryx

8) Impactable

Overview:

• Impactable is a LinkedIn ad agency focusing on B2B brand growth and scaling profitability with its omnichannel marketing strategies.
• They offer various LinkedIn ad services but also assist with content generation, LinkedIn paid ads, outreach, Google search ads and programmatic ads.

Why Choose Impactable?

• Impactable stands out from its competitors as it majorly focuses on LinkedIn leads and outreach that will allow you to stand out among other businesses.
• Impactable comes with customized plans and combos so that you can choose and pay for services according to your brand’s advertising needs.
• They give you control over the content creation by providing you with an interactive content calendar so you can see all future posts in order to give feedback and approval.

Achievements:

• Impactable helped BulkBookstore get 3-4X ROI by retargeting its customers and optimizing cold traffic to reduce cost per click with increased conversions.

• They helped Amazon Agency drop the CPL from $141 to $15, creating 68 new leads and three website conversions by retargeting the audience and creating unique content.

Key Services:

• LinkedIn Paid Ads
• LinkedIn Outreach
• Content Generation
• Website Visitor Identification and Activation

Top Clients:

• Inneronion
• Altium
• Evermad
• Chan With A Plan
• Pneuma Media
• 2626 Consulting

Related Content: The Ultimate Guide to Creating a LinkedIn Ads Campaign

9) Velocity Partner

Overview:

• Velocity Partners is a B2B advertising agency that practices multiple strategies and techniques to improve and enhance brand value among the targeted audience by increasing website traffic, marketing qualified leads, and minimizing cost per lead.
• They build and design websites in a user-friendly way, and create a content management system that is easily accessible by a brand’s customers and provides a clear idea of the brand and products.

Why Choose Velocity Partners?

• Velocity Partners helps you create various unique interactive tools for your website, like quizzes, calculators, micro-sites, email templates, engrossing glossaries, scrolling sites, etc., to help increase lead generation and maximize website traffic organically.
• They provide technical services like website analytics, website audits, content performance barometers, etc.
• Velocity Partners team is well versed in multiple computer languages and skills like HTML 5, Bootstrap, WordPress, CSS3, APIs, GIT, and Creative Suite (Adobe, Sketch, inVision), to provide a smooth and user-friendly experience to your prospective customers.
• Besides branding and positioning, Velocity Partners creates content and specializes in UX/UI website design.

Achievements:

• Sprint Businesses’ brand awareness improved by 24% with the launch of the 5G campaign by Velocity Partners.

• Open Market’s website redesign by Velocity Partners 48%, new users by 22%, and MQLs by 710%.

Key Services:

• B2B Content Marketing
• B2B Branding, Strategy, and Positioning
• B2B Design, Visual Identity and UX
• B2B Web Development
• B2B Content Performance

Top Clients:

• The Feel Good Bakery
• Monetate
• Slack
• PathFactory
• Iron Mountain
• Xerox

Get My Free B2B Marketing Plan

10) Viral Nation

Overview:

• Viral Nation is a marketing agency that builds and enhances your customer relationships with innovative campaigning and various advertising techniques like influencer marketing, content creation, social media management, etc.
• Viral Nation adopts several methods to maximize your brand value and reach, including amplification (to amplify your brand value with paid boosting), white listing (ensuring complete control of influencers’ content) and retargeting (reaching out to audiences with personalized content).

Why Choose Viral Nation?

• Viral Nation’s team of dynamic experts have successfully created over one thousand campaigns for various brands with different content formats, such as social commercials, product reviews, product videos, tutorial videos and gaming streams.

• Their paid and performance media service enables them to maximize media spending with conversion-centric tactics across multiple digital channels.

• They connect you with top industry influencers who can vouch for your brand through rigorous marketing campaigns that bring traffic and recognition from prospective customers.

• They provide detailed and accurate social content audits, which are backed by their artificial intelligence tool.
• Viral Nation has entered the crypto world by offering blockchain marketing strategies and connecting your brand with the NFT community.

Achievements:

• Viral Nation increased Meta Quest 2 results massively, with 61.2 million impressions, 15.8 million views and 1.3 million engagements through influencer advertising.

• Viral Nation created awareness through influencers, posts and media placement to help PubG Mobile gain 2.4 million impressions, 3.5 million reach, and 1.5 million interactions.

Key Services:

• Influencer Marketing
• Paid and Performance Media
• Content Strategy and Ideation
• Distribution and Monetization
• Community Management
• Social Amplifications
• Talent Discovery and Management

Top Clients:

• Call of Duty League
• Meta Quest
• PubG

Related Content: Influencer Marketing Strategy: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Business with Brand Partnerships

How To Choose the Best B2B Marketing Agency

Follow these steps to select the best B2B marketing company for your brand’s goals.

• Identify Your Brand Problems. Before approaching an agency, get clear about the problems that your company is facing that can be solved with the help of an advertising agency.
• Ask For Recommendations. You should always ask for recommendations from peers in your industry before choosing an agency. Consider the success stories of the agencies that have delivered fruitful outcomes for your colleagues’ companies.
• Make a Budget and (Try to) Stick to It. Before deciding on a budget for advertising, you should measure the risks and gains. If the expected outcomes exceed the risks, you can allot a higher budget for your marketing and vice versa. Allotting a decent budget helps you choose a better advertising agency.
• Know Your Network. A good marketing agency will have a network of the best industry influencers and the potential to reach the right audience. For instance, if you have a SaaS company, the agency you opt for must have contacts with IT industry experts from technology companies who can communicate intelligently with the targeted audience.
• Check Out Agencies’ Websites Thoroughly. Checking out an advertising agency’s website and going through their services, pricing, case studies, insights, clients, etc., will give you a comprehensive idea of the agency’s work and how it will benefit your brand value.
• Shortlist All the Prospects. Jot down a list of all the companies you researched and interacted with, and calculate the balance of price and risks involved with all the companies.

Finally, choose the agency that has the capacity and experience to deliver the best returns on your B2B marketing spend.

Difference Between B2B And B2C Marketing

Here are the significant differences between B2B and B2C marketing:

Why Do We Need B2B Marketing?

Here are the top advantages of B2B marketing:

• Creates Awareness: B2B marketing helps customers know your business model, who you are and what you sell.

• Generates Buyers: A comprehensive B2B marketing plan helps put your business in the spotlight and generate new buyers.
• Escalates Traffic: The content published on your website and other third-party sites helps drive traffic to your business.
• Identify New Opportunities: B2B marketing allows you to interact with customers and understand their problems, ultimately giving you a chance to solve their problems by developing new B2B products.
• Improves Sales: Increased number of customers results in a higher number of sales. You can also upsell and cross-sell your existing customers to further increase your profits.
• Improve Your Search Engine Rankings: An effective B2B SEO strategy helps increase your website rankings on search engines.

Conclusion

B2B marketing requires a lot of market research and time. Managing everything yourself can be a challenging task.

To achieve your marketing goals efficiently, consider hiring a B2B marketing agency that has the potential to deliver the best results.

We have listed the top B2B marketing services you can choose for your branding and positioning based on your business goals.

Get My Free B2B Marketing Plan

B2B Marketing FAQs

How do you find B2B customers?

Finding customers for your business-to-business firm is a tedious task. You should be dynamic with your marketing approach.

Here are the points by which you can increase your customer base:

• Participate in relevant social media and LinkedIn groups: Get your social media handles and websites to be a part of the professional groups your industry colleagues have created. Posting and commenting in these professional groups will help you get better reach.
• Conduct industry podcasts: Organize podcasts with influencers and industry specialists to speak on industry-related topics, gather an audience and make them aware of your brand.
• Attend professional meet-ups, conferences and trade fairs: Get yourself enrolled in professional programs and stay up to date with conferences and meet-ups. You’ll get to interact with many professionals who might be interested in your products and services and prove to become your customers.
• Use relevant hashtags on your posts: While posting on social media handles, use essential hashtags related to your business; when you use hashtags relevant to your business, the chances of coming into the limelight with the same industry peers from across the world increase. More people associated with a particular hashtag grow your chances of building customers.

How do you evaluate a B2B marketing agency?

When convinced that you want to hire a marketing agency for your brand positioning, you should ascertain that your chosen company is fulfilling your marketing needs and giving you the best results.

To do, you should evaluate their skills and marketing techniques. Here are the significant points that you can look for while evaluating a marketing agency:

• Their online presence should be well-established.
• They must have the necessary skills.
• They must be transparent about lead generation.
• Communication must be smooth.
• There must be proof of success.
• The expected outcomes must be in line with money spent.

What are customer pain points?

Customer pain points are the problems your prospective customers face in the B2B marketplace. The major concern is understanding what your customers want and including that in your marketing strategies. Here are four major kinds of customer pain points that you can focus on:

• Process Pain Points: These include customers’ problems while interacting with your business during their buying journey, like your website loading too slowly or having limited information available.
• Financial Pain Points: These focuses on the financial strain that a customer faces while investing in a product or service.
• Support Pain Points: Before purchasing a product, customers go through market research that includes a lot of questions. If your company is unable to provide timely and relevant answers during their purchasing journey, they will switch their choice of brand to another.
• Productivity Pain Points: Customers want a well-organized and time-saving process while making a purchase.

The post Best B2B Marketing Agencies: Top 10 Choices for 2023 appeared first on Single Grain.

The best B2B SEO agency could be the key to transforming your business.

A strong presence in the SERPs continues to be one of the most important assets a modern business can have. So if you want any chance of converting your customers, you need to find a place on that first page.

Unfortunately, mastering SEO is easier said than done.

A B2B SEO agency could be your best chance of staying ahead of the curve. In this post, we’ll provide a curated list of top agencies to choose from.

TABLE OF CONTENTS: ↓

Top 6 B2B SEO Agencies

Jump down to the sections below to get a better understanding of what a B2B SEO company is and what to look for when you’re choosing one.

For now, let’s take a look at some of the top contenders.

1) Single Grain

• Specializes In: SEO, Paid Media Advertising, Content Marketing
• Top Clients: Amazon, Salesforce, Airbnb
• Pricing: Custom pricing based on your requirements

We might be a little biased 😁 , but Single Grain has earned its position as one of the top B2B SEO agencies in the world, with countless positive reviews from leading clients like Salesforce, Amazon and more. We have offer a wide range of tried and true paid and organic marketing B2B SEO services, including SEO Campaign Management, Link Prospecting Recommendations, Site Crawl Review and Web Analytics Setup.

At Single Grain, we set ourselves apart from the crowd by ensuring that every company that comes to us in search of SEO support gets a bespoke service. Our experienced team of qualified professionals works with brands to understand the strategic goals of their SEO campaigns, and implement strategies with regular research, testing, and result reviews. We even created our own content optimization tool for this purpose (see this case study).

We’ll keep in touch with you to regularly provide insights into how your SEO campaigns are working, what you might be able to do to improve your results, and where you should be focusing your content marketing strategies. We can even help you to see opportunities for boosting your traffic by combining SEO with paid media advertising.

2) Samurai Marketers

• Specializes In: B2B, White Hat SEO, Link Building
• Top Clients: Coefficient, Keka HR, InvGate
• Pricing: $$$

Samurai Marketers specializes in landing backlinks from real, authoritative companies, including well-known tech sites like Slack, Monday and HubSpot.

Notably, Samurai uses their own proprietary software to build a “Links Landscape” report before starting campaigns. The report shows how many links and with what anchor text one needs to build in order to outrank the competitors. The founder, Shaurya, emphasizes the agency’s white hat SEO approach to steer clear of risky or questionable link-building tactics.

Their link-building service is ideal for B2B and SaaS companies who like to play it safe when it comes to SEO and want links to their existing pieces of content (to avoid the hassle of creating new content).

3) KlientBoost

• Specializes In: SEO, Paid Media Advertising, CRO
• Top Clients: Segment, SAP, Bloomberg
• Pricing: Custom

Another company offering a range of B2B SEO services in the digital landscape, KlientBoost is committed to helping companies understand their SEO strategy from start to finish. B2B SEO experts will work with you to create a state-of-the-art search engine campaign, with valuable link-building initiatives, and content marketing.

KlientBoost works with B2B brands on everything from local SEO to social media and search engine boosted campaigns. You can also expect regular reports on the performance of your SEO-focused content from the KlientBoost team, so you don’t have to guess at which campaigns are driving the best results.

KlientBoost promises an all-in-one approach to SEO, so you can leverage everything from keyword research to the creation of original topics and content assets in one convenient package. There’s also support for off-page and on-page optimization.

Dive Deeper: How to Rank Your Brand-New Website When You Don’t Know SEO

4) Apollo Digital

• Specializes In: SEO, Content Marketing
• Top Clients: IP Vanish, Blissfully, Deskera
• Pricing: Custom

A full-service content marketing and SEO company focused specifically on B2B brands, Apollo Digital promises brands a way to strengthen both their voice and presence online. For those who need extra evidence of the company’s success, there’s access to a range of SEO-focused case studies on the brand’s website.

The company has helped B2B SaaS companies to grow from 0 to 200,000 monthly organic visitors in a couple of years, and it can work with companies from a range of industries and backgrounds, creating unique and customized campaigns based on your specific goals.

One of the best things about Apollo Digital’s approach to B2B SEO support is the visual reports you get from the team on a regular basis. You can quickly and clearly see where certain SEO strategies have increased things like conversions and traffic across multiple pages on your website.

Dive Deeper: The Complete White Hat SEO Guide: Google-Validated SEO that Works like Magic!

5) Session Media

• Specializes In: SEO, SaaS Marketing, Content
• Top Clients: Spectrum brands, Spotler, Contino
• Pricing: Custom

With specialist campaigns built around keywords, content management and link building, Session Media offers B2B companies an evidence-backed approach to improving their presence online. The agency starts by working with your company to get an understanding of your existing online presence, and the primary goals you might have for improving your online reputation.

After working with your team, the Session Media experts go away to research effective keywords and put together an SEO marketing plan for your business. You can also leverage the team to access SEO and PPC campaign advertising at the same time, if you want a two-pronged approach.

Session Media’s professionals also have experience working within the WordPress environment, so they can help optimize your website and make sure it’s more accessible to Google’s search engine crawlers. You can check out a range of case studies and testimonials on the website to learn more about Session Media’s B2B SEO services.

6) Polaris

• Specializes In: SEO, E-commerce SEO, Content Marketing, PR
• Top Clients: Thomson Routers, Make a Wish, Mars
• Pricing: Custom

Another top agency worth considering for any evolving business, Polaris uses expertise in search engine optimization to support customers across a range of B2B environments. The company has more than 10 years’ of experience in SEO and consistently delivers a host of SEO campaigns to outperform ranking, sales, and traffic targets.

The dedicated B2B SEO services from Polaris are designed specially for companies trying to reach out to other growing businesses. Polaris can work with you on optimizing your content marketing strategy, as well as strengthening your e-commerce website from the inside out.

Aside from working on content marketing and comprehensive B2B campaigns with you, Polaris can also offer a range of strategy and consulting services to answer any questions you might have about how to enhance your online presence long-term.

Dive Deeper: 6 SEO Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2023

What Is a B2B SEO Agency?

First, consider this:

• B2B companies generate 2X more revenue from organic search than any other channel.
• Around 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine, but…
• Only 0.78% of all Google searchers click on a result from the second page.

This is why B2B search engine optimization is key to a business’ success.

A B2B SEO agency is an SEO or marketing company that specifically focuses on helping organizations leverage the search engines in the “business to business” environment.

SEO agencies are specialists in navigating, understanding, and even manipulating the search engines to help your business thrive online. In a world where SEO can drive up to 1,000% more traffic than organic social media posts, a B2B SEO agency can be crucial to help you master your online presence.

This means such agencies have special insights into how you can leverage everything from local SEO to content marketing to improving your appearance on the web.

Because B2B and B2C brands sell different kinds of products/services to different types of consumers, a B2B SEO company may use unique methodologies to help its clients thrive online, such as:

• Customer Journey Mapping: The decision process in a B2B sale is often much longer than it is in the B2C market, due to higher costs of products and length of commitment to a service, and a B2B SEO company can help you map the customer journey to create the right SEO campaign.
• Keyword Selection: Keywords are a common component in both B2B and B2C SEO strategies, but because the buying cycle is more complex for B2B customers, you may need to consider a wider range of potential keywords for each kind of customer “intent.”
• Link Building: Link building helps enhance the authority of your website and earn you new sources of traffic. A B2B SEO company can audit your existing link environment, as well as set the stage for new linking opportunities by reaching out to potential partners.
• On-site Optimization: Agencies can help with optimizing all aspects of your website, from the title tags and meta tags to the description tags on your product page, for better recognition from the search engines.
• Content Production: Just like B2C companies, B2B brands can benefit from investing in content. In fact, content can be even more essential for B2B businesses, where it’s crucial to build an emotional relationship with your target audience.

Book My Free SEO Marketing Consultation

The Benefits of Hiring a B2B SEO Agency

Hiring a B2B SEO company gives you an edge over other companies striving to compete on the search engines. Ultimately, figuring out how to master your technical SEO and implement strategies on a consistent basis isn’t easy. An agency gives you some much-needed additional support.

Other benefits of hiring a B2B SEO company include:

• Saved Time: An agency can handle a number of time-consuming tasks on behalf of your B2B business, from keyword research to custom meta-data optimization. With a team of professionals working on your SEO, your company can focus on the things they do best.
• Agility: Most companies don’t have the time to run an efficient business and keep track of the latest changes to SEO algorithms. That’s what SEO agencies do. Hiring an agency can give you the insights you need to adapt to the latest trends and avoid any SEO penalties.
• Improved ROI: An agency is constantly working to ensure that you’re getting measurable results from your SEO campaigns. The average business drives 53% of its traffic via organic search, making it one of the most valuable tools for ROI. An agency can help ensure that you’re leveraging the strategies that make the most sense for your business and deliver the best results.
• Industry Expertise: SEO agencies have a selection of diverse professionals, including technical SEO experts, web developers, copy and content writers, and keyword researchers. You get all the expertise and power of a complete team of experts working on your SEO strategy, but without the expense.
• Custom Services: Many SEO agencies will work hand-in-hand with your organization to create a bespoke strategy for SEO, based on what they already know about the industry and brands like yours. If your B2B SEO company has a lot of experience in your sector, they can even use previous case studies and instances to demonstrate proven strategies.
• Improved Efficiency: Agencies give you access to a highly skilled team of professionals whose only focus is to improve your SEO results. They always take advantage of the latest trends and make sure changes to your SEO campaigns are implemented as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Dive Deeper:
* SEO Keyword Research Made Easy in 2023
* B2B SEO: How to Rank Your Business Website Higher in Search
* Top B2B Marketing Mistakes You’re Making (And How to Fix Them!)

How Do I Choose a B2B SEO Agency for My Business?

There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for choosing the perfect B2B SEO agency for your company’s needs. However, there are certain factors to keep in mind, such as:

Experience with Similar B2B Brands

An SEO agency for B2B brands should have specialist knowledge about how to leverage the latest SEO techniques for companies in the B2B landscape. They should be able to show you case studies of previous companies they’ve worked with to achieve the goals you’re working towards.

Ideally, the best agency will often be one with specific experience in your sector. Companies with a good knowledge of your industry will be able to suggest strategies and content marketing techniques that are appealing to your target audience.

Excellent Reporting

If you’re investing in SEO as part of a B2B e-commerce marketing strategy or brand growth campaign, you’ll need to see evidence that your investment is paying off. A good B2B SEO company should be able to provide measurable insights into their results.

Leading SEO providers use a wide range of tools to track important B2B search marketing metrics like brand awareness, traffic, and clicks from the search engines to demonstrate how different technical SEO strategies are working. Not only will these reports help to demonstrate the value of your investment, but they can also help you to make better decisions on which SEO strategies to pursue in future.

Look for a results-oriented company capable of demonstrating a genuine improvement in your organic traffic, leads and customers with each SEO strategy.

Dive Deeper:
* SEO Score: How to Grade Your Website (in 5 Minutes)
* 4 Types of SEO Analysis & How to Do Them (Step-by-Step)

Customer Service

A commitment to excellent customer service is crucial for any company in search of the best B2B SEO company. Your agency needs to be committed to constantly communicating with you and sharing updates on your campaign.

A strong focus on customer service will also involve helping you understand how to use the best SEO strategies to leverage stronger results. Look for a company capable of guiding you through the search engine optimization process.

A good way to check for evidence of good customer service, is to read up on reviews, testimonials, and even star ratings from other clients:.

🚩 Red Flags to Watch Out For

While you search for a company with an excellent track record in B2B SEO and a strong focus on customer service, make sure you watch out for common red flags, such as:

• Inability to share case studies: If all the reviews you see come with made-up names and no profile photo, this isn’t a good sign. You should easily be able to find testimonials from authentic people.
• Poor website performance: If the website of the SEO company looks outdated or doesn’t have a good position in the search engines, this indicates the brand isn’t invested in its own business or doesn’t know what it’s doing.
• Lack of credentials: If an agency has nothing to back up their claims of exceptional SEO skills, like Google accreditation or certifications, this could be a sign they’re not the right choice for you. Don’t be bamboozled with claims that a company has 50 years of combined experience, or something similar.

Hiring the Right B2B SEO Agency

SEO is one of the most important investments for any business in today’s competitive digital landscape. Hiring the right agency is an excellent way to get one step ahead of the competition. Remember, when choosing your agency:

• Always look for a company with B2B skills: Your SEO agency should know the difference between optimization for B2C and B2B brands.
• Check the company’s reputation: Make sure you check out reviews, testimonials, and case studies to get a better insight into the company’s service levels.
• Communicate with the brand: Connect with the company and discuss your needs to get an idea of their approach to customer service.
• Demand measurable results: Make sure your B2B SEO company can deliver measurable insights into your SEO campaigns, with reports and analytics.

If you want to promote your business by partnering with an excellent SEO agency, Single Grain can take your brand to the next level. 👇

Book My Free SEO Marketing Consultation

Or learn more about what we can do for you here 👉  SEO Marketing Agency

The post Best B2B SEO Agency: Top 6 Choices for 2023 appeared first on Single Grain.

The complexities of communicating with multiple stakeholders for months until a sale is completed and retaining them long enough to justify the acquisition costs are what breaks many startups before they can get over the dreaded “valley of death.”

A B2B SaaS marketing agency can provide the professional help you need to overcome all these issues. But how do you find one? And how do you make sure they are the right fit for your business?

This guide that will help you answer these questions so that you know what to look for when hiring an agency to take your B2B SaaS business to the next level.

Book My Free B2B SaaS Marketing Consultation

What Does a B2B SaaS Marketing Agency Do?

A B2B SaaS marketing agency takes care of strategizing, executing, and managing marketing campaigns for B2B SaaS companies. 

Tech startups hire B2B SaaS marketing agencies due to the complexities of SaaS as a business model. Unlike traditional digital marketing, which has an almost exclusive focus on the top of the funnel, SaaS requires optimizing for the middle and bottom of the funnel as well as beyond the purchase stage.

The “pirate metrics” model that angel investor Dave McLure famously developed illustrates the five stages of a customer’s journey:

It starts with acquisition, where marketers traditionally focus their energies, and then moves to the activation and retention stages. In these two stages, the marketer’s job is to get the newly acquired user to find value in the product and keep using it based on their early success.

During the revenue and referral stages, the marketer is required to get people to pay for the product (and, sometimes, to upsell and cross-sell them) and refer their colleagues. As a whole, this funnel shows that the work of a SaaS marketer is much more complex than that of a traditional marketer.

Although a SaaS marketing agency may implement a strategy that involves working with traditional digital channels like organic search and social media, it most certainly involves much more than that, as the image above shows. 

Some examples of the capabilities the best SaaS marketing agencies provide their clients include:

• Optimizing the customer onboarding flow to increase the activation rate
• Creating nurture and reactivation email campaigns to lower the churn rate
• Improving customer retention through retargeting campaigns
• Testing new pricing models that boost revenue
• Setting and optimizing a referral program

Any SaaS marketing agency worth their while will take a deep look at your company’s niche, product and past marketing experience to decide which parts of the funnel to work on and what tactics will be required.

Dive Deeper:
* What Is B2B SaaS? Everything You Need to Know
* Turning a Lead into a Prospect with MOFU Content

How to Choose the Right B2B SaaS Marketing Agency

As we explained in our guides to choosing your Google Ads agency, content marketing agency and NFT marketing agency, there are a set of requisites a B2B SaaS marketing agency must meet before you hire them.

Given the unique challenges and skills a SaaS marketing agency must have, focusing exclusively on factors like price and experience won’t make it. The best SaaS marketing agencies should also meet the following criteria:

Broad Experience and Skills

A SaaS marketing agency should have extensive skills and experience managing a wide range of marketing channels such as SEO, paid media, and email marketing.

More importantly, a SaaS marketing agency should also have skills in some of the following fields:

• Analytics (quantitative analysis)
• Customer research (qualitative analysis)
• Running tests
• Web development
• Product management

This doesn’t mean an agency must deliver all these services at once. Instead, it means the agency you hire needs to handle at least a few of them. It also must be willing to work with your team, and even with other consultants or agencies that take different parts of the growth process.

Process Over Tactics

Generating brand awareness, attracting buyers, and closing sales in the B2B space requires a strategic and long-term approach to marketing. 

Marketing tactics are undoubtedly necessary, but it’s more important to learn about the processes a SaaS marketing agency uses to achieve the results with their clients. You should learn about their methods to:

• Research your product and customer base
• Implement quantitative analysis and qualitative customer research
• Idealize potential experiments and tactics
• Prioritize said experiments and tactics
• Coordinate the design and execution of the projects

Strong B2B Focus

SaaS companies share a lot of common challenges, regardless of whether they target other businesses (B2B) or consumers (B2C). However, it’d be a mistake to hire a SaaS marketing agency that works mainly with B2C companies. 

The differences between marketing in the B2B and B2C spaces are great enough to justify working with an agency that specializes in the former rather than in the latter. Some of these differences are as follows:

• Buying Cycle: B2B purchases have longer timeframes, sometimes taking more than a year to complete. They also require working with multiple stakeholders (i.e., decision-makers), which require different communication campaigns than in the B2C space.
• Financial Models: B2B purchases usually have lower upfront profit margins due to the required initial marketing and sales costs but compensate over the long-term — this is why lifetime value is such a crucial metric in the B2B SaaS space.
• Customer Success: The activation and retention stages for B2B companies emphasize what’s known as “customer success,” whereas engagement is more important in the B2C space.

Dive Deeper: SaaS CAC: A Guide to Customer Acquisition Costs

Red Flags to Look for Before Hiring a B2B SaaS Marketing Agency

Some agencies like to position themselves in the B2B SaaS space as a synonym for digital marketing. Undoubtedly, creating and running a marketing strategy for a B2B SaaS business marketing strategy will require working with channels like SEO and paid media. 

However, as we’ve seen, traditional digital marketing agencies focus almost exclusively on acquiring leads and customers, whereas a SaaS marketing agency takes care of the entire SaaS funnel.

For that reason, you need to pay attention to their experience working with SaaS companies in the B2B space and the skills they have that show that they do more than just digital marketing.

Common red flags that may indicate this is not the right B2B SaaS agency to work with:

• No experience or specific skills in the B2B SaaS space
• Poor communication (doesn’t return calls, doesn’t let you know what’s going on, talks a lot but doesn’t say much)
• Doesn’t share their marketing strategy for your business with you, the client who is paying them
• Guarantees specific results (often in an unrealistic period of time)
• Uses one formulaic strategy for all clients
• Doesn’t market their own agency very well 
• A lot of negative reviews or no reviews at all

On the other hand, if they talk about onboarding experiences and churn rate, upsells and pricing experiments, referral programs and lifetime value, they are a good agency to work with.

Dive Deeper: Top B2B Marketing Mistakes You’re Making (And How to Fix Them!)

What Does a B2B SaaS Marketing Agency Charge?

Considering that the work of a SaaS marketing agency is much more complex than that of a traditional agency, pricing the former’s services usually takes a tailored approach.

Some marketing agencies charge flat fees, others narrow their work and charge by the hour or by the project. Some agencies in the advertising industry charge a percentage of the ad spend or based on the campaign’s performance. SaaS marketing agencies rarely fit either of these cases. 

Do you need to increase your retention? You may have to rethink your product entirely and spend thousands of dollars creating a new onboarding experience that sets your customer’s expectations appropriately. How much will that cost?

Only the agency you decide to work with will be able to tell you. They may only take care of finding the issues that lead to poor retention in the first place and charge you on an hourly basis. If they also were capable of strategizing potential solutions and directing the development, that could increase the costs even further.

Whatever the case, the best SaaS marketing agencies take a custom approach. Make sure they sit down to discuss your problems deeply until they find what you need to do. And have this conversation with a few potential agencies so you can compare prices and services.

Book My Free B2B SaaS Marketing Consultation

5 Best B2B SaaS Marketing Agencies

Now that you know what to look for in a B2B SaaS agency, here is a carefully curated list of the best agencies and their specializations.

1) Single Grain

• Specializes In: SEO, paid media advertising, content marketing
• Top Clients: Salesforce, Amazon, Intuit
• Pricing: Custom

At Single Grain, we have worked with everything from large B2B SaaS companies to small businesses, helping them scale their marketing results. 

We have faced every challenge SaaS companies face; that’s why our solutions are proven to increase brand awareness, achieve product-market fit, and boost the performance of every step in the funnel. 

We do that by taking a deep look at your value proposition, customer base, and product. From our research, we execute campaigns that lead to your desired results.

Even though some agencies stop at lead generation, we take it even further by working with your CRM to ensure that we’re driving qualified leads.

2) From the Future

• Specializes In: SEO, social media, UX
• Top Clients: HubSpot, Drift, InVision
• Pricing: Minimum project is at $100,000, which works out to a $200-$300 hourly rate

Defined as a “full-funnel digital marketing” agency, From the Future provides all sorts of digital marketing-related services, such as SEO, PR outreach, content marketing, CRO, and analytics.

Their clientele is almost exclusively made of mid-market to enterprise-level companies. According to the company, “our ideal client generates $50M+ in annual revenue and seeks to dominate its market with an integrated strategic approach including Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media promotion, and industry-leading UX Design.“

3) Growth Rocks

• Specializes In: Conversion rate optimization (CRO), inbound marketing, social media
• Top Clients: Reccodo, isMOOD, Pixofix
• Pricing: From one-time $90/hour consulting to $15,000/month projects

Growth Rocks is a pure growth-focused agency that works with SaaS companies in the B2B space, helping them achieve early traction, find product-market fit, and increase the testing pace.

The company serves both resource-strapped startups that need project-specific consulting services and established businesses that require a hands-on approach.

The company explains that their hourly consulting package is a “two-hour intensive, single topic consultation driven by the major pain-point of the startup.” This package introduces “the growth hacking mindset to the startup’s team and to describe the topics and funnels that they should be examining at their present phase of corporate development.”

Compared to the other agencies in this article, the agency is ideal for startups with tight budgets that need help from experienced growth hackers.

4) NoGood

• Specializes In: Inbound marketing, CRO
• Top Clients: ByteDance, Ventract
• Pricing: Custom

Based in New York City, NoGood is a SaaS marketing agency founded and run by proven performance marketers and growth hackers. The company states they have “successfully grown many New York and Silicon Valley brands and increased revenue from hundreds to millions.”

NoGood has received a significant amount of social proof from their work, as TechCrunch has named them one of the best-verified growth agencies in the U.S.

Their focus is mainly focused on the fin-tech, e-commerce, and crypto industries. The company explains their method as a “proven full-funnel, high-velocity experimentation approach [that] helps our partner SaaS brands rapidly scale for less.” Some of the services include building landing pages, customer persona research, SEO, content marketing, and PPC.

Learn More: An NFT Marketing Checklist for Your Crypto Project

5) Klicker

• Specializes In: SEO, content marketing, email marketing
• Pricing: Starts at $1,000 per project, or $100-$149/hr

Klicker is a small agency that works mostly with small- to medium-sized SaaS companies. They pride themselves in taking an ROI-centric approach with a strong focus on SEO, PPC, and content marketing. 

However, they are also experienced in email marketing — especially lead nurturing — and remarketing. These two channels are perfect for improving activation and retention.

Dive Deeper: How Remarketing Can Help Increase Conversions

Hire the Right SaaS Marketing Agency

Now that you know about the best SaaS marketing agencies and how to hire them, you need to get started. These five tips will help you with that:

• Pick one stage of your funnel and work on it. No matter how experienced a SaaS marketing agency may be, their work can only be effective when they work on the most pressing issues. For that reason, pick a stage of your AARRR funnel that’s most underperforming, and get the agency to work on it.
• Look beyond acquisition. B2B SaaS companies can’t rely on acquisition alone; every funnel stage is equally important. What’s the point of acquiring new users if they don’t use your product? Look at every stage of the AARRR funnel and find one that’s not working properly.
• Be channel-agnostic. The SaaS marketing agency you decide to work with shouldn’t force a specific channel only because they’re experienced with it. Given how unique each SaaS product is, the channels you use matter less than the journey the customer goes on with your company. That’s what’s called “channel agnosticism.” Work on the channels that best fit your specific buyer profile to boost the results of each of your funnels.
• Emphasize strong communication channels. Given how complex marketing for SaaS is, make sure the agency you work with defines clear and transparent communication channels. If the involved teams don’t can’t rely on each other, it will dampen the rest of your work.
• The product is critical. SaaS companies usually use their product as part of their marketing work. Get your product and engineering teams to work closely with your SaaS marketing agency.

Schedule your FREE consultation with Single Grain’s B2B SaaS experts to discuss your project requirements.  👇

Book My Free B2B SaaS Marketing Consultation

Or learn more about what we can do for you here 👉  B2B SaaS Marketing Agency

The post 5 Best B2B SaaS Marketing Agencies in 2023 appeared first on Single Grain.

The road to converting a prospect into a paying customer is a winding one. In the world of B2B, the customer journey can be overly intricate and frustrating to navigate.

In this post, we’ll cover:

• who the B2B customer is (as opposed to the B2C customer)
• what a customer journey map is
• the four types of customer journey maps
• types of data to collect for your customer journey map, including data based on stages
• how to create your own customer journey map 

The B2B “Customer”

As they move along their customer journey, prospects can hit a couple of roadblocks:

• There could be numerous stakeholders during a single company’s purchase. Unlike B2C, the “customer” in B2B is a group of people representing the company. So you have multiple persons and their varying opinions that need to agree and align on buying your product or service. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
• Throughout their B2B buyer journey, an average prospect interacts with a minimum of six channels, making it difficult to track the origination of the sale and how to automate that success.
• On top of that, the average sales cycle may last up to four months. So it’s imperative to track this metric to know the actual length of your B2B buyer journey and what drives your success.

According to McKinsey’s research, these three daunting factors are the reason why nearly 65% of your customers won’t convert.

So, what do you do? The only way to ensure that every channel, activity, or marketing campaign is performing as intended is to create a customer journey map that reflects reality and attributes value to each touchpoint.

However, there are a lot more reasons why your business needs a B2B customer journey map. But before we dive into that, let’s understand what a customer journey is first.

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What Is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map (CJM) is a concept map of customer interactions with a company. It is a tool to investigate, analyze, and lay the foundations to continuously improve customer experiences.

Without an established customer journey map, your organization will soon drown in the sea of data and incomprehensible noise. Creating a customer journey map helps you tell the story of your customers’ experiences with your brand across all touchpoints.

This process also allows B2B business leaders to gain insights into common customer pain points, which will allow them to optimize and personalize sales process steps. Journey mapping creates a panoramic picture of how a customer interacts during the customer lifecycle journey and the roles and responsibilities of the various teams in charge of fulfilling that experience.

Creating a customer journey map will also bring an organization together and develop a shared sense of ownership between teams because everyone in the company will know what is required to deliver the experiences that customers expect. Doing so will help you nurture a customer-centric culture.

Related Content: 3 Ways to Personalize the Customer Journey Experience

4 Types of Customer Journey Maps

Depending on the business needs and the extent to which business processes are incorporated into the concept map, B2B customer journey maps may vary.

Typically, there are four types of journey maps. While they look similar on the surface, each has a different focus and business purpose.

1) Current State Customer Journey Map

This is the most commonly used B2B customer journey map that offers a strategic overview of the four main stages of a B2B customer: awareness, decision making, service delivery and feedback, and relationship strengthening.

The current state customer journey map is the best for continuously improving the overall customer experience:

2) Future State Customer Journey Map

While current state maps demonstrate the customer journey as it exists today, future state maps center around what the customer journey should be like in the future, in addition to experiences and reactions.

This is a strategic process that requires a lot of planning and mind mapping on your end, so it’s good to use mind mapping software to make it more efficient and effective. Mapping your ideas and creating detailed flow charts will prove valuable when brainstorming and putting your data to use.

Although data is undoubtedly a vital input, future state journey maps also suggest a fair amount of creative thinking and interpretation:

Future state journey mapping is a valuable approach when your objective is to explore possible customer expectations and create new experiences.

Developing a future customer journey map helps teams align around a common goal. It visualizes what actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers will experience in future interactions with your company.

Based on their current experience, you’ll have a clear picture of where your business fits in. These maps are best suited for illustrating your vision and setting clear, strategic goals.

3) Day-in-the-Life Customer Journey Map

A day-in-the-life map visualizes your customer’s daily routine, such as their interactions with family, commuting, meetings, afternoon coffee, and so on. And it doesn’t matter whether or not these activities are business-related.

However, these events should be organized chronologically. The day-in-the-life map below is relatively straightforward. It highlights the feelings, thoughts, and actions of a frequent business traveler over 12 hours:

This type of customer journey map is excellent for shedding light on what a customer experiences throughout their day. You can use this customer journey map to identify moments in a customer’s day when your product or service will be most valuable.

4) Service Blueprint Customer Journey Map

A service blueprint can complement a classic CJM. If a customer journey map focuses on the customer’s needs, thoughts, and actions, a service blueprint considers the organization’s perspective and its employees.

The map below displays a typical service blueprint: It’s chronological and hierarchical and is divided into four layers — the customer journey, frontstage employee actions, backstage actions, and supporting processes:

Ultimately, service blueprinting helps visualize everything that needs to happen behind the scenes for the customer journey to occur.  

Creating a blueprint can provide a lifeline when making organizational or procedural changes. It can also find solutions to specific roadblocks in the customer journey.

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Collecting Data for Your Customer Journey Map

Pictures without data are just that. But data brings them to life.

Sometimes, data can become convoluted and complex, particularly in B2B markets where tendering, technical product and service requirements often define journeys. To help alleviate this pain, a HubSpot integration, for example, is a great way to channel your customer data into a downloadable and shareable file.

Among other challenges that a CRM platform solves is understanding your customer activity and behavior. Is there a specific touchpoint that everyone seems to pass through before moving on in the customer journey? Analyzing which part of your online marketing campaign or a piece of content has resonated the most with your prospects or clients is integral to your e-commerce metrics.

Your journey mapping will influence your journey analytics across the business. For instance, it will determine what you ask, who you ask, when you ask, and why you ask in your overall customer success program.

Customer journey analytics helps you make informed business decisions because it bases your journey maps on hard evidence rather than a hypothesis. Billions of individual interactions can be captured over time through a myriad of sources like websites, CRM programs, data servers, call center logs, and even IoT devices.

Yet, despite the diversity of data you can harvest, here are two types of data that B2B companies can use to create a customer journey map.

Qualitative Data

Qualitative data covers how your customers think and feel at certain parts of the customer journey and what they’re trying to accomplish — for example, asking your clients questions like, “How satisfied were you? How likely are you to buy again?” Connect with your account managers or customer success champions to get a better understanding of the problems your customers are trying to solve.

Quantitative Data

Alternatively, aside from looking at intent, look at your customers’ actions. This is where you dive into behavioral data — the percentage of your prospects that convert to buyers once they’ve interacted with a touchpoint. Map creation doesn’t have to be overwhelming because you can draw from the experience and material that already exist in your organization to start your planning and begin driving the profit.

Related Content: Buyer’s Journey 101: What Your Email Data Says About Your Customers

Customer Journey Map Data Based on Stages

Breaking down the customer journey by stages, aligning each step with a goal, and reorganizing your touchpoints accordingly are crucial steps towards maximizing your efforts. After all, you should put your customers center stage and offer such a product or service that helps solve their problems.

The Consideration Phase

During this phase, consumers compare and consider different brands based on their reputation, online presence, and other factors. This is how a consumer begins their journey.

• Top of Funnel Content Performance. Conduct keyword research for the top of funnel search terms. To see some of the common questions people ask, use a free tool like Answer the Public or an advanced one such as Semrush. You can then use those questions and search intent to create relevant content for your consideration phase.

Additionally, make sure you take advantage of content heatmaps and event tracking to understand exactly how your prospects are browsing around your website.

• Direct Website Traffic. Measuring direct traffic answers how many people are looking for your brand intentionally. In your website analytics tool, compare your direct traffic number to other traffic sources.

As you comb through relevant data for the consideration phase, assess what your prospects are thinking, feeling, doing, and the touchpoints they experience.

The Evaluation Phase

By this point, your prospects know about the top players in the industry and have completed the initial round of eliminations. Look closely at questions, concerns, or hesitations that customers have about your brand.

• Reviews. Gather reviews from Google, Capterra, G2 Crowd, and other review sites. Group them based on both positive and negative feedback, or according to the customer journey stage they fall under.

• Polls on Product Pages. Ask your prospects if they’d like to access any further information or if they have enough to answer their basic questions. From here, analyze the responses to improve your content, especially regarding benefits your competitors offer.

The Decision-Making Phase

This phase is defined by closing the deal. The prospect has completed their research, has talked to sales or consulted a trusted source, and is now ready to decide.

However, your team shouldn’t assume the situation is irreversible. You can lose a customer at this stage, too.

• Feedback and Surveys. Whether sent through an email or asked directly over the phone, reach out to your newly onboarded users and find out where they first heard about your company or why they chose your product.

According to the Harvard Business Review, “When it comes to service, companies create loyal customers primarily by helping them solve their problems quickly and easily.”

The Post-Purchase Phase (Relationship Strengthening)

This phase is rather critical because it’s time to influence a customer’s experience positively so that they circle back to the consideration or closure stage.

In this stage, the customer expects the brand to deliver on the promise made about the product or service. They’re also highly likely to reach out to customer service or an account manager regularly.

In the post-purchase phase, it’s essential to look for data that shows brand loyalty, or lack thereof.

• Net Promoter Score. Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures how likely your customers are to recommend your brand, demonstrating their customer loyalty on a scale from 1 to 10:

NPS is then calculated by taking the percentage of promoters — those who answered 9 or 10 — and subtracting the percentage of detractors (answers 6 or lower).

• Repeat Purchase Rate. To track if a customer has made any repeat purchase or if there’s an upsell/cross-sell opportunity, set up proper customer and web analytics. For e-commerce, you should look at repeat purchase rate, which is calculated by dividing the total number of customers who have purchased more than once by the total number of customers.

For SaaS and other service companies, look at renewal and upsell rates. To calculate your renewal rate, divide the number of customers who paid their invoices by the total number of customers invoiced, then multiply by 100 to convert that number to a percentage.

• Content Engagement. Review your customer newsletter engagement, time spent on page for returning visitors to your blog, internal website traffic, and exit rate. These metrics demonstrate how your existing customers and visitors engage with your content and where you might be losing them.

Book My Free B2B Marketing Consultation

How to Create a B2B Customer Journey Map

No two B2B customer journeys are alike. Various factors, such as your sales process steps and customer success efforts, will affect the outcome of your journey.

It’s crucial to organize your journey map in defined stages so you can get a complete overview of what’s happening. Your customer journey may have more or fewer stages depending on your customer expectations and the nature of your business.

Using a B2B CJM template such as this one could be helpful to get started:

Define Clear Objectives

Before creating your customer journey map, ask yourself what goals this map is destined to accomplish? What is it about? What experience is it based on?

The goal of your customer journey map for your company is to give you a comprehensive oversight of the journey and steps your customers take in order to achieve one of their goals. These can be to make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, join a loyalty program, and many more. Ultimately, your goal is to use this journey map to create a better customer experience, shorten the sales cycle, and help them achieve their goals faster.

Knowing these answers, you might want to invest in creating a buyer persona. Having a distinct persona helps remind you to direct every phase of your customer journey map towards them.

Related Content: 4 Steps to Discover Your Ideal Buyer Persona for B2B Marketers

Develop Your Personas and Understand Their Goals

Next, conduct your research. The best way to receive valuable customer feedback is through surveys and user testing. It’s worth mentioning that only actual customers or prospects can provide you with accurate information. Based on what you procure from your customer feedback, populate that into your newly created user profiles.

Specify the Touchpoints

Touchpoints are the areas on your website where your customers interact with your business. Based on your research, specify all the touchpoints your customers and prospects are currently using, along with the ones you think they should be using.

Keep in mind that these touchpoints include your website, social media and email, but also your affiliates. Make sure you’re monitoring the performance of all affiliates with affiliate-tracking software that allows you to maximize conversions on other sites and social accounts.

These are all critical steps in developing your customer journey map. Doing so illuminates the path your customers have taken to get where they are now. If they use fewer touchpoints than anticipated, does this mean they are not finding what they need right away and leaving your site early? If they are using more than anticipated, does this mean your website is intricate and requires multiple actions to get to the intended result?

However, your website isn’t the only platform to look at. Consider monitoring your social channels, paid ads, email marketing campaigns, and review sites.

Engage Stakeholders

Involving stakeholders in your customer journey map development can help raise awareness of the project so that people — whether that’s your senior leadership, technical specialists, creative project managers, or front-line employees — get on board with participating. 

However, even though stakeholders are integral to the research, you shouldn’t rely solely on their interviews to create a customer journey map. They understand the domain and perspective on the present situation. They can also advise what roles to add to the user research.

It’s best to create your customer journey map in a workshop setting with all necessary stakeholders to get a unified perspective of what people believe is the case.

Socialize the Map

In most organizations, seeing a comprehensive current customer journey map across organizational silos is eye-opening. Once ready, distribute your journey map to your teams or print it out and put it in shared spaces. Invite people to provide their feedback to make sure it’s a living, breathing document — which brings us to the final step.

Make Changes and Improvements

Once you’ve interpreted your data, make the appropriate changes to your website and other touchpoints. It can include updating your call-to-action or writing longer on-page product copy to emphasize the unique benefits.

These changes should trigger some immediate improvements as they mirror customers’ pain points. Instead of blindly making changes and hoping that they will improve customer experiences, you can feel confident that they will.

Your map should be a constant work-in-progress. Reviewing it monthly or quarterly will help you locate gaps and opportunities for further streamlining your customer journey. Take advantage of your data analytics along with customer feedback to check for any roadblocks.

The process of creating a practical customer journey map is extensive but valuable. To streamline work and improve team collaboration, most businesses opt for online tools with shared access, such as Google Workspace. If you’re working with large quantities of data, using Excel integration with Google Sheets will allow you to automate the process and consolidate several Google sheets into one Excel sheet.

Conclusion

Creating a customer journey map is a “step back” exercise that allows designing truly innovative experiences. It’s highly valuable to engage team members across all departments of your company with its clients and their experience of your brand.

Ultimately, a customer journey map helps you identify your company’s capabilities and uncover what changes need to be made that will allow you to deliver an ideal customer journey, impact revenue, and stand out from the crowd.

Your customers are the greatest advocates of a brand: they tell stories and make recommendations. They have the power to spread enthusiasm and have to be recognized as a core element of long-term strategic growth.

Hopefully you learned how to create a B2B customer journey map! But if you just want an expert B2B agency to do it for you, click here.

The post Tips for Creating a Data-Driven B2B Customer Journey Map appeared first on Single Grain.

However, B2B SaaS companies often make one big mistake when it comes to growing their own businesses: They neglect to market exclusively to B2B audiences, and instead rely heavily on strategies that have been proven to work for B2C SaaS brands.

In this post, we’re going to take a look at everything you need to know about B2B SaaS, including what it is, how it’s different from its B2C counterpart, and how to adjust your marketing efforts accordingly.

What Is B2B SaaS?

SaaS tools are “service as a software.” Rather than purchasing a one-time license for a program that you download onto your computer (like Microsoft Word, for example), you pay a monthly or annual fee to access cloud-based software online through a website or app.

B2B SaaS is a cloud-based tool that is sold on a subscription basis to other businesses, rather than individuals.

Businesses typically use SaaS tools to automate or streamline administrative tasks or to get new functionality, resources and information. Think:

• invoicing software
• inventory management tools
• automated payroll and scheduling systems 
• advanced analytics software 
• project management and collaboration software

Book My Free B2B SaaS Marketing Consultation

B2B SaaS Products vs. B2C SaaS Products

B2B SaaS products are marketed exclusively to businesses, while B2C SaaS products are marketed to consumers.

Let’s look at the popular tool You Need a Budget (YNAB).  It’s designed to help individuals create detailed budgets so that they can allocate funds to certain expenses and know where every penny is going. It’s clearly marketed to individual consumers. Even the site’s graphics and taglines make this clear:

Businesses also need budgeting tools, but YNAB is designed exclusively for individuals, so it doesn’t work well for fluctuating income associated with businesses:

Quickbooks is the B2B equivalent. It’s designed for businesses to use for invoicing, expense tracking, and any other accounting need. It’s better suited to track dramatically fluctuating income and expenses, and it comes with additional features like the ability to track overdue invoices or calculate taxes. This isn’t something B2C software can do.

B2B SaaS products are typically going to be a little more expensive than their B2C counterparts, though this isn’t always the case.

Also, some B2C products may be used by businesses, causing overlap. These include social media publishing tools, graphic design software, and photo editing software like Adobe. There are typically business or “professional” pricing plans available for business audiences on these tools, and their marketing to each audience will look different.

B2B SaaS Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing

B2B SaaS marketing differs from traditional marketing in a number of ways. This is partially because you’re selling a different type of product to a different type of audience.

Most marketing advice, after all, is focused strictly on standard B2C products – like living room rugs, gaming keyboards and suitcases. It makes sense that when you’re trying to sell payroll software to business executives and decision makers that things will be a little different.

B2B SaaS buyers typically do more research and have longer buyer’s journeys than traditional B2C or even standard B2B marketing, and more of that journey involves working with personal sales reps.

A recent study from Gartner found the following about B2B buyers:

• 77% of buyers said their latest purchase was “complex” or “difficult”
• 27% of the buying process is spent researching independently online, 18% is spent researching independently offline, and 17% is spent meeting with potential suppliers

The B2B buyer’s journey is long and winding. It starts with problem identification, before moving onto exploring solutions, determining what they need, and choosing a supplier:

Impulse purchases, in other words, are very low in the B2B SaaS industry. The buyer’s journey is longer and probably more expensive for the business. You’ll need more campaigns, more touch points, and more personal attention during your decision-making process.

That being said, if a customer has signed up for your software, as long as they’re happy with the service, you’ll likely find that B2B SaaS retention rates are higher than industries. One study found that:

• B2C SaaS businesses have an average churn rate of 7.05%, whereas
• B2B SaaS businesses have an average churn rate of only 5%

Once a business has trained its entire team to use a single tool, integrated it with their system, and input all of their information, they’re not going to want to switch. This is particularly true considering that the average buying group is made up to 6-10 workers, so once they agree on a single solution, they’re happy to stick with it.

Book My Free B2B SaaS Marketing Consultation

How Do You Do B2B SaaS Marketing?

In order to compensate for longer buying journeys and the more personalized attention that B2B SaaS buyers need, you’ll need to set up a different sales model.

Here’s how to set up a B2B SaaS sales model:

Connect with Your Target Audience

Use outbound and inbound marketing methods like PPC ads and content marketing to reach high-level decision makers in your target audience. Create messaging that focuses on highlighting the problem that your SaaS can solve:

Learn More: How to Create a Killer SaaS Content Marketing Strategy

Create Detailed Product Pages

Make sure your product pages explain how your software works, why it’s different from your competitors, and how it can help your target audience. Include screenshots or mobile mock-ups that show what your interface looks like.

Offer a Free Consultation

Encourage users to get in touch for a free consultation, an extensive demo, or to sign up for a free trial:

If possible, try to offer credit-card-free trials. This may increase end-to-end conversion rates up to .40% compared to conversion rates of .36% when credit card information is required, and .24% when a payment is required.

Provide an Account Manager

Have a member of your sales team or a dedicated account manager reach out to the customer and set up a phone call to answer any questions they have. Keep the email marketing going, offering a discount on their first year if they purchase upfront. Autoresponders will be key here, but your sales manager should also be following up right before and after the trial ends.

Don’t Forget the Re-Engagement Campaigns

After a client converts, don’t drop them like a hot potato! Continue following up with re-engagement campaigns. Let them know about new features that may encourage them to upgrade to a higher-tiered plan when they roll out.

Learn More: 5 Ways to Re-Engage Those Long-Lost Customers

Scale with Referral Marketing

Turn your attention to scaling with referral marketing. Clients who come from referral marketing typically stay customers longer, and studies have shown that B2B businesses with referrals see a 70% higher conversion rate than their counterparts who don’t.

Set up a referral marketing program, like this one from FreshBooks, that gives both the referrer and the referee a free month if the new client converts, and consider branching out into affiliate marketing, too.

Learn More: 7 Affiliate Marketing Tips from a SaaS Affiliate Manager

B2B SaaS KPIs & Metrics to Keep Your Eye On

Knowing which B2B SaaS metrics to watch is crucial, as it can help you optimize your existing campaigns and know where to start when you decide to create new ones.

Overall, these are the following metrics you’re going to want to keep an eye on to assess your marketing performance and scalability potential:

• Churn rates. This tells you what percentage of your customers who either don’t renew or who cancel their subscription at the end of the membership period. This may be a month or a year, depending on your business model. Churn rates can be calculated by dividing the number of customers who churned during a set period of time by the total number of customers you acquired. Multiply this number by 100 to get the percentage.

• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR). This is the total amount of predictable revenue that your business expects on a monthly basis. It will impact your budget and spending, but it also shows you whether you’re consistently growing or holding steady.
• Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). This tells you what your predictable annual income is that you can expect to receive. It’s incredibly valuable to assess growth over a year-long period.  
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV). Your CLTV tells you how much, on average, each customer is worth to you and how much they’ll spend throughout the entire relationship of your business. A customer who sticks around for two years with a $50 subscription each month isn’t just worth $50; their LTV is $1,200.  
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). You want to know how much it costs you to acquire each new customer. This will ensure that you’re maintaining profitability, and it can help you adjust your budget as necessary or shift your campaigns when needed.  

Dive Deeper:
* Top Marketing KPIs that Every B2B Company Needs to Track
* Top B2B Marketing Mistakes You’re Making (And How to Fix Them!)
* How to Use UX Testing to Improve Your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Top 3 B2B SaaS Companies to Draw Inspiration From

Looking for a little inspiration on how to market your B2B SaaS company? Let’s take a look at three incredible B2B SaaS companies that are at the top of their industries right now.

HubSpot 

HubSpot is a strong tool, offering everything from inbound marketing to sales to analytics to help you drive more conversions. Aside from the fact that the tool is great, their marketing is also on point.

HubSpot’s marketing strategy centers on slowly nurturing potential leads by easing them in. Their content marketing is extraordinary: they’re one of the best industry-leading blogs, which drives in tons of inbound traffic. Even their homepage focuses on the “ease them in” approach. They encourage users to get started for free, and only upgrade as they need to.

Semrush

Semrush is an SEO and site monitoring tools that allows you to conduct market research, keyword research, and even check the quality of your content marketing.

The reason they’re on this list is because they’re always working hard to roll out new features. In the past two years, we’ve gotten their SEO Writing Assistant and the new Market Explorer, both of which are enormous assets to users.

They have strong landing pages dedicated to teaching users about these tools, and they also regularly create content like blog posts and webinars to teach their subscribers and leads how to get the most out of these tools. It’s all about continually offering increasing value and keeping their subscribers engaged.  

Slack

Most businesses and their team members are well aware of Slack by now! The company has skyrocketed in the past few years to become the go-to communication channel for everyone from one-person LLCs to major corporations.

Like HubSpot, Slack starts off with free plans that remain free for an indefinite period of time. Their website does an exceptional job of reassuring users that the tool is free for limited use, while still making sure to highlight features of their paid plans to nurture actual conversions from high-value customers.

Dive Deeper:
* Best SaaS Marketing Agency: Top 5 Choices for 2023
* B2B SEO: How to Rank Your Business Website Higher in Search
* LinkedIn Ads for Enterprise B2B SaaS: The Only Guide You’ll Need

Conclusion

Remember, if you’re a B2B SaaS marketer or business owner trying to increase subscriptions for your software, your entire marketing funnel and all of its content is going to look different compared to a company trying to sell B2C SaaS subscriptions.

Understanding the long, winding buyer’s journey and the KPIs you need to watch for when it comes to B2B SaaS businesses will be key in helping you to shape and optimize your campaigns. 

Want help getting better results for your SaaS business’s marketing? We can help. Click the orange button below to talk to a SaaS lead generation strategist today!

Book My Free B2B SaaS Marketing Consultation

The post What Is B2B SaaS? Everything You Need to Know appeared first on Single Grain.

Couple this with the fact that nearly a third of B2B companies allocate just 5% of their organization’s total budget towards marketing:

The last thing you want is to waste your shoestring marketing budget on making mistakes.

In this post, I’ll list the top B2B marketing mistakes many marketers unwittingly make that are costing their company some serious money — and how to fix them.

TABLE OF CONTENTS: ↓

Top B2B Marketing Mistakes to Avoid in 2023

Here are fifteen amazingly common yet oh-so-costly B2B marketing mistakes you need to avoid.

1) Using Excessive Jargon

When you specifically talk about business-to-business marketing, you may think using jargon freely in your digital marketing collateral — such as blog posts, lead magnets (e-books, white papers, etc.), landing pages, email newsletters, etc. — is all well and good.

Sure, in the right context and to some extent using jargon is reasonable and necessary. It shows that your company is knowledgeable in its niche and knows its stuff.  People who don’t really know what they’re talking about tend to use vague and general wording. So using specialized language helps exude brand authority and may even help you rank for specific keywords.

But using too much jargon can put off your audience as they may have a hard time understanding what you’re saying, or your content might overwhelm them rather than help them.

The Fix: Take the time to get to know your target audience and write content or copy accordingly. When you research your audience well, you can tailor your writing to better resonate with them. In other words, write the way they write.

Always keep your prospects’ level of understanding and knowledge about your niche in mind, and then deliver information using words that are relevant and easy to understand.

Book My Free B2B Marketing Consultation

2) Making It all about Your Company

This is another huge copywriting-related marketing mistake that’s fairly rampant in the B2B space.

Many B2B marketers focus heavily on boasting about how great their product or service is. While it’s obviously a big boon to have a superior product or service…

Your prospects don’t want to hear about your greatness. They want to know what’s in it for them.

How does your offering provide value, solve their problem or make their company more money? Do you offer a free, feature-rich trial? These are the questions they care about when they visit your business website.

So if your marketing copy is full of phrases like “our service is the best in the industry and better than everyone else” rather than “our tools help you streamline internal workflows, send invoices with ease, and improve your teams’ productivity,” you’re making a huge B2B marketing mistake.

The Fix: Again, it’s all about audience research and shifting your focus. Look at your website and its copy from the audience’s perspective. Pretend you know nothing about your product as you read the site descriptions. Are you addressing the user’s pain points? If not, revise your text to prove to your visitors how your business benefits them. 

Check out Ahrefs’ homepage title to see how it’s done:

3) Not Using Responsive Design

Mobile accounts for over half of web traffic worldwide: In the first quarter of 2023, mobile devices (and that’s excluding tablets) generated 54.8% of global website traffic, and has consistently hovered around the 50% mark since the beginning of 2017.

Plus, Google’s mobile-first indexing means the mobile (not the desktop) version of your website is the benchmark for how Google indexes your website and determines your rankings. What’s more, 79% of people say they’re more likely to revisit and share a mobile site if it is easy to use:

So not using a responsive design — which enables you to deliver the same content that adjusts to the user’s device size and shape — is a dire mistake that’ll seriously hurt your site’s user experience and rankings.

The Fix: Prioritize the mobile experience — which means using a responsive design. Furthermore, here are a few best practices to ensure a mobile-friendly experience:

• Minimize the amount of typing needed by merging multiple form fields into a single field, allowing autofill wherever possible, and the option to connect existing accounts (like Facebook, Google or Twitter) as opposed to signing up from scratch.
• Ensure optimal mobile site speed by compressing images, minifying the code, avoiding unnecessary redirects, and enabling browser caching and compression.
• Ditch the navbar and opt for a hamburger menu, which turns your space-hungry navbar into an expandable menu.
• Optimize your content layout for the “thumb zone,” which is the easy-to-reach area of the screen using the thumb while holding the device with one hand:

4) Forgetting to Run Split Tests for Improvement

How do you improve something? By testing it and analyzing the results. The same applies to B2B marketing.

For instance, the first draft of your landing page copy is usually never the best-performing one. If you test a few versions of the copy over a couple weeks, you’ll likely reach a variation that converts much higher than the original.

Split testing isn’t just useful for landing pages. It’s essential for driving better results in various aspects of all your marketing campaigns, including but not limited to:

• SEO elements like title tags and meta descriptions
• Social media captions and formats
• Email subject lines, copy and visuals
• Ad copy and visuals
• CTA buttons

The Fix: Keep split testing the critical areas of your campaigns. Evaluate whether the new version converts better (and why). It’s the only way you can turn so-so results into incredible results.

If you’re wondering, “where do I even begin?” here’s the PIE framework to prioritize which pages to test and in which order:

• Potential: What’s the potential for a conversion rate bump on the page? Consider prioritizing your worst performers.
• Importance: How valuable is the traffic to this page? Consider pages with the most volume and the costliest traffic.
• Ease: How difficult will it be to implement a test on this page or template? The lesser time and effort you need to invest for equivalent returns, the better.

5) Not Leveraging Calls to Action (CTA)

If you haven’t placed calls to action buttons on your site or landing pages, it’s kind of like going on a date with someone and then at the end just sort of quietly walking away instead of clearly asking them for a second date. If you don’t ask, they may just shrug their shoulders and walk away, too.

On the other hand, maybe you are using calls to action everywhere — on your website, social media captions, landing pages, and so on. But are your CTAs doing the job?

Essentially, CTAs provide your audience with a clear direction to the next step once they’re done consuming your content. They lead your audience to the next stage of the buyer’s journey.

Whether a visitor is browsing your website or looking at your social media ad, you want to leverage carefully crafted CTAs to guide them to take specific actions and eventually turn them into leads for your brand.

The Fix: Create calls to action that clearly guide your audience. Here are a few best practices to craft high-converting CTAs:

• Ensure that the CTA button stands out from other elements and is instantly visible.
• Have some negative space around the button so you don’t crowd it and confuse the site visitor.
• Use a color that aligns with your branding and contrasts with the rest of the page.
• Rather than vague CTA copy like “Click Here” or “Submit,” go for descriptive, benefit-oriented copy with action verbs like “Get Your Free Guide” or “Start Your Free Trial.”

See the orange CTA button in the Ahrefs’ example in #2 above? The color, copy and size of the CTA are all done right. Slack is another excellent example of elegant CTAs:

6) Ignoring Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

71% of B2B researchers begin their research with generic Google searches, and 61% of B2B decision-makers start the decision-making process with a web search.

All this is to say just how crucial it is for your B2B business website to rank on the first page of Google search. Ignoring SEO means a ton of lost traffic and leads. And besides more traffic and leads, the higher your website ranks on Google, the better your brand awareness and authority, plain and simple.

That’s because when someone finds your business organically (for relevant non-branded keywords), they’ll be able to appreciate the fact that your company is authoritative enough to be ranking so high. They’ll be more likely to enter your sales funnel because they know that if you’re ranking for relevant keywords in a competitive space, your offerings must be truly valuable.

I can’t stress this enough: focusing on SEO and inbound marketing is vital for your B2B business.

The Fix: Begin with the basics. Tackle your website’s on-page SEO, which involves optimizing:

• Page titles, meta descriptions, and URLs for the right keywords.
• Images for file size (compression) and relevant, descriptive alt text.
• Page load speed, by reducing redirects, enabling caching, minifying the code, etc. Use PageSpeed Insights to get exact recommendations on how to improve your site speed.
• Content such as your blog posts for structure, comprehensiveness, keywords, and internal links.

Next, build a backlink strategy to generate backlinks from high-quality and authoritative websites via tactics like guest posting. Quality backlinks play a huge role in achieving first-page rankings. But there’s a lot more to SEO, and it’s an ever-evolving field with Google refining its AI search algorithm each year.

Because it can be a little bit overwhelming, it’s not a bad idea to invest in a specialist SEO agency that takes care of your website’s on-page, off-page, and technical SEO needs.

Check out this 10-minute video on How to Get More Backlinks and Traffic for Your Site (The Right Way!):

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7) Not Tracking Your Metrics

As the renowned management consultant and author Peter Drucker correctly said:

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

This is especially true for B2B marketing success.

Metrics help you get a clear understanding of how well your campaigns are performing, whether you’re hitting your desired goals, and if you need to change something to avoid wasting your limited marketing budget on campaigns that aren’t bringing in the right leads.

The Fix: Start tracking your metrics regularly. Define your KPIs for each marketing channel (search, social, paid, etc.) and use analytics tools to stay on top of your campaigns’ performance.

For example, you can use Google Analytics to track your website’s performance goals regarding the traffic it brings, the average conversion rate, bounce rate, etc.:

Likewise, use built-in analytics that major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter provide to track engagement metrics and optimize your campaigns.

This table lists the top B2B business KPIs you should be tracking:

Dive Deeper:
* 9 Mission-Critical Lead Generation Metrics You Need to Track
* Everything You Need to Know About B2B Performance Metrics
* Top Marketing KPIs that Every B2B Company Needs to Track

8) Not Understanding Your Clients

B2B or B2C — regardless of who you’re marketing to, always take the time to understand your clients.

A common mistake B2B marketers make is assuming that because B2B companies acquire and work with fewer clients than B2C businesses, all these customers can be treated the same.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t provide your customers with an equal quality of service. It just means that every customer or lead is different and should be marketed to differently.

The Fix: Segment your target customer base. Your segmentation could be based on specific traits such as company size, niche, location, etc. Doing so lets you create a bespoke marketing strategy that’s way more relevant to individual segments.

You likely already have a lot of client data. Clean it up to make it more valuable.

For example, if your company provides video conferencing software, your data may be centered around industries that you’ve had the most success in, such as SaaS enterprises. After cleaning up your data, you might learn that one of your clients uses your software for its visually challenged employee program. This information opens up a whole new market for you to tap into.

Ideally, if you’re looking at enterprise clients, account-based marketing is the right way to go about B2B marketing.

Source

9) Not Using Technology Properly

You’re well aware that to thrive as a business today, you need to go all-in on digital. But with so many great tools and software available, digital can be chaotic.

So, you need a digital strategy — something structured (yet agile) that serves as a reliable roadmap to ensure that you’re investing in the right tools and processes that help keep your business on track for greater performance.

Furthermore, it’s one thing to invest in tools and tech, and entirely another to make sure that all your team members know how to use them to their fullest capabilities.

The Fix: Before jumping in and buying the latest technology, understand how your team will use the tool to its fullest (aka digital adoption), how it will fit into your current workflow and ecosystem, and how the tool will positively impact your marketing ROI. Otherwise, you risk wasting your budget or, worse, it may even mess up your existing marketing performance.

Book My Free B2B Marketing Consultation

10) Not Cleaning Up Your Database

As touched upon a couple of points back, you already have a lot of customer and competitor data, and if you wish for it to be truly useful, you have to clean it up regularly.

Understandably, taking the time to clean your database is like eating your veggies — you know it’s a good thing to do but don’t really want to do it.

Regardless, thanks to the pace of job-hopping these days, your B2B data has a half-life of about 18 months. And after two years, only 45% of your B2B database is still valid:

Here’s what database half-life means for any given B2B prospect list:

The Fix: Customer data from surveys, interviews and research lies at the heart of all your marketing channels and campaigns. Using dirty data (that’s inaccurate, incomplete or obsolete) will do your B2B marketing more harm than good. Be sure to clean up your database software and CRM every 6-12 months, so it reflects the latest data, thus making your marketing relevant and effective.

11) Neglecting Best Practices in Organic or Paid Search

Specifically, this is a big mistake in terms of failing to understand the search intent of your audience. There are three basic types of search queries:

• Informational: Searches performed to answer questions or learn something, with keywords revolving around “how-to,” “what,” “why,” etc.
• Navigational: Searches performed to locate a specific website with branded keywords.
• Transactional: Searches performed to buy something, with keywords revolving around “buy,” “discount” or specific product names.

Also, some people have the intention to buy, not immediately but in the near future, and use Google for research. For example, they might be researching which enterprise SEO software is the “best”. These people have transactional intent but need some more time to be convinced.

The Fix: Don’t forget search intent when keyword optimizing your SEM (organic and paid) campaigns. To rank your blog content, it should contain keywords (primary, LSI, and long-tail) that satisfy the informational/educational intent of your B2B audience (C-level executives, decision-makers, market researchers):

On the other hand, your paid campaigns should be optimized for the transactional intent, with site links to drive people to different pages on your website and show clear benefits of your product. Check out Hootsuite’s (a B2B social media toolkit) PPC ad example below — see the headline, meta copy, and benefit-oriented site links.

12) Using Social Media Poorly

The importance of social media marketing, be it B2B or B2C, needs no introduction. Social media is one of the most effective channels to connect with your potential customers, nurture leads, build brand awareness and authority, and establish meaningful relationships with existing customers.

As a business, social media enables you to converse with your customers in a more “human” and direct way. But a common and potentially off-putting mistake many B2B marketers make is seeing social media as a channel to simply broadcast their promotional messages and nothing more.

The Fix: Drop the corporate jargon (see mistake #1 above!) and opt for an informal and genuine way of social engagement. Respond to comments and queries in a conversational way, using emojis to talk like an individual with a personality (aka your brand voice).

Post helpful content that benefits your followers. Ask them what they want from you, content- or product-wise. Don’t go on and on about your product’s bells and whistles. Instead, strive to spark two-way communication and make connections rather than merely pushing your products.

Here’s an example from Hootsuite on Twitter:

13) Not Aligning Content Assets to the Sales Funnel

Life as a B2B marketer would be so much easier if your prospects converted on their first visit to your website. Alas, that’s rarely the case. In real life, your prospects bounce around multiple content assets on several sites before moving from one stage of the sales funnel to the next.

So if you’re not aligning your content to the sales funnel, you’re essentially creating friction in lead generation, nurturing, and conversion.

The Fix: Audit your content and try to map content assets to specific stages of the funnel:

For example, use that case study that’s rarely downloaded as an intro to a comprehensive blog post. Share customer stories in your B2B email newsletter to nudge subscribers to consider purchasing. Use content upgrades (such as a PDF checklist, e-book, etc.) on your blog to turn visitors into leads:

The idea is to leverage and repurpose your content assets in a way that facilitates a smooth transition from one stage of the sales funnel to the next.

14) Not Aligning Sales and Marketing

While each has different intermediate purposes, you could almost say that sales and marketing are two sides of the same coin, as the end goal is to increase your revenue and retention:

So if your sales and marketing teams are working in silos, rather than synergistically, this is another big mistake that you’ll need to fix.

The Fix: Here are eight steps you can take to align your sales and marketing efforts:

• Establish a common customer persona
• Build a single, unified customer journey
• Define what a marketing qualified lead (MQL) is and when to hand it over to sales
• Measure the same high-level KPIs (revenue, CLV, CAC, etc.)
• Gather customer feedback to revamp marketing strategy and sales messaging
• Ensure that you have consistent messaging across all touchpoints of the funnel
• Let the marketing team provide the assets for every sales stage
• Once a customer is acquired, marketing and sales must team up to maximize retention

Book My Free B2B Marketing Consultation

Conclusion: Make no Mistake

Working on a tight marketing budget and in a competitive landscape, mistakes in your B2B marketing strategy can have a serious impact on your efforts to build a steady stream of leads and surpass the competition.

So make it a point to avoid these top B2B marketing mistakes in your future campaigns so that you can see bigger and better results!

Check out this 3-minute video to quickly learn 4 Simple Ways to Crush B2B Marketing:

The post Top B2B Marketing Mistakes You’re Making (And How to Fix Them!) appeared first on Single Grain.