Inbound marketing is about sharing something high-value that resonates with your audience and drives customers to your business. It places focus on creating useful content instead of simply advertising your brand with the purpose of building greater credibility, trust, and loyalty.
This especially matters in the B2B, where the buyer journey tends to be much more complex. The majority of B2B buyers do a lot of research before even speaking to a sales rep. The core things they seek are expertise, transparency, and long-term value, which is why value-focused inbound marketing B2B plays an important role in attracting them.
In short, inbound marketing builds credibility and trust through high-quality content that addresses the questions and pain points your prospects have in their research. Now, we are going to tell you about the key tactics to implement in your strategy to make the most out of it.
B2B Content Marketing
Content serves as the core pillar of every inbound marketing strategy. It serves every stage of the buyer’s journey—from the moment they explore a problem, they have to compare available solutions and decide to buy. At the same time, good content establishes your visibility in the industry, signals expertise, engages prospects, and generates trust. Hence, good content marketing should lie at the heart of your inbound strategy.
The core elements of a B2B content plan should be as follows:
SEO
Search engine optimization is pivotal in B2B marketing as it helps establish brand discoverability. When done right, SEO can ensure that potential customers easily explore you and your content on the web organically. Besides, a high unpaid position in Google is a big signal of relevance, credibility, and trust, which all matter in a B2B buyer journey.
To make your brand noticeable in organic search, you need to start by selecting the right keywords and aligning them with different parts of your funnel:
Top of the funnel: Keywords with a broad coverage and an informative character. These can include definitions, questions, etc.
Middle of the funnel: Keywords with more specific terms that indicate a higher level of prospects’ interest in a specific solution. These can include product and service names, comparisons of different solutions, etc.
Bottom of the funnel: Keywords that have a transactional intent. These can include formulations with words like “price”, “buy,” etc.
Leverage reliable tools to research relevant keywords for your brand and use them to optimize on-page elements, including your URLs, headings, subheadings, content body, and meta titles and descriptions. Also, focus on generating top-notch optimized content aligned with every stage of your funnel.
After on-page optimization is done, set up ongoing result tracking. Equip yourself with a tool that will let you track your positions in search engine result pages (SERPs), like the rank tracker tool by SE Ranking. This tool will help you see how high you appear in a search for your target keywords and identify areas for improvement in your SEO efforts.
UGC
In addition to SEO, you should implement a UGC tactic to achieve success in inbound marketing. UGC, which stands for user-generated content, helps build trust, credibility, and transparency. It demonstrates that your business has real-life advocates who stand by it. Besides, it lets your prospects see the value and experiences your existing customers received from you, which can greatly impact their buying decisions.
To leverage this tactic, follow these tips:
Establish connections with your customers and consistently interact with them.
Encourage users to share their stories about your brand.
Offer incentives to reward your clients for creating content for you.
Create hashtag campaigns or contests to encourage more UGC content, for example, how Apple did with their “Shot on iPhone” campaign.
Share the content your clients create on your website and social media.
Creative Design
Although often underrated, creativity and design also play a massive role in B2B marketing. When it stands out from the crowd, your design doesn’t only capture prospects’ attention but also shows your business’s commitment to detail. When it’s consistent across all your sources, it also contributes to branding and recognition.
Finally, thoughtful design of your pages, media, and marketing materials can help you create a visual hierarchy and drive the audience’s attention to the most important things, such as your values, benefits, features, etc. So don’t neglect its importance and leverage creative design and visual marketing to look professional and appealing to potential buyers.
Guest Blogging
Guest posting is another content strategy that B2B brands can benefit from. First, it helps you boost your outreach to the audiences of the third-party sites you publish on. Secondly, it helps you earn backlinks, which will boost your rankings and brand awareness. Lastly, if you guest blog on reputable sites, it will signal your credibility and trust.
To gain these benefits, explore reputable sites that you want to post on and start creating narrow-focused guest blogs that bring actual value to users.
Testimonials and Case Studies
Testimonials tell prospects about your expertise and ability to deliver on the promises you make. They also highlight the pain points your business addresses and the customer experience you provide and signal your credibility. Hence, they matter a lot in B2B marketing.
Case studies act similarly to testimonials while also offering rough numbers that indicate the gain and value existing customers receive from your product or service. By combining client testimonials and case studies, you can stand out from the competition and drive more clients. So be sure to make them a part of your strategy.
B2B Social Media Marketing
According to the 2024 B2B Marketing Benchmark report, B2B strategies should now rely on a blend of traditional and modern channels to deliver content that resonates with their audience. In addition to old information delivery channels like websites, blogs, and email that still work, modern businesses also have to leverage social media, which became the top channel in 2024 (75%).
The same report emphasizes the importance of integrating visual social media copy, such as videos, images, and infographics, which are shown to generate more than 50% more engagement.
Here’s an overview of the key practices you should integrate into your inbound strategy to gain benefits from social media:
Influencer marketing. Partnering with leaders of thought and influencers has been shown to bring multiple benefits to B2B brands by boosting awareness, generating engagement, and strengthening credibility. However, a typical influencer in B2B is somewhat different from B2C—often, they aren’t people with millions of followers but rather people known in their industry as proven experts. You can partner with them to co-create content or invite them as expert speakers to offline and online events.
Video content. It’s no secret that the abundance of word-based information on the web has turned modern audiences into skimmers. They have shorter attention spans and consume loads of content by simply skimming through it. In a world like this, delivering your brand messaging can be much harder, especially for B2B prospects who tend to do a lot of research before they decide to buy.
Besides, now, 83% of people prefer watching videos instead of consuming text-based information. Leveraging videos in your social media efforts can help you respond to audience preferences while also boosting brand awareness, improving ROI and sales, and helping your prospects understand your products or services better.
Surveys, podcasts, virtual events, etc. Lastly, to make your social media efforts even more effective, it’s important to use other opportunities offered by such networks. For example:
Social media surveys give you a meaningful way to interact with your audience and learn more about their preferences.
Podcasts are great for reaching highly targeted prospects and having a “conversation” with them, which can build trust in a way that no other form of content can offer.
Virtual events like webinars can help you expand your outreach globally, receive valuable participant data for analytics, deliver even more value to your potential buyers, and boost lead generation.
Additional Tips for Your Strategy
Now that you have the foundation of your inbound strategy let us give you a few extra tips for success:
Map your customer journeys and analyze them to know how your prospects behave and what they’re interested in at every stage of the funnel. Use this knowledge to refocus your inbound strategy and tap into the specific needs of your audience at every stage of the journey to increase conversions.
Leverage marketing automation software to ensure greater efficiency and productivity of your operations and scale your business.
Use CRM. A good CRM platform gives B2B businesses better visibility into their clients and sales pipelines. Using it can help you engage with your customers proactively, provide greater personalization, and detect opportunities for upselling or cross-selling.
Leverage email marketing to build and maintain strong relationships with your clients. Email helps you deliver valuable insights, news, updates, and offers to keep prospects and customers engaged and ensure greater retention.
Leverage AI chatbots to transform the way you generate leads. Chatbots give you a unique opportunity to automate your engagement with prospects and clients. You can use them for lead qualification and follow-up processes to capture more leads and ultimately improve their quality.
Key Takeaways
Everything discussed in this guide brings us to a logical conclusion that inbound marketing takes a strong position in B2B business. It helps tap into the primary needs and expectations of your target audiences, such as transparency, expertise, and long-term value.
The two primary marketing areas you want to cover to make the most out of your inbound efforts include:
Content marketing
Social media marketing
Currently, these two mediums are shown to offer the most benefits to the B2B sector. To leverage them, your brand needs to take a holistic approach and combine traditional tactics with modern approaches. Namely, the core things you want to focus on in your efforts include:
SEO
UGC
Creative Design
Guest blogging
Testimonials and case studies
Influencer marketing
Video content
Surveys, podcasts, virtual events, etc.
A combination of these best practices, along with additional efforts, such as automation, CRM usage, email marketing, and others, should help you boost your brand awareness and capture more prospects. So don’t hesitate to start using these tips now.