Did you know that the average B2B marketing budget is roughly 11.7% of the total company-wide budget? This percentage had decreased from June 2020, when the average budget was 12.6%.
With marketing budgets fluctuating and B2B brands allowing more flexibility and creativity within their marketing strategy, the real question is, what should you spend your 2022 marketing budget on?
We have some tried and tested recommendations that have taken our B2B marketing strategy to the next level, and we hope you can do the same for yours.
Although we all know social media is a great way to connect with your audience as a B2C brand, did you know it’s just as valuable in the B2B world? In fact, 31% of B2B professionals stated that social selling has allowed them to build deeper relationships with clients.
By building these relationships, you can become a trusted brand within your space and speed up the 6-12 month B2B sale cycle.
How? Well, because the foundation of your relationship with a potential prospect would already exist, all you would have to do is wait for them to need your services, and when they do, you’ll be at the top of their minds.
So, the next question is, where do you start?
You do not want to spread yourself too thin and take over every social media platform. A good starting point is looking into where your target audience comes from and investing in one social media platform at a time.
All brands are unique, however most B2B brands benefit from having a strong LinkedIn presence.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, LinkedIn is the most popular and result-driven organic social media platform. It is in the top-three players in the B2B digital advertising space, and nearly 50% of social traffic to B2B websites comes from LinkedIn.
This popular platform allows B2B brands to share content, directly engage with their audiences, and recruit worldwide talent.
Although creating a LinkedIn account is free, there is a fee depending on the benefits you want to get out of it. You can see more information here.
We also recommend looking into platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. These are also brilliant for engaging with your audience, bringing your community together and building relationships with potential prospects.
Similarly to social selling, investing in your senior leaders can be extremely beneficial to your brand as it allows you to build relationships with your target audience and add credibility to your offering.
On average, senior leaders and employees have 10x more followers than their company’s social media accounts. This is especially true for SMEs as their founders often spend more time fine-tuning their personal profiles than their companies.
Personal branding will help you reach a wider audience and build meaningful relationships with potential prospects. So, when or if they are ready to transform into leads, your brand is at the forefront of their mind.
Again similarly to social selling, there are numerous platforms senior leaders can use to connect with prospects. Research shows that 96% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to help push their personal brand further.
However, you don’t have to stop there. You can also use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or even Instagram to direct your audience to your brand's page.
If the pandemic taught the B2B sector one thing, it's the power to serve and adapt your offerings to clients instead of hard-selling to them.
Investing in a content marketing agency or content team is a great way to create awareness of your brand, build relationships with your target audience by becoming a thought leader and create content for each stage of the sales funnel.
Whether you’re searching for a B2B content marketing specialist or you want to build your own content marketing team, here are five key factors you must consider.
If they can confidently deliver all 5, you will have a content marketing strategy that will generate leads, drive organic traffic and boost revenue.
At CopyHouse, we specialise in breaking down complex information and transforming it into digestible content that captivates readers.
From our thorough brand workshops to our expert long-form content and content design services, our specialist team ensures all of our technology and FinTech clients have a seamless experience and see visible results.
Due to the pandemic, we’ve seen events go from in-person to online, and now to hybrid events.
Regardless of what style you feel is most suitable for your brand, events are a staple marketing point that you must include in your strategy to help you build relationships and get your name out there.
At CopyHouse, we have launched two successful monthly webinars — CopyHouse TechTalks and Business Bites. We have also taken part in numerous industry events and this has enabled us to grow our brand, build meaningful relationships and show others that we are experts within our field.
For online events, there are several platforms you can invest in. These include Zoom, EventBrite, StreamYard and LiveStorm.
Before investing in a platform, make sure you research its benefits and drawbacks. Some are brilliant for catering large scale events and others are better for smaller events or live streams. The event platform you invest your marketing budget on should suit what types of events you want to host.
I know what you’re thinking and the answer is no, artificial intelligence software will not replace your marketing team. However, it will help boost productivity by removing those mundane tasks that everyone dreads.
This will help you and your team free up time and focus on the more creative digital marketing ideas that require a human touch.
Here are some AI tools we recommend that will upscale your marketing team’s efforts.
Proofreading is made much easier with the help of Grammarly. Grammarly allows you to speed up the proofreading process by pointing out grammatical errors or highlighting information that may not make sense.
It’s also a great tool that can be used to reshuffle sentences and add some character to your content.
However, with that said, Grammarly should not be solely relied upon. As we all know, AI isn’t perfect, and it’s definitely far from being human. So, when it comes to perfecting the content's tone of voice or focusing on empathy, Grammarly may struggle. This is where a brilliant copywriter is needed to perfect the content and bring it to life.
Otter.ai is a transcription service tool that creates brilliant transcripts of meetings, events, interviews, etc. These are then editable, shareable, accessible and secure. With the help of Otter.ai, you can say goodbye to the long hours spent pausing videos and writing notes.
Similarly to Grammarly, there will always be one or two errors made when using Otter.ai. For example, a brand's name can be taken out of context – CopyHouse has been called Coffee House one too many times. Regardless, Otter.ai is still phenomenal and saves a lot of time.
HubSpot is a CRM software designed to help brands market and sell more effectively. They use a ton of AI technology to help their clients with their marketing.
HubSpot uses AI to clean up data and help brands better manage their contacts across all marketing and sales channels. They also use AI to help marketers optimise their content, and they use AI to give marketing and sales teams easier, better and faster ways to qualify and close leads.
HubSpot makes marketers' lives much easier as their technology can filter through data and create quick results.
Semrush is an online visibility management and content marketing platform that helps companies of all sizes optimise their visibility across numerous channels and create engaging content for their users.
According to The Office of National Statistics, roughly 83.4% of businesses have their own website. This means that each business aims to reach its target audience through search engines and organic traffic.
However, this will only be made possible if they rank high on search engines for particular keywords. That's where Semrush comes in. Semrush has an extensive database and uses AI technology to shuffle through data and present what keywords will allow landing pages and websites to rank higher on search engines.
Semrush also shows how to best optimise your website to ensure you get noticed by your target audience and generate organic traffic.
By using Semrush, you take out the hours that go into searching and shuffling through data.
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