Digital Marketing: The Practical Guide to Bootstrap Your B2B Startup
You have a great product with smart engineers and sales reps that can close a deal, but you don’t know how to promote your solution?
Forget about PR agencies, cold calling, mass emailing campaigns… they are money pits and produce low return on investment.
What you need is a digital Marketing strategy! Following the steps and principles below will help you jumpstart your business:
I/ Strong Website: Simple, Beautiful, Focused
Your website is often the first thing your prospects will see about your business so you need to make sure you build a website that conveys the right message about your product.
1- Think Mobile
We don’t say it enough Mobile is the Internet ! So making sure your site is fully Responsive is a MUST nowadays. Develop your Website for and tested on Mobile.
2- Talk Business
The temptation for a tech startup is to overload your content with all technical details i.e features, benchmark results, etc. This will make you feel good and proud about your technology but it’s unlikely to drive serious leads! Instead, think Business added values and try to back them up with business metrics and customer references.
3- Keep web expertise
If you have no clue on how to start your new website, it might be a good idea to use an external web designer/developer so you get a beautiful professional looking website. But If you externalize your website realization, make sure your website is made using a CMS framework so you can easily update it. You will also need some in-house web development knowledge to fully leverage your online presence.
4- Hurl your URL
In sections below, we will talk about the online approach to driving traffic to your website, but don’t forget to also promote your website on all your offline supports: business cards, marketing collaterals, flyers, etc. Yes, you can also build your online presence with offline strategies!
II/ Content is King, Distribution is Queen
1- Content / Content / Content
Content is the vehicle for conveying your brand’s message and in order to build the right content you need to think about fishing not hunting. You need to listen to your industry challenges, customer needs and wants and engage the conversation using the right baits.
Quality content means bringing value to your particular client base. Educate your clients, show them best practice, tell them what to look out for, give them valuable tips on how to achieve success, demonstrate how you’ve helped others in their shoes; answer their problems, open their eyes.
With good content you will increase your brand awareness and authority in a saturated market, which then has the potential to generate new leads and increase sales as more consumers become exposed to the brand.
The tools for content marketing include, for example, whitepapers, infographics, ebooks and blogs.
2- Distribution – Pick your media
Once you have created your content, you need to seed it. Nowadays, ideas spread online and through social media. Hence you should concentrate your marketing efforts on these channels and pick the right social media for your targeted audience. If you are a B2B business, you should focus on Twitter and Linkedin.
“Advertising is no longer about blasting the most messages to the most people. Instead, it s about this: Ideas that spread, win” – Seth Godin, speaking at IABB Mixx Conference in New York
III/ Generate leads…. QUALIFIED leads
1- Inbound
As a CEO / business owner, you may not always realize that the most important part of your business website is actually what you don’t see.
Firstly, your content must be friendly to both your customers and search engines. You can have the best-looking website if no one can find you, you won’t go far.
Attracting people to your website is not easy: great/shareable content is key but there are many other thinks to pay attention to: performance, usability, choice of keywords, keyword density, use of meta tags for search engine, backlinks, etc. Google search uses more than 200 criteria to rank websites.
Check your Alexa Ranking for a reality check about your audience – Anything above 2,000,000 (or above 100,000 if your product is self-serve) means you seriously need the help of a digital marketer to apply SEO techniques!
Secondly, you need to guide your customers through a marketing funnel. This starts with clear Call-to-Actions on each of your pages and encouraging visitors to get in touch which you – e.g Contact Us, Get a Quote, Request a Demo, etc… The idea is to collect information from your visitors directly – e.g email, company name, telephone, and indirectly – e.g which page they visited, where they clicked… that you can then leverage and transmit to your sales team.
2- Outbound
In any business — more so for a startup with limited resources — you can’t expect customers to find you even with the best inbound strategies as discussed above. You need to find them where there are and when they need you. For B2B businesses, forget about massive email campaigns and cold callings. These are old marketing techniques that are no longer efficient.
Attending trade shows is still a very efficient way to generate lot of leads but with limited resources (money and people) you can’t join all the events relevant to your business… well with web technologies and social media, you can still get involved. Here is how:
- Create web content dedicated to events relevant to your business.
- Follow each event #hashtags and engage the conversation promoting your content.
In addition to virtually attend events, you need to continuously promote your content on Twitter with #hashtag used in your industry. Also find and get involved in LinkedIn groups.
Being active on the right online media for your business will help you develop thought leadership, increase your brand recognition, and eventually generate leads.
Finally leveraging targeted researches on social networks, you can find a LOT of leads that are highly relevant for your business and reach out to them directly on social media or even use classic email campaigns. While contacting them, keep your message succinct, personalized and explain the value you will bring.
For more information about these strategies and how they can be applied to generate leads for your business, feel free to contact us!
