Let’s face it: not every B2B business is ready or mature for digital marketing, especially when they want to generate leads.
No? But I have a website! And social media presence!
That’s a start. But that doesn’t mean you are ready. There are various phases of digital marketing that a company can be in, which further dictates the strategy adopted.
But first, let’s get to the heart of your approach:
- Do you want to spend money on ads to keep the traffic to your website up, so you get a good number of leads?
- Do you want people to come to your website, and truly understand the value you deliver and then proceed to buy from you?
We come across companies who want the first approach, mostly because they have some funding or budgets. At the time when they are flush with funds, they are not terribly bothered about what is going on, truly going on at the website. Get the traffic, get the leads.
Get the picture?
The second approach is a long haul. It is like coaxing your website to unveil its true potential. And the coy thing that it is, it is painstaking. Who would want that, right!
Wrong.
Here’s a clue: “A majority of the leads that convert into deals for us are those that come organically from the website,’ said the CEO of a company to us recently. We handle the digital marketing for this company, which has seen over three years of consistent, continuous effort.
Including steady ad campaigns.
Today, the company enjoys near consistent leads, often more than their sales team can handle.
It takes time to get there, and a lot of effort, hits and misses. And it’s not simply about generating leads. The organization also has to be ready to handle them appropriately.
So as the company grows, the company also goes through various phases of digital marketing, and each phase requires a different strategy.
Here’s Niswey’s version of these phases of digital marketing.
Phase 1: Kickstarter
It is not enough to have a site with some SEO done. You need these too:
– Enough useful and relevant content for the target audience to browse and download
– On page SEO done in consultation with you, in line with your business focus and objectives
– A good user experience (UX) for the target audience
That doesn’t sound a lot. But this can take anywhere between a few weeks to a few months to make this happen, depending on your resources.
You could run ads while all this happens, but without content and a good UX, chances are it may not be the most optimized way of spending your marketing money. So a judicious spend is recommended.
Phase 2: Accelerator
Once your base hygiene is done–content, SEO, UX–you are ready to increase the momentum. You want more people to visit your site. Your strategy will now be to press the accelerator on social updates and advertising. Traffic will increase, you will have more data to work with, and you can start taking serious look at the various analytics. Who is coming to your website? What do they do? How much time do they spend? Are they leads? What are their other interest areas? What is the bounce rate? And so on.
Along side you will learn the robustness of your CRM and sales team to be able to handle the leads being generated.
You will now know what metrics to focus on which matter to your business goals. What is the site generating now and how much do you need to generate, in a specific timeframe?
You can now firm up your strategy on what new content needs to be created on an ongoing basis. Because the target audience wants to know about ways of solving their challenges.
How often do you need to create content? Can you now have a more focused email marketing strategy? You can now increase the pace of each aspect of your digital marketing.
You can work with tools to enable you to automate some of the tasks and get better insights into the data.
Phase 3: Jet Setter
By now your digital marketing is giving you the results in the direction of business goals.
Your business has been strengthened for more sales and delivery. Now you are ready to get more leads or sales from the website. And you can easily consider if you should now move to a marketing automation platform to optimize your activities.
Now your digital marketing runs well oiled: valuable content gets created and repurposed consistently, SEO, social media activities, and email marketing happens as per schedule.
Webinars and podcasts are doing well. Advertising runs consistently with conversion optimization in place. A lot of automation has happened, so the marketing team can focus on new campaigns.
So, depending on the phase you are in, you have to focus on different activities to see the results you eventually want. And each phase takes a bit of time. How much, will be decided on the needs of your business and the resources you have.
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