We are a brick and mortar company, do we need to be online? Why are you expensive?
Answers to these questions and more.
Q) We are a B2B company engaged in traditional, hard-core brick and mortar, offline business with a lot of consultancy thrown in. Do we really need digital marketing? We are, after all, not selling anything online!
Answer: If your target group uses a mobile device or a laptop to look for business or technical information that you can provide, then you need to engage in digital and inbound marketing. It doesn’t matter if you have not done it for the past century, or that none of your competitors still do. It doesn’t matter how strong your offline sales and consultancy is.
You have to be where your target group is. If they are online, you need to be as well. If you are not, someone else will be, and your century-old lead could vanish within years!
Q) I suppose, in SEO services, you would be submitting articles to directories?
Answer: We won’t be. We will just be creating great content to go on your website, content that is valuable and relevant to your target group, so they engage with your brand and you are able to meet your business goals. And for that content, we will do the necessary on-page SEO. And promote them to the right audience.
Q) We are not an e-com company, or a media site. We are a B2B company. We do very technical stuff. How will you create content for us, when you don’t even know what we do.
Answer: Way back in 2010, Knowiz Solutions, Niswey’s parent company, decided to focus on B2B digital marketing. Why? Because we had already done a lot of work in the B2B space, and we realized that difficult it was to work on B2B marketing content. Which was great for us, because we knew we would have fewer competitors. And looking back, we think that was a great move. B2B marketing content is tricky because you have to write about technical stuff and bring the business angle to it. Not many writers can do it. Few marketing professionals can do it. Knowiz focused on developing this expertise and we now have mature process to mine knowledge from companies and create great B2B content.
We spend time to understand your business. We speak to your vertical heads, technology specialists, and even your customers. And once we have understood the information needs your potential customers have, we get down to creating that content. This involves secondary research, and a whole lot of primary research, and studying documents you share with us. We have the drafts reviewed by you, and iterate them till we get them right.
Q) We have a SaaS product for small businesses. Our target group is not highly read. How do we create content for them?
Answer: Create graphics and infographics. And videos. And podcasts. Run webinars. Of course, all these are more complex to create than text-based content, and require a lot more input from you, but they do have higher engagement power.
Q) Freelancers charge per word, and work out really cheap. Then why are you so expensive?
Answer: Most freelancers write on anything-lifestyle, travel, fashion, wellness, gadgets, education and what have you. So they follow an industry standard of charging per word.
However, creating B2B marketing content is not the same. It cannot be based wholly on secondary research, because it’s your USPs and capabilities we have to showcase, not somebody else’s. Anyone who will create content without talking to your specialists can only create content that is really not about you.
It’s your call. What do you want to pay for?
Q) Do you work on fixed+variable pricing? Can it start from day one?
Answer: Yes, we are open to working with fixed + variable models. These are great for businesses that need to source many leads per day.
However, we do not recommend going with a variable component from day 1 of the engagement. More often than not, we have to bring the website and social presence to a certain hygiene level wrt technical aspects of the website, content, SEO. Only then can the website become ready to generate leads or get signups. The creation of this hygiene level is a business investment that is unavoidable for companies who want to do digital marketing–without this, you don’t have a fighting chance in the online space.
These activities are usually done in 4-6 months time. After which we are open to exploring fixed + variable pricing models. In fact for most of our digital marketing customers, we ensure some metrics are defined by month 4.
Q) Four months? That’s a lot of investment we have to make without being assured of returns. We are looking for a straight-line solution.
Answer: Much as we would also like it, marketing, especially B2B digital marketing, is not a straight line solution. You create a base, build, test, measure and modify, and build again.
This process cannot be a straight line solution, and is not possible at all if the base level doesn’t even exist.
Digital marketing can give you returns from day one, if you run ads. But that is not a sustainable model; the day you stop advertising, your traffic falls. And you would have made little gains wrt stickiness.
Our objective is to give you a solution that is a mix of organic and inorganic efforts, so that you consistently build relevant traffic and see conversions. That takes time. If you are not prepared to wait, then you should stick to digital ads, and not be bothered about building a brand online, the sustainable way.
Learn more about our B2B Marketing services. Or if you would like to talk to us, leave a note here.
Also Read | B2B: The 3 Phases of Digital Marketing | The Cost of NOT Doing Inbound Marketing
