The primary difference between business-to-business (B2B) marketing from business-to-consumer (B2C) is that the former requires more targeted strategies to acquire high-quality leads. For the latter, you only need to reach a lot of people to achieve a favorable conversion rate. It isn’t as straightforward when marketing for a B2B company.
If you’re outsourcing this process, you must look for a service provider that meets your needs. You can find lots of reliable B2B marketing agencies online, but the most crucial thing you should do is to work with one that can help you achieve your short-term and long-term goals.
Here are the things you can do to end up with the best B2B marketing agencies for your company:
1. Identify Your Marketing Goals
The first step to finding the perfect service provider for your business is to determine what you want to achieve out of your marketing strategy. Of course, everyone wants to reach their target audience and convert them into paying customers.
However, you should be specific with this aspect. Do you want to gain new clients or target a new industry or sector? Do you want recurring customers? These are some questions that you should ask yourself before you can start looking for a B2B marketing agency.
2. Check Their Field Of Expertise
Digital marketing is an extensive field, so you should look for experts in the areas that can help your company achieve its goals. Check the main service offerings of a potential provider to ensure that you get the solutions to your needs. You should even look for a dedicated B2B marketing agency since they are more adept at coming up with B2B marketing strategies for your business type.
These are the different areas of digital marketing:
- Search Engine Optimization – One of the primary services that you should get from a B2B marketing agency is search engine optimization (SEO). This method is valuable for reaching your target audience even with a limited budget. It works for both B2C and B2B companies.
- Social Media Management – Every brand must have a substantial social media presence nowadays. You must look for this service from a potential marketing agency. Social media is a significant platform for engaging your customers in conversations and becoming an authority figure in your industry.
- Content Management – If you want to outsource the task of creating relevant content for your website, employ content creators to take care of this process on your behalf. They can write articles for your blog and even create tutorial videos to help your clients make the most out of your products or services.
- Web Analytics – Numbers play a crucial role in any business. Statistics allow you to see the progress and efficacy of your digital marketing efforts. The agency you work with must have the tools to track how far your posts have reached, as well as how many leads turned into paying customers. They must be able to provide you with data on your website’s engagement by developing a comprehensive yet understandable analysis report.
- Brand Management – People’s perception of your brand influences your profits. A B2B marketing agency can also serve as a public relations partner because they handle most of the content that gets published to consumers. They must be adept at understanding local and international trends in your niche to show potential customers that you’re one of the leaders in the industry.
- Competition Monitoring – A digital marketing agency that can track how your competitors are doing can help you craft strategies to stay ahead of the game. For instance, you can find link building opportunities by looking at a rival company’s backlink profile. With this data, you can reach out to those sources to see if they can also publish your content and link so that your brand can be introduced to that particular reader or consumer base.
- Advertising Support – The advertising landscape has evolved from traditional methods to digital. With this, a B2B marketing agency must be proficient in identifying the right ad content, format, and platform for your business to reach the most consumers. Then, they can create compelling advertisements to boost how people perceive your brand. Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are a cost-effective way of gaining high-quality leads for your business.
- Email Marketing – Email continues to be a valuable means of communication for B2B companies. Most of your correspondence with clients may be done through email, so it makes sense that you use this to market your products and services as well. You can send weekly newsletters to your customer base to keep them updated on promos and discounts, as well as other relevant content.
3. Evaluate Their Experience
Aside from knowing their field of expertise, it also matters how long the company has been operating and how many clients they’ve serviced. While digital marketing has boomed relatively recently, the practice is actually as old as the Internet itself. It’s just been continually evolving according to consumers’ needs. Plus, there are more and more people getting access to the World Wide Web, so your customer base will keep on growing as well.
Established companies have developers in their teams who witness how Google continues to fine-tune its algorithm. This type of experience allows these agencies to become the best in their field. The age of an agency and the number of clients they have can give you an idea of how they work, and whether their expertise is the one that your business needs.
4. Determine Their Methods
The buying journey of a B2B customer is significantly different from that of a B2C buyer. For one, most purchases are given much thought, and it’s rarely impulsive or spontaneous. Additionally, B2B buyers do their own research before pushing through with a purchase. There are also more people involved in this type of transaction, from your point-of-contact to the executives of a client company. That’s why the digital marketing team you work with must be able to use methods or strategies explicitly for this type of scenario.
5. Ask About Their Tools
Technically, you’re also a B2B customer, and you’re enlisting the help of an agency. You must do your research and become familiar with the tools that you should look for in a digital marketing team.
These are some of them:
Traffic Analytics – The company must have a tool to analyze how many people are visiting your website for the first time, the number of recurring visitors, as well as the number of your mobile app downloads. Tracking the web traffic of your site provides quantifiable data on the efficacy of their digital marketing strategies.
- Ranking Tracker – To gauge the success of an SEO campaign, the agency should be able to monitor your website’s rank on search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords. This data gives insight on how you can boost your rank so that consumers will view your brand as a leader in the industry.
- Conversion Rates – This figure pertains to the number of visitors who became paying customers. It’s another significant factor to consider when evaluating the efficacy of your digital marketing strategies. The agency must have tools to keep track of your site’s conversion rates.
- Content Management – The team should also have a content management system (CMS) to store all articles and media that get published on your website. More than being a central location for files, most CMS tools have analytics features to provide you with significant insights into your site’s digital marketing performance.
- Campaign Performance – This factor takes various data, such as traffic, conversion rates, and ranking, to show how well your campaign is running. The data from this tool can make you see which areas you should improve to widen your brand’s digital reach.
6. Assess If Their Culture Aligns With Yours
When you work with an agency, you have to make sure that you’re comfortable with the team. You must take the time to speak with them or a representative to assess their compatibility with your company.
Ask about what values they encourage in their business. Check if their standards and ideals align with yours to avoid problems in the future. For instance, if transparency is vital for your company, you’d want an agency that will provide you with honest and prompt feedback.
7. Read Client Reviews
Aside from talking with the agency, you can also research online for reviews made by their previous or current clients. This can give you an idea of what it’ll be like to work with the team. Positive and negative feedback is useful for determining a company’s strengths and weaknesses. With this, you can evaluate whether you are amenable to their shortcomings or you’d like to hire a different one.
8. Inquire About Their Pricing Structure
Knowing the price of their services is practical. You can find lots of proficient digital marketing teams, even with an average budget. You should remember, however, that you must be wary of agencies that charge too low for their services since there might be a catch.
Conclusion
Hiring a B2B marketing agency to take care of your SEO and other digital promotion processes can help you focus on revenue-generating tasks. You just have to find a company that can give you the solutions to your business’ needs. Check the tips above and use them to guide your search for the best digital marketing team for your brand.