This is the second post of our New Year’s installment on ways B2B brands can retool their marketing assets to improve website traffic, lead conversions rates and overall brand awareness in 2017.
Trade shows are big deals
Trade shows are where many B2B companies spend the most time and money by far. According to our newest white paper, “Your Roadmap to B2B Trade Show Success,” B2B companies “invest nearly 40% of their marketing budget in exhibitions” in order to reach customers, prospects and influencers in one event. If you are looking for ways to gain more traction in the form of leads and media coverage at trade shows, then feel free to download our white paper from this link today!
Modernize your social media strategy
How is your company currently using social media to reach new prospects and develop thought leadership? Do you make the occasional post to Twitter or LinkedIn only to return a couple weeks later for another couple of posts? Are you getting bogged down making tons of posts but not seeing any traction in the form of more follows, reposts and deeper levels of engagement?
This year why not research your target audience more to learn what sort of pages and influencers they follow? Figure out what these pages and influencers are offering the people you want to engage with. Are there any common themes in the messaging? If you are selling cybersecurity solutions to CIOs of small enterprises, do your targets spend time on Reddit sharing thoughts on the latest hacks, or are they reposting their favorite cybersecurity bloggers on LinkedIn? Find answers to those questions and you’ll find new way to engage them more consistently in hopes of building up trust and drive future conversions.
Be strategic with your social media, as well. Heading to a trade show later in the year? Be sure you prepare your social media campaign in advance and include outreach to key journalists and bloggers. Loop in your blog to drive traffic there, or develop a landing page for a product announcement to facilitate lead capture — or both! Combine ad buys on social networks with a webinar showing the benefits of your new product, a launch party at the trade show, a contest give-away.
Don’t forget social ad buys
Modernizing your social media strategy must include social media ad buys. After all, the Facebooks of the world are not making money by letting you do business on them for free. They are fast becoming the best way for businesses to brand and lay the groundwork for lead conversions. While Facebook may not be the ideal platform for B2B companies (yet!), you can make smart ad buys on LinkedIn and Twitter that can drive more traffic, advance thought leadership and grow your company’s following.
Don’t forget to stay abreast of how social ad buying is changing, because it is. Improvements to advertising platforms on social media come all the time. For instance, it’s now possible to upload emails of your prospects and customers on Facebook to run targeted campaigns; you can then have Facebook create a mirrored list of high-potential targets based on the demographics of your customer and prospect list. LinkedIn and Twitter are now following Facebook’s lead and allowing email uploads to create targeted ad groups as well.
SEO
Popular search engines like Google and Bing are constantly in flux as they try to refine their search algorithms to award legitimate content producers and discount or even block ones that game the system for organic higher rankings. For instance, it used to be common practice to send out “press releases” on distribution platforms like PRWeb until Google caught on to the practice of keyword stuffing employed by many SEO companies. Your SEO is better served by following best-in-class practices such as producing quality content on your blog with backlinks to your website, contributed articles to other influential industry blogs and even media placements in traditional media. There are no doubt other tricks of the SEO trade that won’t run the risk of getting you blackballed on search engines like Google but you would be wise to research them before pursuing them.