How to level up your B2B marketing for faster filling sales pipelines

The basics of B2B marketing will get you noticed and help you win work. But they are just a foundation and therefore to deliver faster growth, we recommend investing in these techniques:

Advanced LinkedIn

Beyond regularly posting on your company page and personal profiles, you can:

• Comment on popular posts (sharing your views, not just saying “Love this” or “Very insightful”. A longer response will also make your comment sit at the top, which gains you more attention and visibility)

• Share your content in related closed groups that your audience is likely a member of – we recommend tailoring the copy and even blog posts to fit with the group’s specific audience.

• Post personal content from your personal profiles to increase awareness – although it’s not directly work-related, sharing your own interests creates a human connection. These posts are very popular on LinkedIn. Once the LinkedIn algorithm sees this popular post, it ranks your consequent posts higher and will pop up in the feed of your ideal customers more regularly.

Paid opportunities

There are also tons of paid LinkedIn opportunities such as lead gen forms where a contact can complete a form to receive your guide instantly, and you receive their contact details. To banner ads, and even paid InMail. It’s worth trialing a small sum – make sure you are super niche with your audience to maximise your spend.

Direct sales

In addition, there are more direct sales approaches you can make through connecting with your target audience, liking their content, their company content and then sending them an introduction video.

💡Top tip: Videos, which you can create for free on Loom, are super effective.

👉Here’s a short blog on Tried and tested tips for converting sales and shortening sales cycles

Content distribution

As well as sharing your content with closed groups in LinkedIn, there are always membership bodies associated to your industry. These provide guidance and news to your target audience. Here, you can either share content for free or pay a small sum to have it feature on their website, shared on social media or have your content emailed to their database.

💡Top tip: Most publications will not allow you to share product/sales relates content. They want guidance to help their members. Some will even remove your content if it’s found to breach these rules.

PPC campaigns

To help boost rankings in Google, Pay Per Click is great for brands with low organic rankings.

We recommend promoting free guides to stand out – in comparison to product heavy terms, less companies bid on free best practice related ones which means it costs less and you are more likely to get your ad seen by your target audience. And, free guidance is a way to add value to your audience so is more likely to get clicked.

💡Top tip: You want to be attracting the c.97% of the audience that aren’t actively shopping for a solution. Which is essentially those looking for guidance. Here’s why.

PPC doesn’t have to be expensive – there are freelancers and small companies that can manage low-budget campaigns.

Lead nurturing

Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with contacts that you want to become your customers. The focus is on education and regular dialogue, a mix of thought leadership and your company product updates, to show value, build trust and remain front-of-mind when that contact is ready to make a purchase.

Over two-thirds (67%) of B2B marketers say they see at least a 10% increase in sales opportunities through lead nurturing, with 15% seeing opportunities increase by 30% or more.

So, it’s a personal favourite technique for me.

👉Here are 7 simple steps to successful B2B lead nurturing.

Sponsored content

Going back to data for email lists, a strong database is key to email success.

We strongly advise against the general purchase of data/mailing lists (this is the opposite of sponsored content) – With purchased lists, the data is generally poor, (it’s essentially cold) so engagements are generally low and unsubscribes are high.

When it comes to demand generation, it’s key to be in for the long-term. After all, it takes time to build trust - nobody wants to feel sold to.

The sponsored content option is a quick way to gain warm engagements and quality data with your target audience. But of course, for this reason, it’s not cheap.

Essentially, you pay for a trade publication to promote thought leadership content and you can pay for the engagement data (not all publications feel comfortable sharing the data with you, so always ask for this).

💡Top tip: There can be lots of publications for your field. To help filter down who to spend your money with, ask for membership numbers and break down as well as typical engagement rates (most closely matching your industry and the piece of content you plan to promote).

Wrap up:

As B2B buying increasingly moves online, both marketing and sales techniques must adapt in order to stay relevant.

Undoubtedly, customers are migrating decisively from in-person channels to digital alternatives.

That’s why websites, email, and social channels must be purpose-built to deliver the right content at the right time to increase sales performance. This is justified by a simple truth: customers learn and buy digitally.

There are plenty of other tactics at your disposal, like bespoke roundtable events (another one of my favourites). If you need support with your marketing, get in touch for a free consultation.

📖 For our free playbook on ‘How to create demand, nurture leads, and convert sales’, email me: becca@rooandeve.com.