B2B Digital Marketing Success
An effective B2B website clearly defines your brand, value proposition, product/service portfolio (scope of supply) and competitive advantages (or lack thereof). It also provides (or SHOULD provide) one or more calls to action that prompt prospective customers to initiate contact. With a solid website as a foundation, B2B small businesses can begin to identify and prioritize other high impact digital marketing tools/tactics suited to the business’s unique requirements.
In fact, according to Salesforce®, your website is now THE DOMINANT FACTOR in determining digital marketing success. For B2B small businesses this concept is even more significant, since your website is also the fundamental starting point for an effective sales execution strategy. More often than ever, potential customers will evaluate an organization and its products/services vs competitive offerings long before they commit to contacting the company to discuss their requirements. In this sense, your website/digital marketing investments are primarily sales tools, and are often critical to achieving the growth objectives of your selling team.
Digital Marketing Success: A Sales Perspective
There are multitudes of digital marketing tools and tactics available to support your organization’s sales and growth objectives. Unfortunately, it is not always easy to determine which of the many digital marketing tools available is best suited to your current sales situation (visibility, market position, competitive environment, budget and time constraints). The table below provides a list of proven tools that may come in to play. The most effective way to define and prioritize digital marketing investments that offer a reasonable, defensible ROI is to rank them in terms of their impact on your sales process.
B2B Digital Marketing Tools
To Summarize …
Digital marketing success — from a B2B sales perspective — is achieved when your investments have a measurable impact on sales, to the extent that the value of new business (lifetime value) exceeds expenditures. Initiatives that focus first on optimizing a company’s web presence, and then on acquiring the tools needed to support the sales team’s day-to-day selling process and competitive requirements for visibility, positioning and messaging are most likely to achieve a reasonable return on investment. And sales performance metrics (e.g. qualified leads, sustainable growth trends) provide an effective “yardstick” for defining the success of digital marketing investments.
