3 Successful Engagement Campaigns For Your B2B Marketing Strategy
My company had a problem. Our sales were stagnant, and our industry was becoming saturated with low-value competitors and a diminishing barrier to entry.
If we couldn’t develop an offering that created immense value to our ideal targets and relay that message, we would become a low-value competitor in a sea of hungry valueless sharks.
There are two cold hard truths to a successful B2B marketing strategy.
The first is you can’t look like every other company selling what you sell.
Your message has to resonate. It has to get the attention of your ideal buyer and get them to engage with your company.
Two is you can’t be everything to everybody. Because you’re a B2B company, it’s safe to say your lifetime value per client is larger than a typical B2C brand.
You have to get clear on who your ideal clients are.
Once you know who they are, you can build your B2B marketing strategy to convert a new client, likely through your sales team.
Your sales team will rarely make a cold call (although B2B marketing strategies without an outbound sales system aren’t producing the results they could be), and the prospect is instantly ready to complete a high-value purchase.
You have to become a trusted adviser, and that starts with being known through your marketing and sales strategies.
Here we’ll go over three marketing campaigns to get your ideal clients engaged with your brand, and warmed up for future opportunities.
Create a campaign that gets your targets aware of you.
An awareness campaign helps a target become aware of you.
If your ideal clients don’t know who you are, then what’s the point? Without them knowing about you, you’re irrelevant.
For your company to become a trusted adviser, you have to get the attention of your ideal clients.
An awareness campaign does just that.
Awareness campaigns don’t generate direct sales, but they help build brand recognition and potential retargeting lists.
One way you can do this is by creating a video targeted to your ideal clients.
Here’s how my B2B company Skylink did it:
According to Aamplify, a good engagement rate on LinkedIn is 2%. This video campaign resulted in a 3.87% engagement rate.
Similarly, on a Facebook awareness campaign, it generated a 13.9% engagement rate.
People who didn’t know about my company, now do.
Someone who didn’t know about your oil digging drill bit now does. A target who didn’t know about your ERP software now does.
You get the awareness point.
There are two primary goals for awareness campaigns:
Brand recognition
Retargeting
Create a campaign that gets your targets to engage with you.
Brand recognition is excellent, but you want people to engage with you. I can look at your corporate video a thousand times, but it’ll likely never get me to engage with you.
You want to start developing a relationship with your ideal target.
An engagement campaign is where you start talking with your prospects. You engage them through some form of content.
This content should provide entertainment, information, or preferably both.
I’ve had a ton of success with content marketing. I’ll write an actionable blog post and put digital advertising money behind it to get the best chance of being read.
Here’s an example:
We generated a 7.7% engagement rate to a niche audience. Not everyone needs an aircraft part for a large commercial aircraft.
Imagine if your audience or industry is larger.
Even if it’s not, it’s still possible to generate engagement with your company.
You want your potential clients to begin to interact with you. Once you provide value and they start engaging, the sales momentum has started.
Get them to take action and subscribe.
The final step of your initial B2B marketing campaigns is to get your prospect to give you their contact information.
Your offer has to be irresistible and help them achieve a business or personal goal.
You’ll often want to tie these together, as B2B clients are still human. Create an offer that helps them overcome a distinct challenge.
These offers can come in the form of eBooks, checklists, guides, case studies, or various other kinds of lead magnets.
Whatever it is, your prospect fills out a form, enters there contact information, and you send them information about how to access the offer, with the opportunity of a future sales call.
Here’s an example audit we used:
This ad generated a 4.25% engagement rate, a 2.25% CTR, with a $1.10 cost-per-click.
They lead is then sent to this landing page to subscribe:
14.09% of the people who visit this page, subscribe. It’s a lower converting landing page, but it also serves to qualify as we don’t have the sales capacity to filter through thousands of leads.
Once they get to the thank you page, we offer an upsell package that further qualifies the leads, and it has a 32.21% conversion rate.
In this subscribe campaign, even if they don’t give you their contact details, you can retarget them with future offers.
A B2B marketing strategy can lead to a long sales cycle, so the best marketing opportunity is to leverage various campaigns targeting candidates at different stages of the customer journey.
If you want to take your sales to another level, adopt an account-based marketing strategy, create campaigns that target different stages of the customer journey, and execute an outbound prospecting strategy, and you’ll have a rich sales pipeline.
Use these B2B marketing campaigns to help get you there.
