Many service providers pour resources into marketing efforts that just don’t deliver results. You may find yourself wondering why the growth just isn’t there in your inbound marketing for B2B efforts. It’s a common frustration, but you are not alone.
Instead of chasing fleeting results, what if your ideal clients came to *you*? That is the core concept of inbound marketing for B2B. A solid inbound marketing strategy that consistently draws in converting leads will build sustainability and revenue.
Why Traditional B2B Marketing Falls Short
Old ways of doing things, like cold calling, are still surprisingly common. Research indicates that 70% of salespeople still rely on the phone. But those marketing tactics feel increasingly intrusive.
These outbound marketing methods are disruptive and often inefficient. They interrupt potential buyers and waste resources. These methods don’t align with how today’s buyers operate, because they will perform extensive online research.
The Shift in Buyer Behavior
B2B buyers are now more independent, taking research into their own hands. Buyers conduct thorough online research before making contact. They gather data and decide when and how to communicate with any company.
Data confirms that 47% of B2B buyers consume three to five pieces of content before engaging with a salesperson. Ignoring this trend is a critical mistake. Modern B2B marketers will understand, address, and help inform that buyer’s journey with proper strategy, keywords, and content.
What is B2B Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is about making your expertise available online. This method earns a potential customer’s trust. It starts by mapping your efforts with the journey the customer will take as a buyer.
It’s about understanding and then aligning the buying process. The buyer’s journey starts with an ill-defined problem, progressing through researching options, and figuring out the best decision. A great B2B inbound marketer will address, help, and even influence that research and journey for the buyer.
The Inbound Methodology: Attract, Engage, Delight
The inbound marketing methodology is to first Attract potential clients. It progresses towards converting and engaging these customers deeper. Great B2B marketers help turn customers into brand advocates.
The key is giving buyers what they need at each step. But content alone won’t cut it. Aligning this methodology will put your expertise to the test and turn visitors into customers.
Core Strategies: Building Your Inbound Foundation
Think of your strategy as building on a solid foundation. The foundation is great research, insights, and strategy. Once it is fully defined and informed, it then needs to be activated.
Your content will become an integral part of the process. Consider it your 24/7 salesperson. Great content answers key questions for potential buyers during their journey, and it is strategically published online for your business.
Keyword Research: Understanding the Buyer
Proper B2B Keyword research for your inbound strategy must serve two key points. First, the content needs to provide search engines a semantic structure. Most importantly, your content needs to fulfill the users’ search intentions with insightful responses.
It’s critical to have a defined strategy for targeting a content topic. Here are some useful points:
- Identify a single Topic and Supporting Keyphrases.
- Examine Top Results of Searches and Evaluate the Commonalities Among Those Ranked Positions.
- Organize Content using Headers and/or Outline Order.
- Write Well-Structured Content Sections and Be Concise.
Keywords should flow and appear as needed within context. Never force or repeat Keywords and avoid “stuffing”. Google gives us 63 characters, make the most of those to craft an attractive search engine optimization listing.
Content Marketing: Fueling the Engine
Content marketing powers the whole process for inbound marketing. This fuels a great plan. It includes items like blog posts, ebooks, white papers, videos and webinars that are designed for the buyer’s decision process.
Statistics show a strong connection between content consumption and decision-making. Around 60% of people are inspired to check a product after reading about it. High-quality content will influence decisions because, data shows, approximately 84% of people now have that expectation.
The Power of Blogging
Blogging is super critical. Research says that 53% of marketers see this as their top content marketing priority. You create value when providing insightful and informative blog content.
B2B marketers who prioritize blogging see 67% more leads. Keep the text fresh, useful and up-to-date. When posting on blogs make the comments, relevant, concise, authentic, and well-reasoned, instead of generic and self-serving content.
Leveraging Video Content
Using B2B video content is powerful. Videos will reach approximately 82% of customer internet traffic in 2025. Great B2B video content may come as informational, how-tos, walkthrough, or company related news.
As inbound strategy advances with marketing technology, consider AI marketing for making video content. AI-powered video is the next big step forward because it’s making these videos scalable with data and feedback.
Beyond the Basics: Interactive and Rich Content
Go deeper than surface level content. Consider webinars or tools that will keep prospects engaged. A lead magnet can help draw in potential clients to further the engagement.
This trend continues to gain traction as an important element of the strategy. The virtual event industry is expanding rapidly and predicted to grow of 21.4% annually through 2030.
SEO: Getting Found Online
Without good search engine optimization, your great content remains unnoticed. You need visibility and rankings on relevant terms. Focus on the best search engines; Google holds the market share for most English speaking parts of the world.
However, not everything online will see success. In fact, 90.63 percent of content gets no traffic from Google, proving this is an important step that takes expertise and knowledge.
Technical SEO: Building a Solid Website Foundation
Getting your web work setup is not simply having a website. It means using modern technologies to properly setup the structure for B2B marketing purposes. It also involves implementing an effective content strategy that speaks to your audience’s pain points.
Use Google Analytics to analyze traffic patterns. This helps to identify high-converting pages or high-traffic opportunities. Understanding these things may give insight into your business and inform key steps.
On-Page Optimization: Making Your Content Discoverable
Be strategic, but don’t force it, when placing Keyphrases on your site. Follow best search engine optimization practices by focusing on the most-important phrases, but remember that good-quality readable content is paramount. Search engines favor readability, usability, and expertise.
Content and any changes done during editing should be clear, authentic, well-written, relevant, and helpful. These pages exist on your website for real people, so they expect those human aspects. Google also now values readability when giving better visibility, driving more organic traffic.
Social Media: Engaging Your Audience
Don’t confuse social media marketing with broadcasting. Engage instead of shouting. Create a content schedule, join relevant conversations, respond, and interact to grow brand awareness.
Social media is where most of the B2B customer audience lives today. Reports state that more than half (54%) of B2B buyers use social media to learn about a business. Platforms, like LinkedIn, allow users to get insight directly from buyers and brands.
Lead Magnets and Conversion: Turning Visitors into Leads
Make an offering with some relevant call to actions. Consider things that readers can learn like ebooks or a monthly digest.
Make sure your CTAs have clear language. Align that CTA to the relevant content near it on the page to increase conversion opportunities, providing B2B clients new inroads into your sales funnels and turning visitors into qualified leads.
Email Marketing: Nurturing Relationships
Email works for business. For every $1 spent, email marketing makes $44 in returns. You should build up your email list to capitalize on this.
It goes beyond a promotional channel. Email nurture sequences provide touch points that help expand personal experiences in the funnel. You can keep leads engaged by helping them.
The Benefits of Inbound Marketing for B2B
Many feel inbound marketing offers more value because it helps establish your company as a thought leader. This value could come as guest blogging opportunities or invitations for interviews.
| Benefit | Description |
|---|---|
| Cost-Effective Lead Generation | Inbound marketing tends to give cost-effective results and helps the long-term health of your company. Research claims, it has a reduced costs that averages about 61% lower cost per lead compared to Outbound Marketing. |
| Builds Lasting Relationships | Consistent content and resources help address key questions from buyers. It puts trust into place when helping buyers before they decide. The marketing team should collaborate with the sales team on this. |
| Higher Quality Leads | As relationships form before any sale, there’s more value than there might be on cold sales interactions. When the audience comes to you and converts, you get more qualified and serious sales prospects. |
| Measurable Results | Inbound methodology goes far beyond “getting likes”. This can directly correlate to metrics like increased website traffic, a bump in lead generations, increased conversion numbers and revenue. With these more measurable touch points, you see improvements and can adjust marketing channels as necessary. |
Real-World Success Stories
Consider looking at HubSpot’s case studies. Real companies like Booxi have reported saving approximately $100k per year, with inbound.
There are more success stories online. These further prove the case for using Inbound B2B methodology and delivering valuable content to potential clients.
Inbound Marketing for B2B In Practice
This might feel intense, so just focus first on getting a grasp of the target and buyer persona. Get clear on how their journey works, and how you help answer questions to their pain points.
Make data-based choices. Great inbound marketing tracks a buyer’s every click up to sale conversions. Use all the tech at your disposal and keep watch to optimize as trends show over time.
Think and track Long-term, beyond just one point in the funnel. When your inbound content starts performing, keep feeding data and results back into any learnings. Proposify does it every year with their “State of Proposals report.” Think what type of things your users would value.
Conclusion
With “Inbound marketing for B2B”, a good focus may translate into more sustainable success. You can do this by helping customers versus disrupting them.
Good marketers stay aligned with current-day buyer behaviors. Keeping data as a focal point of a larger process proves an invaluable partnership for business looking for better marketing strategies.