The Business world is firmly focusing on digital transformation. Companies are feverishly assessing and reconsidering current revenue models, operational processes, customer engagement and marketing strategies. By 2020, one million new devices will go online every hour. As a consequence the digital experience has become a new reality that creates disruptions as well as significantly more data. In the new digital world, 83 percent of B2B buyers conduct online research before they make a purchase. Four out of five customer purchases are starting online. And an estimated 60 percent of the journey to a buying decision is traveled before a supplier is even contacted.

In this third part of our five part series we want to explain some basic points about the digital marketing campaign you need to set up in order to generate sufficient impact and sales for your brand.

Digital Marketing Campaign

In a world of extremes there are constraints limiting your efforts to design an effective marketing campaign, not least regulation. But there are lots of opportunities too, especially with the progressing digitalization. You can now target the audience more precisely, prioritize much easier with the help of a rapidly expanding data base and create a customer-centric website with feedback tools. And there is an increasing number of digital marketing campaign that can generate visible impact, among them marketing automation, content marketing, big data, mobile marketing, social media marketing, CRO and SEO. In order to become more effectively you first need to define the brand purpose, frame the key brand message and then formulate a strategy in order to prioritize your efforts. Relevant market and customer insights should be implemented in real-time. And you need to provide informed and useful content that allows your audience to become smarter during their journey.

Therefore, the probably most important tool is content, but not so much about yourself. Instead, it should focus on those who you want to sell your products to. In a growing number of cases distribution will be digital: emails, newsletters, eBooks, white papers, webinars, blog posts and videos. The right mix will depend on the audience and the strategy that was formulated.

A crucial part of the campaign is lead generation because as a B2B company you want the contact details of deciders who may be interested in buying your product. Once you have them, you need to stay in touch with them. The natural hub for generating leads is the corporate website which integrates all the relevant offers, information and conversation. The corporate website is also the launch pad for various campaigns. And the more clients make use of search engines, the better it is to run an instructive and exploratory blog. The blog is the most suitable tool to drive new visitors to the website. Storytelling will be an essential part of the content that is created. Digital advertising is a must, because it has been skyrocketing at the expense of print in recent years.

With so many digital marketing channels available, there is a temptation to focus on just one or a few of them. But the most effective solution will be an integrated approach. It needs to be multi-channel and multi-everything. Targeted digital advertising like AdWords needs to support your content creation. And platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter offer their own sets of retargeting options. Last, but not least, don´t forget to make your site responsive to mobile. It now accounts for more than half of web traffic.

Coming up in this five part series:

Part IV: Social Media and the Transformation of Communication

Part V:  B2B Data Management