Change is a natural part of the world that we live in.
“There’s nothing permanent. Except change.” - Heraclitus
From technology and fashion to everything in between, we live in a world where change is inevitable - and B2B digital marketing isn’t an exemption to the rule.
The landscape of B2B marketing has evolved significantly since the 1990s. Back then, traditional methods ruled the roost, but now we’re in a new era. This transformation has brought both new challenges and opportunities, as outlined in our B2B Marketing Paradigm.
So, while there may be over 25,000 marketing agencies in the UK alone competing for your audience’s attention, the good news is that you have the tools to stay ahead. By understanding this shift and embracing the right digital marketing strategies, your success is firmly within your control.
In this article, we’re going go over everything you need to know to survive and thrive in the hurley burly world of modern marketing, including:
So, with pleasantries done and dusted, let’s turn our attention to the basics…
B2B digital marketing is the marketing of products and services to other businesses and organisations through online channels and digital technologies.
People often talk about the distinct differences between B2B and B2C digital marketing.
While there’s a perception that B2C targets the end consumer and B2B is marketing to businesses, there are differences between the two, you’re still marketing to a human - and your marketing has to reflect that.
Your marketing has to resonate on a human level, and factor in content and communications that are emotional, as well as logical.
First and foremost, they’re aimed at totally different audiences: B2B digital marketing is aimed at businesses, professionals, and organisations, namely key stakeholders in charge of the purse strings.
On the other hand, B2C digital marketing targets consumers who are buying for personal use.
B2B digital marketing is geared towards generating leads, cultivating relationships, and establishing your business as a leader within your industry.
Unlike B2C, B2B purchases are often complex and rarely happen 'off the page'. This is because B2B decisions typically involve a larger buying committee, bigger investments, and longer decision-making cycles. As a result, B2B marketing places more emphasis on building trust and fostering repeat business over time.
B2C digital marketing focuses on driving immediate sales, building brand awareness, and fostering customer loyalty.
B2C purchases are usually quicker, more straightforward, and often take place online, with individual consumers making decisions that involve smaller stakes. Quick conversion rates and one-time purchases are more common in this space.
Despite these differences, there are still strategic similarities between B2B and B2C digital marketing, with human-centricity at the epicentre of both types of strategies.
With multiple stakeholders to win over, the B2B decision-making process is longer and often requires greater information, demos, and demonstrations of ROI before the would-be customer parts with their money.
B2C customers are a different kettle of fish, with decisions driven by emotions, brand perception, and instant gratification.
While content plays a key role in any digital marketing strategy, strategies differ from B2B to B2C.
B2B content is more educational and informative, with whitepapers, case studies, webinars, and long-form blogs commonly used to demonstrate expertise and value.
On the other hand, B2C content offers more creative licence with a focus on entertaining and engaging the audience. In this case, social media posts, videos, infographics, and short blog posts are used to form a connection with the audience.
However, whether in B2B or B2C marketing, the content strategy is always driven by what your buyers want to know. Both approaches share a common goal: to create content that addresses the audience's unique questions, needs, and interests, whether that involves detailed technical information or creative, engaging content.
The messaging and tone of your content will differ depending on whether you’re catering to a B2B or B2C audience. B2B content is typically more formal and focuses on valuepropositions, efficiency, and the technical benefits of a product or service, with B2C content adopting a more casual tone.
Effective B2B channels include LinkedIn, industry-specific websites, email marketing, and professional webinars. These platforms enable networking and detailed exchanges of information.
Effective B2C channels include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube and are ideal for reaching a broad audience and encouraging direct consumer interaction.
Understanding these differences is crucial for developing effective digital marketing strategies tailored to each audience.
However, irrespective of whether you’re creating a B2B digital marketing strategy or adopting a B2C approach, don’t lose sight of the fact that you’re targeting humans.
People buy from brands they know, like, and trust, so adopt a human-centred approach and don’t get sidetracked by approaches overly set in logic.
Whether it’s MySpace, Blockbuster Video, or Sega, some things can become a victim of their own success - inbound marketing falls into the same category.
Inbound marketing campaigns are heavily dependent on compelling content.
However, as more companies have embraced inbound marketing, the digital landscape has become oversaturated with content; two million blogs are being published everyday and 31% of businesses publish two or more videos each month.
According to HubSpot, 65% of marketers said it’s more difficult to create engaging content due to content oversaturation. This makes it harder for inbound strategies like blogging and SEO to cut through the noise and reach target audiences.
This has hit marketers where it hurts, and with results taking a hit, a widespread assumption has been made that inbound marketing is dead and buried.
According to HubSpot’s 2023 State of Marketing Report, while inbound marketing remains a staple, 55% of marketers are rethinking their strategies due to challenges in ROI, competition, and content saturation.
But hold your horses: inbound marketing is alive and kicking. The problem lies with the fact that the pioneering techniques that shaped inbound marketing are commonplace, making it harder than ever to decipher between inbound and marketing, as highlighted by our MD Ian Guiver in the B2B Marketing Paradigm.
The bottom line? As is the case with B2B digital marketing, inbound marketing has also changed since its inception in 2008 - but how?
Over 20 years ago, HubSpot coined the term ‘inbound marketing’—a new approach fuelled by content. The premise was simple:
At the time, this was a fresh and exciting way to engage potential customers. It spoon-fed buyers the information they needed, supporting them at each stage of the buyer's journey.
However, as buyer behaviour has evolved, so too must your B2B digital marketing strategy to keep pace with the changing landscape.
While inbound marketing isn’t wrong, it comes with significant challenges, particularly around trust and content saturation. For instance, 73% of B2B companies incorporate content marketing into their strategy, yet roughly one-quarter still don’t. This often comes down to two critical obstacles: time and resources.
Another challenge facing inbound marketing is content quality. Inbound marketing relies heavily on top-tier content to attract and retain buyers.
But in today’s world, we are inundated with content across multiple platforms—7.5 million blogs are published and 361.6 billion emails are sent daily, not to mention the surge of content on YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, and emerging AI-driven platforms.
With so much content being pushed out, it’s harder than ever for your brand’s voice to stand out from the crowd. The diversity of channels also complicates things—sharing content designed for your website on LinkedIn or Twitter doesn’t cut it anymore. Instead, you need platform-specific content for channels like TikTok and LinkedIn, rather than merely resharing existing materials.
The content deluge has also led to another critical issue: trust. Buyers are increasingly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of voices all claiming to be the ‘trusted option’ or the ‘single source of truth’. Instead of being supported by this wealth of information, many buyers feel more confused than ever, making it harder for them to make confident purchasing decisions.
Trust is the foundation of any successful inbound strategy, yet it’s increasingly difficult to build. Buyers, especially those unfamiliar with your brand, need to take a leap of faith to engage further—whether that’s providing their contact information or dedicating time to your content. This leap requires alignment between the promises your content makes and the genuine value it delivers.
Today’s buyers aren’t just looking for more information—they’re looking for informed opinions and insights they can rely on.
To build trust, your content must offer real value and demonstrate your expertise. If you haven’t already established yourself as a trusted source of truth, you’ll face an uphill battle to capture attention and earn the confidence of your customers.
In an environment where trust in downloads and content offers has eroded, it’s vital to establish a clear, well-thought-out B2B digital marketing strategy.
This strategy must differentiate your brand from the noise and demonstrate that you are genuinely committed to delivering value, not just pushing out content for content’s sake.
By committing to delivering insightful, trustworthy, and platform-specific content, you can rise above the saturation and build lasting relationships with your audience. Avoid getting tarred with the same brush as others by focusing on authenticity, consistency, and the value of informed opinions—this is what today’s B2B buyers are truly looking for.
It’s all well, and it's good telling you how things have evolved, but how have individual channels changed?
As mentioned previously, the traditional content marketing approach was to create content that catered to the top, middle and bottom of the funnel, addressing every conceivable question your target persona might have about your solution.
The strategy was straightforward: attract potential customers with informative content, and then guide them towards a more in-depth resource, such as an eBook, using compelling CTA’s. This eBook, usually gated, would capture the prospect’s details, allowing marketers to nurture them down the funnel through automated email campaigns.
The ultimate goal was to position your brand as the obvious solution to their problem.
One of the fundamental flaws with this is the concept of a linear marketing funnel. The idea that buyers move through a predictable, step-by-step journey towards a purchase is wide of the mark.
B2B purchasing decisions are often made by committees, with multiple people influencing the decision-making process. The idea that you can systematically guide prospects down a funnel fails to account for the complexity of real-world buying behaviours.
The other significant issue is the wariness towards gated content.
81% of B2B professionals report that they would choose not to download content if it requires filling out a form. This reluctance is largely due to the declining quality of gated content.
According to industry insights, as much as 80% of B2B content marketing assets are gated, yet they often fail to deliver the level of satisfaction and depth that prospects expect.
This reflects further down the funnel too. The volume of leads generated and their eventual contribution to revenue is disconnected. For example, in 2022, we found that only 10% of marketing-sourced revenue was attributed to leads coming from eBooks or other downloads.
Firstly, it’s important to recognise that not all gated content is inherently bad. If your content is genuinely valuable and has received positive feedback from your audience, it should remain gated. If you’ve created a brand that has an affinity with your target audience, they’ll assume your content is of high quality.
Similarly, content that is crucial to the decision-making process, such as pricing guides, should be gated as prospects don’t mind sharing contact information if their intent to work with you is high.
However, if your gated content isn’t essential to the buyer’s decision-making process, consider making it accessible and offer a dual version of your content.
For example, you can create an ungated version of a resource, similar to a pillar page or a detailed blog post, which is available freely on your website - or even elsewhere. But it’s also recommended to offer a gated PDF version for those who prefer it in a PDF.
This strategy not only boosts your SEO by providing valuable content that’s easily accessible but also keeps the door open for prospects who are willing to convert through a form.
For example, we have our ‘Manufacturing Marketing’ pillar page, which is a 10,000-word article. This is free to view on our website. However, we also offer up a PDF version of this on the blog so, if you don’t want to read it on our website, you can take it away and read it in your own time.
Additionally, focusing on commercial-based keyword intents should be a priority in your content strategy.
By targeting keywords that indicate a higher likelihood of purchase intent, you maximise your chances of reaching an audience that is in-market and ready to engage with your solution.
For instance, if you’re a marketing agency, prioritising keywords like ‘inbound marketing services’ can help attract prospects who are actively searching for the services you offer.
While B2C brands have thrived on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, with their ability to be playful, engaging, and visually appealing, B2B marketers have often floundered.
There’s an ongoing perception that B2B topics are too complex to drive engagement on social media. As a result, many B2B marketers resorted to a formulaic approach: extracting a quote from a blog post, pairing it with a link and a featured image, and sharing it on their company’s social channels.
While this may have slightly increased blog views, it rarely led to any significant engagement or brand affinity - and certainly no business or conversions.
One of the most important developments in social media marketing for B2B is the growing emphasis on social selling.
It’s driven by a fundamental truth: people are more likely to trust recommendations from friends, family, and peers than they are to trust businesses and brands. Research has shown that consumers are 90% more likely to trust and buy from a brand recommended by someone they know or a peer.
B2B businesses have begun to harness this by turning their employees—particularly subject matter experts and executives—into influential voices for their brands.
Instead of pushing company posts through corporate accounts, these businesses are encouraging their leaders to share insights, opinions, and experiences on their personal social media profiles to humanise the brand.
What’s also changed is the types of content that perform well on social media. Where B2B brands once relied almost exclusively on static content like blog links, today’s successful strategies are far more dynamic.
Incorporating podcasts, video series, and webinars to engage audiences with video. This has become a dominant force, as it offers a highly engaging way to convey complex ideas while putting a human face to your brand.
A key part of making this work is repurposing content. Let’s say you host a webinar or record a podcast. After the live event, that content doesn’t need to be left to gather dust.
Instead, you can chop it up into bite-sized snippets that can be shared across social media, used in sales enablement materials, or even written up into blog posts.
For example, with our Make & Market podcast featuring Elliot Rayner, we initially focused on an in-depth discussion about positioning with an external expert.
Once the episode was recorded, we repurposed the content into smaller video snippets that we shared on LinkedIn. These snippets sparked further discussions and engagement, which we then expanded into a full blog post. This multi-channel approach ensured that the insights from the podcast reached as many potential customers as possible.
Your first step is to secure executive buy-in. You’ll need the support of your leadership team and subject matter experts to create social-first content that will resonate with your audience.
One effective way to do this is by launching a regular podcast or video series in which your experts discuss the specific challenges and pain points that your target audience faces.
After the initial content is created, the next step is to repurpose it.
As mentioned earlier, this could involve breaking down longer video recordings into shorter, shareable snippets that you can distribute across various social channels. This can, as we’re about to talk about, be turned into newsletter-style emails, enabling you to send it directly to your prospects but offering them a value-driven touchpoint with your brand.
You can also use these snippets as sales enablement tools, equipping your team with valuable content that can be used to nurture leads and drive conversions.
Traditionally, B2B marketers would send an email automatically upon the publishing of a new blog post, including a short excerpt and a link to the full article on the company’s website.
While this approach was somewhat effective in driving traffic to the blog, it didn’t do much in terms of converting leads into customers.
So HubSpot and other platforms thought of the answer. Enter email automation.
This allowed for more personalised and targeted content delivery. Automation enabled businesses to create email sequences designed to move prospects further down the funnel, serving them content based on their previous interactions.
A typical sequence might include a:
While this kind of structure isn’t wrong, it has its limitations in the modern marketing landscape.
As with other forms of digital marketing, the traditional approach to email marketing assumes a linear buyer journey. But the reality is, as we discussed earlier, B2B buyers don’t follow a predictable path to purchase.
A recent example from our own marketing efforts illustrates this challenge.
We ran an automated email sequence similar to the one described above, and while the open rates were strong and the emails performed well in terms of engagement metrics, we didn’t see any conversions until the very last message—the break-up email. That’s when a prospect responded with, “Oh, I didn’t see these emails, but I’m interested in speaking with you.”
This highlights a key issue with email marketing today: volume.
With billions of emails sent daily, and 49% of them considered spam according to Email Tool Tester, it’s no wonder prospects often ignore nurturing emails, assuming they’re junk.
The challenge now is not just about getting your emails delivered or opened; it’s about ensuring they stand out and provide real value to the recipient.
Unlike social media or content marketing, where new formats and tactics can be employed to improve engagement, there’s little you can do to directly influence email deliverability and open rates beyond continually optimising your subject lines.
What you can control, however, is the value your emails provide.
The key to modern email marketing is to build affinity with your audience. Focus on making the email itself as valuable as possible by providing zero-click value.
This means delivering useful, actionable information directly within the email, allowing recipients to get value from the content without ever needing to click through to your website.
For instance, rather than just teasing a blog post with a short snippet and link, take the core insights from that blog and turn them into a longer-form, newsletter-style email.
Include the actionable takeaways, tips, or strategies directly in the email so that your audience can consume the content right there, in-channel, rather than making them navigate to your website.
Of course, this raises an important question: how do you measure success if you’re not driving clicks to your website?
The answer lies in shifting the way you think about email metrics. Website traffic may no longer be the most relevant indicator of email success.
Instead, consider tracking engagement metrics within the email itself. Platforms likeHubSpot now offer the ability to measure metrics such as read time and completion rates. These insights can help you understand how much of your email content is being consumed and whether it’s resonating with your audience.
When planning your B2B digital marketing strategy, you need to be honest with yourself and others in your business.
Firstly, can you say, hand on heart, that the quality of your content is such that it’ll instil trust amongst your audience? Are you using technical storytelling to make it intriguing for your audience?
If not, go back to the drawing board and start over, because without trust, your whole plan is as useful as a chocolate fireguard.
All too often, companies share a piece of content and consider the job done. But the hard work doesn’t end once you hit ‘Publish’.
A great B2B digital marketing strategy is informed by strategic insights gained by tracking metrics into engagement, conversions, user behaviour, and so on.. These paint the picture of what you’ve done well, and which elements of your content need to be optimised.
Oftentimes, marketers channel all of their efforts into understanding how their internal content is performing.
However, it’s equally important to review the content of similar content being created by your competitors - seek inspiration from their good content to create something great. Similarly, learn from the mistakes they’re making, rather than taking the hit yourself.
You may be asking yourself, “How can I use content to reduce your prospect’s cynicism and build trust?”
Firstly, you need to create reader-first content for your B2B digital marketing strategy.
When you tell a riveting story, people sit up and take notice.
62% of B2B marketers find storytelling effective in content marketing, whilst research has indicated storytelling increases the value of products by up to 2,706%.
As Elliott Rayner, storytelling expert and former guest of our Make & Market Podcast, and fellow agencies like Granite 5 will attest, storytelling is a powerful ally for your B2B digital marketing strategy.
It fuels engagement, forms strong relationships with your audience, makes your brand more relatable, showcases client success stories, and most importantly, inspires people to take action.
With 77% of consumers preferring to purchase from a brand they recognise, never underestimate the power of building a personal brand in the communities and channels where your target customers are based.
Richard Branson, Phil Knight, and Steve Jobs are prime examples of people who’ve built legacies on the foundation of strong personal brands. When people can attribute a face to a brand, it instils trust. And as we said earlier, people buy from people they know, like, and trust.
Benefits can be attributed to gating some of the content that’s part of your B2B digital marketing strategy.
Prospect A fills in the download form, company B builds its lead-generation database.
The problem, however, ties back to what we mentioned earlier: With so much content being published that doesn’t bring any value, some people are (understandably), reluctant to hand over their information for mediocre returns.
Whilst we’re not suggesting you should ungate all of your content, be brave, loosen the shackles, ungate some of your resources, and showcase your confidence in the content you’re creating.
Before you know it, you won’t have to go searching for customers.
They’ll come searching for you.
Hot take: a lot of B2B digital marketing companies are boring.
They regurgitate vanilla messaging, create campaigns void of imagination, and don’t bring anything different to the table.
And guess what: companies who blend in, don’t stand out.
You could apply this pedestrian approach to your business - or you could inject your opinion into your marketing and provoke some thought. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking fact-filled marketing gets people’s juices flowing.
We all have an opinion, so curate creative campaigns and strategies that evoke emotion and speak to your customer - we guarantee a strategy percolating personality that makes your audience think will resonate much more with your customers than an out-of-the-box approach being applied by every man and his dog.
Granted, there’s a time and a place to use disruptive marketing, but the best marketing strategies are those that the customer can relate to - if the chance materialises to do something out of the ordinary, grab it with both hands.
The ‘traditional’ approach to inbound marketing relied on one piece of content being shared across multiple platforms.
However, ‘new’ inbound marketing has adopted a platform-first approach, with content tailored to meet the requirements of each specific platform - a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach is a thing of the past.
This presents an interesting predicament for marketers, in that the user no longer has to come to your website to get the information they need.
Research has revealed companies using omnichannel strategies achieve 91% greater year-over-year customer retention rates compared to those that don’t. Providing a consistent brand experience across multiple channels can increase revenue by up to 23%.
You may be thinking, “I don’t have the time, nor resources to generate content on a mass scale.”
We’ve two words for you that’ll change that outlook in a heartbeat: content repurposing.
In this instance, we’ll use a podcast as the original piece of content to kickstart your repurposing process - and it couldn’t be easier:
One podcast easily transformed into a series of blogs, social media posts, an eBook, and video content to instil a multi-channel approach to your B2B digital marketing strategy.
The golden rule: work smarter, not harder.
If you’re looking for the hardest way to make an easy living, marketing is a good place to start.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the days of low-volume, high-quality content are a thing of the past. Production is high, but quality is at an all-time low - and it’s having a detrimental impact on your buyers.
While the overload of channels has made platform-first, zero-click content vital, your B2B digital marketing strategy needs to incorporate content that has something to say, is well-produced and combines quality and creativity to make an impression.
Granted, it’s no walk in the park, and many companies won’t know where to start.
However, that doesn’t alter the fact that buyers won’t open unsolicited emails or align their buying cycle to suit your sales campaigns - you need to change your approach to accommodate them or run the serious risk of falling by the wayside.
Outsourcing your marketing to a specialist agency presents your business with the expertise and acumen needed to put a B2B digital marketing strategy in place that’s befitting of your needs.
Our content, marketing, and dedicated consultants have the experience to support you every step of the way and lay the foundation for a strategy befitting the modern consumer.