B2B Inbound Marketing: Best Strategies (with Examples and Tactics)

We’re living in a time in which advertisements constantly bombard customers. Brands are shouting for our attention, trying desperately to rise above the ever-growing tide of competitors. The flood of messaging starts blending.

In the end, we, as consumers, simply tune it out. Sometimes literally. A 2021 research found that approximately 40% of U.S. internet users use an ad blocker. Considering how much some businesses spend on paid ads, this is a major loss.

All of this can be exhausting, both for an advertiser and customers! It’s no wonder traditional outbound marketing tactics aren’t as effective anymore.

Enter inbound marketing, a transformative approach that proves time and time again to excel in this changing landscape. More specifically, we’re talking about B2B inbound marketing strategies. When your business crafts an inbound marketing plan, you’re setting yourself up for quality lead generation, SEO (search engine optimization), email marketing, increased website traffic, and a higher ROI.

Learn all there is to know about inbound marketing strategies in this comprehensive guide. Connect with us to launch winning campaigns and grow your business! By the time you’ve finished reading this guide, you’ll not only understand the “what” and “why” of B2B inbound marketing campaign but also the “how.”

 

What is B2B Inbound Marketing?

B2B (or business-to-business) inbound marketing is about attracting, engaging, and delighting potential customers. HubSpot coined the term in the early 2000s, and marketers have eagerly embraced and finetuned the methodologies ever since.

By delivering valuable SEO-optimized content types like customized email marketing to users, businesses can build meaningful relationships and product trust with their customers.

B2B inbound marketing tactics are less abrasive than cold calls, mass email marketing, content marketing, and other outdated methods. At its core, an inbound marketing plan requires a profound mindset shift; it places the customer at the center of the strategy.

Modern B2B buyers are more informed, research-oriented, and selective than ever before. Content marketing should educate and empower potential customers even through email marketing as opposed to constantly pitching a product or service.

Comparing Inbound Marketing to Outbound Marketing

Think of inbound marketing as a magnet, drawing in potential customers or clients with useful and SEO-optimized content types tailored to users’ unique interests. The goal of inbound strategy is not to interrupt users with your branding marketing. Rather, your business should enhance users’ experience or product search.

On the other hand, outbound marketing involves pushing marketing messages to a wide audience of potential customers, often through paid ads channels like TV/radio commercials, billboards, content marketing, and cold calling. It’s typically less targeted and, therefore, doesn’t resonate with the majority of people who encounter these messages.

Research revealed that leads generated by B2B inbound marketing tactics cost 62% less than leads generated by outbound marketing. It’s indisputable. Inbound marketing is a more cost-effective form of lead generation.

To sum it up, inbound marketing campaign is customer-centric, while outbound marketing is business-centric. In recent years, inbound marketing has gained prominence for its ability to research and authentically engage with a target audience. It’s a critical strategy in the modern marketer’s toolkit.

The Benefits of Inbound Marketing for B2B

B2B inbound offers a wide range of benefits for businesses seeking long-term growth and sustainable success. These are some of the key advantages:

• Targeted audience engagement: Content marketing that aligns with the needs of ideal customers will not only attract users but also engage those who are genuinely interested in your products or services. 
• Cost-effective strategy: Online content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, and social media content are generally less expensive than paid ads and PPC advertising.
• Building trust and credibility: Through consistent and relevant content marketing, your branding becomes a trusted source in customers’ eyes and throughout your industry. This can lead to users more product loyalty and customer retention.
• Measurable and adaptable: Inbound marketing leverages research data and analytics to measure campaign performance. You can track KPIs, such as website traffic, lead generation, landing page views, users conversion rates, and more, to see what’s working and what needs improvement.

On top of all of this, B2B inbound marketing strategies result in long-term growth. Unlike outbound marketing campaigns that can be short-lived and reliant on continuous spending on paid ads, the benefits of B2B inbound marketing campaigns tend to accumulate over time. 

As you build a library of valuable and SEO-optimized content and foster relationships with your customers, the organic traffic and leads generated can provide a steady stream of business opportunities, creating a foundation for sustainable growth.

How Inbound Marketing Works

As you’ve read, inbound marketing is intricate but doesn’t have to be too complicated. It all starts with developing a buyer persona. When you humanize your target audience, you can better get inside their head and understand their product expectations.

Some factors you may want to consider when building your buyer persona:

• Demographics: Users’ age, gender, income, family structure, level of education, socioeconomic status, geographic location, etc.
• Pain points: What challenges do they face and/or what is preventing them from achieving their goals?
• Values: What matters to them most when choosing a product/service? Is it a product price, convenience, or sustainability?

When it comes to B2B buyers, you’ll likely want to think more about your target company or decision-makers at those companies. There are tons of resources to help you craft in-depth buyer personas. 

It can help to analyze customer data and compare it to the business’s ideal customer. If the two are drastically different, it may be time for a message shift. If they’re similar, you’re on the right track.

Once you have a well-rounded idea of the ideal customer(s), B2B inbound marketing works by figuring out the best ways to connect with them. Informed by these personas, brands can identify the most effective SEO-optimized content marketing and messaging likely to resonate with their target audience.

One tried and true marketing tool is paying attention to and leveraging buying triggers. Buying triggers cause potential consumers to have a clear (sometimes immediate) need for a product/service. Some of these triggers are universal, such as fear, trust, and belonging. Others are more subjective and will require the research of unique product expectations of an individual.

The Key Principles of B2B Inbound Marketing

While specific B2B inbound marketing strategies have evolved over time to better align with consumer behavior, the fundamental principles of inbound marketing remain the same. 

The five key principles are: standardize, contextualize, optimize, personalize, and empathize. It’s often represented by the acronym SCOPE. What do they mean within the context of inbound marketing?

• Standardize: Tell your stories (their arc, essence, etc.) consistently. Don’t change the content at its core, or it can come off as untrustworthy. Use its regular SEO optimization only.
• Contextualize: Tailor your content to resonate with the particular needs of your audience. Without changing the messaging, make it SEO-optimized to resonate with whomever you interact with.
• Optimize: Pay attention to ways you can improve your storytelling or content strategy. For example, this could mean going back to the drawing board to improve your SEO optimization.
• Personalize: Imbue your content with a personalized touch to better form a connection with your audience.
• Empathize: Lean into the human element to better relate with your audience. After all, every brand is made up of people.

If you prioritize these principles when developing each B2B inbound marketing campaign, you’re bound to engage meaningfully with the right people. SCOPE should be your guiding force. Without it, you may as well be shouting into the void.

Key B2B Inbound Marketing Channels

In the digital age, there are a multitude of B2B inbound marketing channels. The number of options seems to grow every day, too, with new social media platforms and trends popping up all the time. Agility is one of many important qualities of a good marketer.

Related content: B2B Digital Marketing Trends

The best B2B marketing channels for your business might differ from those of another business. It all depends on who your target audience is and where they spend their time online. This is the perfect time to refer back to your buyer persona.

Some of the top marketing channels in 2024 are:

• Social media marketing (SMM), including influencer marketing
• Content marketing, including blog posts, whitepapers, infographics, etc.
• Email marketing
• Video marketing, including YouTube and your own landing pages
• Podcasting
• Search engine marketing (SEM), including SEO and PPC (Pay per click) advertising
• Thought leadership and B2B PR events, such as webinars or panel discussions

Unless you have a robust marketing team, it’s impossible to invest fully into every one of these content channels, nor is it the best way to go. Assess the relevance of each social media channel to your industry and niche. Some businesses may find value in influencer marketing or professional networks like LinkedIn. In contrast, others might thrive on platforms like Instagram with video marketing or industry-specific forums with blog posts. 

Some social media content platforms require a lot more time and effort than others. For instance, creating a podcast generally involves writing some sort of script, acquiring good audio equipment, taking the time to record, editing the audio, and uploading it to social media listening platforms. And that’s before you’ve even promoted it. In contrast, Instagram social media blog posts might take significantly less time and resources.

You might be interested in: B2B Social Media Marketing Strategy

How to Build an Inbound Marketing Strategy for B2B

Now comes the exciting part…putting your knowledge into practice! There is no singular “right way” to build an effective B2B inbound marketing strategy. There are also times when things don’t perform in the ways that we were confident they would. 

Marketing—while grounded in research—is ultimately about trial and error.

Through our years of experience as a B2B inbound marketing agency, we’ve helped tons of businesses launch successful campaigns. Though no two campaigns are the same, there are actionable steps that go into building a great strategy.

Related Content: Top Inbound Marketing Agencies for 2024

1. Define Your Goals and Objectives

Lay out SMART goals for your B2B inbound marketing strategies effort. Do you aim to boost website traffic, generate leads, increase brand awareness, or enhance customer retention? By explicitly stating these goals from the start, you have a guidepost for what you’re looking to achieve.

2. Hone in on Your Buyer Persona

We’ve already covered why developing a buyer persona is fundamental to a sound inbound marketing strategy. Don’t create it and forget about it. On the contrary, invest time into thinking about and understanding this person. Every aspect of your strategy should center on your persona(s).

3. Do Your Research and Analyze Competitors

Competitive analysis is integral to most business decisions, especially when it comes to marketing efforts. Identify a handful of your top competitors and evaluate their social media presence, content, and branding. What seems to be working? Are there gaps that you could fill? Ways you can adapt parts of their strategy and improve it? 

Of course, you should never plagiarize somebody’s content. However, it’s acceptable and even encouraged to glean inspiration from what your competitors are doing. There are plenty of marketing tools that can grant you competitor insights.

4. Create a Content Strategy Roadmap

Your content strategy is the heart and soul of your inbound marketing efforts. It’s the engine that powers your ability to attract, engage, and delight your audience. Content marketing tools vary widely, including blog posts, infographics, whitepapers, videos, webinars, email marketing, and more.

Visualize your content marketing plan by creating and maintaining a content calendar. It will help you stay organized, keep a steady pace, and mark important dates. There’s a reason why over 90% of companies use content calendars. You can find premade templates online. 

Every piece of content you produce should prioritize search engine optimization (SEO), which begins with keyword research. Familiarize yourself and any other content creators with SEO best practices. Quality SEO will help boost your search engine rankings and increase the likelihood that your content will reach its intended users.

Just as SEO is about playing to search engines, hashtags, and proper formatting help optimize your content for different social media platforms. Research hashtags, trends, and correct sizing so that your content goes far, is relevant, and looks good.

5. Distribute and Promote Your Content

The saying “create once, publish everywhere” rings true here. Instead of pouring time and energy into tons of unique blog posts and other content, create something stellar and adapt it to other platforms. For example, you may call for influencers to build an effective influencer marketing strategy.

For example, you could record a Q&A video with brand reps or influencers. This video could be posted on YouTube as a form of video marketing. Usually, videos cast by influencers get thousands of views. You may find and attract influencers with multi-million audiences on social media platforms. Many influencers may not even require money for their engagement. The audio from the Q&A could be published as a podcast. The transcript can become a blog post. Short clips or pull quotes can go on social media or email marketing. The content distribution opportunities are vast. 

Related Content: B2B Video Marketing: The Complete Guide for 2024

Additionally, leverage your professional network and colleagues. Encourage influencers to share content in their circles. If done right, the content should be helpful and worth sharing.

6. Measure Performance and Refine Your Strategy

Once you’ve created, optimized, and promoted tailored content, give it a little time to soak. You may not see results right away. You may not even see results for a few days or weeks. Regardless, it’s important to evaluate your content KPIs regularly. 

Those goals you defined at the get-go? Check how you measured them. Be honest with yourself on what could have been done better. It may be beneficial to solicit the input of others. An outside perspective could uncover new opportunities. Equipped with this knowledge and experience, update or re-invent an even better B2B inbound marketing strategy.

What Results Can Be Achieved Through Inbound Marketing?

When carried out effectively, inbound marketing can help businesses achieve a variety of outcomes. As mentioned before, one of the biggest advantages of inbound marketing is that it can help nurture long-term growth, not just short-term wins.

Some of the most valuable results that can be achieved through inbound marketing are:

• Increased website traffic: A solid SEO content strategy can drive a lot of organic (unpaid) traffic to your website. While PPC is a form of paid advertising, it often brings in valuable traffic because these users search for content related to your product/service. As the number of new users increases, so does your website’s domain authority, which will boost your search engine rankings and visibility.
• Lead generation: Inbound marketing tactics generate a lot of warm/hot leads, basically the opposite of what cold calling does. These leads have shown a genuine interest in your products or services, making them further down the sales funnel.
• Higher conversion rates: Because inbound marketing content is tailored towards a particular audience, it’s likely to resonate with them and garner engagement. More clicks, subscriptions, form fills, phone calls, email marketing, etc.
• Better brand awareness/authority: Coupled with powerful branding, inbound marketing can do wonders for brand awareness. Regularly producing high-quality content positions a brand as a trusted source, strengthening its reputation and loyalty from consumers.
• Measurable ROI: Inbound marketing is data-driven, allowing you to measure your campaigns’ ROI accurately. You can track metrics such as customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLV), conversion rates, and more. 

These are just a sampling of the different measurable outcomes that can be achieved through B2B inbound marketing. If certain results matter more to you than others, you can finetune your strategy to target that specific metric. 

Why You Should Partner With a B2B Inbound Marketing Agency

Planning an effective B2B inbound marketing strategy can be a lot of work, but you don’t have to do it alone! When you partner with a B2B inbound agency, you benefit from their expertise, experience, and results-driven approaches.

Agencies stay up-to-date with the latest industry trends and provide access to essential resources and tools while optimizing your budget. Outsourcing your inbound marketing frees up internal teams to focus on other strategic projects. 

In essence, teaming up with a B2B marketing agency can set you off on the right foot and really accelerate your growth.

Use the Best B2B Inbound Marketing Benefits with Ninjapromo

When you want exceptional inbound marketing, look no further than Ninjapromo. We help take your marketing to new heights with data-driven strategies and tactics. Whether you’re looking to boost website traffic with email marketing, generate leads, or foster lasting customer relationships, Ninjapromo’s services are designed to maximize your ROI and help you achieve your goals.

Conclusion

Inbound marketing is far from just a buzzword. It’s a transformational and modern approach to marketing that centers on the customer. With the right content strategy, businesses can create a profound impact by addressing their audience’s needs, optimizing for search engines, and providing personalized experiences. 

When done artfully, inbound marketing leads to increased website traffic, lead generation, improved conversion rates, and enhanced brand authority. By embracing its principles and continuously adapting, businesses can chart a course toward sustainable growth, customer loyalty, and enduring success.