The 3 Digital Tools B2B Marketers Need (and are often not using)

igital marketing in the B2B space typically lags for two main reasons. First, sales cycles are often long and involve multiple touchpoints including offline sources. And second, because B2B cultures are often still traditionally sales-driven and haven’t yet embraced a marketing mindset.

The latter is a bugbear of many great marketers whose skills and effectiveness are hindered by idle attitudes so in this article we breakdown the elephant in the room – is digital marketing suitable for B2B (and how to convince senior business leaders) – before turning to the 3 tools that are must-haves in every B2B marketer’s arsenal and which will help with attribution, conversions and ultimately creating a compelling case study to invest more into digital marketing.

Is Digital Marketing Suitable for B2B?

99% of the time the answer is a resounding YES but there are instances when digital marketing is not going to add any material value to B2B marketing. The decision whether to go digital or not depends on the size of the market and their propensity to use the internet. For example, if your serviceable market is 100 organisations, it really doesn’t make sense to invest in anything digital beyond your website because the time and cost to contact every organisation would be easily manageable by one or two people. Alternatively, if your market is too large to contact directly but they don’t use the internet, then your budget will be similarly wasted.

For B2B organisations with a market too big to contact directly and who use the internet, digital marketing is essential – not in isolation, but in addition to other marketing activities.

The Key to a Great B2B Campaign

The magic formula for an effective digital campaign goes like this:

1. Create compelling content with a strong call-to-action (CTA)
2. Promote it online to drive traffic to your website
3. Capture prospects (identified leads)
4. Nurture suspects (non-identified leads)
5. Convert leads to sales
6. Delight customers
7. Turn customers into referrals

Easy right? Oh, if only!

The reality is that while the formula is straight forward, there is a lot of room for error along the way that will impact the results. Identifying and fixing those choke points therefore is an essential part of the continuous improvement of campaigns – and the key to success.

Common choke points of a campaign include:

1. Boring or irrelevant content
2. A weak CTA (like trying to go straight in for the sell too soon)
3. Targeting the wrong audience (or the wrong stage of the buyer journey)
4. A slow-loading landing page
5. An unimpressive landing page (including user experience design)
6. A weak, misaligned, or tainted brand

Finding which of those choke points is holding back your campaign means that you can fix them and, through a process of optimisation, demonstrate a solid ROI on your investment, rather than assuming that the campaign was a failure based on the first results. The following three tools will provide you with the breadcrumbs to follow.

Three Digital Tools B2B Marketers Need

The starting point when assessing potential choke points is your click-through rate. Assuming you’re targeting the right audience on the right platform/s, if people aren’t clicking then start by focussing on points 1and 2 above – your content, offer, and CTA. Try split testing one at a time to see which is underperforming.

Once you’re confident that your content and CTA are rock solid, these are the three tools you’ll need for the rest:

1. Hotjar
2. Visitor Queue
3. HubSpot (or similar)

Hotjar

Hotjar offers a freemium license for heat mapping (click and scroll tracking) and screen recording. Yes, you can literally watch what people are doing on your landing page! While you can’t identify users, the insights will show you if there is anything wrong with your landing page. If people aren’t scrolling down, test a few alternatives in the hero section until they start moving further down. If people are clicking on non-clickable content, make those elements clickable with another CTA.

Visitor Queue

Visitor Queue is perfect for two things: to make certain you are targeting the right traffic and to identify accounts (companies) that are showing buyer intent but who didn’t convert.

Like Hotjar, Visitor Queue is GDPR complaint and won’t show you the users' information. It does however go one step further and show you the network from where a user was visiting your site. You can then jump into LinkedIn, find the key stakeholders, connect with them, and attempt to convert them through direct sales techniques.

Visitor Queue isn’t free but it’s worth the small investment.

HubSpot

Even identifiable leads aren’t always ready to convert, so having a tool like HubSpot to track user behaviour on your site including when they come back and what they’re looking for, will help you to convert leads when they are ready to buy. For example, if an identifiable user keeps going to your pricing page or contact page but doesn’t do anything, it’s a good time to take the initiative and reach out to them.

Bonus: Hearsay

The three tools mentioned above are an incredible source of quantitative data, but they don’t tell the whole story. To truly understand your audience and what motivates them, you need high-quality, actionable quantitative data. Otherwise, you’ll continue to be left guessing what new split testing technique to try. Hearsay is an Australian SaaS platform designed for companies looking to get more from their data by having in-depth, insightful conversations with their customers and prospective customers. It’s free to try, so if you’re serious about UX and CX then sign up on their website.  

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