B2B Tips To Get Back Ready!

According to Lloyds Bank’s business barometer, economic confidence for Autumn trading is at a record high. In fact, the number of UK firms expecting higher employment rose to the highest level for close to four years in July.

What’s more, countless global reports are pointing to our increasing use of online commerce – particularly building towards the end of the year. So if your marketing budget has been treading water over the Summer, now is the time to activate. Here are our top tips to prepare for the best digital marketing for Q3 and Q4.

Better brand awareness

Seasonal breaks (this includes the early part of September) can cause a lag in online activity across both B2B and B2C. So there is little point fuelling paid campaigns if your audiences are not searching for solutions. However maintaining strategic brand awareness is important and this type of marketing should continue into the Autumn. According to Linkedin, customers are more likely to convert if they’ve been exposed to your brand at least 3-5 times.

Remember that even when on a break, B2B customers will likely be in ‘open learning mode’. Whilst not actively searching for business solutions, educational online content can still engage during downtime. This type of brand awareness might include easily digestible content such as short videos, social media tips or downloadable e-books.

Fire Up Autumn

Autumn is when your lead generation campaign should really heat up and become much more hyper targeted. During this period, consider a re-marketing strategy, especially if you’ve already been generating good engagement through branded content. Now is the opportunity to build your audience profile and re-engage those customers who may have read your articles or explored your website. It’s the season to get up close and personal! Re-marketing will help you draw in those potential customers who were curious but did not convert (yet!). Investing in this type of targeting will help harness new customers, putting you well ahead of your competitors.

And remember! Any targeted digital marketing will work best when building on the foundation stones of good brand awareness.

Know your customer

Probably one of the oldest rules in the marketing book! Essentially, don’t embark on your digital marketing campaign until you really know enough about your customer. Defining clear personas will help you curate the right messaging, tone, creative content, platform and budget. Deep customer understanding underpin the foundation stones for effective engagement. But do remember, customer needs do change – so you need to be agile and flexible too.

Be content smart

If there’s one certainty about your marketplace this season? You are not the only business actively exploring new ways to convert customers! A significant new business demand to replenish 2020 covid impact losses is being felt industry-wide. So consider agile, smart tactics to keep engagement high without blowing the budget!

Short form video content for time poor business customers is a sure fire way to maintain engagement. And video content can be edited, spliced and re-shared to ensure you optimise a return on your video production budget.

Tune in and turn out

Plan a content calendar that speaks directly to your customers and their search requirements right now. In B2B terms, this could be about how your product or service helps reduce costs, increases business efficiency or provides tools for better teamwork and collaboration.

Planning your activity and budget now will enable better Q3 and Q4 performance. Even though some B2B business sectors are still facing confidence challenges, it’s likely that some of the competition may have reduced so even though there could be less demand, there are still opportunities for taking a business leadership position to drive higher revenue.

The festive highway

Seasonal nuances are incredibly important to consider and there’s a marked formula for B2B digital marketing that means you have until around 20 December to deploy your marketing tactics and the majority of your budget! Usually once you’re past that key date in December, evidence shows a 60% drop off in demand and engagement. Keep 10-15% of your budget in the tank for ticking over until the New Year. And remember that all important lesson about maintaining branding awareness whilst your paid marketing takes a break.

If you need any support planning your B2B digital marketing – we’re here to help! somebody@somebodydigital.com