The best analogy I can think of for the world wide web is this…as all of you know, it is literally a virtual shopping mall. Your store front can potentially have foot traffic every second of the day, BUT…does your store front have a brick wall? Can your prospects locate you, is your address visible? Or, have you torn down that brick wall and installed a welcoming message that you are there to solve their problem, you have a sale going on, you are the answer to their prayers? Think of that virtual mall and you can determine if driving traffic to your site makes sense.
Your online strategy will depend on your audience and business model. If your business provides a service or an online product to consumers or businesses, your firms stakeholders need to craft up an online strategy yesterday!!! NOT tomorrow or next week…YESTERDAY! For this one topic, I will stick to the B2B strategy, we will save the B2C topic for another time.
But first, let’s go over some important topics. How can you get to that decision…below are some steps that will help answer the question, “is driving traffic to the website a lucrative option?”
Who are we? How does the general public perceive us?
Who is our audience and where do they reside?
Where does your audience research your services?
The two most important questions…”What is our value proposition?” “What pain does our audience experience that we can solve today?”.
The Google universe is an ideal spot to generate interest, but is Google my only option? Nope…online advertising for a B2B market can occur on several platforms. Research the following platforms if you cannot afford a PPC expert; LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Twitter and Slideshare.
I have touched on the Google PPC platform so my focus will shift to LinkedIn. Facebook, Reddit and YouTube will be published at a later date. I’m not a big believer in Twitter or Slideshare, but that can change.
LinkedIn can be really valuable, as the majority of you know, it’s a social network for professionals. Like many social media platforms with advertising capability, LinkedIn allows for budget control, cost per click optimization and conversion tracking. This powerful platform allows you to also do the following:
- Target a specific role
- Geo-targeting
- Size of firm – You can base this on number of employees or the amount of revenue the firm generates each year.
- Target a specific vertical
LinkedIn has both ads and sponsored content. Both have their uses, but sponsored content could make the key difference to your B2B marketing strategy for certain parts of the buying cycle, or maybe your goal is for brand recognition.
Be aware that LinkedIn is expensive – it operates on pay-per-click, and while you might get a lot of impressions, click-through are harder to get.
Some Tips:
- In-platform reporting is limited and not ideal for the metric centric individuals, I recommend connecting a third-party reporting tool such as Databox to build dashboards to analyze and optimize campaigns.
- The ‘matched audiences’ feature allows you to upload a csv and target a specific list of companies with the ability to then create additional lookalike audiences from this.
Whether your objective is to drive website traffic, build brand awareness or generate leads, LinkedIn has some great features to drive results
Good luck to all of you, if you have any questions, feel free to DM me.
