In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, B2B brands face a unique set of challenges and opportunities. Dave Roth, a seasoned expert from Emergent Digital, took the stage at Engage 2023 to share his proven strategies in the session “Digital Marketing Playbook for B2B Brands.” With a focus on boosting B2B lead generation efficiency and maximizing monetization potential, Dave’s insights provided attendees with a roadmap to success. 

Dave outlined defensive and offensive plays B2B marketers should have on deck: robust content, harnessing 1st party data, marketing automation, intelligent lead scoring, multichannel paid media, CRM integration, offline conversion tracking, and down-funnel optimization. This toolkit ensures that brands are well-equipped to tackle the complex landscape of B2B marketing.

The Holistic Journey

In today’s multichannel reality, connecting with customers requires a holistic approach. Both in-person and online interactions throughout the customer journey play a significant role on the conversion path. From initial engagement to final conversion, B2B marketers must consider every touchpoint. This is especially true for products with extended sales cycles. Identifying milestones, key points in the customer conversion journey that directly lead to revenue. Track these, then setting up optimization opportunities. Nurturing prospects is just as crucial as landing them; hence understanding the complete customer journey is pivotal.

By crafting high-volume, multi-channel programs, brands can tap into advanced segments, dynamic tracking, and traffic source analysis to optimize their campaigns. The focus shifts beyond just generating leads but to a comprehensive strategy that considers down-funnel optimization for maximum conversions.

Content Strategy: The Heart of Engagement

A compelling content strategy is the cornerstone of B2B success. Align your brand’s value with your audience’s interests and needs. The result is high-value content that resonates. Dave encourages marketers to provide substantial value to their audiences, creating a content-rich ecosystem that drives engagement and conversions.  Create content that offers substantial value, exceeding what’s extracted.

Harnessing First-Party Data

Use your own data. In an evolving privacy landscape, it’s a goldmine that enables precise target prospecting, lookalike audience creation, and potent remarketing strategies. With the reduced reliance on third-party cookies, first-party data becomes the foundation for successful campaigns and meaningful customer relationships. 

By harnessing your own data, you can elevate your B2B marketing game to new heights more efficiently. This data, sourced directly from your audience, offers invaluable insights into their preferences, behaviors, and needs. From customer lists enriched with various fields to comprehensive data sets, first-party data empowers you to understand your audience on a deeper level.

Ad platforms have evolved to seamlessly integrate first-party data, bridging the gaps left by the changing digital landscape. As Dave put it, “Marketing in a cookie-less world is like driving at night; you have to rely on something else.” In a time where third-party cookies are less reliable, first-party data becomes the guiding light, enabling marketers to navigate the terrain confidently.

Mastering Automation and CRM Integration

When traffic lands on your site, marketing automation and CRM systems take the lead in nurturing and converting potential customers. When set up correctly, CRM platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, Pardot, and Zoho are the backbone to this nurturing process, turning prospects into devoted customers.

Multichannel Paid Media

The paid media landscape holds opportunities for B2B lead generation and conversion.  A multi-channel approach—paid social, paid content, and lead generation at the upper funnel, while paid search, comparison sites and strategic network partnerships dominate the lower funnel. These are further magnified with loading first-party audiences into ad performance and leveraging automation and dynamic creative for optimal results.

A Data-Driven Valuation Approach

Dave’s session didn’t stop at lead generation; he brought attention to the ultimate goal: valuation. Understanding how customers generate value and tracking their journey from acquisition to conversion and beyond is key. Assess models of valuation and make iterative improvements. Perfection isn’t the goal—actionable insights are. The importance of a strategy is that it evolves, adapts, and delivers results.

Long Term Success Through Signals

Signals—those invaluable indicators that help platforms optimize your campaigns. Fine-tune optimization strategies, direct on what’s good in order to optimize. Dave also highlighted the potential of trade publications as hidden gems in B2B marketing, urging marketers to tap into unconventional sources for growth.

B2B Success and Beyond

In an age where B2B marketing demands precision and relevance, Dave’s insights offer a guide you can apply to your B2B brands today. As digital continues to evolve, it’s clear that leveraging first party data is the backbone to success. By embracing a strategic blend of efficient lead generation, comprehensive content, data-driven decision-making, and innovative marketing technology, brands can unlock potential and transform their digital presence. 

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Lauren’s theme was making content marketing magic and she showed how she had asked AI to take her profile picture and make her into a content sorceress. A quick way someone could leverage the themes in their own brands.

Brand Pillars along with Brand Voice and Key Audience were the potion to take one good idea (or in her case one podcast) and create a tree of ever-expanding content ideas. Start with the pillar, define the audience, then add topics using AI. Each topic can then have several angles, and each of those angles can be delivered in different formats.

Be very specific in defining AI’s task, “you will help me generate x amount of content ideas…” and providing it all the necessary context.  It’s important to provide feedback during your conversations. Each AI conversation is independent, and it does not learn from the previous conversation, so you want to have less conversations with more prompts within the conversation.

To differentiate your content from everyone else using AI, be very specific in how you define audience, voice, and tone. Try asking AI to create content in the voice and tone of three very different well known celebrities for ideas in creating your own.

Lauren closed with the importance of teaching your teams to delegate routine tasks to AI. And how AI should not make team members nervous, but help them leverage their strengths and cover areas they might be weaker in.

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The digital marketing ecosystem has experienced dramatic changes, particularly in the last few years. For example, Web 3’s metaverse provided brand marketers to think in new dimensions during the pandemic. More recently, ChatGPT made artificial intelligence approachable and exponentially more impactful on virtually every aspect of marketing. In this article, we explore digital marketing strategies and tactics that haven’t worn well in the past decade, to ensure your 2024 marketing plan is both timeless and forward-looking.

Building a digital marketing department
Marketing should be agnostic to media type, and so should the strategist be developing and implementing marketing campaigns. As such, companies need to conduct a skills assessment of existing marketing teams to determine who may need training or who may need to be replaced with talent that natively understands both digital and analog worlds. This obsolete strategy is still an issue for most marketing teams that have not focused on integration and will continue to haunt slow adopters.

Designing a website via internal stakeholder committee
The primary reason for the lack of user-centered design is that most websites are built by a host of departmental managers who have far too much say on colors, fonts, images, and copy. The problem with committee-based design is that these representatives make decisions based on their personal tastes and preferences versus those of the site’s intended user. While this approach is increasingly uncommon, it is still a very real issue due to the group thinking inherent in corporations.

Creating content for content’s sake
With rampant adoption of ChatGPT and similar generative AI platforms, content is easier to create than ever before. This trend has exacerbated the desire to focus on quantity of content over quality, which is only hurting brands in the long term. Successful brands will spend the time to research, develop, optimize, and syndicate content that matters to their constituents and works well across device types and screen sizes. At the very least, invest in high quality editors if you plan to cut copywriting staff due to increased ChatGPT reliance.

Doing black-hat SEO
Google has developed a detailed set of guidelines for search-friendly website design. If you follow their rules, you will be much more likely to rank for desired search terms. Even Bing operates on very similar terms: no IP-spoofing, redirects, hidden or duplicate text, etc. To boil it down, do good marketing and Google will reward you with higher rankings. Google’s E-E-A-T updates identified and penalized a significant number of websites for violating best practices, yet companies still feel the pull of the quick wins that black- and grey-hat SEO can supposedly provide. Big mistake. Play for the long game with compelling content, clean code, and the kind of site credibility and authority that can only be earned, not bought.

Avoiding landing page testing
Unfortunately, not much has changed over the past decade, in terms of landing page testing and optimization adoption across the marketing landscape. The companies that “get it” continue to invest and evolve their efforts, resulting in ever-increasing conversion rates. Far too many marketers, however, are too busy, skeptical, or unlearned regarding the benefits of landing page optimization (LPO). I believe a significant percentage of these remaining marketers will finally commit to testing, if not diving full-bore into LPO in 2024, especially with help from ChatGPT and similar AI-powered tools.

Focusing on engagement in social media
In the first wave of social media marketing (1995-2009), marketers focused on gaining followers and fans. The second wave of social media (2010-2014) focused on conversations and engagement efforts. The third wave (2015 and beyond) focused on three primary areas: collaboration, conversions and brand narrative. Smaller companies, business-to-business organizations, and profit-driven corporations should now focus more on conversion-based strategies and tactics that drive revenue. Bigger consumer brands will shift focus towards developing a brand narrative that helps consumers identify with the company and fit it into the picture a person has of themselves (i.e., shared values like environmental or social issues). Brands will focus from being “Liked” to being “Attached” to the consumer.

Paying third-party vendors to represent your brand in social media
The most common excuses for outsourcing social media management include a lack of internal resources and a lack of proficiency with social platforms. The bottom line is that nobody knows your brand better than your employees, partners, and other advocates. Let them oversee spreading the good word, not a low-paid college graduate working from home. I wish this were less common than it is, but many brands still feel the need to outsource their voice in social media, rather than building the resources in-house (with guidance from experts like us, of course).

Underestimating the power of video (and audio) marketing
I speak regularly about social media and search marketing and am a huge champion of multimedia content, especially video for marketing. I’m still amazed that the marketers to whom I present so often lack cohesive video (and audio) organic and paid content strategies. YouTube is still the world’s second largest search engine, so what are you doing to get into that conversation with consistently compelling content? Brands of all sizes and shapes also need a coherent TikTok and vertical video marketing strategy to be relevant in 2024.

Renting email lists
With the understanding that building an email database in-house is still a highly effective sales and marketing strategy, companies continue to test new strategies to grow their list. Some of the more effective methods of building a house email list include SEO, PPC, direct (mail) marketing, co-registration (email) with partners, contests (via social media platforms like X/Twitter and Facebook) and most importantly, search marketing. This has not changed, and thankfully, fewer organizations are renting low-quality email lists that typically generate a high percentage of spam complaints.

Sending unsegmented or untargeted emails
Despite the evolution of email marketing platforms, a significant percentage of businesses (particularly smaller ones with limited budget and bandwidth) continue to send out unsegmented or targeted emails. Spending the time to understand your email list by digging deep into the analytics and contact profiles, even with help from AI, can reap huge rewards. From there, create and target content based on indicated preferences, as well as demographic and psychographic information. Leveraging the power of AI now available in many email/CRM/marketing automation platforms, watch the value of each subscriber increase exponentially, with incremental effort.

Gaming online reviews
Most brands understand the power of social proof in the form of customer reviews. Unfortunately, too many brands are quick to “buy” or influence positive reviews. The result is the risk of being penalized by search engines, directories, and other review sites. The greater danger is consumers seeing through the charade and taking their business elsewhere. The short answer: create compelling and memorable customer experiences that will make them want to create and share positive reviews. Many companies are focusing on customer delight in 2015 and will bubble to the top as a result.

For a business to succeed in this increasingly complicated and noisy digital world, marketers must let go of obsolete ideas and embrace the concept of continually testing evolving techniques and technologies. The outdated digital marketing techniques outlined above are best retired in 2023, to free up bandwidth and budget for greater success in the years to come.

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Title: What does Technical SEO look like in 2023?

Description:

As the digital landscape is evolving faster than ever with AI, technical SEO remains crucial for businesses looking to stay ahead in the SERPs. In this presentation, we will explore the current state of technical SEO in 2023 and discuss key trends around web performance, user experience, tooling, automations and more.

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Title: Digital Marketing Playbook for B2B Brands

Description:

In this session we tackle the challenges that come with running lead-gen campaigns for B2B Brands. We’ll help set you up for success with these tried-and-true strategies and tactics

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Title: Using Automated Articles Successfully: Is it Possible?

Description:

Carolyn will walk the audience through a case study that takes a detailed look at the capabilities of automated journalism, news story requirements, and options for implementation.

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Title: Creating Actionable SEO Deliverables

Description:

Every day we are documenting and writing up JIRA tickets, talking with developers or clients, sending emails, submitting bugs, creating SEO recommendations, and much more. So, what do business owners, clients, product teams and dev teams care about? Dave walks through his years of working in the agency, in-house and consulting spaces to help you get the most out of your time spent digging and doing various explainers and writeups.

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Title: The Future is Now – Responding to Google’s AI Changes with SEO

Description:

Google’s changes in 2023 have been fast and furious, and the launch and evolution of interactive, AI-generated search results has everyone nervous and wondering how their organic traffic will be impacted.

CEO & Founder of MobileMoxie, Cindy Krum has a proven track record of anticipating and predicting changes from Google, and she will talk us through what to expect next, and how smart SEO’s can plan for it. Bard is Google’s AI system that will now push the number one organic rankings down, further in the search results.

Learn how great SEOs can maintain or even gain visibility in search results that are crowded with Google’s new AI content. Drive rankings by embracing new SEO strategies, tactics and content formats by understanding the impact of language models that Google uses to process information, like BERT and MUM, and how they impact SEO and Search Generated Experiences (SGE). This keynote will walk you through what to expect, and how you can plan for the evolution and future of search.

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Title: GPT-Amped B2B & B2B2C Dossier Marketing: Automated LinkedIn/Sales Navigator Hacks to Build Brands & Crush Conversion

Description:

Build & run an SEO training program at your organization (or for your clients). Here’s the twist: Your audience will acLinkedin’s SalesNavigator is arguably one of the most powerful marketing tools on earth for converting both business and personal-use targets. Combined with GPT4, rad tools including PhantomBuster, Dux-Soup, and others, highly tuned target audiences, will self-discover your soft, NON-spammy, highly automated networking engagement tactics, request connection…and become yours for the taking. Conversions inevitably follow.

Attendees will learn how to

-Research integrated paid & organic (mind-melting) psychographic targeting to form lists of known individuals and companies (dossiers)

-Use GPT4 to quickly focus and expand audience research by methods previously not feasible -Insane automation techniques respectfully wielded, so powerful they’re dangerous in the hands of unscrupulous marketers

-Create a steady, predictable flow of new, focused inbound connection requests from audience members

-Shepard individual audience members towards both B2B and B2C conversions, from long cycle lead gen to non-business consumer conversions

-Build indelible brand identity to enhance conversions

-Integrate marketing tactics, organic, paid, and intra-channel

-Remain compliant to CCPA, GDPR, & emergent privacy concerns

-Vertical PR applications, which have resulted in many a link built, article placed, news sourcing, interviews accomplished, earned media, podcast appearances, and more.

Why mess around with the same old moderately effective techniques? Instead, gain market-busting results targeting lists of known humans. We have tons of data to document selling many millions, HR recruitment, media placement, and other uses. I’ll show everything and attendees will leave with powerful new weapons to crush B2B, B2C, & B2B2C marketing.

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Title: Google Shopping Feed & Campaign Tips to Rule PMax, Shopping Ads, The World…

Description:

With the advent of Performance Max campaigns in the Ecommerce PPC world, one of the most crucial tools in the DTC brand’s toolbox is the… product feed. The product feed?! Yup, the product feed. In this session, Kirk will take a look at crucial optimization ideas within Google Merchant Center AND Google Ads to help give you an edge over your competitor in the land of Google Shopping.

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