Successful digital marketing operations are not just a good addition to your business operations. Without them, you might be getting negative results, not neutral.
Many of us mainly see digital marketing operations as an additive function to business success. Whether we’re talking about promotional operations, customer experience, or others, we see that without proper marketing, the business can run, and with proper digital marketing operations, it can run better.
But especially when it comes to B2B companies selling products and solutions nationally or internationally, we’ve run into multiple examples over the years where B2B marketing operations have not only failed to add value to the sales process, customer experience, and gross margin, but have actually deducted from it.
Sometimes you’re not only failing to help customers buy: you’re sabotaging the process.
Why are B2B companies challenged with this?
B2B companies are especially vulnerable to this. When you’re beginning, it’s brutal full-body-contact hardcore B2B sales operations to get the revenues up. When this works, companies tend to stick with what has worked so far and is profitable, even if it will hinder future results.
This is why proper B2B digital marketing (and by proper I mean done by professionals in a strategic manner) is left by the wayside and marketing can become dead weight at some point.
If you’re late to improve your digital marketing to a proper level, you will find that you suffer, as getting results takes time. This is especially true if you have to unwind something negative first: you’re not starting from zero, you’re starting from negative.
Your competitors will run away with everything you’re failing at
Since we don’t work in a vacuum but in an ever-changing market, it’s not only our actions or lack of actions that can hinder our success, but everything we don’t do that the competition does. I’m not saying that successful digital marketing is going to solve everything, but it will at least stop hurting you.
Your customers’ memory will be long
Even when you get your act together, it doesn’t mean that your B2B customers will suddenly do a full 180 degrees and add all of these new things to your advantage in their mind. The longer you’ve been behind, the more work and time it requires. Similarly to the previous section, the faster you start, the less damage is done.
Your passive assets will be your downfall
Your problem will be everything that you don’t actively manage but your customers run into often. These are your web presence, the freshness of your website, the technical and experiential ease of communication, and the signals you gather from your customers.
The reason active digital marketing operations or the lack of them will not put you in a position less than zero is simply because if you don’t promote or make an effort, you’re losing out to your competition, but you’re not actively hindering yourself.
Failures in web presence
Web presence is what users run into when they’re looking for you or discover you online, whether they’re checking for additional information about your company after a meeting with sales, or they’re just in a discovery phase.
Special care should be taken with these, especially when rebranding, doing business restructuring, or forming other significant changes, as old information around the internet isn’t optimal for your B2B digital marketing efforts.
Here are the key parts to look at when making sure you’re not passively hurting your commercial chances.
Search engines
Search engines are a primary mode of travel to your website. Often, even if the person is just searching for your website, they’ll use them, as most browsers’ address bars are connected to a search engine. What this means is that even before getting to your website, people will see your brand on Google. And how your brand looks in the Google search results page after a brand search matters for your digital marketing success.
Since search engines index a lot of information and proactively create different assets (often with low quality), even if you don’t manage them, you might be in for a surprise when you take a look.
What you need to be considerate of are things like:
- Knowledge Panel: Displays detailed brand information from Google’s Knowledge Graph, including description, logo, social profiles, and key facts about the brand.
- First-view search results: What is shown in the first view when you search for the brand.
- Rich Sitelinks: Enhanced sitelinks showing important internal brand pages like About Us, Contact, Products.
- Google My Business: Displays location, business hours, reviews, images, and a map for brand presence.
- And more.
You can find the equivalent also on Bing, which should not be discounted only because of its low market share, as it is in use by many corporate professionals.
If you set these up properly, or enable some of them to be available (you can’t manage them all completely), you are already taking the right steps. This way you’ll avoid someone being put off by how your yard looks even before they enter your house. Because we often believe that how you do anything is how you do everything, and a messy porch signals a messy house in this case.
Social media assets
Unlike the search side, social media is usually built by your organization already. Securing and tending to the necessary social media assets is critical to make sure that someone else can’t claim them. At the same time, a healthy dose of pruning is useful for your B2B digital marketing presence.
Keep these in mind to make sure your social media assets are not hurting you:
- Park, remove, or pause unused accounts that you don’t mean to continue using
- Frequently check and update your About sections and others that describe your B2B business
- Consistency is more important than high frequency of posting: rather than posting 12 times in 4 weeks and then staying quiet for the rest of the year, post once a month. It shows that your business is at least consistent
- If you have stopped posting a long time ago, consider removing old posts
All of these are to combat any notion that your business is not active anymore, as old posts can signal the death of a business. Often it’s better to have none than to have some that are old: focus on doing rather little well. Now, if you have a vibrant and active social media presence, this may not apply to you, but go occasionally to have a look at the About section. It’s forgotten often in active accounts as well, as you rarely check it.
Third-party portals and pages
Your B2B company may be listed in different niche directories, niche commerce platforms, media publications (company profile), and more. These assets, while maintained by others, are your responsibility to keep up to date. Make sure that the information is accurate and timely.
There’s nothing worse than getting a good media hit or paying for a trading platform only to have the profile your B2B customers are referred to look shabby and unprofessional.
Your own website
You’d think your last line of defense in digital marketing, your own website, would be the least of your worries in this list. Wrong! Not only might you now have old or wrong information on your website, you may also have been active before and now be lacking. Seeing a news section or a blog that was actively updated for months or years but hasn’t had a recent post in 1 year means only one thing: you went bankrupt. If this is not the case, just kick out the old stuff or get that content engine fired back up. Like with social media, it’s better to be consistent than super-active.
Then there are the small things like old copyright dates and more that give a mismanaged view, even if naturally they’re not your core business.
Analysis makes perfect
As a part of analyzing how our clients’ customers meet them, we do a variety of web presence analyses for B2B companies. We can do it for you as well, but here’s something to get you started yourself: take these ideas and have a 30-minute walk in your customers’ shoes. Get a fresh view and start finding out about your company online. Evaluate at the same time: is this the message you want to send?