Best Growth Strategies for B2B Tech Companies

Growing B2B tech companies is a big job. The traditional methods of development included pumping money into tired advertising and marketing techniques to a large target market, hoping to get a couple of hits. This takes a lot of time and manpower, with little return on investment. A new unique marketing and sales method call Inbound involves bringing in and nurturing leads with content based on their interests, objectives, and struggles. According to a current report on the state of Inbound by MIT, 68% of companies claim that Inbound strategies have created rapid growth. Here are some of the best growth strategies to grow B2B tech companies.

Understand your target market

To grow your company, you need to have a clear understanding of just who you are targeting. Take time to develop Buyer Personas (imaginary depictions of your ideal customer). What is their role at work? What are their objectives? What are their struggles? How do they make decisions? Where do they get their information? Getting answers to these questions will help make it easier to understand your target market.

Develop a selection of content

Your potential customers are constantly trying to get information on a variety of topics. One of the best ways to engage them is by consistently sending content that will interest them. This could be blogs, infographics, videos, whitepapers, webinars, ebooks, and reports. Expanding your content will help you get to a bigger target market and improve your conversion rates. You can ask your marketing team to produce a content calendar that will help you prepare your content on a regular basis. This will help you keep consistent. According to Hubspot, B2B marketing professionals that use blogs get 67% more leads compared to those that do not.

Use SEO

Optimizing your website for internet search will help increase your search engine position and make it easier for potential customers to find you online. The first step is to learn what keywords or phrases your leads are using when searching online. Tools like Google+ Keyword Planner can be useful for keyword research. You can work with your marketing and sales teams to identify keywords or phrases that match your buyer personas and find words leads search online. Once you have a list of the best keywords, your content developers can put them into headlines, photo captions, photo alt messages, URLs, and web content. Other areas that can help SEO are backlinks, external links, and internal links.

Create exciting calls-to-action

A call-to-action (CTA) is a link or clickable button that encourages potential clients to take a wanted action. This could be an offer, sharing content, or joining your newsletter. Your online developers and marketing pros can use CTAs that entice leads like “Download our free ebook now!” A good CTA should develop a sense of urgency (“Buy today!”). To make your CTA stand out, your website developers should make the colors vary.

Guest on authority sites

Getting your content posted on widely-known sites will develop you as an authority among B2B tech companies and bring in even more traffic to your company’s site. So how do you pick sites to guest on? Search for sites that cover the same topic as your own. If you have a B2B software site, it wouldn’t make sense to guest on a fashion blog. The websites you guest on should have excellent Domain Authority (DA), and good track record, and energetic follower engagement. Look at the comment area of existing posts to find out if people are leaving messages or comments. The more engaged they are, the more influence the guest post will have. Ultimately, find out if the site lets you include backlinks to your site in the content or writer biography. These backlinks will help enhance your search engine position.

Share content on social media

It’s not enough just to have great content on your website. You need to have a plan to advertise this content to bring in web traffic. Social media networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Google+ are effective channels for advertising content. Be sure to share all posts from your company on these sites. If followers find the content valuable, they might go to your site and share with their contacts. This means an increase in brand name awareness and more web traffic. According to a Social Media Marketing Industry Report, 90% of all marketing experts said that their social media initiatives have produced more exposure for their B2B tech companies.

Nurture leads strategically

Email marketing is extremely effective for nurturing leads until they convert into clients. You need to offer potential customers freemium content like ebooks or reports for their contact information. Once you have developed your email list, you can then sent client e-newsletters with valuable content on a regular basis. Supplying your list with special content will make them feel valued and will improve commitment. This will increase the number of sales being closed. Research by McKinsey found that email is 40 times more effective at transforming new leads than Facebook or Twitter.

The bottom line

The steps discussed above are all part of the Inbound Methodology. Many companies in a variety of industries have started using this new collection of sales and marketing strategies and have seen great success. B2B tech companies are no exception. We’ve helped many CEOs and Managing Directors apply Inbound into their B2B Software organizations. Don’t hesitate to schedule your free strategy session. We can help you examine your properties and give you ways to grow your business faster!