Search
SOLUTIONS
SERVICES
CAMPAIGNS
TECHNOLOGY
INSIGHTS
COMPANY
OUR WORK
OUR WORK
CONTACT
CONTACT
Performance Marketing

Four Ways to Adapt Your B2B Digital Marketing Strategy During a Crisis

April 15, 2020 | by Paul Headley
  1. Home
  2. Blog
  3. Performance Marketing
  4. Four Ways to Adapt Your B2B Digital Marketing Strategy During a Crisis
B2B sales cycles require extensive research with adaptation based on changing behaviors. We outline the process to approach a strategy during a crisis.

How should a content strategist adopt their approach for a business-to-business (B2B) audience?

A B2B audience is both similar and different from a B2C audience. On the one hand, your B2B audience has adapted their behaviors rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic just as a B2C audience has. Both audiences are spending more time online as they practice social distancing. Both are still making decisions about products and services to buy (albeit for different reasons). Put another way, the same person doing a search on Amazon for coffee is also online doing their jobs for their employers.

But the B2B customer journey is different from the B2C journey, too. B2B sales cycles are usually longer and require more extensive research and consideration even under the best of times. Purchasing a multimillion dollar software system for an enterprise does not happen the same way buying paper towels or cat food does.

Based on our client work, we suggest that businesses adapt their digital content strategy in four ways for a B2B audience:

1. Keep Top-of-the-Funnel Awareness High

The one thing you want to do is stay active online. You don’t want to be caught flat-footed when the COVID-19 crisis calms down. The lengthier B2B customer journey makes it harder for a marketer to pivot and catch up when business turns around. When I talk with clients, I often use the analogy of a trucker operating a finely tuned semi. Truckers typically keep their engines idling even when the truck is not in use. Why? Because it’s too inefficient, time consuming, and costly to restart a rig after it’s been sitting idle overnight.

The same holds true for B2B marketing. To be sure, your customers are probably slowing down their decision-making process or putting some important decisions on hold completely. But that doesn’t mean your customers are going dark. They’re still needing to stay informed to do their jobs. Don’t let yourself fall off their radar screens.

2. Go Where Your Audience Is

Here’s where B2B marketers need to make an important pivot. While their own businesses are disrupted and longer-term decisions are postponed, a B2B audience may have shifted its attention from doing active research about you on industry portals, websites, trade publications, and the like.

So where are they? Although they’re still doing Google searches and visiting websites, they’re more likely shifting their attention from industry-focused content to social media sites such as Facebook where they can remain connected with others and do more passive forms of casual research on other business through their Facebook pages. While they are on social media, they are in a more passive mode: not actively searching but still open to receiving content depending on how relevant and engaging that content is. Consider adopting, say, programmatic advertising that targets specific B2B audiences on Facebook.

3. Mind Your Analytics

Keep close tabs on customer behavior online. Where are they online? Where are you seeing increases or decreases on dwell time on your website? How does that data differ by type of buyer? One of our B2B clients is a provider of security products. We’ve segmented their audience several ways, ranging from security consultants to facilities managers. For our client, we provide detailed analytics reporting for each audience segment. We can tell them whether they’re seeing an uptick of interest (or a downtick) across each audience type from one landing page to the next. Doing so makes it possible for our client to figure out:

  • What kind of content to dial up (or down).
  • Opportunities to adapt their approach for a specific buyer inside an organization. (Just to cite a hypothetical example: a facilities manager might be especially interested in more efficient ways to manage security with a lean-to-nonexistent staff right now.)

These insights may apply not only on the client’s website but also everywhere else the client is present online.

4. Re-assess Your Tactics

This is an opportune time to test and re-assess and your current digital efforts once a marketing shift is put in place. Rerun a site crawl, conduct your content gap analysis, and start addressing those deeper web pages that could use some extra love. Assess whether your current digital strategy is reaching all your targeted audiences. 

If your spend it being scaled back or paused, do you have a plan to get the wheels turning again when things normalize? Do you have an impact study in the works?  It’s important to remember that even though business seems to have slowed, audiences are still there, they’re researching, becoming more informed, and holding on to all of that demand until they can make sense of what’s happening.  

Contact Investis Digital

If you’re trying to figure out how best to pivot your strategy and build an audience that lasts past the recent disruption, please contact Investis Digital, and we’ll be happy to help. In addition to providing ongoing marketing strategy, we have made available content dedicated to helping you manage through the COVID-19 disruption. We’re here to help.