Get your C-level to buy into B2B digital marketing

We’ve all been there, it’s a new year and we have a meeting with the higher-up decision-makers at the company to discuss marketing plans. You mention that digital marketing should be a bigger focus in the marketing mix however you still are getting push back from the C-level at your company because they are confused about the effectiveness of digital marketing.

If you’re a marketing manager that is trying to get your C-level to set aside budget for digital B2B marketing tell them this:

B2B decision-makers are becoming more inclined to digital

A research report released in September 2017 indicates that over half of B2B researchers are millennials and this stat will continue to rise.

You can test B2B digital marketing

The old ‘waterfall’ approach to marketing required big budgets and long planning cycles. On the other hand, B2B digital marketing allows for an agile approach to marketing where campaigns can be implemented within 8 to 12-week sprints,  results can be generated and campaigns can be modified and improved for the next 6 to 12 week campaign sprint.

B2B is more cost effective

Since targeting online is becoming more precise, fewer dollars are wasted on implementing marketing tactics that are appropriate for the masses. For example, it makes more sense to spend marketing budgets on targeted online media buys as opposed to advertising in a mass-targeted tradeshow magazine.

If you’re still getting push back, share this example:

Let’s say you’re a company like Miovision that sells sophisticated tech hardware and software to cities, towns and municipalities. Fifteen years ago, a marketing manager at a company like Miovision would have to rely solely on traditional marketing activities such as tradeshows, advertising in trade magazines, direct mail packages and a sales force to generate interest in their products. Your C-level can benefit from understanding that there’s several more effective ways Miovision’s target market can be reached digitally today.

Here’s an example of LinkedIn content marketing campaign Stryve implemented for Miovision:

In this campaign a content piece that helped traffic engineers understand ways their city’s bike and pedestrian traffic could be improved was created. A LinkedIn sponsored content campaign was implemented to promote the content piece to people in North American who have ‘traffic engineer’ or ‘city planner’ in their LinkedIn profiles. The campaign was run for 3-weeks; with only a $1500 ad spend the campaign generated 184 marketing qualified leads which translated to 3x above the target product sales.

Digital marketing creates a blue ocean of niche marketing opportunities for B2B marketing manager because of the sophistication of the targeting that can be done on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter.

The new year is here, it’s important now more than ever to integrate digital marketing tactics into your marketing mix. We hope this info helps sell your organization’s decision-makers on the merits of B2B digital marketing.