The Best Growth Marketing Strategies for B2B Service Providers

Growth marketing is a relatively new term used to define the type of marketing that is focused on growing and scaling a business via tactics and strategies driven by customer data. Unlike traditional marketing, growth marketing prioritizes small hypotheses, regular experimentation, and constant iterations over long-term campaigns. Growth marketers mix creative and technical expertise, with visibility of the entire customer journey. One of the biggest benefits of growth marketing is that it allows you to focus on a certain metric that you want to increase.

Social Media Presence

The importance of social media for B2B companies has grown substantially. There was a time when social media was primarily dominated by B2C companies since it allowed them to interact directly with the consumers. However, in recent years, we’ve seen social media platforms being actively used by companies that provide services to other companies. Platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook have been at the forefront of this shift for B2B marketing, especially with solutions like native lead generation ads.?

Engage with Customers

Social media is a great way to engage with your customers. It allows you to create insightful content that resonates well with your customers, inviting them to share their thoughts. Many times, companies think that the only important thing is to create good social media posts. However, it is equally crucial to engage with your prospects and buyers in the comments. It is a great way to answer some of the pre-qualifying questions your potential customers might have about your service, allowing you to get better-quality leads. As a potential buyer, social media requires little commitment and provides an easy way to reach a business. It is this less formal and “friendlier” approach that makes social media so effective.

Lead Generation Ads

As highlighted above, social media is a great place to run lead generation ads, especially if you’re a B2B business with potential customers on LinkedIn and Facebook. Both of these platforms allow you to run native ads that are perfect for gathering leads with an easy process. They have simple form submissions with some of the fields automatically filled, making it easier and faster for the contact information to be submitted. Moreover, these lead generation ads run entirely on the platform, meaning potential customers don’t have to be redirected to a website to convert, avoiding any unnecessary steps.

Competitor Analysis?

An important aspect of growth marketing is having visibility of what the competitors are doing. There are many tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Similarweb that allow you to see what your competitors are doing and if there's an opportunity for you. While your main competitors will likely stay the same, their position and market share are constantly shifting. Here’s why you need to regularly perform competitor analysis:

• Reviewing Benchmarks. Your internal stats help you understand which channels are performing best. However, you should consider benchmarking your metrics against your competitors, as they might have achieved better results.
• Catch Up with Market Trends. Monitoring the competitive landscape allows you to understand how the market is performing and if there are peaks or declines in demand that you need to be prepared for. Understanding these market trends will help you avoid any surprises.?
• Learn Best Practices. While being proactive can give you a competitive advantage, sometimes it is better to let your competitors do all the testing with new channels (especially if the risks are too high for you). Competitor analysis will help you understand the new best practices while avoiding any budget wastage.?
• Updating the Marketing Mix. Keeping an eye on the digital marketing campaigns your competitors are running will provide you important information on any new product launches. This will also give you ideas on how to develop your own list of B2B products and services.?
• Refining Your Goals. With the changes in the online market and the competitor landscape, you might need to revisit your objectives as well as your marketing strategy. For effective growth marketing, your business should be fluid and adaptable enough to adjust your strategy when needed.

Marketing Automation

When you’re investing your efforts in growth marketing, the last thing you want to do is waste time on tasks that can be automated. With marketing automation tools, you can utilize technology to better streamline your marketing efforts. You can manage all aspects of a marketing campaign from a single platform. By automating any time-intensive tasks, you can scale up your sales and marketing efforts.?

Here are some of the common ways in which you can automate your marketing:

• Email Marketing. Email marketing is one of the most conventional ways to reach your customers online. The interesting thing is that it continues to be very effective because it allows your message to reach potential customers right in their inbox. There are email marketing platforms that can help you build email sequences to send out certain communication based on certain triggers.
• Social Media Automation. Most marketing automation tools nowadays come with a complete suite of products for social media scheduling. This allows you to schedule your social media posts across all of your profiles from one place, instead of you having to do it manually on each platform.?
• Zapier. Zapier is a marketing automation tool that helps businesses create interlinked functions across various types of software. Based on a trigger in one piece of software, you’re able to set up certain actions in the other piece of the software. This allows you to give a very customized and targeted experience to your prospects (perfect for growth marketing!).

A/B Testing

One of the strengths of digital marketing is that it allows you to perform tests in real-time to see what works for your company. With A/B testing you can test different strategies, designs, and copies to see what gets you better conversions. To guarantee growth, you need to constantly test various aspects of your marketing. Also known as split testing, A/B testing involves running two versions of a campaign with minor differences.

For example, you could be running two different ad creatives for your next social media campaign. The high-performing version will then be further tested with another version, with possibly a different call to action or landing page. With each round of testing, you get closer to the best-optimized version.

Provide content for the whole Buyer Journey

Not all customers are the same. Different buyers are in different stages in the buyer journey. This is why it is critical for you to write enough content for each step of the funnel and every stage your prospects will go through to become a customer.?

Generalized content will not be effective in securing leads because it will usually miss the questions your potential buyers need answered. You need to respect the stage your buyers are in. When trying to attract new customers, if you push too hard to convert them, you will look desperate, causing an instant turn-off for your prospects. What you need to look at is building a long-term relationship that adds real value to the customers. With an inbound strategy, you are able to build content around your customers, supporting them by answering their questions and giving them reasons to use your service.

In the same way, if you’re looking to create content for repeat customers, you’ll need to look at how you add value to the existing relationship and reward them for their loyalty. Providing the right content at the right time is key for growth marketing, and with marketing automation tools in place, a lot of this will run on autopilot.

Conclusion

With growth marketing, you can effectively scale up your B2B business. Customers like engagement and they appreciate the personalized messaging. Following the above strategies will help you be more efficient with growth marketing as well as be more targeted in attracting the right customers at the right time.

At LeadHQ, we specialize in helping B2B clients scale up their sales efforts. Feel free to reach out to me for any advice on how your business can benefit from things like:

• A/B testing
• Writing content for every step of the buyer journey
• Marketing automation
• Lead generation

No strings attached! You can reach me through LinkedIn or you can visit https://leadhq.io/ for more information.