John Davis
I shouldn’t need to tell you that in the world of B2B, engagement and reach are crucial.
Reach is essential to capturing the attention of as many potential leads as possible. It’s central to building brand awareness and earning consumer trust- something that’s crucial at a time when 92% of B2B buyers already have a shortlist of preferred vendors before they start shopping for products.
Engagement is how you turn awareness into action – building relationships with buyers that convince them to invest in whatever you have to sell.
The problem? Increasing reach and engagement is currently harder than ever. How do you connect with new customers in a world where AI systems and algorithms are blocking access to your audience? How do you forge relationships when B2B buyers struggle to trust vendors?
Based on our own success helping B2B tech companies thrive in the new digital era, here are our top suggestions to turbocharge your results.
The Challenge of Increasing B2B Engagement and Reach
B2B tech vendors have always had challenges to overcome in the digital marketing landscape. From identifying the genuine needs and priorities of entire “buyer committees”, to finding ways to stand out in a sea of growing competition.
The evolution of the digital world, marked by changes to Google algorithms, social media platform standards, and of course, AI, has introduced even more hurdles to overcome.
Already, AI-summarized search results have led to many companies losing between 20-70% of their search engine traffic. Plus, the surge of AI generated content has made it harder for businesses to position themselves as thought leaders, and earn trust with genuine insights.
Social media platforms are promoting influencers and content creators over news and vendor updates, and buyer journeys are growing more complex because nobody knows what, or who to trust.
On top of that, the priorities of B2B buyers are changing. More than ever, these customers value personalization, authenticity, and genuine insights from vendors. Regurgitating the same old strategies, focused entirely on generic social media posts, and content optimized for specific keywords just isn’t enough. It’s time to rethink your strategy.
The Key Ingredients to B2B Engagement and Reach
We’ll cover the key strategies you can use to improve B2B engagement and reach in a moment. First, however, it’s worth identifying the key ingredients that should be consistent throughout your digital marketing efforts:
- Value: This might seem obvious, but B2B buyers want genuine value before they’ve even purchased a product from your company. They want to see proprietary data, real, authentic insights, and a commitment from your company to help them achieve positive results.
- Trust: B2B buyers are overwhelmed by AI-generated content, fake news, and false claims. They need to see that they can actually trust your company. This means you need to maintain an authentic, human voice in everything you do.
- Versatility: The chances are you’re not just trying to connect with one buyer in the B2B tech world. You’re forging connections with multiple stakeholders through an ever-more complex buyer journey. Adapt your content with a focus on diversity and versatility.
X Strategies for Improved B2B Engagement and Reach
So, how do you prevent your company from becoming invisible in the age of digital marketing chaos? These are the strategies that have worked best for our team so far.
1. Go Deeper when Defining your Target Audience
Every B2B company should know how important it is to have clearly defined buyer personas and audience segments in mind when they’re creating content for any channel. The trouble is many companies still don’t go nearly as “deep” as they should with their research.
It’s not enough to know you’re targeting SMBs or enterprise companies. You need to know:
- Who is involved in the buyer committee? Which specific team members are you trying to reach and engage (i.e. CMOs, CFOs, CTOs)? What are their priorities, pain points and goals? What questions will they need to answer before making a purchase?
- What are your buyer’s triggers? What convinces a potential customer to consider, or reject your brand? Are they more influenced by data and statistics, genuine customer success stories, recommendations from other consumers, or something else?
- How do they conduct research? Where do they look for solutions to their problems? Are they just searching for keywords on Google search engines? Are they talking to their peers, or checking social media? Do they read industry publications and listen to influencers?
The key to really understanding your target audience in today’s world is using your own data. Actually have discussions with previous buyers. Send out surveys, and use social listening tools to track what customers are saying about your company and products on social media and review sites.
2. Rethink the B2B Buyer Journey Map
It’s easy to fall back into the stereotypical way of viewing B2B customers as a tech company. You might assume your business buyers are serious, logical, and rarely act on emotion. That’s why so many B2B tech brands focus on the bottom of the funnel, trying to convert customers before they’ve had a chance to build a real connection with their audience.
However, studies show that only 5% of the B2B prospects vendors are trying to reach are actually looking to buy something immediately.
In a rapidly changing industry, many of your potential “leads” won’t know what they actually need yet. It’s the stories you tell as a B2B brand during the early stages of the buyer funnel that expand your reach, and push customers towards the consideration stage.
So, go back to the drawing board and think about where customers actually start their journey. Maybe they learn about the benefits of AI on an industry publication, then view videos about AI achievements on YouTube. Next, they might start to research companies on search engines, and visit their social media channels to learn more about them.
Your aim should be to make your company as visible as possible throughout this journey, so that when your customers start actually considering products, your brand naturally pops into focus.
3. Use AI to Enhance Omnichannel Marketing
Since today’s B2B tech buyers demand authentic, human, and unique content, it’s important to be cautious with AI. However, if you ignore it completely, you’re putting yourself at a serious disadvantage. AI can help you boost marketing team productivity, transform conversations with customers into unique content assets, and simplify omnichannel campaigns.
If you want to improve B2B engagement and reach, you need to take advantage of the tools available to you. With AI, it’s much easier to convert content into different formats that connect with your audience across all of the channels they use in their buyer journey.
You can convert videos into blog posts, and vice versa, create webinar content, infographics, and images that reach customers across social media. You can even translate content into different tones and languages to connect with specific buyer segments.
AI can even help you optimize your content for different channels. The right tools, such as SEMRush, can help you track down effective keywords for SEO strategies. Other resources like Google Gemini and ChatGPT can suggest new ways to approach and format content for social media.
Ultimately, in today’s world, you can either embrace the AI era and use it to boost B2B engagement or reach, or you can be swept away by the AI flood.
4. Prioritize Video
Omnichannel content is crucial to engaging a wide range of buyers in your B2B audience looking for different types of information, from eBooks to podcasts. However, no matter what type of customers you’re trying to reach (or which channels you use), video is a powerful tool.
Video helps you cut through the noise created by endless AI-written blog posts and regurgitated news stories with fresh, engaging content. In fact, video-focused platforms like YouTube and TikTok are increasingly becoming the number one source of news and insights for modern buyers.
The important thing here is to be diverse with your video content. Don’t just create product announcement and demo videos. Go beyond obviously promotional content with pieces designed to nurture trust, such as:
- Thought leadership pieces: Roundtables, interviews, and discussion videos where you explore industry trends and share genuine opinions.
- Educational content: How-to videos, guides, and even webinars that help your customers achieve specific goals or address common challenges.
- Virtual events: Online events that foster engagement and interaction with polls, surveys, messaging forums, and Q&A sessions.
5. Nurture and Activate Your Community
Customer loyalty and retention has always been important for B2B tech companies. However, leveraging your existing community has become particularly important in today’s world. Not only does it help you stay on top of rising customer acquisition costs, and avoid churn, but activating and nurturing your community can expand your reach too.
Build your community by capturing customer email addresses, and creating campaigns designed to keep them engaged and informed after they make a purchase. Invest in customer success managers and onboarding techniques with gamified elements to delight and inspire your existing customers.
Once you have an active community, leverage their support. Identify potential advocates and ask them to join a loyalty or referral program. Connect directly with your customers, and ask them for interviews so you can create comprehensive case studies to share on your website, or learn more about their buyer journey and distinct needs.
Host exclusive hybrid events and social media “live sessions” for the customers that are already connected with your brand. Your community will help you bypass the AI gatekeepers, and earn the trust of new potential leads.
6. Stay Human
I mentioned the value of bringing AI into your B2B engagement and reach boosting strategy above. However, embracing AI doesn’t mean losing your human touch. In fact, it’s more important than ever for B2B tech companies to show their human side, as AI continues to take over.
Consumers will only trust companies that share real, authentic experiences, and show genuine emotion. It’s your focus on human authenticity that will differentiate your content from the competition (making it more valuable). Plus, it’s how you’ll earn the trust and respect of your target audience in a competitive space.
With that in mind:
- Share authentic stories: Tell customers about the challenges your company has faced, or the problems you’ve helped other organizations overcome. Share your experiences in a transparent, meaningful and resolution-focused way.
- Showcase your team: Bring your employees into the spotlight. Show your customers what they’ve accomplished, and what they’re like. After all, these are the people your buyers are going to be interacting with in the long-term.
- Find your voice: Forget boring, bland, generic content. Speak to customers from the heart. Use humor and personality whenever you can. Prove to your customers that you’re not just another robot.
7. Explore New Forms of Interactivity
B2B engagement rarely happens by chance – at least not in today’s world. B2B tech companies can’t just create content and wait for it to deliver results anymore. They need to actively reach out and connect with their customers.
Actually interacting with your audience isn’t just crucial to strengthening relationships. It’s also the key to collecting valuable data at a time when you can’t just rely on cookies and basic metrics. Use social media and your blog to ask your customers questions. Use polls, quizzes, and live videos to interact with customers in real-time.
Go back to the journey map you created before and think about how you can make each touchpoint more interactive. For instance, why just share a video demo if you can create a demo for your product in virtual or augmented reality? Why not switch out a long-form video for an interactive webinar?
Creating memorable, interactive experiences for your audience will give you the engagement boost you need. Plus, it’ll entice your customers to share those experiences online, taking your reach even further. It’s a win-win situation.
8. Keep Evolving
Finally, don’t make the mistake of standing still. Even if you find a strategy that delivers results for you now – it might not pay off in the future. Platform algorithms are changing, along with B2B buyer preferences and expectations. So embrace an era of constant optimization.
Gather data from your social media and web-based content campaigns, but don’t rely on quantitative insights alone. Actively seek feedback from your clients, ask them questions, speak to your customer service team, and pay attention to your community.
Let your audience guide your future B2B engagement and reach strategies. After all, they know what they want. Experiment with new strategies, whether it’s working with influencers and industry publications, or diving into new media formats.
You’ll need to take some risks. But, even if they don’t all pay off – they’ll give you information you can use to improve and optimize your marketing budget.
Master the New Age of B2B Engagement
Expanding your reach, and achieving consistent B2B engagement levels isn’t easy. That’s particularly true in today’s AI-saturated, and increasingly complicated digital marketing space. But realistically, reach and engagement are crucial to maintaining sustainable growth.
If you miss out on one or the other, you’ll fade into obscurity as other tech leaders rise to the forefront. Use the strategies above to give your marketing strategy an edge this year, and start building real, human relationships with your audience. Otherwise, you’re dooming your company to a fight for leads it’ll struggle to win.
