Salesforce surveyed thousands of marketers to learn their top marketing objectives and priorities for 2014. With more than 2,500 responses, we’ve analyzed their insights to give you a current snapshot of the state of marketing for B2B.
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Marketers agree that SEO has the highest ROI out of any digital marketing initiative. Tasks include keyword discovery, competitive analysis, and on-page technical audit and implementation.
2. Authority Link Building
To grow in today’s hyper-competitive online environment, marketers know to improve their rank in the search engine result pages (SERPs) they will need authority sites linking to their site and content. Link authority building is a link building strategy used in search engine optimization whereby a web site’s ranking is boosted by acquiring backlinks from web sites with authority.
3. Email Marketing
Email marketing campaigns are essential elements of B2B marketing strategies. They communicate and build relationships with prospects, gather important data and help boost marketing ROI. To build, execute and maintain effective email marketing campaigns, marketers must pay close attention to their audience and the message and avoid the common trap of simply blasting out self-promotional messages.
4. Social Media Marketing
Social media allows you to be proactive with your potential audience and clients by allowing you to communicate with those who care about your brand. The interactions and engagement your social media program generates aren’t always linked to a sale, but they are important components in achieving business objectives. Bring value to your business with your social media program by gathering intelligence to learn more about your customers. Use social media to bolster other marketing initiatives through integration and build your email database through social media programs.
5. Content Marketing
Content marketing is positioned to establish brand authority or to serve as information to clients. Quality regular content builds trust and positions your company as an expert. People do business with people they trust and like. Shared and personal experiences can underpin relationships and can be effectively used to build engagement.
6. Authorship
Authorship serves as a kind of byline in the Google search results. It typically includes the headshot for the writer, which helps make it easy for searchers to easily identify authors they recognize. Search data that shows that search results with authorship tend to get clicked more frequently, as people do tend to gravitate to search results written by people they know and trust.
7. Mobile Friendly Design
Offer the best user experience will improve your companies ROI. The convenience of mobile access and the ability to place an order or view a catalog on mobile devices and tablets is a growing trend. Google itself recommends that developers use responsive design in its mobile design strategy. In its Webmasters guidelines, Google states that “making a website that is friendly to smartphone users has now become a critical part of website management”. Therefore if Google recommends it and you’re able to serve content effectively to mobile users then you will score big points with the search engine and the chances of you ranking higher than your mobile unfriendly competitors is increased.
8. Conversion Rate Optimization
The goal of CRO is to improve the user experience and increase the chances of conversion by implementing changes driven by data, not opinion. When testing potential improvements, the goal may be to improve user engagement with content or navigation, increase clicks or interactions with a specific element (such as a form or downloadable asset), reduce bounce rates, or direct the user’s attention to a desired element.
9. Key Performance Indicators (PKI)
A Key Performance Indicator is a measureable value that demonstrates the effectiveness of a business process at contributing to the attainment of key business objectives. By monitoring the right KPIs and business metrics, you gain valuable insight into the performance of your business and, more importantly, gain the strategic awareness you need to make the right decision at the right time.
10. Marketing Automation/CRM
Marketing Automation is a subset of customer relationship management (CRM) that focuses on the definition, scheduling, segmentation and tracking of marketing campaigns. The use of marketing automation makes processes that would otherwise have been performed manually much more efficient and makes new processes possible. Marketing automation reduces repetitive tasks associated with the marketing process and resolves: customer segmentation and campaign management.