Digital Marketing
Today’s marketing leaders have more technology tools than ever to engage prospects before they contact your sales team. For the past few years, companies have experienced a digital marketing transformation that has inverted conventional B2B marketing models.
Information Age has referred to this shift as “a revolution of strategy and execution.” No longer do technicians, engineers and purchasing managers depend on your sales team for product and company information. Windmill Strategy will help you navigate this changing landscape and create and execute a flexible plan that combines each of these elements to achieve your marketing goals, no matter where you are on your digital transformation roadmap.
70% of your prospects have already visited your website, downloaded datasheets, read product reviews and checked out your case studies before they contact you.
Your customers do hold all the power! To market to modern B2B buyers, companies have re-engineered processes, adopted more effective marketing strategies and bought into cutting-edge digital technologies.
Why Windmill Strategy?
Our time-tested planning process is a disciplined approach that builds in steps that lead to continuous improvement, an essential component of digital marketing strategy. You must be nimble, and open to pivoting in competitive markets. Additionally, our strategists and experts have broad experiences serving technology-driven, industrial and technical companies.
Every digital marketing project begins with an overall marketing strategy, which helps direct how we combine three essential ingredients of the plan: Sales Enablement, Web Design, Content Strategy.
From here, we work with clients to identify your key audiences and why they choose you. Next, we consider social media, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertising (often referred to as PPC or SEM) and other tactics while formulating a unique online and offline conversion path for your company. Within this portfolio of tactics, your website leads the charge.
Your Website — The Tip of the Marketing Spear
For most B2B businesses, your website is the tip of the marketing spear. It’s the first touchpoint for prospects, and it has a pivotal role in turning visitors into leads and leads into customers. Of course, there are other contact points in your marketing mix that serve critical functions, but it’s your site that’s the marketing hub.
You’re still meeting prospects at trade shows, for instance, yet the website remains vital in the buyer’s journey as they visit the site and explore your content soon after. We’ll help you align every message they hear and see at each touchpoint of the buyer’s journey — awareness, consideration and decision. This is critical, because if your website isn’t effective at engaging your prospects, they’ll quickly move on to your competitor’s site.
It’s also essential that your efforts to increase website traffic result in the right leads. Otherwise, you’ll create more noise and slow your salespeople down as they sift through unqualified contacts. To make sure your site is fine-tuned to generate leads (and the right leads) we offer a comprehensive website audit, that examines over a dozen factors that affect its overall performance. Digital marketing tactics are fine-tuned for B2B niche audiences so that they focus on the people who will actually do business with you.
We’ll work with you to employ numerous digital marketing tactics that create brand awareness, educate audiences, build credibility and loyalty, and generate high-quality leads.
Digital Marketing Areas of Expertise
Content marketing
One of the fastest evolving and most effective techniques for sharing ideas and solutions that address your prospects’ issues is content marketing. Here, tactics such as email campaigns, blog posts, white papers and e-books are used to nurture audiences. Our copywriters and technical staff help you plan and create content assets that will attract and engage your prospects, and guide you on the best way to get subject matter experts on your team to contribute their knowledge with the least friction. And like your service or manufacturing operations, a good content marketing plan includes a production schedule that clarifies who does what, where and when.
On-site search engine optimization (SEO)
If we build and launch a new website for you, we ensure that it’s optimized for search engines, so that your site ranks highly in search results for the queries your prospects are making. The work that’s done to optimize your site covers a lot of ground, including:
- Perform keyword research
- Incoming Link Analysis
- Create a ranking report (with competitive analysis)
- Select keyword phrases
- Author title tags, alt tags and meta descriptions
- Analyze site architecture, content and tagging to ensure it meets search best-practice standards
Google Ads
Nearly 70 percent of industrial marketing leaders are using pay-per-click (PPC) to attract new audiences. PPC campaigns can include text-based search ads as well as display or banner ads. Typically, we build upon the keyword list we created for your on-site SEO plan (above). This approach results in high-quality, relevant ads that maximize quality scores and minimize acquisition costs. PPC for industry generally requires a different type of fine-tuning than advertising to consumer audiences, so that we reach the specific subset of B2B buyers that you need to engage and influence.
Social media
By leveraging platforms like Linkedin and Twitter, social media is ideal for sharing your brand’s personality and distributing content. In the last few years alone, 70 percent of tech and industrial marketers increased the use of social media for content marketing, and 81 percent rely on social media publishing/analytics tools. Knowing how and where to reach your ideal prospects is key here to ensure that efforts and budgets are producing a positive ROI. We can help you use your own in-house mailing lists to directly target your customers on social media. We also know how to effectively use demographic, interest, lookalike audiences, and company-specific targeting to ensure your promoted social posts are seen only by relevant industry prospects.
Business prospecting software setup and configuration
Tools like Leadfeeder, LeadForensics and HubSpot provide insight into who’s visiting your website and which pages they are viewing. These tools show you the actual company names (and often, LinkedIn profiles) of the visitors who have been anonymously browsing your website. You can integrate the software with your existing CRM and alert your salespeople to visits that are ready for a follow-up from sales.
Call tracking setup
We’ll help you track calls related to specific marketing campaigns you run. This technology is ideal for monitoring phone call conservations that you can connect to digital and offline campaigns. Windmill Strategy will configure the tools to automatically record the use of each phone number directly to Google Analytics as a goal or campaign conversion.
Retargeting ad setup
Also called remarketing, retargeting is a tactic that shows display and search ads, or both, about your company to visitors who have spent time on your site exploring content. These ads pop-up on other websites in the form of advertisements as your prospects surf the web. Retargeting technology is what companies such as Amazon use to entice you with previously viewed products. Advanced techniques — similar to audience targeting — help us define new segments based on your prospects’ website viewing history. Next, we’ll present display ads to your prospects when they visit these sites — and connect you with new audiences unaware of your brand.
Digital Marketing Continuous Improvement
One of the tenets of successful digital marketing is that we’re always on a path of continuous improvement. Campaigns, for example, are often subject to influences beyond your control — Google algorithm changes, competitive tactics and prospect engagement — but which demand continuous micro-changes to your plans. The ongoing management of your marketing programs can be done by our team, or you may choose to handle it yourself with the information we provide you, which includes an always-available customized cloud-marketing dashboard.
But most importantly, the continuous monitoring of your analytics and KPIs provides you with actionable insights into the quantity and quality of your leads, a key measure of your digital marketing effectiveness.
Generate More Leads, Close More Business
