The Top 5 Marketing Channels B2B Software Providers Should Focus On in 2022

Best practices for effective email marketing:

• Use data segmentation in lead generation forms. As you collect visitor data on your website, segment it with parameters such as profession, job title and industry, and use it to design personalized emails for specific user groups.
• Set up prebuilt email templates. Give marketing-approved templates to the sales outreach teams to target broader user segments more effectively.
• Create mobile-friendly emails. The number of users opening emails on mobile is increasing, so make sure you use responsive designs.
• Use email retargeting. Leverage information about existing customers to retarget them with personalized emails. It can be a great way to source leads for cross-selling and upselling.  

Best practices for social media marketing:

• Look for communities where target buyers are active. Prioritize discussion groups, peer forums and social channels where your audience is actively consuming content and engaging in conversations.  
• Use your website and app data to retarget prospects. Social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter allow advertisers to build custom audiences based on their existing contacts, web visitors and app users. Use these options to target users who have previously interacted with your brand.
• Know your goal when choosing between the cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-impression (CPM) models. CPC is best suited if you wish to target specific buyer profiles like certain job roles, while CPM is more effective at the early stages when the goal is to prioritize reach over clicks.
• Create videos to increase engagement. Incorporating short videos can drive higher user engagement. You can use them to showcase your product, share tips, funnel users to other content and feature customer testimonials. (“4 Best Practices To Optimize Your B2B Video Marketing Effort.”)

Best practices to use software review sites for marketing:

• Seek out the review sites most important for your business. Choose a site your target audience frequently visits to make purchase decisions and make sure your product or service can be found there. You can search top rated software review sites with queries such as “top software review websites” or “reviews for X software.”
• Solicit feedback and reviews from customers. Ask your customers to review your product on third-party review sites, as well as your own website. Use testimonials to highlight aspects about your software such as pricing, features and ease-of-use.
• Use PPC (pay per click) and account-based marketing (ABM) to get an edge over competition and better reach the target audience. Review sites can help you reach broad audiences or narrow it down with attributes such as job title and industry.

Best practices to improve organic and paid search marketing:

• Increase the amount of site content with SEO-friendly practices. A go-to search engine optimization tactic is to improve your web pages with content that focuses on high-value keywords as well as ensuring the overall quality of your content.
• Go beyond keyword mentions to align content with buyer search queries. Search engines reward content that answers users’ queries. Align your content to buyer search behavior by including longer, more conversational titles like “how to” or “what is.” 
• Connect personalized landing pages with programmatic ads and ABM. Direct user segments to pages designed specifically for them for more precise targeting. Programmatic ads can work well to initially capture broader user groups and ABM can further narrow your targeting by using buyer intent data to reach high-quality leads.
• Give clear CTAs in paid search and display ads. Make sure your ads lead users to immediate conversion points on your website such as a lead capturing form. For paid search, include CTAs like “schedule an Appointment” and “get a Quote.”  

Best practices for using webinars and podcasts for marketing:

• Call experts to your virtual events. Audiences are always eager to listen to people of stature from the industry. You can invite relevant experts with high authority, like a CEO, founder or industry expert to provide insights.
• Conduct a Q&A to build more engagement. Give your viewers more to take away from your webinars by soliciting questions and letting your experts answer.
• Choose between a webinar or podcast by asking yourself: What’s my goal? Do you want to generate leads or do you want to provide instructional content? If the former is your main goal, webinars can help you connect with users in real-time. Podcasts are great when you want to talk generically about a subject, and they give you more control over the discussion.

3 Key Shifts for B2B Marketers from Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2021:

• Increased spending in pure-play digital channels. CMOs are allocating 72% of their overall marketing budget to digital channels, whether paid, owned or earned.
• Prioritizing investment in paid search. B2B marketing leaders are spending significantly more in paid search, which typically follows a pay-per-click (PPC) model, where you pay only when a prospect clicks on your ad.
• Social media has emerged as the top channel. While established channels like email have been the go-to for B2B, marketers are shifting their attention to social media. More than 50% of B2B marketing leaders have increased investments in social media. Not to mention, they are experimenting with diverse platforms in the mix, from LinkedIn to Instagram.

^{_{Source: Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2021}}