A well thought out B2B marketing strategy is the foundation of any successful marketing effort. The process of creating a marketing plan encourages you to identify your objectives and employ steps to achieve those objectives. A subset of your marketing plan is a B2B digital marketing plan. Before identifying the key components of your B2B digital marketing plan, be sure you have already identified the following:

1. Objectives: Identify your business objectives that the digital marketing plan aims to achieve. These could be around increasing brand awareness, generating leads or driving sales.
2. Target audience: Define your target audience. You are also likely to need to segment your audience. This includes identifying demographics, behaviours and interests of your potential customers.
3. Key messages, Define your key messages, USP and Customer Value Proposition

Related post: 8 ways to segment your target market

The key components of a B2B digital marketing plan are:

1. Social media: Identify the best social media platforms to reach your target audience. At the very least, for B2B tech companies, this includes Twitter and LinkedIn. You might also chose Instagram to highlight the human side of your organisation.
2. Email marketing: Email marketing can help you achieve most marketing objectives. It enables you cultivate prospects, increase sales leads and brand awareness and to demonstrate that you are a thought leader in your industry. It is important to segment your market to provide the most targetted email possible. Remember, you are writing to a person – a human, not a business.
3. Content marketing;  This includes blogs, videos, infographics and podcasts to help you increase brand awareness. Plan for how often content will be published, who is responsible for publishing it and channels you will use.
4. Search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy: SEO helps your chances of being ranked higher on organic search results pages. 80% of your SEO efforts can be done yourself by optimising each web page and blog post. 
5. Online advertising: In general, I don’t recommend Google advertising for B2B companies – the audience tends to be too wide. LinkedIn is a far better bet if you wish to include online advertising as part of your B2B digital marketing plan. You may also wish to consider placing ads on websites your target market reads, or sponsor email newsletters that your prospects subscribe to.
6. Budget: Determine the budget required for your digital marketing efforts. This includes identifying the cost of any paid advertising as well as the personnel required to execute the plan eg agency or contractor. 
7. Measurement: How are you going to measure your efforts to determine the success of the plan and make adjustments to improve it? This could include tracking website traffic, conversion rates and social media followers and engagement.

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