There has been a lot of talk about how to build a B2B audience, but what about how to get into their heads? Understanding your target audience is the only way to craft messages that are relevant and resonate with them.
You can do this by leveraging social media monitoring tools, listening to customer feedback, and more. It’s not as hard as you think! The following 15 hacks will help you gain insight into your B2B audience so you can be more effective in your marketing efforts:
| Takeaways |
|---|
| Understand the importance of B2B audience insights. |
| Conduct thorough market research to identify pain points. |
| Utilize data analytics to gain deeper understanding. |
| Create buyer personas to represent different audience segments. |
| Craft compelling and relevant content for each persona. |
| Personalize marketing messages to resonate with individual needs. |
| Use social media to engage and connect with the audience. |
| Leverage email marketing for targeted communication. |
| Provide educational content to establish thought leadership. |
| Offer solutions that address specific industry challenges. |
| Encourage feedback and engage in two-way communication. |
| Monitor and adapt your strategies based on audience behavior. |
| Collaborate with influencers to enhance credibility. |
| Focus on building trust and fostering long-term relationships. |
| Continuously refine your approach as the market evolves. |
1. Run A Survey
Running a survey is a great way to get to know your audience, and it can be used in many different ways.
Understanding how people think about your brand: You can learn what your customers think of the things you say about yourself, like mission statements and taglines. If they don’t match up with what people perceive, it could be time for an update!
Understanding how people think about your product: This can help you decide if there’s anything wrong with how you’re marketing the product or if perhaps there isn’t enough information out on the market yet for them to form an opinion.
It will also give you insight into what features are most important to them; this may lead you toward developing new features or highlighting existing ones more prominently in future promotions and ultimately result in happier customers who stick around longer!
Understanding how people think about service:
This is where surveys really shine bright–they allow companies (or individuals) assess their customer’s satisfaction levels before making changes so as not to waste money trying something new only find out later that no one likes it much anyway.”
Creating engaging marketing videos is essential for connecting with your audience. Learn how to make stunning B2C marketing videos that captivate and resonate.
2. Host A Webinar Or Live Stream
Hosting a webinar is one of the best ways to get into the head of your B2B audience. It’s a great way to share information, build credibility and authority, and generate leads. Here’s how you can host an effective webinar:
What is a webinar? A webinar is an online seminar that you host for your target audience. You can use them to sell products or services, but they’re also great for educational purposes. Webinars are typically live-streamed events where viewers watch from their own devices (i.e., laptops). They can be recorded and viewed later on as well if needed.
Why should I host one? A big reason why companies choose to host these types of events is that they’re easy to organize and promote – all you need is a decent internet connection and some time off from work!
Another reason why people like hosting them so much is because it gives them full control over content creation and delivery which means no more waiting around till someone else gets back with answers that might not even exist yet!
This makes them ideal ways by which companies can engage directly with customers at any point during business hours without having any delays due to other team members being unavailable or busy elsewhere throughout their day.”
3. Perform An A/B Test On Your Website Landing Page
If you have a landing page, then it’s time to perform an A/B test.
A/B testing is a method of testing two versions of a web page, to improve the conversion rate. It’s great for testing your landing page for conversion: if your conversion rate is low, then change things around on your landing page and see what works best.
Conversion rate is the percentage of site visitors who take the desired action (like signing up for your email newsletter).
Bounce rate is the percentage of site visitors who leave after only viewing one page meaning they weren’t interested enough in what they saw on that particular page to stick around and look at more content or view another section of your website.
Cost per lead measures how much it costs you to acquire one qualified lead via PPC marketing efforts like Google AdWords or Facebook ads.[1]
Boosting sales and generating leads requires innovative strategies. Discover creative marketing tips that can set your B2B efforts apart and drive results.
4. Use Social Media Monitoring Tools
Many social media monitoring tools can assist you in understanding your audience. I’ll walk through the most popular ones and give you a few tips on how to use them to their full potential.
The first step is setting up an account with each tool, which may require creating a log-in if you don’t already have one. Next, it’s time to start building lists of keywords related to your business or industry.
You might want to include some general keywords like “content marketing” or “marketing automation software” as well as more specific ones like “Marketo vs HubSpot: Which is better?”
Once this has been done, it’s time for monitoring! Each platform has its way of showing results for your searches; some may show only recent posts about certain topics while others will display all-time data on a particular hashtag or keyword phrase (e.g., [#SocialMediaExpert]).
It’s important that when making decisions based on what customers say online about your company/brand/product/service you don’t just look at one source — instead compare results across several tools so that nothing slips through the cracks!
5. Look At The Kind Of Content Your Audience Shares On Social Media
If you’re looking to get inside the mind of your audience, one of the best places to start is by looking at what they’re already sharing on social media. You should look at:
What do they share? Do most of them share press releases, whitepapers, and eBooks, or do they prefer infographics?
Are there any specific topics that keep coming up (for example ‘customer service’ or ‘PCI-DSS compliance’)? This will help you understand how much information your audience is looking for around these topics.
What do they like? There are two ways that this can be useful; once again it gives insight into what kind of content resonates with them (and therefore what kind of content you should create).
But it also tells us something about their preferences when it comes to design style, length, and even tone.
For example, if lots of people like an infographic but don’t comment on tweets then we know that infographics are popular among our target audience and concisely provide great visual information – but if no one likes photos then maybe we should try video instead!
Incorporating humor in your marketing can be powerful. Dive into the psychology behind it in our guide on being funny in B2C marketing to understand how to connect with your audience effectively.
6. Read Online Reviews About Your Company Or Product
Review sites are a great way for you to get insight into what your audience is thinking, like, and disliking. You can also see the types of content they’re engaging with, which can help you improve your product or service.
Reviews can also be a great source of ideas for new blog posts, videos, and other content that will help you convert people interested in your company into paying customers. Many reviews contain elements that would make them easy to turn into blog posts for example:
I love [product/service], but this one feature…
[Product] made our lives easier!
They don’t have [product feature] yet, but I hope they add it soon!
When we first started using [Product], it was buggy so we had some problems at first…
7. Engagement
The seventh step to getting into your audience’s head is engagement.
Engagement is a measure of how often a user interacts with your content. It can be as simple as clicking on an article, or it can be more complicated, like leaving comments or sharing the article on social media.
The engagement rate is the number of users who interact with the content divided by the total number of users who view that content (or some similar metric).
The cost per lead (CPL) is one way to measure engagement and CPL should be low if you want your audience to buy from you again in future interactions with them.
A low CPL means that each new lead costs little money for you, which allows for increased profits for future sales opportunities down the road.
Top traffic sources are also useful because they allow you to identify when people come from popular websites versus other sites that send fewer visitors overall.
But could still be valuable nonetheless the latter might need special attention later on due to their smaller but loyal following base
Learning from successful content marketing examples can inspire your own strategies. Check out examples of content marketing done right to gather insights and ideas for your B2B campaigns.
8. Average Conversion Rate
The average conversion rate is simply the percentage of people who click your CTA that then take the desired action. In other words, if you have 1000 visitors and 100 click your call-to-action button, then your average conversion rate would be 10%.
A high average conversion rate is generally considered to be above 5%, but some industries can get away with lower numbers.
For example, a restaurant delivery brand’s website might only convert 2% of its traffic into customers because it has more passive users coming in through mobile search rather than actively browsing on their desktop computers.
It’s important to measure this number regularly because it can tell you whether or not you need to make changes on your site to increase clicks and ultimately sales!
9. Cost Per Lead
Cost Per Lead (CPL) is a metric that shows how much money you’re spending to acquire a new client. It’s calculated by taking the total amount of revenue generated by a customer and dividing it by the total amount that was spent on acquiring that customer.
Here’s an example: If you spend $10,000 on Facebook ads, and generate $500 in revenue from one new customer – your cost per lead would be $50 (500/10).
The average CPL for B2B companies ranges from $50-$100 depending on industry type and company size. But if your company’s CPL is higher than most others in your industry — chances are there’s room for improvement!
Cost Per Lead Examples:
10. Top Traffic Sources
You can find this information by looking at your website analytics. You can also ask your Google Analytics representative if they have a way to get this data directly from their platform, but most likely they won’t (more on that later).
If you want to give it a go yourself, there are several ways you can do it:
Google Analytics Audience Segments
This is the easiest method because it’s built into GA itself. You’ll need to set up some custom segments and filters to pull out the top traffic sources from each campaign/site/app that’s sending traffic to your site.
So that you can compare them against one another easily later on. First things first though let’s take a look at what makes up these top traffic sources!
Email Open Rates
It’s a good idea to keep an eye on your email open rates. This is because, as I mentioned earlier, they can tell you how engaged your audience is with your emails.
If they’re opening them, then it means that they’re interested in what you have to say (or perhaps even looking forward to hearing from you). And if your open rate is low, then it might be time for some changes to improve engagement further down the line.
So what exactly does an “average” email open rate look like? According to MailChimp’s research for 2017 on this topic:
- The average B2B company has a 20% overall email marketing campaign open rate across all channels;
- A majority of those companies (61%) see an average of more than 20% across all channels; and
- Overall, B2-B companies seem satisfied with their performance when it comes to getting opened by subscribers (84%).
12. Event Attendance
Attending events and conferences is one of the most effective ways of getting inside the heads of your audience members.
Because it allows you to directly engage with them and get a sense of how they think and feel about certain topics, products, and services. You can attend webinars, seminars, workshops, or even trade shows.
You can also attend training sessions on any topic that’s related to your business or industry – this could be industry-specific training (e.g., retail training) or general business skills (e.g., marketing).
Another great way to find out what your target audience wants is by hosting events yourself!
13. Website Visitors
- Page views. If a website has 100 visitors per month, that’s an average of three per day. If it gets 800 visitors per month, that’s an average of 13 daily visits.
- Time on site is important because it shows how long people spend on your site before they leave the longer they stay, the more engaged they are with your content and brand.
- Bounce rate measures how many people leave your page without exploring further; this can be due to poorly written copy or confusing navigation.
- Conversion rate refers to how often a visitor takes action after reading or viewing something on your website (like signing up for an email list).
- Cost Per Lead (CPL) is the amount of money you spend in advertising and marketing in order to acquire one new client/customer/lead/prospect
14. Daily New Leads
The number of leads that your website receives each day is an important metric to track because it shows how many people are visiting your website and how many of those people are converting into leads, which means they have started the buying process with you.
It’s also a leading indicator of the health of your business and can be used as a benchmark for where you want to be in terms of revenue generated by new customers (i.e., if someone lands on our site but doesn’t become a customer right away, we know there are things we need to fix).
Finally, daily new leads can help us determine whether we need to make changes based on what content is causing visitors not to convert (or not even visit at all) so we can improve conversions or increase traffic overall!
Scaling your marketing efforts requires a solid formula for success. Explore our guide on driving marketing results at scale to uncover strategies and techniques that can lead to significant growth.
15. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to your website who leave without visiting any other page on your site. The lower the bounce rate, the better it is for your business.
Here’s why: A high bounce rate means that people are choosing not to engage with your content, which can be frustrating and cause them to leave immediately a no-no for any marketing campaign!
So get into your customer’s heads by asking yourself how they feel when they’re reading through content and making sure that there are no dead ends or distractions along the way.
While you’re at it, test out different calls-to-action throughout each page so that you can see which ones work best for different audiences (and ultimately increase conversions).
Conclusion
We hope you’re now well-versed in the different methods used to get in your customer’s head.
You should have a good idea of which methods are best suited for your individual needs. We recommend starting with whichever method is most comfortable before moving on to something more challenging if that’s what you want.
If you get stuck or confused at any point, just remember that this is only one step in the process of creating successful content and that we’re here to help
Further Reading
B2B Audience Targeting: A Comprehensive Guide Short Description: Learn the ins and outs of B2B audience targeting, including strategies and techniques to effectively reach your desired audience.
How to Connect with Your Target Audience in B2B Marketing Short Description: Discover practical approaches to establishing meaningful connections with your target audience in B2B marketing.
10 Foolproof Ways to Reach Your B2B Audience Short Description: Uncover ten reliable methods to successfully reach and engage your B2B audience, driving business growth.
FAQs
What is B2B audience targeting?
B2B audience targeting involves identifying and focusing on specific groups of businesses or professionals who are most likely to be interested in your products or services.
How can I connect with my target audience in B2B marketing?
To connect with your target audience in B2B marketing, you can utilize personalized messaging, relevant content, and targeted outreach to address their pain points and needs effectively.
What are some foolproof ways to reach a B2B audience?
Some foolproof ways to reach a B2B audience include leveraging content marketing, engaging on social media platforms, attending industry events, and utilizing email campaigns.
Why is B2B audience targeting important?
B2B audience targeting is crucial because it helps you allocate your resources more efficiently by focusing on prospects who are more likely to convert, leading to higher ROI and better overall marketing effectiveness.
How can I ensure my B2B audience engagement?
Ensuring B2B audience engagement requires offering valuable insights, thought leadership, and solutions through various channels, fostering ongoing connections and interactions.
Costantine Edward is a digital marketing expert, freelance writer, and entrepreneur who helps people attain financial freedom. I’ve been working in marketing since I was 18 years old and have managed to build a successful career doing what I love.