If you are a B2B business owner looking to bounce back from the effects of the pandemic and elevate your brand in 2021, you need to invest in building a strong online presence.
For many business owners out there, a digital presence means setting up your website or a Facebook page, but is that really true? Will a website or social media page alone get you leads or clients? Not in this age!
B2B buyers have evolved over the last few years and have access to far more information than they used to. So, there’s a whole bunch of things you need to do in order to build brand awareness, drive qualified traffic to your website, convert visitors into leads/customers and establish your brand as an authority in your niche.
Accomplishing all this requires a lot of research, analysis and planning, not to mention expertise and experience in various aspects of digital marketing. As a business, you may not have these skills or experience in-house.
That’s where a digital marketing consultancy can be really valuable. But let’s first understand what it is.
What is a digital marketing consultancy?
A digital marketing consultancy guides business owners towards achieving their business goals with the right digital marketing strategy. It provides personalized consulting by studying your business, analyzing your competitive landscape, and putting together a robust action plan to create a strong brand positioning among your audience online.
This ultimately helps you generate more traffic and sales.
How is a digital marketing consultancy different from a digital marketing agency?
So many clients get confused between these two, so it’s probably best to clear it before going further. As we mentioned in the previous section, a digital marketing consultancy ‘guides’ or ‘advises’ businesses on the best possible ways of turning their vision into a reality.
It focuses on your brand’s overall positioning online and planning growth strategies in line with your vision and goals, whereas a digital marketing agency would be actively involved in the execution of those strategies and day-to-day digital marketing activities.
For instance, if you wanted a website developed or run a PPC campaign to promote an offer, you should use a digital marketing agency.
However, if you’re looking for the right digital marketing strategy that combines your website, content marketing, social media, SEO and paid channels in a way that would help you build your brand online and drive sales, a digital marketing consultancy would be an ideal fit.
With that in mind, let’s look at some of the advantages of enlisting the services of a digital marketing consultancy for your business:
Why you should hire a digital marketing consultancy for your B2B firm
It brings a fresh perspective to solving your business challenges
It’s quite common for B2B business owners to get caught up in a set mindset when approaching their business challenges. This is usually the result of being too familiar with your business.
When you’ve been doing things a certain way for a long time, it’s easy to forget that there are other ways you could do them. If the old approach isn’t working, you need to try something new, which is why hiring a digital marketing consultancy can be a huge boon.
A digital marketing consultancy brings an objective, external point-of-view to help you solve your business challenges. Using their in-depth knowledge of digital marketing and data-driven approach, they can unlock actionable insights and find novel solutions to your problems.
It can identify digital gaps and opportunities
The work of a digital marketing consultancy starts with conducting a thorough digital audit of your business. This includes analyzing the state of your website, blog, social media profiles, SEO(on-page, off-page, technical), your marketing stack, and other aspects relevant to your business.
This helps identify your strengths, opportunities and weaknesses to develop the right digital strategy for your business that helps you fill the gap between where you are and where you want to be.
It aligns your marketing to your brand’s vision and mission
It’s quite common for businesses, including those in the B2B space to lose sight of their vision when marketing themselves. When you don’t have a well-defined digital strategy, your marketing ends up going haywire - Your website copy is all over the place, you try to do everything on social media (just because others are doing it), your digital campaigns don’t have clear messaging, you get a large number of junk leads that never convert, and ultimately you fail to meet your revenue targets. Sounds familiar?
So how do you resolve this? By hiring a digital marketing consultancy. They would build an end-to-end inbound marketing strategy for you that is fully aligned with your brand’s goals and vision.
The end result? Strong brand positioning, significantly better quality leads, and higher revenue!
It helps you build authority in your domain
Unlike selling to consumers, the business-to-business buying journey is long, and it can take weeks, even months to move prospects down the funnel before they are sales-ready. One of the factors that affect the length of the sales cycle is your brand equity and positioning. Businesses buy from people they can trust, and trust isn’t built overnight.
A B2B digital marketing consultancy understands this, and therefore focuses on creating long-term strategies with an emphasis on inbound and content marketing to help you position your business as an authority in your field. By creating targeted and authoritative content for every stage of the marketing funnel, they would help you not only close faster, but also retain clients longer.
It enables efficient utilization of your marketing budgets
A digital marketing consultancy specializes in building laser-focused strategies based on regular and thorough research and analysis, rather than hunches and guesses.
By defining your ideal customers, value proposition and S.M.A.R.T goals at the outset, a digital consultancy clearly lays out the path that your business will follow to achieve your goals.
When the roadmap for your business is clearly defined, you allocate resources towards marketing activities, channels and tools that are most likely to help you achieve desirable outcomes, rather than wasting them on the ones that won’t.
Without a carefully planned strategy, you’ll end up targeting people that aren’t interested in your products/services, on channels that aren’t relevant to your brand, with messaging that won’t resonate with your target audience.
It provides deep insights to ensure strategies continue to stay effective
Marketing is not a one-time activity that you implement once and forget about it. It’s a living, breathing organism that needs to evolve based on your performance and changes in the external environment.
A digital consultancy leverages data analytics to constantly track your performance based on pre-defined metrics and provide you actionable insights. This ensures your marketing strategy remains relevant and effective, and every marketing initiative contributes positively towards achieving your business objectives.
Final thoughts
As you can see, using the services of a digital marketing consultancy can benefit your business in a number of ways. At Allura Digital, we provide personalized, data-driven consulting to help you generate long-term business growth through proven inbound marketing strategies.
Book a free 30-min discovery call to discuss your marketing goals and take the first step towards building a winning marketing strategy for 2021 and beyond!
