- Original Poster
- #1
I would be interested on hearing people's views on niche B2B digital marketing and how to do it well.
Many of the standard rules you will see in the textbooks and digital marketing courses simply don't work very well for low-volume B2B marketing. For example, all the general wisdom about PPC search is all very well and good when you have plenty of people searching for your product each month on google. You segment your market, work out their needs, work out how each of these segments might search in google and then design your ads and landing pages around that. But none of this really works when you only have a few hundred people searching for your product each month. You might get viable search volume for your generic terms but once you start segmenting it down you just don't get enough volumes and hence all those plans for beautifully aligned and linked landing pages go out the window.
This was a lesson I learned many years ago when trying to apply all my fine theoretical marketing knowledge to our industrial spray nozzle business. It does not get much more niche than industrial spray nozzles. I tried to do all the Google ads stuff and basically could only really get enough search volumes for generic search terms. Almost all the PPC consultants and "experts" I spoke to gave me the same standard playbook of what should be done, and none of it worked, simply because you can't get enough search volume to run segmented campaigns. I rapidly concluded that most of the so-called experts really didn't understand B2B niche marketing that well. I'm sure there are good companies out there but I never found any that really understood the subtleties of this area.
For me, the most fundamental thing about B2B niche marketing is that you really have to understand your business and customers. This is why most digital marketing agencies fail because in order to understand something as obscure as the "industrial spray nozzle market" would take weeks or months of research and is probably beyond the capabilities of most marketing people. It takes even the qualified engineers we employ as salespeople at least a year before they are of any use to me, so what hope would a non-engineer digital marketing expert have of understanding anything about my business?
All this is different for B2C because most B2C products, by definition, are fairly easy for marketers to understand. There will probably be some familiarity with the product and you won't need a degree in engineering or other specialist knowledge to understand the benefits of the product. So, it is a relatively simple task for a marketer to understand something like a clothing range, or a toy, some new garden tool or whatever other B2C product. We can all get a reasonable understanding of these things by looking at competitor offerings and conducting customer surveys and the like. It's not that complicated, the complexity actually comes later when working out how the hell you compete for clicks with well-established players that can outspend you 10:1. And that is when the standard PPC theory comes into play and you set about carving out your niche and choosing your battleground to suit your strengths. But not much of that applies to B2B niche products.
My solution to that problem was basically to forget about PPC and focus on good technical content to drive long-tail SEO. There are probably only a handful of people searching each month for "air atomizing nozzles for food applications" but each one of those is a really good prospect punter and if we appear page 1 top slot with our page on that exact topic then we will get that call. It might only be 1 or 2 calls a month but that's probably £2,000 of high-margin business and then you repeat that for the other 100 or so niches and hey presto now you have a nice marketing machine. You can't do this with PPC because each individual specific term will not have enough volume to link to a specific landing page on that topic. But you can, over time, do it with good content because the good news is that there ain't much competition and it's not that hard to dominate google for something like "air atomizing spray nozzle". This is how we dominated google for our niche and how we out-compete much larger organisations with bigger marketing budgets.
Another massive problem for B2B marketing in general is actually tracking success. With B2C it's relatively straightforward. With the right tracking software, you can see where the orders came from and which adds generate the initial inquiry. With B2B the buying cycle is so long and complex that this becomes really tricky! For example, a spray nozzle enquiry might start with a design engineer who is looking to solve a particular spray problem, they will google up spray nozzles, end up on our site, give us a call, we then do our consultancy work and get the nozzle specified into whatever he is building and the part number is put in the drawing. Then 6 months later the project goes ahead and a completely different company (either the end client or the purchasing company) comes to us with a request for 6 of our part number xxxxxxx. We take the order of course but the sale actually occurred 6 months ago when we spoke to the design engineer, how he found us is the important thing from a marketing perspective. But the conversation 6 months ago might not even be linked to the one now with the company that is buying in our CRM! I love Hubspot and it's probably the best way to try and track all of this, but even a cool program like HubSpot struggles with these disjointed sales processes.
Anyway - are there any fellow travelers here marketing niche B2B products? Do the challenges above resonate? Or what other challenges have you found?
Many of the standard rules you will see in the textbooks and digital marketing courses simply don't work very well for low-volume B2B marketing. For example, all the general wisdom about PPC search is all very well and good when you have plenty of people searching for your product each month on google. You segment your market, work out their needs, work out how each of these segments might search in google and then design your ads and landing pages around that. But none of this really works when you only have a few hundred people searching for your product each month. You might get viable search volume for your generic terms but once you start segmenting it down you just don't get enough volumes and hence all those plans for beautifully aligned and linked landing pages go out the window.
This was a lesson I learned many years ago when trying to apply all my fine theoretical marketing knowledge to our industrial spray nozzle business. It does not get much more niche than industrial spray nozzles. I tried to do all the Google ads stuff and basically could only really get enough search volumes for generic search terms. Almost all the PPC consultants and "experts" I spoke to gave me the same standard playbook of what should be done, and none of it worked, simply because you can't get enough search volume to run segmented campaigns. I rapidly concluded that most of the so-called experts really didn't understand B2B niche marketing that well. I'm sure there are good companies out there but I never found any that really understood the subtleties of this area.
For me, the most fundamental thing about B2B niche marketing is that you really have to understand your business and customers. This is why most digital marketing agencies fail because in order to understand something as obscure as the "industrial spray nozzle market" would take weeks or months of research and is probably beyond the capabilities of most marketing people. It takes even the qualified engineers we employ as salespeople at least a year before they are of any use to me, so what hope would a non-engineer digital marketing expert have of understanding anything about my business?
All this is different for B2C because most B2C products, by definition, are fairly easy for marketers to understand. There will probably be some familiarity with the product and you won't need a degree in engineering or other specialist knowledge to understand the benefits of the product. So, it is a relatively simple task for a marketer to understand something like a clothing range, or a toy, some new garden tool or whatever other B2C product. We can all get a reasonable understanding of these things by looking at competitor offerings and conducting customer surveys and the like. It's not that complicated, the complexity actually comes later when working out how the hell you compete for clicks with well-established players that can outspend you 10:1. And that is when the standard PPC theory comes into play and you set about carving out your niche and choosing your battleground to suit your strengths. But not much of that applies to B2B niche products.
My solution to that problem was basically to forget about PPC and focus on good technical content to drive long-tail SEO. There are probably only a handful of people searching each month for "air atomizing nozzles for food applications" but each one of those is a really good prospect punter and if we appear page 1 top slot with our page on that exact topic then we will get that call. It might only be 1 or 2 calls a month but that's probably £2,000 of high-margin business and then you repeat that for the other 100 or so niches and hey presto now you have a nice marketing machine. You can't do this with PPC because each individual specific term will not have enough volume to link to a specific landing page on that topic. But you can, over time, do it with good content because the good news is that there ain't much competition and it's not that hard to dominate google for something like "air atomizing spray nozzle". This is how we dominated google for our niche and how we out-compete much larger organisations with bigger marketing budgets.
Another massive problem for B2B marketing in general is actually tracking success. With B2C it's relatively straightforward. With the right tracking software, you can see where the orders came from and which adds generate the initial inquiry. With B2B the buying cycle is so long and complex that this becomes really tricky! For example, a spray nozzle enquiry might start with a design engineer who is looking to solve a particular spray problem, they will google up spray nozzles, end up on our site, give us a call, we then do our consultancy work and get the nozzle specified into whatever he is building and the part number is put in the drawing. Then 6 months later the project goes ahead and a completely different company (either the end client or the purchasing company) comes to us with a request for 6 of our part number xxxxxxx. We take the order of course but the sale actually occurred 6 months ago when we spoke to the design engineer, how he found us is the important thing from a marketing perspective. But the conversation 6 months ago might not even be linked to the one now with the company that is buying in our CRM! I love Hubspot and it's probably the best way to try and track all of this, but even a cool program like HubSpot struggles with these disjointed sales processes.
Anyway - are there any fellow travelers here marketing niche B2B products? Do the challenges above resonate? Or what other challenges have you found?
