4 Ideas for your 2023 SME Digital Marketing Plan 

The four core pillars of your 2023 digital marketing activity plan

1. Digital experience

Over the last five years, the way B2B buyers research, compare, and buy has drastically changed. Gone are the days when buyers would chat with sales reps on the phone or meet prospective buyers at an industry event. No matter the industry, with digital strategy at the helm, most buyers start their purchase journey online – even if they end up purchasing offline.

According to research from Adweek, over 80% of buyers visit a website before making a purchase. As a result, the B2B buying experience is no different and is trending towards a more consumer-based approach. Where the buyer conducts their own research before purchasing – think about the way consumers read reviews and compare products on Amazon.

For this reason, implementing the right digital marketing strategies will help B2B buyers make and act on decisions faster. 

But, how can you make sure your brand is visible during the research phase to stand a chance of being selected? 

📖You can find out more about the changing B2B buyer and experience and the strategies you can implement in our ebook: Digital Marketing and Today’s B2B Buyer: New Rules of Digital Marketing. 

2. Inbound marketing

With an uncertain year ahead, inbound marketing will become a top priority. And the good news is, digital marketers can utilise these strategies to drive your inbound marketing strategy. 

Digital marketing is now essential for any inbound marketing strategy because, as we have already mentioned, B2B buyers are now researching online. 

An effective inbound marketing strategy should involve creating content that’s highly targeted towards your target audience and which will help you to capture high quality leads for your business. 

That’s why your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and content marketing efforts should be highly tailored towards your target audience. 

Likewise, your content should answer the questions your potential customers are likely to have surrounding your products or services to help build trust and build your authority in your industry. 

In short, if you can solve your potential customer’s problems, they’re more likely to trust you and buy from you in the future. 

The key takeaway: Complementing your digital marketing efforts with tailored content, relevant landing pages, email marketing and lead magnets will help you to draw qualified leads to your website and help you to increase conversion rates for your business.

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3. Content marketing

The way buyers consume content has changed significantly and buyers are actually spending more time with content. But…B2B buyers want high-value content. 

Creating this content is key to building trust with your audience, so it’s more important than ever.

Research shows that 80% of decision-makers prefer to gain information from a blog post rather than viewing an ad. So, gaining cut-through in a crowded market is less about the ads you can get out there and more about the information you can provide to your audience. 

Alongside helping you to build trust with your potential customers, content marketing is also essential for making sure your website ranks highly in search engine results. Plus, this is all part of your inbound marketing strategy. 

To demonstrate this, it’s key to optimise the content you create to match the search terms and the search intent of your customers. This is how you’re going to make sure you’re found in the right place at the right time. By doing this, you’re not only answering their questions, but you’re also showing Google the relevance and quality of your content too.

Remember: When optimising a content strategy for Google, it also needs to be useful to your website visitors too. In September 2022, Google rolled out the ‘Helpful Content Update’, which aims to rank content written for people and devalues content written purely for SEO purposes. So, when you create content, always think humans first and then optimise for the right keywords – Google will now be able to see when you’re creating content just to boost rankings and which is not helpful to readers. 

👉You can read more about this in our blog: Google’s ‘Helpful Content Algorithm Update’: How do you write content for humans? 

4. Brand Awareness 

Finally, understanding brand awareness is key for SME companies that want to scale their business in 2023. 

Why? According to research from LinkedIn and Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, only 5% of the market is in buying mode at any given time. This means at least 95% of your target audience is not ready to buy today. 

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As an interesting side note: While the 95% are ‘out of market’ for now, they’re still watching, still educating themselves, learning about pain points, and starting to trust the experts. When they are ready to buy – you want to be top of mind. 

So, which digital marketing strategies can help you to drive brand awareness for your business? 

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• Social media marketing channels (paid and organic) - social media platforms such as LinkedIn can help you to show off your brand personality and connect with potential customers. You can share your content here too to keep your business top of mind until they’re ready to buy. Video ads can help you to get in front of your target audience too. 
• SEO - we’ve already mentioned the importance of SEO, but it’s a crucial part of building brand awareness. It puts you in the search results at the exact moment your potential customers are looking for an answer to their problem. They might not be ready to buy straight away, but if your content is useful, they’re going to keep coming back. 
• PPC - SEO can take time to see the results, but PPC can help you appear at the top of the search results and build brand awareness in the meantime. It’s a great way to get in front of the right people when they’re searching for a solution to their problem. You can lead them to a highly targeted landing page and either capture their details or provide the information they need. 

In summary 

During times of uncertainty, there are fewer active buyers ‘in-market’ so it’s essential for businesses to put a greater focus on digital marketing strategies – and work with the right digital marketing agencies. 

This is key to growing their presence in the market to make sure they’re seen by the right people, at the right time, in the right places.

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You might also like:

• Checklist: Key agency criteria when looking to outsource SME digital marketing
• 4 ideas for your 2023 SME Digital Marketing Plan
• The Ultimate Guide to B2B digital marketing strategies: maximise your budget and generate revenue
• Digital Marketing Results: tried and tested methods to maximise ROI for SMEs
• SME digital marketing essentials: How to kick start your plan
• 7 top SME digital marketing strategies for B2B
• What is SME digital marketing? A complete guide for B2B

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