How to implement self-reported attribution in HubSpot
Mar 09, 2023
Most discussions about B2B marketing strategies focus on what's new or trendy. But what really matters is strategies that drive business growth. Through working with dozens of clients and seeing real results across the B2B marketing landscape, we've identified the strategies that consistently deliver growth.
Our top strategy is... strategy itself. Whilst that might sound odd, there's a compelling reason why strategy leads our list.
In B2B marketing, particularly among SMEs, there's a lack of true data-driven analysis. Marketers often confuse tactics with strategy, jumping straight to channel selection without understanding what genuinely drives results.
This is because we hear so much about other companies' marketing that we believe certain approaches will work when our own data often tells a different story.
Effective strategy requires you to understand:
A proper strategy enables you to step back, assess performance objectively, and create a roadmap for continuous improvement based on real results rather than conventional wisdom. This foundational work ensures your marketing activities align with buyer preferences and business objectives rather than following assumptions.
Your website is your most important business asset. Even with a recently updated website that reflects your brand well, no other lever offers better returns than conversion rate optimisation (CRO).
Forget the traditional focus on button colours or other microscopic variations. In B2B, where traffic volumes are typically lower than B2C, these small changes rarely have statistically significant improvements. Instead, focus on the elements that materially impact your conversion rate, like:
Even a 0.01% improvement in website performance can have a huge impact on growth when you consider it as a multiplier on all your other B2B demand generation activities.
Despite AI's evolution in search, SEO remains a crucial strategy for driving pipeline and revenue.
While Google's AI snippets are taking traffic from educational and informational queries, they fundamentally cannot replace high-intent commercial searches without a huge societal shift in buyer behaviour.
For example, when someone searches for "project management software" or similar commercial-intent terms, they want to evaluate specific features, compare different solutions, and make informed decisions based on their criteria. They won't trust AI to make these important purchase decisions for them.
Commercial keywords - like "buy project management software", "best CRM platform", or "marketing automation tools" - represent buyers actively looking to purchase. These searches drive the most valuable pipeline because they indicate clear purchase intent.
However, ranking for these valuable commercial terms requires a broader content strategy. Search engines determine your authority and relevance for commercial keywords based on your entire depth of content. This means you need to:
This graph shows the average organic traffic for our website, blendb2b.com, over the last two years. You can see that even with the introduction of AI overviews in August 2024, our traffic has continued to grow thanks to our SEO efforts.
Having a podcast has become common in B2B marketing, but few companies generate significant business directly from listeners. The real value lies in using your podcast as a content creation engine.
Podcasting offers an efficient way to create valuable content through natural conversation. It's easier and faster than writing blog posts or filming dedicated videos from scratch, and each episode can fuel your entire content strategy through:
So, while your podcast might not directly drive leads, the content you create from it can significantly impact conversions through increased brand awareness, brand affinity, and website traffic.
For example, our podcast, Websites Decoded, has good listener numbers for a niche category but isn't breaking any download records.
However, it enables us to repurpose content in lots of different ways, like short-form clips for LinkedIn ads, and increases the production speed for all content mediums.
5. LinkedIn marketing
LinkedIn provides a unique opportunity to reach both active buyers and the 95% of your market not yet looking for solutions. This makes it a powerful platform for building brand awareness before purchase decisions happen.
The platform requires two distinct approaches.
Organic content works best through personal profiles rather than company pages. While maintaining your company page matters, the real engagement comes from enabling your team to share valuable insights and content. Focus on empowering employees to post regularly while keeping company page updates as a baseline activity.
LinkedIn's paid advertising offers precise targeting that helps position your brand with ideal buyers. Through strategic ad campaigns, you can reach senior decision-makers and build familiarity with your brand long before they enter a buying cycle. This early visibility often means you're already a trusted option when they begin evaluating solutions.
Events remain one of the most effective ways to build relationships with potential buyers, particularly in niche industries where digital channels have limited reach.
The face-to-face interactions at industry events, conferences, and meetups create opportunities for meaningful conversations that often can't be replicated online.
However, measuring event success requires looking beyond the usual metrics.
While sales teams naturally gravitate towards events and badge scanning might suggest success, the true value often takes 6-12 months to materialise in your pipeline. This means focusing on quality over quantity - prioritising meaningful conversations that could lead to future opportunities rather than collecting as many contact details as possible.
Events also present unique content opportunities. Creating content at events, whether through customer interviews, industry discussions, or expert panels, gives you valuable material to share with a broader audience. This extends the event's impact far beyond those who attended.
To maximise event ROI:
The key is measuring which events truly drive revenue, helping you invest in the ones that matter most to your business.
While data orchestration may not be considered a traditional marketing strategy, it's a critical foundation for driving impactful demand generation.
Real performance data often reveals dramatic variances across key business metrics:
Implementing tracking processes or integrated platforms for automated reporting is the key to unlocking these pipeline performance insights.
With better visibility, marketing teams can justify increased budgets, optimise resource allocation, and improve sales-marketing alignment. This data-driven approach forms the foundation for more efficient and impactful demand generation strategies moving forward.
Rather than viewing data orchestration as a standalone tactic, it's helpful to consider it as an essential enabler of overall marketing effectiveness. By gaining deeper pipeline transparency, marketers can make more informed decisions, measure the true ROI of their efforts, and ultimately drive stronger business outcomes.
While each of these strategies delivers value individually, they're most effective as part of a broader demand generation approach. Modern B2B buyers prefer to research, evaluate, and move through their journey independently. And a comprehensive demand generation strategy respects this preference while ensuring your brand is visible and valuable at every stage.
Want to learn more about building an effective demand generation strategy?
Read our complete guide to B2B demand generation to understand how these strategies work together to drive growth.
