The Essential B2B Marketing Tactics for 2023

You have your goals. You know your opportunities. You’re ready to leverage your brand’s strengths. 

Now, it’s a matter of figuring out exactly what tactics you’ll employ. 

As the digital realm is now a critical element of a successful B2B marketing strategy (thanks, COVID), engaging prospects on their terms is mission-critical. 

Consumers at every level are more unique than ever. They’re more educated, selective, and savvy, too.   

B2B marketing tactics for 2023 that deliver require an agile and robust approach that’s always prospect-centric. 

8 “Must” B2B Marketing Tactics for 2023 + Our Recommendations 

In online marketing, there’s nothing more powerful than a cohesive suite of tactics strategically implemented and rooted in consumer trends. 

Here are eight things every B2B company’s 2023 marketing tactics should include, plus our recommendations for each:

1. A buyer persona
2. A steady stream of blog articles 
3. Optimized blog posts 
4. Creating videos 
5. An always-on social media strategy  
6. Optimized content & website 
7. Building pillar pages 
8. Personalized engagements  
   
   

1. A Buyer Persona 

Think about your company and what it does. Chances are its products/services are meant for a specific type of customer. In other words, you aren’t making everything for everyone – that business model is … well… impossible. 

The same mentality applies to B2B marketing. Though it would be wonderful to have a marketing strategy that reaches every potential prospect and convinces them to take action, such an approach is a fool’s errand. 

That’s where a buyer persona is invaluable.

A modern take on the traditional target market, a buyer persona helps you distill exactly who your ideal customer is, down to their likes and dislikes. A buyer persona draws from market analysis, current customer data, and hypothetical situations to create a semi-fictitious profile of your ideal customer. With a persona in hand, it’s lightyears easier to create a marketing strategy that’s customized and concentrated to meet your goals, as well as prospects who could become your favorite long-term customers. 

Resource: Don’t have a buyer persona? We can help. Download our free Ultimate Persona Guide and use the accompanying template to create your very own buyer persona!

2. A Steady Stream of Blog Articles

Read any article about content production and you’ll come across the adage “content is king.” 

Despite its frequent use, it’s true. Content is indeed king – especially in digital marketing. 

Blogging is one of the easiest, fastest, and most practical ways to generate new content for your website. The occasional blog post, however, isn’t enough. 

From an SEO perspective, regularly posting new articles helps your site rank better. Every time a new post is published, there’s a compounding effect on your website. Google recognizes your site as one that’s dynamic and putting out fresh information. This, in turn, helps your site rank better (appear higher up in search results), thus driving more traffic. More traffic brings more opportunities to reach new prospects who may engage with your company. 

Regularly published content shows visitors that your organization is a thought leader and a resource. Who better to trust in helping solve a problem than a company that earned your trust as a credible source? From an optics perspective, a blog that hasn’t seen a new post in some time isn’t a good look – it inadvertently sends a message that your company doesn’t have much to share. 

3. Optimized Blog Posts

To an extent, we’re jumping ahead to point six. 

Blog articles are the perfect opportunity for a quick boost to your site’s overall authority when optimized correctly. 

On-point blog article optimization means a piece is written with: 

• The keywords your persona is regularly searching (a primary keyword & supporting secondary keywords) 
• The right density of keywords 
• External links (see what we did on the previous bullet point?)
• Internal links to relevant content (see what we did here?)
• Formatting (zoom out on this article. Do you notice how the information is presented?)
• The SEO (search engine optimization) basics outlined in point six

Unoptimized blog articles do little for your site’s overall profile and ranking. Consider it like writing an anthology of books that very few people will ever come across.

4. Creating Videos 

Video consumption has dominated Internet activity for several years. That’s no surprise -- the average person spends 100+ minutes every day watching online videos.

In short, videos do wonders in digital marketing.  

For any company, integrating videos into their marketing tactics is a no-brainer. And the stats don’t lie – videos help guide prospects along their buyer’s journey and provide another means of engagement. 

5. An Always-on Social Media Strategy 

Just like blogging, posting on social media should be a regular part of an ongoing digital marketing strategy. With the way the world works and how consumers research and engage with companies, there’s no reason not to. Just like a neglected blog, sparsely populated social media channels do very little for your company. 

Maintaining a presence on social media does take planning and commitment. A solid social media strategy involves: 

1. Developing a social media schedule and sticking to it – plan to post at least a few times a week on each of your social media profiles. Scheduling posts takes some heavy lifting out of maintaining a regular posting cadence. 
2. Calling in the experts – don’t be afraid to share content from credible sources outside your company. Doing so helps boost your organization's profile as a thought leader and resource. 
3. Calling followers to action – whenever possible, invite your followers to take an action with your posts. Even something as simple as “read more” or “find out why” works – anything to encourage followers to take a next step and hang with your content for a while. 
4. Fostering engagement – taking the call to action a step further, there’s nothing better on a social post than when followers start interacting with it. Posing questions or encouraging followers to comment are powerful ways to nurture relationships and generate leads with your company. 

Pro Tip: Remember that steady stream of blog articles and videos we mentioned? Each piece is a candidate for a social post or two. What’s more, they’re fodder to fill in gaps between promoting new content.  

6. Optimize Your Content & Website  

The behind-the-scenes work of content publishing and site maintenance, SEO helps search engines find your webpage and guide others to it. 

Whether you’re publishing your latest blog, a new product page, or even a photo, optimization allows your website to reach its full potential. 

What does optimization look like? 

Basic SEO involves making sure your webpages have:

• A primary keyword
• Supporting secondary keywords
• Page titles
• Meta descriptions
• Image alt text
• URL & slug structures
• On-page headers

Site optimization can get much more technical and require a certain level of expertise to achieve. Examples of higher-level SEO improvements include:

• Maintaining a high site speed
• Making your site mobile-friendly 
• Pursuing backlinks 
• Creating an XLM site map

Resource: Maximize your website’s SEO. Download our B2B Website SEO Checklist:

7. Building Pillar Pages

This is one of our favorite tactics as it pulls together many of the previous tactics we’ve discussed. 

Pillar pages – particularly 10x pillar pages – are what we like to characterize as “blogs on steroids” and “Google gold.”

Essentially a super blog, a pillar page is a piece of long-form content on a particular topic. They consist of multiple articles that are related and linked to each other (i.e. topic cluster) with new information – and a few CTAs or even a video or two– peppered in throughout. 

While Google likes blog articles, it loves pillar pages. Ultimately, pillar pages leverage all the good parts of optimized blog articles and web pages to improve your site’s authority and ranking. In Google’s eyes, a pillar page makes your site more credible. 

Resource: Need some inspiration for your first pillar page? Check out these five examples.

8. Personalize Engagements  

In some respects, the buying process has only become more isolated in recent years. 

How?

The majority of prospects are doing their homework long before making a purchase. That means the window of engagement between a sales team and lead is much smaller than it was decades ago. 

However, when a prospect is ready for interaction, they’re looking for a personalized experience. According to a survey by Epsilon, 80% of respondents indicated they are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized experiences. 

Suffice to say, whether it’s via email or with dynamic web pages that adjust content based upon location, a personalized engagement goes a long way in moving prospects down the sales funnel.

Resource: Take a deeper dive into mechanisms that deliver a highly personalized experience for prospects. 

Tackling B2B Marketing in 2023

Whether you’re relying on your internal marketing team or enlisting the services of a marketing agency, B2B marketing tactics for 2023 are impactful and sometimes complex. 

But most importantly, they all work cohesively to engage prospects and foster meaningful interactions with your company. 

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