Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

1. Understand your target audience very well. Who are they? What's on their minds? What are their greatest unmet needs?

2. Create content that speaks directly to what's on their minds. Focus on how you can help them, not on selling yourself/your products or services.

3. Invite inquiries and/or sign-ups for ongoing communication.

4. Consider using Adwords with a high-conversion landing page, if appropriate in your industry/sector.

For lead generation, forget content: focus on ranking on page 1 of the major search engines for the relevant keywords.

Emma, what I do is select some key companies that you would like to do business with. Check them out through their website or blog/newsletters, Then try and put yourself in their place and look at your own business objectively through each target company's eyes. What would you want your company to do to win the B2B orders from these target companies? Then you can answer the question: Does my website answer the issues and questions you can expect from prospective customers.

Step one is doing an audience definition and then researching the keywords and topics targeting that audience. There are a bunch of great tools for doing this kind of research. You can do it manually by looking at look-alike competitors and then using tools like SpyFu to do keyword research (you can see what keywords competitors are using).

I'm a big believer in focusing on inbound. So creating a content marketing strategy aligned with keywords and then writing 2-3 solid articles/week (which can actually be pretty difficult).

The content draws them in and then you can exit intent, sign up bars, inline forms, etc to build an audience.

It's a lot of work. I'm a startup in the SMB b2b space for marketing automation vs. my last startup focused on the enterprise. Different markets, but this strategy always works long term.