How to Craft Your B2B Inbound Marketing Strategy in 2024 (with Must-Have Tools)

Olivia Milton 06 Aug 2024

The way people buy products has drastically changed over the years.

Nowadays, buyers can google their desired product or service options, compare them, and make an informed decision virtually all on their own. And while with B2B purchases things are slightly more complicated, the rhetoric stays the same.

What this means for businesses is that they should be proactive in their marketing, and ensure that they fall into their buyers’ radars once they decide to start weighing up their options.

This is where inbound marketing comes into play—it’s a marketing strategy of bringing potential customers to the business, rather than the other way around as with outbound marketing and sales.

Outbound strategies are crucial and have their own advantages no doubt, but there’s only so much outreach a business can do to generate interest. In fact, inbound marketing strategies save businesses over $14 per new lead acquired compared to outbound.

In this article, we’ll explore the powers of inbound marketing for B2B businesses in 2024, along with actionable tips to build your own strategy, and essential tools to help you along the way.

What is an inbound marketing strategy?

An inbound marketing strategy refers to numerous marketing tactics that bring potential customers to the business by matching their buyer’s journey with relevant and meaningful engagement and assistance.

At its foundation, Inbound marketing is about providing value to potential customers while they are weighing up their options or even deciding whether they need to make a purchase in the first place.

In a day and age where most customers are tired of constant bombardment from businesses, inbound marketing strategies are one of the best ways to generate relevant, and most importantly, interested leads, and according to HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing report — 93% of businesses agree.

While your inbound marketing strategy is providing timely and relevant value in the form of content, webinars, how-to tutorials, etc., customers learn more about your brand, build trust, and therefore become more inclined to share their contact information and move the conversation forward.

Customers are now fully in charge of the entire buying process, and they dictate where and when they’d like to be communicated by businesses, so it’s best to play by their rules.

Understanding the B2B buying process

The only way to truly grasp inbound marketing is to fully understand the B2B buying process, in other words, how your buyers go from realizing they have a pain point that needs solving to making a purchase (just a short tip here – a B2B e-commerce marketplace simplifies this journey by offering streamlined processes for buyers and sellers).

In the most simple terms, the B2B buying process looks like this:

B2B buyers become aware of a business pain point or opportunity that they have and then begin researching about it in more detail.
Then, they begin researching and weighing up their options, comparing their features, pricing plans, added value, etc.
Finally, B2B buyers become ready to make a purchase, and depending on how well your inbound marketing strategies are set in place determines whether you’re on their lineup of potential solutions or not.

Or, simply, like this:

b2b inbound marketing strategy and buying process

Keep in mind that this is a great oversimplification, and the modern-day B2B buying process is anything but linear. It’s volatile and unpredictable, with some buyers taking their time before making a decision and jumping back and forth from one stage to another.

Inbound marketing focuses on being their trustworthy and expert assistant throughout their journey, respecting their way of making decisions and building trust in the process.

Crafting your B2B inbound marketing strategy

Much like outbound marketing and sales, an effective inbound marketing strategy is heavily data-driven, so it’s best to equip with the right software to automate your strategy and personalize all interactions.

what is an inbound marketing strategy as a step-by-step process

This is why we’ll be including relevant tools throughout this guide that can help you create a fully-functional, lead-generating, ROI-producing inbound marketing strategy.

Buyer personas

Buyer personas are detailed representations of your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) that highlight their common characteristics and behaviors, based on intensive market research and an analysis of existing customers.

This is the first step to understanding your buyers — how they go about their buyer journey and most importantly, what is their buyer intent.

Once uncovered, marketing teams can best navigate their inbound efforts by prioritizing the channels, content, resources, and pain points that are most relevant to them.

HubSpot offers a pretty cool (and totally free) online tool that helps businesses effectively create their buyer personas, but in order to get the best results — you need to conduct your own deep research first.

Depending on your solution, you will most likely have multiple buyer personas with different characteristics and behavior patterns, meaning your inbound marketing strategy won’t be one-size-fits-all. But hey, more brand reach for you!

Once you’ve accurately created your buyer personas, it’s equally important to set up your inbound marketing objectives so each tactic you decide to incorporate into your strategy has a measurable end goal.

Know Your Customers!

Think you know who your customers are? Spoiler: it’s often not who you think. Our “Ideal Customer Profile and Buyer Personas Workbook” is packed with tips and templates to help you build accurate ICPs and spot-on buyer personas. Perfect your prospecting and sales process today!

Content marketing

It’s often said — content is king, and it couldn’t be more true when it comes to inbound marketing.

Think about any purchase you’ve made recently, I can almost guarantee that you first read an article or two about how the product works, the best options on the market, or both. Well, so do the majority of B2B buyers, over 70% according to LinkedIn.

Leaning back to the stages of the buyer journey, your inbound marketing content strategy should be aligned with each stage, providing relevant and valuable information to help educate buyers and answer their questions.

For instance, in the awareness stage—focus on educational content about your market, common pain points, common solutions, etc. In the consideration stage—create solution-oriented content that goes more in-depth about how certain products (like yours) can resolve those pain points. And in the decision stage—bring out the guns and showcase how your product is a great solution.

Your content strategy could entail blog articles, eBooks, videos, how-to tutorials, infographics, case studies, and the list goes on and on. The trick here is to not use any tricks, and instead, focus on always generating quality content that is beneficial to your audience, staying truthful, and prioritizing value over pushing the sale.

To make your content even more visible and secure those top Google positions, make sure to include guest posts, linkbuilding, and SEO into your strategy (more on that shortly).

Marketing teams can leverage numerous tools to enhance their content efforts, for instance, Canva to create graphic content, infographics, branded images, templates, and so on.

Additionally, why not leverage some of the awesome generative AI writing tools out there like Writersonic to assist you in this? The key word is ‘assist’ though, because in case you didn’t know, Google really really doesn’t like 100% AI-written content, and will punish you for it.

Just remember, content is about creativity, so don’t be afraid to think outside the box when thinking about how to provide valuable content to your audience. At Reply.io for instance, we’ve recently created our very own Cold Outreach Course for those looking to level up their outreach skills:

Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO is the art of powering up your content to ensure high Google search rankings, in other words — so that your links are among the first to show up when someone is searching for a specific query.

SEO primarily focuses on incorporating the most top-performing keywords into your content so Google ranks the article higher and gives it more visibility, but there are also numerous other elements of SEO.

Meta titles and descriptions, mobile optimization, header titles, internal linking, content length and originality, and even the speed of your website all play their role in your content’s SEO rankings.

Without any over-exaggeration, without incorporating SEO into your inbound marketing efforts, you run the risk of completely losing out on potential leads, simply because they will never have the opportunity to come across your content in the first place.

Once done correctly, however, coupled with quality content, you can expect a huge spike in traffic to your website through your content, which very well may be the beginning of potential buyers learning about your product and considering a purchase.

SEO is quite complicated, so it’s best to have a dedicated SEO specialist on your team, but there are certain tools that can simplify this process. Google Analytics provides detailed SEO and marketing analytics of your website and content pages to help you see which forms of content generate traffic and which don’t, helping you tweak and perfect your content plan.

Moreover, tools like Surfer or Semrush research and analyze content topics to provide the most crucial keywords to optimize your content with, ensuring that your writing efforts pay off.

Social media marketing

When it comes to social media marketing, things are pretty straightforward.

Most probably, your business already has company profiles on the biggest B2B channels to expand your brand reach, engage with your audience, and so on. This in itself is a form of inbound marketing, but there are always ways to make it even more effective.

For starters, it’s crucial to choose the right platforms to invest your efforts. For B2B, LinkedIn is by far the most superior social media platform to engage with your audience, but don’t shy away from Twitter, Facebook, and even TikTok!

Believe it or not, TikTok has become an excellent source of marketing for B2B firms, though it goes without saying that, you’ll need quality video content to make it on this platform.

B2B firms can also leverage strategic partnerships with influencers whose audience aligns with theirs to further expand their reach.

Last but not least, social selling is an absolute must in today’s day and age, which refers to company employees (especially high-level ones) building up their personal online profiles to establish thought leadership and build credibility, which in turn expands your company’s brand awareness.

Social media channels are one of the best (and cost-effective) ways to market your content and webinars directly to your audience, something that we are big fans of at Reply.io:

Certain social media management tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social help businesses turn their social media channels into powerful lead-generation tools with their scheduling, monitoring, and analytics features.

Lead magnets

Lead magnets is an umbrella term for any type of free product or service given away for free in return for the interested person’s contact information.

Free gated content is one of the most popular ways to make it happen, usually with more ‘unique’ content forms like eBooks or case studies.

However, why stop there? Webinars and podcasts are both excellent ways to provide educational, high-quality information to your audience while growing your brand awareness and credibility. To attend your webinars, those interested will have to fill in their name and email (in most cases), which gives you a new lead for your marketing and nurturing efforts.

Some other examples of lead magnets that we’ve used over the years to bring potential prospects to our website are our email template library and our ROI calculator to name a few.

Discover 100+ battle-tested templates for all your business needs. Perfect for pros and newbies alike, our customizable collection simplifies and streamlines your communications.

Explore templates now

Lead nurturing

Your SEO-optimized content, social media channels, and lead magnets will bring in interested leads to your business, but now it’s time to effectively nurture them.

For starters, you should have a battle-ready inbound email marketing strategy to further effectively engage your new leads with valuable and relevant content. Much like with content, your email campaigns should be personalized for each different buyer persona and for each stage of the buyer journey.

Depending on where your leads are in their journey, your inbound marketing emails could focus on educational resources for those in the awareness stage, and then more product-centered, promotional ones for those in the consideration or decision stages.

You should definitely gear up with a tool like Reply.io to automate and personalize at scale your email marketing campaigns with AI, significantly reducing the time spent generating those emails.

Also, now that you have many potential leads coming to your website, it’s crucial to optimize it with relevant CTAs, and forms, and if you want to take it a step further—an AI Chatbot.

With Reply’s AI Chatbot, businesses can capture, qualify, and nurture website visitors without you lifting a finger! You simply integrate your company’s knowledge base into the AI Chabot, set up its goals, create your very own video AI avatars (you read that right), and watch it do its magic

It can answer any questions your website visitors may have about your product or service, send relevant leads directly into your inbound and outbound sales campaigns, and even book meetings on your behalf.

The future of inbound marketing is AI-driven, and our Chatbot is the prime example of why, make sure to check it out!

Capture Hot Leads on Autopilot!

Meet Reply AI Chat – your new sales assistant with video avatars. Engage website visitors and turn them into hot leads and booked meetings right within the chat. Transform your website traffic into real opportunities!

Try AI Chat now!

Analytics and optimization

Your inbound digital marketing strategy begins with analytics to determine your buyer personas and behaviors, and it ends with analytics to evaluate and optimize your strategy.

Once your strategy is in place, it’s important to continuously measure its performance based on the key metrics such as website traffic, new leads acquired, and conversion rates.

This will give you a picture of which inbound tactics work best and which underperform, which content is interesting to your audience and which isn’t, and so on, helping you invest your time and resources in those that bring in the most lucrative results.

Once again, you can turn to Google Analytics to measure the performance of your strategy and individual tactics. For instance, you may find that webinars bring in the most amount of leads who eventually become customers, meaning you should probably prioritize creating valuable virtual events to double down!

Keep in mind that inbound marketing is far from stable, which means that in a couple of months, you can find that your webinars slowed down in terms of new leads acquired while your new competitor review articles picked up the pace, so keep your finger on the pulse.

Importance of an inbound marketing strategy for B2B

As previously mentioned, in B2B—inbound marketing is not enough on its own, but neither is outbound.

It’s absolutely imperative to include both inbound and outbound marketing strategies in your business to consistently and organically generate leads.

However, inbound marketing does have its own unique advantages, which are:

builds a strong brand reputation among your target audience, helping you establish your company as a reliable, trustworthy, and experienced solution provider;
more cost-effective method to generate quality leads, while producing greater lead-to-consumer conversion rates;
sales affect marketing and vice versa, and inbound provides invaluable data and support materials to sales teams about how prospects think and behave throughout their buying journey;
fosters long-term relationships with your prospective and existing customers, which is the best source of B2B longevity in today’s day and age.

All in all, inbound marketing is a power lead generation strategy that naturally aligns with the reality of the market and what your buyers want, which is undeniably a great recipe for success.

While your inbound strategy is continuously attracting, assisting, and engaging with your prospects, inbound sales teams will have a much easier job making the sale by engaging with customers who already have a positive experience with your brand.

The future of inbound marketing

Content, SEO, social media, email, website chatbots … it may sound overwhelming, but the great thing about inbound marketing is that once you’ve set the right processes in place—everything falls into place and you will be organically generating leads.

The future of inbound marketing is looking bright. With AI in the picture for content creation and hyper-personalization, it will become even easier to provide the right message at the right time to your potential buyers.

It also looks like there will be an increased demand for video content, simply because that’s what the buyers want, and as this article repeatedly emphasized—inbound is entirely about them!

So take the time to fully understand your audience and market, map out their thought process and behavior in each stage of the buyer journey, and create your fully-fledged inbound marketing strategy for the busy year ahead. Your buyers will be thankful!