This article was originally published in the Elevate Your Marketing newsletter and has been repurposed and republished here with the author’s permission. Here is the link to the original article.
Personally, I am not a big proponent of hacks. This is mostly because many marketing consultants, strategists, and agencies tend to misuse the term. In most cases, there are no shortcuts in marketing. Even if you achieve something overnight, that’s either not sustainable and/or repeatable. So safeguard yourself from such false promises – especially from external parties.
At the same time, there are certain steps you can take in B2B growth marketing that will help enhance the outcomes of your efforts. Most of the time, they are not a one-time activity, but rather a set of consistent actions that give you the desired results over time.
In this article, we look at 11 such ‘hacks’ that if done the right way will help your business grow. Unlike the usual growth hacks that you see in a lot of articles online (like creating content, getting active on social media, building an email list, conducting a webinar, etc.), all the 11 tips I have covered here are specific actionable items, of which at least some are going to be new to you.
In addition, some of my picks are those which are overlooked or often ignored. But they can be more effective than a lot of conventional growth techniques that we usually talk about. Further, this is the first among a series articles where we will plenty of unconventional yet practical B2B growth hacks.
That said, let’s roll!
11 B2B growth hacks that will set your business on the path of growth
Some of the hacks I am going to discuss are free of cost. All they need is your time and dedication. However, there are a few others that cost money in the form of tools or other resources. I have organized the free ones at the top with those that need some dollars to be burnt following them.
So here are 11 of my favorite B2B growth hacks:
- Modifying titles and meta descriptions for better clickthrough
- Consolidating the list of companies viewing your leaders’ posts
- Content clustering and internal linking
- Participating in vendor events
- Leveraging visitor tracking to nail down your targeting
- Using an exit popup tool
- Building a free tool
- Automated social media promotion
- Experimenting with surveys
- Using an e-gifting platform
- Hiring creators and relationship builders
Let us look at each of these in detail next.
1. Modifying titles and meta descriptions for better clickthrough
This is one of the easiest yet less explored growth hacks. This involves identifying pages that have the lowest CTR (clickthrough rate) and making changes to various elements to improve the average CTR.
The CTR of a result in SERP (Search Engine Results Page) depends predominantly on 3 to 4 factors such as the title, meta description, the URL/website name, and sitelinks.
Of these, title and description are the most important, and hence finetuning them can lead to more clicks – thereby attracting more traffic and conversions.
To get the data for this, head over to Google Search Console. Under the performance section, go to ‘search results’. Now click the CTR area at the top of the page and navigate to the ‘pages’ tab. Here, you will be able to see all the pages with their corresponding impressions, clicks, and CTR values. Now sort the pages in ascending order with the lowest CTR value at the top.
Note: While you do this, you can ignore pages below a certain threshold when it comes to impressions. This is to avoid any pages that do not have a significant number of impressions. If impressions are low, it is not a click-through problem.
Now, take all those pages that have very low CTR and go back and optimize their titles and meta descriptions for more clicks. You can also try implementing structured data markup to enhance your search results.
2. Consolidating the list of companies viewing your leaders’ posts
This is about leveraging LinkedIn’s analytics on individual people’s posts to identify target accounts that otherwise might not have been on your radar. For a post published using a personal profile, LinkedIn shares the list of the top 5 companies that saw your post (please see the image below that shows this for one of my posts).
Often what happens is that you find a lot of companies that meet the target criteria of your business in the list. If you make it a point to consolidate this data for your founders’ or key leaders’ posts over some time, you will have a list of net new accounts that you probably would not have identified using a tool like Zoom Info or LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
Now, how is this a growth hack?
Whether this becomes a growth hack or not will depend on how you use the data. Here are some ways in which you can use the info for growth:
- For email marketing campaigns
- LinkedIn campaigns
- Google customer match campaigns
- LinkedIn outreach (DM)
The disadvantage of this method is that it is time consuming and requires time investment from your leaders. Hence, this technique is more suitable for early-stage companies where even data like this can be worth a treasure.
Also read: Account Based Marketing Strategies: 12 Ways To Find Target Accounts
3. Content clustering and internal linking for B2B growth marketing
In one of Skalegrow’s previous articles, we learned how content clustering and repurposing is the best formula for building a scalable content strategy (check out the article here: Content Clustering And Repurposing – Building A Scalable B2B Content Strategy). This technique is more of an extension of the content clustering part of it.
Essentially, what you do is group the existing articles and other pages on your website into different clusters. The next step is to identify linkable pages from them. Now go to relevant individual pages where links to these pages can be inserted. The last step is to modify the content of those pages in such a way that the links can be placed naturally.
Doing this will help increase the ranking of your pages over time. It will also attract more traffic to the linked pages, This in turn will lead to more leads and conversions.
4. Participating in vendor events
Do you know what is one thing that B2B sellers would definitely love? Customers sharing the positive experience of using their products or services.
One of the recent trends in this space is companies getting key stakeholders from their customers to speak at a webinar or an event (instead of merely sharing a testimonial). This is for sure a great growth hack for the seller.
However, this is usually not seen as a growth opportunity for the customer organization. But think about it. If you are the customer, this will help you reach the audience of another company for free. And you might have a lot of relevant accounts that are part of that audience.
One of the best practices here is to select a vendor that will have a large portion of its target audience relevant to your business. You also need a vendor or partner – the collaboration with whom has helped your business immensely. Also, this technique can be extended to partner organizations as well.
5. Visitor tracking as a B2B growth hack
This involves using a visitor tracking tool to find the accounts visiting your website. Examples of visitor tracking tools include:
- Kickfire
- Factors AI
- Leadfeeder
- LeadForensics
- VisitorQueue
- ZoomInfo
If you have an intent intelligence tool like 6sense at your disposal, you can further validate the intent of specific accounts by comparing the pages they visited and the third-party intent data.
As in the case of growth hack #2, the way you use this information will determine how successful a growth hack this is.
6. Using an exit popup tool for B2B growth hacking
An exit intent or popup tool helps to prevent visitors from leaving the website by showing a popup message right before they leave. The message you show can be customized. It can be a question, an ebook promotion, or even promoting an upcoming webinar
Some of the tools available in the market for this are:
- Optinmonster
- Picreel
- Hellobar
- Thrive Leads
Depending on what you prefer, you can either use a form or a banner that leads users to other pages. It is a good idea to try different variants on different pages and see which one works the best. This can be configured in most of the exit intent tools.
7. Building a free tool
Many marketing experts suggest based on their experience and studies that free tools generate a ton of traffic and sometimes leads (depending on whether you have a data collection system built into the tool).
The following image illustrates a few examples of free tools across multiple industries:
If you find it difficult to build a tool from scratch, there are a few options you can go with such as:
- Outsourcing it to an app or product development company.
- Partnering with a company that sells a tool you might want to offer (in such a case, the partner might be willing to offer 1 or 2 modules of their product for free).
- Using a marketplace like CodeCanyon to purchase a tool and white label it.
8. Automated social media promotion
Can you get your content shared on social media by multiple people with a few clicks? The answer is yes.
There is a tool called QuuuPromote that can get your content shared by real people (not bots).
The platform works like a two-sided marketplace. Many of you might be familiar with the content curation platform Quuu. It is owned by the creators of QuuuPromote. While Quuu helps users find relevant content to share, QuuuPromote works on the other side of the equation where users can get their content promoted.
The below video gives an overview of how QuuuPromote works:
Though there are 500+ niches across which you can get your content shared, it is definitely a good idea to see if it works for your business. Make sure you read product reviews, watch review videos, and possibly reach out to someone who has used the tool to see if it has helped them create useful results.
Disclaimer: I have not personally used this tool. The information I shared here has been consolidated from various sources including the company website, blogs, and podcasts.
9. Surveys as a B2B growth hack
Surveys as growth tools? Really? Yes, really!
Do you know that surveys are one of the best lead generation methods used by lead gen agencies? They do it for a reason – because it works.
Survey campaigns are usually sent out to a large set of relevant contacts from your target accounts. You can also promote it on channels like email, social media, website, LinkedIn outreach, etc.
The objectives of a survey campaign are:
- To collect emails and other information (if you are using channels other than email)
- Gauge the intent of your prospects by asking the right questions
A survey works best when you approach it with a mindset of collecting information or doing research, and not pushing to sell your products or services, The kind of questions you ask would depend completely on your niche. Overall, the idea is to understand if the prospect is interested in exploring your offerings today or in the immediate future.
Though you can do surveys using Google forms, for better analytics and advanced features, it is a good idea to use any of the following tools:
- Survey Monkey
- Typeform
- Qualtrics
- Qualaroo
10. Using an e-gifting platform
e-gifting and direct mail have started becoming a trend lately, Platforms like Sendoso, Reachdesk, and Postal.io are behind making this popular. Unlike the other techniques in the list, this is more focused on nurturing existing accounts or prospects that are already part of your database/system. This helps in growth by improving the engagement from your accounts and making your relationship with them stronger – hence increasing your chances of winning a customer.
Since this has not yet become mainstream, leveraging e-gifting and sending platforms is one of the ways for you to stand out from the competition.
Watch the below video from Sendoso to understand how this works:
11. Hiring creators and relationship builders
Hiring creators is popular in the B2C space. However, I think it is high time that B2B businesses also embrace this.
But it shouldn’t stop there. As we still live in an era where a vast majority of sales happen based on human relationships, hiring dedicated resources to create content related to your niche while at the same time building relationships (both online and offline) with the right stakeholders in your prospect organizations can be a game-changer.
This role is not completely new, but rather a combination of content creation, inside sales, and sales. The content creation part of it will focus on creating organic content that attracts your target audience (mostly on social media).
Traditional inside sales professionals usually don’t go any further than talking to prospects online. Once the rapport is built, they hand over the leads to the sales team. Extending this to offline interactions (which would involve a bit of field sales) can better help gauge the prospect’s intent before the lead is passed on to sales. As all these are done, salespeople can focus on converting high-intent deals rather than wasting time on the field.
I have not seen this model implemented anywhere in the B2B space. But I believe this is worth experimenting with. If done well, this should do some magic.
Final works about B2B growth hacking
As I mentioned earlier, there are no shortcuts to growth. Use the hacks we discussed in this article as a method to accelerate your growth, and not a magic wand that will turn things in your favor overnight. In marketing, consistency beats everything.
Skalegrow – B2B marketing agency
With marketing getting tougher and tougher, every wrong foot you make might hamper your growth. What you need is the right guidance and a helping hand. This is where Skalegrow can make a sea of difference.
Skalegrow helps IT, tech, SaaS, and embedded systems companies leverage new-age marketing tactics to grow their business. Check out the below intro video to learn more about what Skalegrow brings to the table:
Our services include content marketing, SEO, graphic design, video marketing, LinkedIn marketing, email marketing, performance marketing, and website management. Write to us at info@skalegrow.com or visit our services page for more details.
About the author
Naseef KPO is the Founder and CEO of Skalegrow. He comes with rich experience across multiple areas of B2B marketing including content marketing, demand generation, SEO, account-based marketing, marketing analytics, revenue attribution, marketing technology, etc. He writes thought-provoking and relevant articles on The Skalegrow Blog and his weekly LinkedIn newsletter Elevate Your Marketing.
Prior to starting Skalegrow, Naseef led large marketing teams in multi-million dollar B2B organizations where he made significant contributions to the topline growth of the business. He has also appeared on numerous podcasts where he shared his thoughts on trending marketing topics such as the application of AI in marketing, startup marketing, ABM, and B2B content marketing, just to name a few. Being the founder of Skalegrow, he is currently focusing on helping its clients stay ahead of their competition by using innovative yet practical marketing tactics.
You can connect with Naseef KPO on LinkedIn.
