10 STEPS TO AN INTEGRATED DIGITAL PRESENCE FOR A B2B ENTERPRISE

In today’s hyperconnected world, having a strong digital presence is not an option any more — it is crucial. As a brand, your digital identity influences how your customers, prospects, stakeholders, etc. perceive your brand, sometimes even before any direct interaction. Consistently narrating one story irrespective of where your audience is online creates a lasting impact and builds trust. To get to this point, it is imperative to understand the digital landscape you operate in, the customer journey, and a lot more. In this series, we’ll try to break down all aspects of a brand’s digital identity, which would include the strategy, execution & AI tools available.

This article about building an integrated digital presence will be a series of write-ups with each one diving deep into 1 of the 10 steps. As the articles are live, the links will be added here for easy access.

Now, back to the article — The initial phase begins with the ‘Preparation’ wherein we lay the foundation with steps 1 & 2. This involves extensive research, followed by building the strategies and aligning with cross-functional teams. The final phase will focus on execution, optimization, reporting, and stakeholder management.

Overview of the 10 steps:

1. Understand the Brand Environment: Industry Landscape, Digital Landscape & Competitor Landscape

2. Define the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): Audience Persona & Customer Journey

3. Craft a Channel Strategy: Digital Channel Integration, Nurture, & Regional strategy

4. Integrate with other Marketing Functions: Field Marketing, Channel Marketing, etc.

5. Align with Sales Teams: Ensure a unified go-to-market approach

6. Develop a Communication Strategy: Findings from the Research, Seasonality & Personalization

7. Set Goals & Plan Accordingly: Define Objectives & Next Steps

8. Design the Ideal Martech Stack

9. Establish Reporting & Stakeholder Management: Define Dashboards & Regular Cadences

10. Data Driven Optimization: Use insights from performance to improve and redesign strategies

    
    

STEP 1: UNDERSTANDING THE LANDSCAPE THE BRAND OPERATES IN 

Industry Landscape

The first step is to know the circumstances your brand operates in. This can be a combination of primary research wherein sales & SDRs/BDRs are interviewed, and secondary research collecting relevant details like govt. Initiatives, historical events, stats, etc. can provide great insights that feed into the communication strategy, as you understand more about what your prospects/customers are looking for.

The cybersecurity industry is a great example in this case.

• Research can show at a regional level what the general stats and behaviour can look like. Does the government have laws in place that are different from other countries? Australia for example has an Essential Eight — Framework for Organizations, while the UAE has the CyberIC program.

• Stats help understand the market better — If a country stands in the top 5 most hacked regions worldwide, and if they are known to pay ransoms in the case of ransomware attacks, this shows the seriousness of brands adopting and upgrading their cyber defense systems and if they are working against a deadline. It also helps to understand if there is a shortage of skills, is it a mature market looking for vendor replacements or a developing market looking for a new solution. This is good information to have, and craft strategies accordingly.

  
  

AI tools available to accomplish the secondary research at a faster pace while checking for accuracy: ChatGPT, Claude.

If your brand has multiple products or solutions, chances are, the environments are very different even if your audience may be the same. In these cases, the entire process would have to be repeated for each product.

Digital Landscape

To understand what your audience wants to hear about, it helps to look at topics covered by publishers worldwide and within the region. This will give a sense of what the audience is looking for.

For example, the IT services consulting industry has a plethora of topics to cover. A quick research among publishers in the US will reveal the hot topics: AI & ML, data privacy, developer productivity, quantum computing (early stages), skills gap, etc. Talking to local SDRs and sales teams can also provide insights into what prospects and customers look for.

Competitor Landscape

Once the industry and digital landscape is understood to an extent, adding a layer of competitive intelligence strengthens the research 10x. There are multiple aspects to be considered here — what is the competition talking about, where can they be found, and any additional information about their digital activity. This information will help craft the brand message to differentiate from the competitor, and make it stronger if possible.

What are they talking about:

• The competitor website is the perfect place to start to understand the brand positioning, UVP, the resources section, accolades received, etc.

• The best way to find information around their communication via ads, is to use 3rd party tools. “Moat” used to be one of the best, but isn’t available post acquisition by Oracle. Other alternatives include Meta Ads Library, LinkedIn Ads Library.

  
  

Where can they be found:

• Starting with the common but effective channels, a quick search on Google for keywords relevant to the product/solutions will show sponsored search results. For paid social, the tools mentioned above can be used to understand if the competitors run sponsored ads. Similarweb & SEMRUSH are another set of tools that can help understand their channel mix.

• Diving into competitor backlinks will give a sense of their source of traffic and if relevant, identify ways to get a link that drives traffic to your website. Here are some tools that can help identify backlinks: ahrefs, SEMRUSH, Neil Patel

  
  

While the process mentioned above involves a lot of research, the insights gained are always exciting. Using this piece of information to build your strategies will help your brand resonate with the audience, and set you apart from your competitors in an information-saturated digital landscape.

Stay tuned for the next article on “Defining Your Ideal Customer Profile”.