B2B inbound marketing examples to blow your mind

Inbound marketing might seem like the realm of brands that have cool stories to tell and customers that love to download recipes but B2B organisations are surprisingly good at using inbound marketing to their advantage.

Professional services are not the only industries that reap the rewards of inbound marketing. It might be easier for an insurance firm, or legal business to create blog articles, guides and social media posts that their prospects would find exciting but how about a data organisation? Or a SaaS provider?

In this blog we'll look our some awesome inbound marketing examples that B2B companies have deployed to their advantage, and not all of them use HubSpot.

Hootsuite

The social media marketing and management software knows a thing or two about how powerful social media is for a business. So it might surprise a few people that the chosen example of their great inbound marketing isn't a social media campaign.

Case studies are a very powerful way of showcasing to a potential customer that you can solve their problems. In the B2B space this is even more important because you're often marketing to someone that needs to sell your solution, and business, to higher powers and colleagues.

Hootsuite uses impressive video case studies to get the personality of their customers across. Their passion for the solution is also evident and it's a much more effective sales tool than a Hootsuite rep standing in front of the camera!

Microsoft

Under a dedicated microsite the Microsoft Story Labs is a mix of customer success stories and features on the lives that Microsoft's products have touched in some way. It puts the human element first (check out 'The Halo 5 Effect' to see what we mean) and then transitions almost seamlessly into showcasing the product.

The parallax scrolling and interactive elements mean this is a blog unlike anything else you've seen. At it's core, however, is an unmistakably inbound heart. By not only focusing on keywords, SEO and content optimisation and going into true to form storytelling Microsoft Stories create a space where the human element is at the fore. As a first touch point to the brand it has the power to convert and for those that are already fans of products such powerful storytelling keeps them hooked.

The 'In the cloud we trust' story is a particularly good example of awesome B2B inbound marketing. It goes to show that telling a story can be the start but that information sharing and imparting knowledge can be done freely to win an audience.

Intuit

The financial software company behind QuickBooks created some pretty impressive animated infographics to help showcase how working from home can affect workplace culture. It's worth noting that this example was on the verge of being removed due to being almost impossible to find however as it was a good example at the time it remains.

The infograph showed the potential financial impacts of having a work force that worked from home. It conducted research that showed the workforce was willing to forego things like free meals, reduce their holiday allowance and some would even take a smaller salary if they were able to work from home.

Most of this sounds like an HR opportunity so why does an accounting firm benefit from advising a business on opportunities in location management? Well the fact they identify cost savings helps a potential customer see that Intuit/QuickBooks is a leader in managing a business's finances. This offers peace of mind and confidence of choice, two key components in selling a solution into a business.

Litmus

As an email testing an analytics platform you'd think they'd have the email direct marketing part of communications as a pretty solid part of their marketing efforts. However, done wrong email marketing is very much outbound. If you simply broadcast the information you want to tell, with little consideration for the human on the receiving end then you're not very inbound at all.

Litmus achieves great results in its own email marketing by using engaging GIFs (something we've seen work well in our campaigns) and bold colours to practise what they offer - emails that get great conversions. The analytics on offer encourage users to optimise and adapt their marketing to become more relevant and engaging, and less about pushing a message to tick a box.

These examples show that even B2B organisations can harness the power of inbound marketing. Yet you'll notice that the examples selected all have one thing in common, they're mostly software companies.

So why is it that SaaS companies are utilising inbound as a core part of their client acquisition strategy? In many cases it's because inbound is the most effective avenue they have.

HubSpot is an obvious example of this move. Not only have they built their business on selling inbound marketing but they use it as their core sales tool.

Rather than cold selling to businesses that are already learning that there is another way to be 'sold' to harnessing authentic and passive marketing methods that win a client before you've even spoken to them is not only more efficient but it's also more effective.

To see even more enviable inbound marketing examples grab a copy of our free download.

If you're already using HubSpot and looking for specialists to help you optimise your campaigns, check out our HubSpot Support programmes.  If you're not using HubSpot but like the sound of using inbound marketing to grow your enquiries and sales then consider partnering with us for your inbound marketing management needs.