B2B Marketing: An Essential Strategy Guide in 2020
What is B2B Marketing?
B2B (business-to-business) marketing is the promotion of products or services to businesses or other organisations, like software such as Salesforce or industry-specific goods like personal protective equipment for hospitals.
While B2B businesses sell wholesale products and services directly to other businesses for commercial use, B2C (business-to-consumer) businesses sell retail products and services to customers for personal use, such as Cotton On, or beauty salons, or the new wave of Marie Kondo-inspired organisation consultants.
Traditional B2B marketing strategies focused on sales support - booking trade shows, organising directory advertising, and developing sales material. Now, though, B2B marketing is likely to be the first touchpoint a customer has with your organisation, through online advertising, email campaigns, or social media.
The importance of business-to-business marketing
For B2B companies, marketing is a fundamental part of generating leads and customers. It’s common for B2B companies to place more emphasis on the sales and business development departments. But marketing is vital in establishing your organisation as a leader in your industry, positioning your brand, and engaging with your target audience.
5 Types of B2B marketing strategies
The best B2B marketing teams use a combination of tactics that enable them to excel at acquiring new customers, closing sales, optimising retention, and nurturing brand advocates. Here are some of the highest-performing B2B marketing strategies to help you discover your ideal mix.
1. Content marketing
Firstly, your website should be optimised - ready to convert prospects, discoverable by search engines (SEO), and mobile-ready. Content marketing works by educating potential customers about your product or service, as well as positioning your organisation as an authority in the field. It drives traffic to your site, providing an opportunity to capture leads. Your blog content itself should also be optimised, and a solid place to start is by researching keywords within your industry and targeting those in your pieces. Your content can be posted either on your own website or as guest posts on other targeted sites to bring in customers.
As well as writing blogs, content like video and podcasts can be produced relatively quickly with lower overheads than TV or radio advertising. These are especially valuable if your product is best explained visually, you have a particularly charismatic presenter, or the content is an interview-style piece.
2. Email marketing
According to Smart Insights, email marketing is 30x more effective than any other marketing channel, while the latest Salesforce State of Marketing report has found that email marketing remains a keystone in effective direct engagement, particularly in customer retention and upselling.
3. Social media marketing
A safe starting point for most businesses is LinkedIn, where you can have multiple conversations at once by training your staff in effective ways to engage with prospects. It’s a particularly good target for B2B, with high-level decision makers potentially viewing your content (be that paid or organic). Apart from real-time engagement with current clients, one of the true benefits of advertising on social media is the level of targeting that enables you to market your products to your ideal customer.
4. Pay-per-click ads/Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Ranking at the top of page one organically on Google is the goal for most businesses, but if you can’t wait for your SEO to kick in, you can take advantage of SEM and potentially have ads for your products displayed at the top of Google (bearing in mind there is still competition within the paid advertising space). SEM can boost your lead generation plan quickly and has the added benefit of adjusting campaigns daily, depending on what you’d like to push.
5. eBooks/downloadable content
Unlike most B2C situations, B2B marketing usually involves communicating with an employee who has to validate their buying decision to a team. Producing downloadable content like ebooks packed with case studies and industry-specific statistics allows your customer to make an informed choice, while also giving them a tool to easily present to key stakeholders on your behalf.
How to create a B2B marketing strategy
To create your own B2B marketing strategy there are a few cardinal rules you need to follow to get the best results:
1. Define clear objectives
Start with the end in mind. Clarify your goals by documenting, prioritising, and assigning to your team members in order to create a focus for your work.
2. Set KPIs
Once you have goals, measure their performance with KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). They should be specific, achievable, and measurable. Looking at KPIs over time, you can begin to see seasonal trends or where certain products or channels are not performing as well as others. If you have a goal to increase overall site traffic, a KPI may be to increase traffic to the blog pages by 5% by the end of the year. You could work to achieve this by publishing optimised blog content and pushing it out via email and social channels.
3. Know your audience
According to the fifth annual State of Marketing report, high-performing organisations are 8x more likely to deliver the right message, on the right channel, at the right time. The key to this is knowing your audience. Build a description of your ideal customer, the type of business they’re in, and where they are. How will you reach them? What problem are they trying to solve with your product? How do they make purchasing decisions and what can you do to simplify that for them? An effective way of building a workable view of your audience is to implement buyer personas - a representation of each of the types of customers that your business caters to. This can help both ground and personalise your brand communications by approaching an “actual” person, rather than “Professional Females 25-34, SE Australia”.
4. Select audience-appropriate marketing strategies
Every customer type is different. Some respond better to email campaigns, others like to consume content themselves by navigating your website. Finding the right B2B marketing method for your customer is just as important as building the campaign itself. There may be conversations around your brand already happening on social media - it’s vital that this is the priority, and strategies such as paid advertising require less focus. Equally, if your target audience isn’t into social media, investing a large amount of resources (both time and money) into connecting with them there is missing the mark. Use your analytics data, customer service team, and sales team to find how your audience prefers to engage with your organisation.
5. Use integrated campaigns
The best strategy is an integrated campaign that spans offline and online channels, and different channels within each of them. Again, it’s important to focus on your target audience and the channels they’re already using. Are these channels appropriate for your product and message? If your campaign is centred around an ebook, an email campaign, PPC campaign with an opt-in landing page, and a LinkedIn push might be the right combination to optimise uptake. The messaging itself needs to be coordinated (or at least complementary) across channels, and your branding needs to be consistent.
6. Measure the results and adjust as needed
Managing campaigns, both online and offline, inbound and outbound, is made easier with a CRM (customer relationship management) platform. Further, tracking individual customer journeys via CRM will allow for better targeted campaigns and help you to focus effort where you’ll get the best results.
A CRM can also provide analytics that will give you a clear view of campaign performance and help you to optimise results for future marketing communications.
How are businesses using B2B marketing strategies today?
GECapital
GE Capital brings 130 years of experience in growth on a global level, but it has quickly embraced new social technologies in order to meet customers’ expectations. Social networks in the B2B space allow for instant connection with customers which provides data that wouldn’t have been available previously.
Xtreme Lashes
Xtreme Lashes, a global business founded by Jo Mousselli, trains beauty professionals to be Xtreme Lashes Certified Stylists.
Using Salesforce products to scale and support all parts of their business, Xtreme Lashes has Sales Cloud’s analytics and reporting features to see which promotions worked best, and why. “We put a lot of emphasis on data, and take a scientific approach to customer service and quality control,” said Mousselli. “What I love even more is the ability to see which courses and products lead to the best results for our stylists. On that roadmap to success, being able to analyse everything from one database is so valuable. We were able to do analysis before, but not nearly as well.”
Download the Sixth State of Marketing report
For further insights into becoming a high-performing marketer, download the annual Sixth State of Marketing report.
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