Some businesses link B2B marketing strategies with direct and outbound techniques—marketing messages sent directly to clients or prospective buyers. These strategies aim to be captivating and convincing enough that the audience responds to the offering and seriously considers your services.
B2B marketing strategies should be on your marketing tool belt. However, you may wonder which ones are necessary for success in today's hyper-competitive environment.
In this post, we will look at the top 13 B2B marketing strategies that can assist your company in keeping up and moving ahead.
B2B marketing is a technique in which companies sell products or services to other companies directly.
In some cases, B2B companies operate as such because they sell goods that only other companies want to purchase in large quantities.
Consider an automobile part manufacturer. Although some individuals may want to purchase tailpipes and brake pads to repair their vehicles, a significant number of automobile parts are purchased by other businesses. These might be auto manufacturing companies that use parts to build cars on assembly lines or mechanics that use them to repair or service existing cars.
So, instead of selling small quantities of automotive parts to fix one-time consumer repairs, you can think bigger by regularly selling larger orders to companies.
In other cases, a business may provide a product that may work in both B2B and B2C models but prefer the latter to simplify business processes.
For example, a firm that sells printer paper may market to specific customers. However, collaborating with several retailers to distribute paper within their stores would necessitate doing so.
This might be logistically challenging for certain businesses. Instead, by following a B2B marketing strategy, the company can concentrate on selling massive volumes of paper to a relatively small number of industries.
This removes the need for collaboration with other retailers. It also streamlines logistics because there would be few sales to fulfill and customer relationships to manage.
So, in these cases, B2B marketing strategies center on interacting with those other businesses that will trade with you.
When most marketers think of B2B marketing strategies, they think of inbound and outbound marketing tactics. But these are two entirely different things.
Your marketing strategy describes your marketing objectives, how you will assess campaign success, who your target audience is, and where and how your brand will be positioned. The many marketing techniques you use all contribute to your overall strategy.
There are various benefits to using a B2B marketing strategy, including:
Businesses and prospective customers need to know who you are, what you can provide, and how they can work with you.
One of the top benefits of B2B marketing is generating leads, and a comprehensive marketing strategy can place you in front of potential buyers. The efficacy of word-of-mouth marketing is limited.
Marketing content on your website and popular third-party websites like LinkedIn will help boost traffic to your brand.
Will potential buyers find you if they look for online support from a company like yours? Will your company rank high enough in organic search results? If you aren't in the first 10-20 search results, your chances of interacting are slim. Effective content marketing may boost your search engine rankings and, as a result, your visibility.
Chasing fresh leads and a new business all the time might be counterproductive. A good B2B marketing plan may help you become a specialist in your field, helping you build long-term relationships with customers.
A B2B digital marketing strategy can give you a wealth of information about how other businesses interact with you. What is the most popular content on your website? How are businesses engaging with your marketing strategies?
A B2B marketing funnel is a roadmap that illustrates how customers interact with a brand from the first interaction. It shows the path consumers take to become customers and specifies the marketing actions that should be taken at each phase of the funnel.
The B2B marketing funnel includes lead generation and conversion processes, which can be automated. Human interaction, however, remains an integral part of the conversion process. This is because the B2B sales process involves several decision-makers from the lead qualifying stage to reach mutual terms to clinch the contract.
A typical B2B marketing funnel can be divided into four phases as indicated below:
This phase begins the moment a prospective customer hears about your brand. Perhaps they see your Tweet, read your Linkedin post, get positive feedback from a partner, learn about you after your brand appears on a search engine result page, or receive an email from your sales team.
B2B customers, in particular, are likely to understand their problems and work tirelessly to find solutions. Regardless of how they come to know your company, your brand image plants a seed in their mind.. On the other hand, you can actively develop helpful content to attract your target audiences.
The interest phase begins after your brand name has appeared in their minds, based on the value or exciting level of the content. Potential buyers may read more of your content, click a link to your landing page, Google your brand name, give their phone number or email address to receive ebooks or newsletters, and so on.
Typically, at this point, they have given a signal that there may be something between them and your business. This period can last anywhere from a few minutes to several months or even years. It might happen shortly after the first step or later because your target audiences could be getting a lot of information simultaneously.
When prospective customers reach out to you, it usually implies they want to learn more about your brand and go forward with a business relationship or a contract. A few competitors will provide similar products or services as you.
Your B2B prospects will go through this stage rationally, putting all options on the table and comparing them. As a result, you explain your product's or service's usage or efficacy to their demands, clarify your advantages, build a thorough plan that answers their questions, or provide additional insights into pricing options. This level typically requires much negotiation or measurement.
Getting your B2B customers to this point takes time. They now trust your brand and understand what you intend to do to leverage their business. Long-term commitment or partnership is exceptionally crucial in the B2B industry.
If you continue to provide high-quality services or products, your current consumers will return for more. They will refer your brand to other businesses in the future. This lead-generation source will become your most potent weapon in your plan.
These four phases span practically the whole framework of a traditional marketing funnel. You may use this framework to create your own personalized B2B marketing funnel based on the characteristics and principles of your sector. Remember that identifying which phase a prospect is on is critical.
Nowadays, marketing is the sole purpose of every business to survive. Being in the business world, you are responsible for monitoring your target market's requirements, demands, and the techniques used by your competitors.
The 13 marketing strategies below will help you generate leads, convert new customers, and grow your income.\
If you want to take a competitive lead, you should employ tactics that allow prospective buyers to make purchasing decisions themselves. The steps you can take to persuade prospective buyers to choose you above the competition are as follows:
By thoroughly understanding the buyer's journey, the pain point customers encounter along the way, and the influencing factors that shape their thinking, sales representatives can more effectively empathize with customers and position their services or products along the buyer's journey.
It is critical to identify and lessen buyer pain points so they can easily access the information they require on your website. The more accessible and more superficial it is for your customers to find the information they need, the faster they will make a purchasing decision, possibly without turning to your competitors.
You can use email marketing, a direct marketing channel, to share information about new products, offers, and updates with your customers. In the long term, a well-designed email marketing campaign increases sales and contributes to developing a community around your business.
For example, the following example shows how an email marketing tactic is used to inform users about the in-app interactive guides to help them know more about their software.
According to the Demand Generation Report, 93% of B2B customers choose informative content over sales pitches. Rather than creating product-focused content, the best approach would be to create content that captures the buyer's problem in the context of their business.
Buyer enablement tools can also help buyers make more informed decisions. Solution guides, buyer checklists, and self-assessment tools are examples of buyer enablement tools.
Outdated, traditional marketing strategies typically focus on generating as many leads as possible to the top of your sales funnel. These strategies might need a lot of work for little reward.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a customized strategy for individual B2B buyers within a business. A tailored method like this might be valuable for a variety of reasons.
ABM focuses on directly targeting key decision-makers at businesses that meet the needs of your ideal potential customer. Here, you concentrate on real people and tailor the campaign to them. This results in a way shorter sales cycle and higher conversion rates.
Regarding account-based marketing techniques in B2B marketers, alignment between your sales and marketing teams is crucial. Sales and marketing must collaborate to deliver a unified B2B ABM strategy and methods without appearing redundant or aggressive.
In 2022, Account-based marketing tactics are ideal for customer acquisition campaigns involving longer sales cycles and more complex deals. They can be the tipping point that results in significant deals closing. As a result, it is unquestionably a high marketing strategy that you should consider implementing, as it has the potential to yield tremendous benefits.
Make use of the following email marketing best practices:
According to Experian, emails with customized subject lines had 26% higher unique open rates than non-customized emails. So, start customizing early if you want to drive opens and clicks.
Backlinko research found that emails with subject lines of 36 to 50 characters had the best response rates, surpassing short subject lines (1 - 15 characters) by 32.7%.
According to Boomerang, emails with 50-125 words had 50% or higher response rates. So try to limit your content to two or three normal paragraphs.
According to Backlinko's study, emails containing personalized body content have 33% greater response rates than non-personalized emails.
After the prospects have opened and read your email, what do you want them to do - click a link? Write a reply? Include a clear call to action so that your recipients know what to do next.
We've spoken a lot about email marketing, but it's not the be-all and end-all of B2B marketing. To generate results and expand your business, you must also master SEO.
Because B2B user journeys are so complicated and research-intensive, having content that ranks organically for each conversion funnel stage is beneficial.
This way, you're not just providing customers with the assistance and information they need to make decisions; you're also exhibiting your authority and expertise, keeping your brand at the forefront of their minds when they're ready to buy.
With gentle persuasion, your existing client base can become one of the most valuable marketing assets.
As per Intuitive and Heinz Marketing, 84% of B2B decision makers begin their purchasing process with a reference from someone in their network, such as a close friend, a colleague, or even someone on LinkedIn.
So, wouldn't it be awesome if you could consistently earn high-value referrals? The fact is, you can. On the other hand, an effective referral marketing scheme requires some thinking. You must specifically figure out the following:
Unsurprisingly, the most effective referral systems prioritize referrals from loyal clients.
If a business likes your product or service, has many users, and just upsold to a higher tier, then it's understandable that the people they refer will also be great customers.
Prospective buyers trust other people's recommendations more than any message from your business. Reviews and testimonials are essential in B2B decision-making, but only some B2B companies consider using them as a B2B marketing strategy. So, generating and utilizing reviews is a simple way to stay ahead of the competition.
Positive feedback and testimonials can be reused. Consider putting them in these and other places where potential buyers look:
A low-quality landing page may stifle your growth by being generic, too wordy, and poorly designed. It would be a waste of time to target potential prospects and bring them to your website just to have a poor landing page experience let you down.
Do you want to create better-performing landing pages? Use the following recommended practices:
Each landing page should exist to achieve a particular purpose, whether that aim is to drive ebook downloads, capture webinar registrations, generate demo requests, or something entirely else. If you attempt to push multiple actions from a single page, your messaging will be muddled, as will your audience.
Build unique pages for each campaign or target audience rather than relying on a single, generic landing page to capture all of your leads.
Lead capture forms with a few fields have a better conversion rate. So, if you only need a prospect's name and email address, don't ask for their phone number, business size, or first pet's name.
You want consumers to refrain from clicking away from a high-performing landing page and start browsing the rest of your site. So forget about inserting the navigation bar and internal links and let customers browse through your high-performing landing page.
When it comes to landing page copy, less is enough. Data shows that landing pages with simple language and less than 100 words of copy have higher conversion rates.
A B2B content marketing plan is intended to get you in front of your potential customers and address their pressing problems, leading them to want to learn more about your company. Your content should evoke a sense of reciprocity in your audience, making them desire to do business with you rather than your competitors.
Your content strategy is critical because it can generate low-cost, organic leads and help you stand out.
What distinguishes quality content marketing is the ability to target potential consumers directly, cost-effectively create leads, and optimize the reach and revenue-generating possibilities of each piece of content.
Because mobile devices account for more than half of all online traffic, you need to execute a mobile-first approach to ensure you're getting all prospective leads.
About 5 billion mobile users worldwide may be reached using mobile marketing strategies. Now that mobile has become a significant source of media consumption, businesses must capitalize on increased traffic and data collection opportunities.
Make sure that your website content is responsive on any mobile device. Because company owners and department managers increasingly use portable devices to study business solutions, make your website reachable through any device and optimize it for the biggest screens down to the smallest devices.
Invest in mobile applications to directly reach prospective and existing customers since this will accelerate sales and client engagement. Make sure you budget for mobile app remarketing because studies show that users stop using applications after 30 days.
Many B2B marketers make the mistake of spending all their efforts on mainstream social media. Yes, these platforms help broaden your reach, but they should never be the sole focus of any growth marketing campaign.
LinkedIn is the ideal social network for business-to-business marketing. While your company's Twitter and Facebook pages may draw attention, your LinkedIn profile assists you in developing and maintaining the image of a trustworthy brand.
The process of generating leads on LinkedIn is straightforward:
B2B marketers have typically placed little emphasis on empowering buyers. Most marketing teams aim to get leads in front of a sales representative as quickly as possible.
However, attitudes are shifting. Buyers have been increasingly keen to do more legwork without having a salesman on standby, partly because the internet has made face-to-face interaction less of a "thing."
According to McKinsey & Company research, 70% of B2B decision-makers are willing to make remote or self-service purchases for items costing $50,000 or more. In comparison, 27% are willing to spend more than $500,000.
Furthermore, just one-fifth of buyers want to return to a world of in-person sales interactions. Importantly, this does not imply that you should reduce your sales force.
More free trials and DIY product demos may result from remote and self-service sales. However, your team should still be available to assist and help consumers through live chat, video conferencing, and other communication channels.
You're probably already capturing leads at the top of the B2B funnel with tools like eBooks and videos.
But why not include webinars in your marketing mix to give your lead-generation strategies a more interactive edge?
Webinars provide several advantages. Three-quarters of B2B marketers and sales professionals believe webinars are an effective method to generate high-quality leads, with an estimated 2% - 5% of webinar attendees going on to purchase.
However, if you want to generate results through webinars, they must be high quality. This involves adhering to the following recommended practices:
Is a panel discussion the best way to deliver your topic? A Q&A session with questions from the audience? A one-person presentation? A one-on-one meeting?
Your target audience is interested in something other than hearing about every single feature and advantage of your product. Instead, focus on addressing a specific problem that your audience is experiencing. All the better if you can show how your product contributes to the solution.
Expect everything to go differently than planned on the big day. Conduct a test run to iron out any technological kinks. Is the sound quality good? Is the background too distracting? Do you require more lighting?
It may seem apparent, but no one will turn up if you don't get the promotion right. Send webinar emails to your marketing list ahead of time, and think about reaching out to new audiences with social media advertisements.
The importance of automation for B2B marketing cannot be overstated. Four out of every five automation users generate more leads than their non-automated counterparts, and three-quarters achieve higher conversion rates. Therefore, it is not to be dismissed.
So, how should marketing automation be used?
There are various ways B2B marketing automation strategies or tips to keep your pipeline full. However, at the very least, you should try automating the following processes:
Marketers struggle to identify which campaigns or ads bring in the most quality leads without monitoring. That's why lead tracking is important. Lead tracking is the process of identifying prospects' sources, analyzing the phases of the sales funnel, and taking specific action to seal the deal. It helps marketing teams obtain more qualified leads, develop better campaigns, and increase sales.
Use automated lead nurturing campaigns to provide helpful information to customers, answer their queries, and remove purchase barriers.
Not all leads are equal. Some are nearly guaranteed to buy, while others are simply not a good match right now (and may never be). Using automated lead scoring, you can allocate points to leads depending on their actions, such as clicking an email CTA, browsing a fundamental web page, or subscribing for a free trial. The more points a lead has, the warmer they are.
The first few days following a customer's trial or purchase of your product are critical. If you do it right, they'll be around for years; get it wrong, and they'll be gone in a day. Sending automated onboarding emails can assist you in guiding them through this potentially tricky time. Use behavior-based marketing that automatically responds to activities they've taken to make your emails as relevant as possible.
In today's marketing world, your company must regularly evaluate and enhance its B2B marketing strategies to remain competitive.
The marketing world is evolving rapidly, but today, businesses that successfully collect and use data on their performance are well-positioned to win.
Do you also want your business to grow at a high pace? If so, AppFlows can help.
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Content writer by day and a book nerd by night, Ammar Mazhar has been writing for 3 years for B2B and B2C businesses. As a wordsmith, Ammar knows how to write SEO-optimized content that your users will find insightful, igniting results for your business.
Ammar Mazhar
August 1, 2022
Ammar Mazhar
August 1, 2022
Ammar Mazhar
August 1, 2022
