What is B2B Marketing?
Business-to-business (B2B) marketing promotes products or services to businesses and other organisation software, like Salesforce or industry-specific goods, like personal protective equipment for hospitals. You’ll learn more about this type of business in our article, ‘How to start a B2B Marketing Business’.
Traditional B2B marketing strategies were always focused on sales support. They are now more likely to be the first touchpoint a customer has with your organisation. B2B marketing is now expected to be the first touchpoint a customer has with your organisational online advertising, email campaigns, or social media.
B2B Marketing Resources
We’re a bunch of marketers, and when we’re not obsessively researching and thinking about the data and how marketing works, we’re obsessively reading about marketing or talking about marketing and noticing other people doing it. So we thought, let’s share this list of the best online marketing resources – and then you can obsess all you want about the data and the possibilities.
1. HubSpot Blog
The HubSpot blog offers useful information and resources on various topics, including content strategy, inbound marketing, email marketing, blogging, and lead gen campaigns. As a b2b company themselves, it’s also an excellent example of b2b marketing done well.
2. Search Engine Journal
The Search Engine Journal is an excellent blog for everything search-related. They’ve got answers to any questions you may have regarding SEO, PPC, content, social media, and how they all tie together in your marketing strategy.
3. Marketing Trends Podcast
Marketing Trends Podcast is a great place to start for anyone looking to understand better the latest trends in marketing, innovation, customer experience, and strategy.
4. HubSpot Training
The best inbound marketing tool is HubSpot Academy. It’s got everything you need to learn about email marketing and more. Learn how to drive the right leads through the perfect lead nurturing sequence.
5. Canva
Canva is the easiest way to make your visuals stand out if your budget won’t stretch to include a designer. With thousands of free templates, photos, and graphics, you can whip up a custom image to go with your new ebook and a LinkedIn header to match in no time. But we digress. If you’re looking to upskill, Canva’s free Design School has courses to teach you the basics of graphic design, social media, business branding, and presentations.
6. FlipMyFunnel Podcast
The daily FlipMyFunnel podcast by Sangram Vajre is dedicated to helping b2b marketing, sales and customer success professionals improve their craft. It contains topics like leadership, sales and marketing alignment, account-based marketing, content marketing, agile marketing, and more. While covering a comprehensive range of topics, this podcast is never boring.
7. Udemy
Udemy offers high-quality courses across a wide range of technical topics, some of which are even free!
Get expert marketing advice from our team. We’ll show you how to pivot your marketing strategy for the 2022 environment. Brand chemistry is a b2b marketing agency that helps your customers love your brand. We’re the only marketing agency that focuses exclusively on business-to-business. We get great results with our latest marketing tactics.
B2B Marketing Strategies
Typically, there are four types of marketing strategies for business-to-business marketing.
1. Market Penetration
Market penetration strategies are designed around increasing the share of the wallet with your existing clients and industry. Sometimes referred to as maximum lifetime value. Designed from a B2B marketing perspective to lock out competitors coming into your existing client base. You set out to grow the share of wallet for your products and services and, of course, at the same time deliver value to your client base.
They build digital structure charts identifying influencers, buyers, and decision-makers. The structure and automate their outreach strategy and contract management plan. They understand how many times a contact sees their ads and clicks on their advertisement. How many documents do they download, and interactions with their website? And of course, how often they open their proposals and the pages, they are reading. They use these digital insights to know when the right time is to pick up the phone and call their contacts. They know how to do a successful email script and are very good at selling.
2. Market Development
If you’ve got an eCommerce website and a product or two to sell, you’ll know that setting up an Amazon listing can be a nightmare. It’s easy to spend a day trying to get it right. There are some basic rules you need to follow if you want to make sure you have your Amazon listing ready on time and that it stands out.
In addition to this, you can build look-a-like audiences from your existing client list. You are expanding your reach in advertising and potential growth. With defined audiences, you can measure the performance of your advertising and your conversions—the path by which it takes you to identify a lead through to closing a leader. You can then look for mechanisms within your digital architecture to generate leads.
Identifying areas of interest that potential clients respond to. You are removing friction from your process and unnecessary points in the marketing qualified lead cycle. It’s all about removing friction for B2B marketing. If you’re not careful, your marketing could end up feeling just like the old adage, “The customer is always right,” and this is why we have to remove friction.
3. Product Development
When it comes to product development, we need to measure, collect, analyse, and interpret data. The first step is to develop a strategy that will provide us with the best possible insight into the market and identify opportunities to develop and test our product concepts. This will allow us to reduce the cost of product development and product development errors.
4. Diversification
By diversifying into a new industry, you can take the lessons learned from your existing digital marketing performance, and you can apply these lessons in a new industry. You must identify the most appropriate stakeholders in the new industry, and it’s equally important that you understand the best ways to reach out to them from a B2B marketing and advertising perspective. Once you’ve mapped out the ideal approach for your new industry, then you can adjust your approach to fit in with your existing client base.
It’s a very simple thing that can enable you to move faster, execute quicker, test faster, and take what you know from one market to another. To illustrate this point, an effective landing page in the Health industry might also be effective for the Federal Government? The page’s context will be changed, but the design, structure, and associated workflows will fundamentally stay the same.
What is the difference between B2B and B2C Marketing?
When it comes to B2B marketing, it is distinctly different from B2C marketing. You usually target an organisation than an individual, and your focus is on getting your products and services in front of four or five decision-makers. This depends on the complexity of the decision.
You might be targeting the CEO, CFO, CMO, and procurement. However, as a digital marketer, you know that each of these roles has different requirements and priorities. This means you need to structure your marketing differently for each of them. Today though, we have digital marketing insights, and you can see each of their role requirements and priorities.
1. Purchase Motivators
There are many reasons why a person might be motivated to purchase something. For example, a person may be motivated to purchase a product because:
A. They want to impress others.
B. They want to make a good impression.
C. They want others to like them.
D. They generally like the product being purchased.
E. They want to feel good about themselves.
There are a several factors you can include in your marketing campaign to make people want to buy from you. The more you can make a person want to buy your product, the more likely they are to buy it.
2. Target Audience
There are many ways to market to a business audience. B2B buyers may be one person or a group of people. Depending on your product or service cost, you may only need one or two touchpoints to hook them to buy your product. You should talk to potential customers about a new idea, solution, or product that you’re working on.
Think about the people involved when planning your next marketing campaign. It’s important to think about what type of buyers you want to reach and develop a buyer persona for each one. Then, build a marketing strategy that speaks to each one.
3. Decision-making Process
There are two main components of the B2B funnel: awareness and consideration. As soon as a customer is aware of you, they will either consider or not. A customer’s awareness is determined by many factors: industry knowledge, product knowledge, prior interactions with your brand, and more. If your organisation is a smaller company, there’s usually less decision-makers to go through. But if your organisation is larger, there will be more people involved in making a decision, and you’ll have to think about how those decision-makers need to be treated.
To transition from B2C to B2B marketing, you’ll need to be more open, honest, and direct with your customers. You’ll need to establish trust over time and then work with them to determine if they’re a good fit for your business.
Because of this, you must develop content that appeals to different stakeholders at each stage of the buyer’s journey. The amount and type of content will vary significantly between B2C and B2B because you speak to different audiences and provide different information throughout the purchase process.
4 Steps to measuring social media ROI in B2B Marketing
The decision to invest in social media as a B2B marketing tool is almost always about the three words: return on investment. According to data from Economist Intelligence Unit, 45% of B2B companies stated that their inability to prove ROI was the biggest roadblock to social media investment. But the “I can’t measure ROI” excuse no longer cuts it. The emergence of closed-loop marketing tools, which collect data at each funnel stage, has removed this B2B marketing obstacle. There are numerous closed-loop B2B marketing software solutions available. At Ubique Digital Solutions, we use HubSpot as our inbound marketing tool of choice. We use HubSpot and the associated software to measure the return on our social media efforts.
Step 1: Segment data by platform
We segment our data so we can analyse the individual performance of each platform. Each platform is an important part of our overall marketing strategy, but we employ different tactics for each platform, and each needs to be analysed. This allows us to calculate ROI for each platform and overall ROI.
Step 2: Measure website traffic quantity
It’s hard to measure the performance of a B2B marketer. But there are ways to evaluate the effectiveness of a particular channel. One of them is how many clicks your social media posts generate. How many people are clicking on the links in your social media updates? From our experience in B2B marketing, we’ve found that LinkedIn is by far the most powerful social media platform for generating traffic, followed by Twitter.
Step 3: Track Visit-to-Lead Conversion
We establish the quantity of traffic generated by each platform by calculating the number of visits, the number of pages viewed, and unique visitors. Based on this, we calculate the visit-to-lead ratio, which is calculated by dividing the number of leads by the total amount of traffic. It’s important to note that a low conversion rate may be due to other factors such as weak or irrelevant website content, badly designed landing pages and subpar offers.
Step 4: Track Lead-to-Customer Conversion
The last stage in the loop is figuring out how many leads converted into customers. You do this by dividing the number of customers you have by the total leads. Once you’ve worked out how many new customers you’ve gained through your social media marketing efforts, you can finally calculate ROI!
How to identify your B2B target market
In order to identify your customer markets, you need to take some time and work out the different options. You need to ensure you have tracking pixels set up on your website. This will give you more insight into who your customers are and where they’re coming from.
It would be useful if you used social media for marketing to generate leads and build your sales funnel. If you want to create an audience of people who want your product, you need to be part of the same platform as these potential clients to monitor and measure the results of your efforts.
You should research the two main or three main areas on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. If you want to make your brand more successful, you should look a little deeper and look at platforms like LinkedIn and Seek at the roles such as CMO SaaS-based companies (or whatever role suits your pursuits) and the key priorities for these roles types. Use listing tools to identify conversations across the web that relate to the product, service, and or industry. If your competitors are not playing the same game, this will help you accelerate your growth trajectory. But if they are, you’ll fall demonstrably behind!
5 Tips for B2B Marketing
Digital marketing for B2B companies must be very different for other businesses. B2B companies generally use marketing to grow their business. They’re not as “nimble” as startups. You’ll see that they’re often more intentional with their digital marketing and are trying to build deeper relationships with their target audiences.
1. Finding your channels
Each industry has a number of channels that work best for them. It’s important to discover where your key decision-makers are spending their time and take advantage of this. For B2B companies, channels such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and EDM marketing generally work best to get users through the sales funnel.
Track your visitors using your analytics tools to learn what they’re interested in and engage them. When you track your visitors on your website, app, and social media channels, you can learn more about what makes each channel useful.
2. Grow your user base and nurture your leads
You’ll learn how to build an email list from scratch, improve customer loyalty, and keep customers engaged with personalised using email and social media.
An automated email is triggered whenever a user spends a certain amount of time on one of your service landing pages. For example, if a user spends X amount of time on one of your service landing pages, an automated email is sent with a guide for that particular service.
Communication should be consistent across all of your channels, and you should be aware of all communication being distributed to your customers.
3. Create valuable, important content and distribute it regularly
Content marketing is a component of search engine optimisation and will help you drive conversions. Use Google Trends to find out which content topics are currently being searched and are likely to be found by your users. Once you have your content ready, distribute it at the right time and through the right channels to build your user base and then distribute branded content at the same time. Creating gated content and prompting users to enter their details to access it is effective. It’s a quick, easy and simple way to build your user base and distribute branded content at the same time.
4. Study your customer data and find trends
It’s critical to use your customer data to understand the behaviour of customers through channels in order to get an accurate view of where your customers are traveling, which helps you to make more informed decisions about where you should allocate your marketing spend.
5. Build a connected community
Any business needs to have good connections with its customers and prospects. With the rise of digital, users are looking for human connections with digital channels’ convenience. By creating communities across your digital marketing channels, you’re allowing your customers (and prospects) to communicate with one another and your team. Spend some time listening to your market, responding to customer reviews, and genuinely taking in feedback that is relative to your position. We’ll help your teamwork through this, as we understand that digital marketing is a time-consuming discipline for any business.
The importance of branding for B2B businesses
As a B2B company, if you don’t have a brand that stands out in your industry, you risk customers choosing your competition with you. But having a strong B2B brand, including a compelling value proposition, can help ensure that happens less often and that your business grows. B2C businesses, are less concerned about standing out. But a strong B2B brand can be just as important for them. A strong B2B brand: A: A brand is an intangible asset that identifies, differentiates, and attracts customers to a product or service.
1. Shortens the sales cycle
2. Enables your brand to charge and sustain a price premium
3. Enables your brand to build trust with its key stakeholders – customers, employees, shareholders, distributors, partners, intermediaries etc.
4. It creates loyal customers, advocates, and even evangelists out of those who buy
5. Lowers sensitivity to price increases
6. Attracts and keeps the best employee talent.
7. The financial pay-off
Strong brands cause buyers to be more emotionally attracted to your products and services than those with weaker brands. Stronger brands, therefore, lead to higher revenue.
Why is B2B Marketing important to the community?
They say ‘your vibe attracts your tribe’. Your community is a space where your customers come together to learn, share, and interact with your brand. The more value you provide to your community regarding educational content, experiences, and personal interaction, the more likely your community will grow organically.
As a result, your brand will be seen as the trusted solution to their problems. Providing effective community building, including publishing and sharing content, can unlock powerful benefits to your B2B brand. It positions you as a trusted authority, shows empathy for your customers, and helps your company become the trusted solution.
The B2B community is often a great way for companies to engage with their customers. You’ll find out about your customers in a human and emotional way that’s different from just asking for their feedback in a survey. The community is also a great place for brands to listen to customers and take action on their feedback. This will open a powerful cycle of enhancement, innovation, and closer product and service alignment with your customer’s needs.
If you want to build your community organically, you must create an engaging, fun, authentic community and build customer loyalty. It’s because you’re perceived as the brand people are naturally flocking to instead of the brand that’s annoying customers with product ads.
Key benefits of B2B Marketing
Improve conversion rates by collecting data from more places, applying intelligence at scale, and using learned insights. Identify and nurture key target accounts and individuals, and deliver consistent, personalised, relevant experiences that drive action—marketing automation for connected B2B marketing.
Improve conversion rates with personalisation importance of data aggregation and lead management in marketing automation. When you combine your sales and marketing data into a single system, you get a better understanding of your customers and the ability to align all communications with one another. This allows you to shorten your sales cycle, deliver personalised pages, and take full advantage of feedback from customers.
1. Shorten sales cycles
Unified data unifies sales and marketing. In turn, it provides a clearer understanding of the customer, consistent messaging, and better implementation of customer feedback. This also leads to more efficient marketing. How to engage buyers, spend effectively, and convert leads faster.
2. Maximising marketing efficiency
Delivering the right message in the moments that matter to engage buyers, allocate spending effectively, and convert leads faster. Getting the right news to the right person is critical to business success.
3. Expand revenue through customer loyalty
Understand customer preferences and motivations in the market to be successful with your ABM programs. Improve customer relationships by understanding their needs, building relationships, and increasing retention. Find ways to communicate with customers at scale using advanced technology and a modern approach to digital engagement.
How to identify a B2B Marketing Agency
When you identify a B2B marketing agency, you need to understand that it’s not just about the work they do. You also need to understand their approach to working, their understanding of your requirements, their ability to overlay digital and social strategies, and their knowledge of managing relationships and teams.
A marketing automation platform can help you identify the market you’re going after. It can create and position content based on inbound and outbound marketing approaches. It will also allow you to acquire new leads, and customers. As a B2B digital agency, your success will depend on how well you manage your marketing performance.
We recommend you Ubique Digital Solutions. This is an excellent digital agency that will help you with B2B marketing. UDS is working on digital strategies for different clients and helped them accelerate their position and pivot entirely their marketing strategies. If you’re interested in talking to UDS about how they can help you with your business concern, you can contact them here.
