If B2B marketing is about selling goods and services to businesses and organizations, does it mean that it is different from B2C? Yes, despite using common marketing tools and models, B2B focuses on other things.
For business people, expertise, logic, ROI, and financial gain are crucial for a purchase decision. They are focal points in terms of customers’ choice on proceeding with the products. What does it mean for a B2B marketer, then? A peculiar approach to promoting the products as well as communicating with clients.
Read on to know more about B2B marketing tactics and how to market products to organizations right.
How to do B2B marketing
Effective business-to-business marketing depends on reflecting the needs of prospects, offering value, and using appropriate strategies. It still sounds like B2C marketing, right? But the differences come from the much greater complexity of the solution. Not just the product or service itself (whether it is spare parts supply or bank security systems). This leads to:
- Wide effect throughout the company. It’s never a single person or department. Think about how to mitigate even minor possible claims.
- Longer sales cycle (3-6 months are typical). The customer needs to explore every alternative available on the market. Make each of them be compared to you. Deliver every possible argument “Why you are better” in advance.
- More decision-makers. The boss of the boss of the boss of your prospect can easily ruin all your efforts. So, are you talking to the right persons? To them all?
There are obviously more points, but these are the key ones. The good consequences of this are notably higher prices and margins on the B2B market. As well as long-term deals, because B2B prospects are willing to pick a sustainable solution.
At the same time, any business-to-business marketing strategy should include actions aimed at retention. Why? The very business is responsible for the product or service it provides. Besides, in the B2B industry, customers seek long-term cooperation and product’s continuous effect on their business. That way, marketers have to spend more time on education, relationship building, and customer service.
The points mentioned above allow us to see that the B2B marketing framework requires understanding your customer, raising expertise, and offering solutions.
In this regard, there are the recommendations based on the best examples of B2B strategies:
Identify buyers’ pain points
Your business-to-business marketing strategy will give no results unless your products offer the solutions to the customer. The pain points, or problems, that targeted organization experiences are paramount for elaborating the approach to marketing and sales.
Thus, watch the trends and do social listening. In other words, find the source of demand for your product and study it. In the end, it is about designing the right message for the audience.
Show your expertise
B2B clients usually take time to pick the solution for their business. As they are looking for extensive cooperation, they focus on trust. How can you improve it? By showing that you are an expert and giving practical insights and recommendations. In this regard, you may share content, organize webinars, create guides, and make reports.
Build relationships
Notably, b2b marketing strategy examples show that building relationships add to sales in the long run. In particular, it decreases the attrition of the customers, adding to growth as you don’t lose customers. Besides, such a tactic fosters word of mouth and brings greater results. Yet, marketing on social media can be challenging without social selling. It implies that you don’t push customers to buy something but offer value first.
As a result, the B2B marketing framework takes buyers’ needs and issues to elaborate expert solutions that will likely establish a bond with customers and improve sales in the long term.
B2B marketing tactics
Effective business-to-business marketing also depends on how you apply strategies regarding the stage of the customer’s journey. Some of the methods work best on awareness or consideration stages; others are more of universal nature.
Let’s look at some of the most used B2B marketing tactics:
Email marketing: Most practical and universal
Notably, email marketing is a standard method for marketers, irrespective of the niche. It comes in handy in the B2B industry when prospecting, generating leads, sharing content, and even boosting sales.
The best examples of B2B marketing strategies underline using outreach to attract leads. Nowadays, marketing teams would use an email finder and a business leads database to extract corporate email addresses.
That way, they will be able to contact prospects. For the outreach to work, you would need to have the buyer’s persona designed, find the match, extract their email, and write a personalized message to ask for a referral.
Yet, it is also great for sharing content, educating, and attracting people to your website. That way, you offer value and build relationships. Besides, the content shared can be a part of the retention efforts of the marketing teams. The developed email marketing strategy also means segmenting the audience and launching different campaigns for prospects and buyers.
Social media marketing: Connecting to customer
Social media as a business-to-business marketing strategy brings more benefits if applied in the initial stages of the customer journey. How? Having a page on social media allows you to establish a confident online presence and develop it. Besides, it is a way to present your values and mission, adding to trust.
Moreover, social selling techniques proved to be great for building relationships and showing expertise. At the same time, you can use the targeted ads feature to attract more leads or share content. Social media is a useful tool in raising awareness and affecting the customer on the stage of consideration.
Content marketing: Offering value
Notably, content marketing is a vital part of any B2B marketing strategy. Why? You can combine it with other methods and utilize it at different stages of the conversion funnel. Yet, the greatest advantage of it is that content marketing offers priceless advice and educates potential customers. It underlines their issues and offers solutions. Isn’t it exactly what B2B organizations need to solve their problems?
Besides, content marketing allows you to contribute to your blog that can attract traffic if supported by the SEO specialist. As a result, content marketing can attract leads, guide prospects, and push them towards subsequent funnel stages.
Website strategies and SEO: Optimizing your presence
For sure, you know that you need a website for any business today. With it, you would be able to present your products to the customers online. However, you should think of making it suitable for the buyers as well as promotion of goods to ensure effective business-to-business marketing operation.
Your plan should involve:
- The creation of the site map.
- Defining the best analytics tools.
- Designating different landing pages for various audiences.
Also, do not forget about SEO optimization, including the correct meta information. Consecutively, if you set it right, you would be able to rank higher in Google search or promote your website with paid advertising, improving the chances of attracting quality leads.
Story by Maksym Grygoriev. Maksym has 15 years experience in marketing at B2B and B2C markets for engineering solutions, e-commerce, products distribution in EU/US markets. He helps small and medium businesses to build and optimize digital performance. If you have any marketing questions or would like to offer cooperation, please feel free to contact at LinkedIn
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