B2B marketing strategies are marketing efforts of a business to attract other companies with the goal of partnership and business success. In addition, these strategies help businesses drive results by influencing their potential customers or buyers to avail of their offerings.
Regardless of whether your business is a startup or one that’s established with a big sales force, there’s one main objective—to influence your potential customers to increase conversion. Hence, to turn this into reality, your brand needs an effective and improved marketing approach.
However, it requires time and expertise to plan and implement strategies. Fortunately, outsourcing digital marketing services is now easy and convenient. If you’re looking for marketers to help you level up your marketing game, we got you covered! Read on for the best B2B marketing strategies this year.
What is B2B Marketing?
B2B marketing stands for business-to-business marketing. This pertains to all of the traditional and digital marketing schemes used in attracting potential customers with the help of other businesses. B2B marketers are asked to speak to businesses primary drivers, which are financial sense and ROI. That’s why having knowledge of the pain points and motivators of your target audience is vital to achieving a successful campaign.
Furthermore, most marketing strategies are represented by a number of digital marketing tactics, such as taking advantage of social media channels, content marketing, and ads. These marketing assets should be optimized to reach high-quality lead generation. For this reason, it’s essential to apply certain marketing strategies in each campaign.
How to Build a B2B Marketing Strategy
To have an effective B2B marketing strategy, marketers are required to work with stakeholders and decision makers. This is done to ensure they’re answering the needs of the businesses they’re collaborating with. Here are some ways to better plan B2B marketing strategies.
- Define your marketing goals. List down the objectives your company and your partners want to achieve.
- Study the status quo. Analyze the current state of your business to know what else you need to work on to accomplish your marketing goals.
- Determine your target audience. Doing so enables you to make your brand and marketing plans more focused to your clients’ needs.
- Identify the customer journey. Knowing your client’s behavior toward your brand helps you create better strategies to turn leads to loyal customers.
- Measure marketing results. Modern digital marketing includes evaluating the effectiveness of the plan by assessing results based from KPIs and large data.
How Marketing and Sales Work Together in B2B
In your B2B marketing strategies, marketing and sales have a defined relationship. When the services of these 2 functions are combined, there’s an optimized experience for prospective customers and existing ones. This is possible when marketing and sales align their goals and collaborate on achieving them.
They can apply targeted account-based marketing strategies to secure deals with other businesses; engage them with effective and tailored content; and use technology to maintain leads and encourage them to journey through the marketing funnel. Simply put, marketing fuels your target customers to avail of your brand, while your sales team ensures that no leads are lost and that conversion rates are increased.
List of Top 5 B2B Marketing Strategies
The main goals of the B2B marketing strategy framework are brand awareness and having loyal and long-term customers. If you want to boost lead generation and reputation, here are some effective B2B marketing strategies you can do.
1. Partner with skilled B2B marketing specialists.
To have good B2B marketing strategies, you need to have skilled B2B marketers. Having a low number of customers could mean you have ineffective marketing efforts. To leverage B2B marketing, you need a team who are experts in conversion optimization, copywriting, graphic design, SEO, IT, and project management, to name a few. Fortunately, you can hire effective yet affordable digital marketing agencies that can boost your way up the competitive market.
2. Perform case studies.
Another good tactic involves knowing how your products and services have influenced the lifestyles of your customers. One way to do this is to perform case studies. It’s similar to the effect of word-of-mouth schemes, which is one of the most well-known marketing tools. This helps you gain the trust of your target customers as you develop a good relationship with other brands.
Furthermore, a case study lets you take a closer look at the success stories of your customers. Such stories can be used in mapping content in a buyer’s journey and in writing blogs. Doing so increases your chances of achieving business goals. Plus, it shows potential clients how well you understand the industry pain points of your audience.
3. Adapt to a longer buying cycle.
B2B marketing has a longer buying cycle compared to B2C. In fact, in a study by McKinsey, it’s stated that by the end of 2020, the B2B buying cycle has become even longer. This has affected the budget, resulting in B2B buyers exerting more efforts in researching the brand and calculating the ROI before making the purchase.
Expert Tip: Create engaging content to attract clients and outsource marketers who can focus on improving ROI.
4. Add emotions in your advertisements.
Let’s face it, business decisions have an emotional basis. Even though there’s a decision-making body in businesses who are in charge of research and to making calls based on logic, these individuals are still people. Therefore, it’s advisable that B2B businesses add emotion that can hook your clients into your marketing strategies.
5. Use dynamic content on your website.
Apply customized content to your website to allow a more personalized experience for your visitors. For instance, you can have live chat options on certain pages or pop-ups to guide them through varying topics based on the blog category. Revamp your site and add features that can increase engagement, such as pop-ups that ask for buyers’ information.
A web content may include:
- Website statistics (new or existing customers, click-through rates, and pages viewed)
- Factors in the sales funnel or customer lifecycle
- Source of referral (SERP, social media, and email)
- Geolocation / geotracking
Tips When Planning Your SEO Strategy
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the act of ensuring that you produce nothing but high quality content. This is critical for your website and other content to rank highly in the search engine results page (SERP). Here are the top 5 ways to conquer the SERP.
- Add links to your articles
- Use keywords strategically
- Utilize topic clusters
- Boost link-building efforts
- Follow the SEO requirements
B2B SEO strategies allow businesses to offer solutions to their target market’s problems. This is done by taking advantage of the most searched topics, keywords, and phrases. Moreover, having content that addresses to their needs increases your site’s traffic and sales.
How to Measure Impact of Your B2B Marketing Strategy
With successful B2B marketing strategies, your website will start to earn more inbound traffic. However, with an average conversion rate of 2%, your company needs to revamp your strategies to improve brand visibility and sales. You may start by researching your competitors and evaluating your site’s performance.
Here are some guide questions you can ask to evaluate your competitor:
- What makes them effective companies?
- What are the factors that make their audience visit and return to their site?
- How to apply their marketing efforts to increase ROI?
Aside from those questions, here are some ways to check the impact of B2B marketing strategies to your business:
- Use visitor identification tools to see and compare your business to your competitors;
- Check their business details, source and campaign data, and their website’s authority;
- Apply the data you have gathered to create better B2B strategies; and
- Adjust your B2B marketing strategies according to your customers’ needs.
Invest in B2B Marketing with BlueFly Studios’ Strategies
To take advantage of B2B marketing strategies, you need to keep your dynamic business customers in mind. That said, you need to make sure that you have answers to their problems. Your brand needs online exposure so that your target audience can see if your service or product is worth buying. To ensure that you can effectively promote your business, hiring a trusted digital marketing agency is key.
Make your brand known across the globe with effective B2B marketing strategies. Guess what? You can avoid the hassle marketing entails by outsourcing expert marketers. Partner with BlueFly Studios and leverage B2B marketing strategies created by competent digital marketing professionals. What are you waiting for? Contact us today, and together, let’s build a better brand to achieve your business goals.