What Are The Best B2B Marketing Strategies For Scaling Your Business?
First off, what is B2B marketing? Business-to-business marketing, per definition, refers to the marketing of services or products to other businesses and organizations. So, if you care to learn more about B2B marketing strategies and tactics, you've come to the right place.
In a broad sense, creating B2B marketing content means that you need to focus on making it informational and straightforward. Why, might you ask? Well, business purchase decisions are usually based more on bottom-line revenue impact. As a result, Return On Investment (ROI) in a monetary sense is a focus point for corporate decision-makers.
Now, the big question: which B2B marketing strategies should you try out? If you're looking for some examples of B2B marketing strategies, these can include:
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- High-performing website
- PPC (pay-per-click) advertising platforms
- Email marketing
- Podcasting and videos
- Social media and influencer marketing
- Digital ad campaigns
To keep it simple, one can say that B2B marketing strategies are methods that B2B companies use to generate demand for their products or services. Once you know what your target market is and where they like to hang out digitally, you can create your marketing plan by deciding which strategies will work best for your audience.
Now, let's explore the topic in depth to shed light on each element of the most effective modern B2B marketing strategies.
5 B2B Marketing Strategies You Can Try
What I love about marketing is that it depends on its audience. While there are big differences between B2B and B2C marketing, the pieces of B2B marketing material you're going to use will surely differ as well. In this section, we'll dive into the various B2B marketing strategies you can implement to reach your ideal business audience. Before we start analyzing everything, it's appropriate to shed some light on the B2B buyer's journey. The main reason for this is that each stage might impact your marketing strategies. Also, it is related to how you implement your ideas.
To keep it short, here's the buyer's journey:
- Awareness Stage
This is when the prospect is experiencing and expressing symptoms of a problem or opportunity. At this stage, most prospects do research to get a better understanding of their problem and what it is exactly.
- Consideration Stage
Now that the prospects know more and have identified their problem, they are committed to researching solutions. Also, they are set to use this opportunity they've found to improve any issues they are encountering.
- Decision Stage
At this stage, the prospect has already set his/her mind on which solution strategy, method, or approach they are going for. Hence, they are compiling a long list of suitable vendors who can help with products and services that fit into their chosen solution strategy. At this stage, they try to make a short list of pros and cons so that they can then make a final purchase decision.
All set? Great, let's proceed to the B2B marketing strategies.
1. B2B Digital Marketing Relevant To Your Target Audience
No matter if your business focuses on B2C or B2B, one thing is certain: you should have a digital presence. That can include the use of paid ads, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), having a website, utilizing social media, etc. Here are a few tactics and tips to actually strengthen your B2B digital marketing strategy.
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Identify Your Target Audience
If you want to have an effective B2B digital marketing strategy, as a first step, you have to define your target audience and your buyer personas. Being able to use demographic and psychographic info to understand your ideal customers is key. Actually, this is vital to deciding your marketing activities. Plus, the valuable insights will help you in creating content and digital material that resonates with your audience and their needs. There's clearly no reason to spend time and money on material that cannot reach the right eyes and ears.
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Focus On Creating A Website That Informs And Converts
For your digital marketing efforts to be successful, your website needs to be informative and engaging. After all, research shows that over 80% of buyers visit a website before purchasing a product or service. Also, you should consider that the typical B2B sales cycle usually involves many key players. Some of these are known as gatekeepers. They are any initial intermediary between a salesperson and a decision-maker within an organization. Of course, decision-makers still remain most marketers' main target. (Plus, you should not forget all the other folks who have a say in buying into a purchase). You can even leverage niche influencers to promote your product or service.
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Digital Presence Optimization
It's undeniable that you need to have an engaging and informative website, but users must also be able to find it. For your website to be easily discoverable, you can utilize on-page SEO and technical SEO tactics. Be it alt text or meta descriptions, site speed, and structured data, SEO and keyword optimization are imperative. Off-page SEO is also a bold move since external linking strategies and social sharing can boost your organic traffic even more. Just keep it "white hat" when it comes to SEO tactics—no one wants retaliation from the search engines.
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Running PPC campaigns In Google And Niche Directories
Finally, your digital presence with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is equally important. Such a strategy allows you to get your content and brand in front of new audiences. Best of all? You can do so via search engines and other advertising platforms. For example, we've seen great success with our eLearning PPC directories. What we've noticed is that if you want to see an ROI from your paid ads, you must focus on some important steps.
For one, incorporating your buyer persona data into your message and targeting is vital. Also, boosting content that they can relate to is a go-to strategy. Businesses that want to be successful and reach a great number of potential customers have to target relevant categories within their brand. It's not just about promoting your product or services. You can promote content that talks about how your services and products solve their pain points.
2. B2B Email Marketing
Speaking of proven B2B marketing tactics, email marketing is a method that can help you reach business customers effectively through B2B inbound marketing strategies. In fact, 93% of B2B marketers use email. Why not become one of them? Emails not only lead to engagement, but they can also turn subscribers into leads. And that's when you have the chance to actually make them customers. Of course, optimizing email marketing for conversions is key. Most importantly, you must ensure deliverability and increase engagement. But you must also focus on growing your email list.
One note here for you; your email marketing campaign must consistently resonate with your business customers. Regarding your focus, my best advice is to focus on things that matter to your customers—like time, money, and resources. Also, you can use this powerful solution to share your brand's content.
Did you know that 83% of B2B companies use email newsletters as part of their content marketing program? Well, we are one of them, and you should be too. As B2B marketers, we've noticed that these newsletters are most critical to our content marketing success.
Here are some email marketing best practices you have to keep your eye on:
- Write enticing subject lines
- Keep one call-to-action (CTA) per email
- Leverage email segmentation to reach the most relevant audience
- Make sure your email designs are responsive
Look, sending cold emails might feel weird at first. However, as uncomfortable as it is, there are always ways to convert new customers with the right email campaign approach. So, make sure to send marketing emails to the most relevant contacts. My best advice is to grow your email list by utilizing opt-in forms and gated assets like lead generation eBooks and webinars. That's how we do it!
Follow this link to learn more about email marketing best practices.
3. B2B Content Marketing
Throughout this article, I've highlighted several times how B2B customers tend to focus on expertise. Also, they are driven by logic, and they usually desire to be educated on topics that interest them. Thus, the main reason to choose a B2B content marketing strategy is that it is an excellent tool to satisfy customer priorities like the above.
You see, implementing a traditional PR marketing strategy will only manage to interrupt a consumer's day-to-day with promo material. In contrast, a content marketing strategy does exactly the opposite. It's a channel that adds valuable information and informs consumers. And that is what your B2B customers are looking for: identifying and finding solutions to their problems.
Of course, one of my favorite content marketing benefits is that it supports SEO efforts as well. By understanding and anticipating what your audience is searching for, you can help them discover your website via your content. Best of all? You can keep them engaged and potentially convert visitors to customers!
Also, B2B companies should always test content. For example, you can run a test and see what type of content works best. Is it a webinar, an eBook, an article, or a simple video? It's important to understand what format of content attracts the right types of buyers.
Again, when focusing on the B2B buyer journey, make sure to include content around these:
- Checklists
- White papers
- Industry reports
- Webinars
- Case studies
- ROI calculators
- Testimonials
In fact, most business decision-makers prefer to get information from articles rather than ads. That's yet another reason to start allocating your resources to content marketing instead of using only traditional advertising strategies.
Care to see what topics convert at the highest rate in the eLearning niche? Learn how you can use a SEO competitor analysis to find interesting topics.
4. B2B Social Media Marketing
Did you know that 84% of C-Suite executives and 75% of B2B buyers use social media when making a purchase? Consequently, social media marketing can be key to getting more sales. However, using this strategy to connect with business customers is hard for many B2B brands. Mainly because the sales cycle is usually lengthier and there's also a long chain of command.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not suggesting that B2B social media marketing is the best place to get the greatest number of leads. But it's an option. Most importantly, when you can utilize this strategy at the beginning of your customers' buyer journeys. If you want to build your brand awareness, social media can be a powerful tool. But for this to work in your favor, you need to give your company an online personality, a human voice. Make no mistake; the above are powerful factors for brands that want to connect with potential customers.
That said, your social media accounts might not convert at the same rate as your content or email marketing. However, they're just as important. So, keep considering your followers as valuable assets. You never know when they'll be ready to convert to leads or become new customers.
Teaming up with niche influencers and online publications is also a must. Such collaborations help you leverage already engaged audiences to promote your products or services. Having thought leaders as well as your employees act as advocates will surely bring more engagement with your content than sharing it on your own.
5. Measuring B2B Marketing Performance
Truth be told, measuring the ROI of your marketing activities is hard. And it can vary, as it might be easier for some activities than others. For instance, you'll have no issue tracking a social media advertising campaign's ROI by tracking the sales made from an ad placed on Facebook. Facebook's Ad Manager makes things easy when it comes to tracking sales.
Yet, tracking other activities can be more difficult. For example, you cannot easily analyze which pieces of social posts or blog content resulted in sales. These cases are a bit trickier. However, I've written a whole article about how to measure content marketing performance. Take a look if you like!
In addition, considering A/B testing for various marketing activities is critical. But, you must also make sure that you're tracking ROI to determine which platforms traditionally have the most significant ROI for your business. For instance, many marketers get the highest ROI from Facebook, while others credit LinkedIn. These results can vary depending on your audience, brand, or business needs.
Summing Up
As you can understand, the types of B2B marketing strategies you can implement to grow your business are endless. And it's not just about content marketing and paid advertising. Similar to email marketing, social media is an extremely effective channel for sharing your content. Best of all, it's ideal if you want to enhance your brand expertise. And as we all know, showcasing expertise is something that B2B customers appreciate. So, you must take every opportunity you're given to let the world know about what you have to offer and how you can solve their pain points.
Apart from the central issue of measuring the ROI of your marketing activities, there are some other challenges. For example, many companies struggle to manage their website. Also, plenty of brands find generating traffic and leads extremely difficult. Not to mention how many marketing leaders find it challenging to train team members. Last but not least, there's always the lingering problem of not finding sales-marketing alignment.
Thus, the most important thing I want you to remember is that you need to set all the above in motion to get the most out of your efforts. And remember, effective B2B digital marketing is all about optimization and improving performance—one step at a time.
Do you want to discover a variety of B2B marketing strategies you can use to reach and resonate with your eLearning business audience? Check out our digital marketing solutions.
