We’ve heard these marketing terms b2b, b2c, blah, blah, blah…
Do you know what these terms mean? When one company is selling their products then someone or another company is buying them. On the basis of the type of the customer, we differentiate them whether they are performing b2b operations or b2c.
What is the meaning of b2b marketing?
Let’s understand first what b2b means! Well, the word is self-explanatory, it means business-to-business marketing (b2b).
In simple words, when a company is aiming to sell their products to a group of people or businesses rather than an individual buyer, then it’s called b2b marketing.
This whole sales process is called a b2b sales process in which all the steps, phases, and series of events are included that occur when a business is selling its services or products to another business. It is a way of generating demands for products and services from other companies.
B2B marketing strategy doesn’t bind itself to some particular types of strategies but any strategy can be a b2b marketing strategy if it is being used to promote and sell products or services to other businesses.
B2B and B2C marketing can intersect in a lot of ways, you need to define yourself what is according to you b2b or what is b2c, as they’re not any strict definitions of these marketing strategies.
One person can represent both b2b or b2c depending on the purchase, for what and why they are making it. E.g. some masters of marketing say that freelancers and solopreneurs are technically a b2c audience, do you agree?
Well, they can be both! How? Let’s make it clear with another example.
Freelancers and solopreneurs also need to take a strong decision on how to spend their resources and where. At this position they work as a business, so they should be targeting through b2b marketing strategies.
But, on the other hand when they’re making a purchase for their personal use, services or products on which their career or income sources isn’t dependent then they should be targeted under b2c marketing strategies.
I hope you all have got it crystal clear!!!
So, you must be thinking to perform it as soon as possible and getting the most out of this marketing strategy for your business, let’s wait until we’re coming to the topic.
Types of Strategies of B2B Marketing
There’re plenty of strategies being used in B2B Marketing. We’re including here the top most and easily implementable strategies.
Website and SEO
These are the two things you should be always focusing on, no marketing campaign can be said successful if you’re not focussing on these two things.
Every B2B company should have a fully responsive mobile-friendly website. The sales process of a B2B customers is longer than that of B2C customers, they just don’t buy anything being impulsive.
Before purchasing from other businesses, they perform a lot of market research and I would say that a website is the most effective way to showcase the benefits of your products and services, and spread awareness.
Follow the CATT Marketing funnel, it’s an easy and effective marketing funnel to make the best use of the marketing strategies. In which c represents Content, and attention, trust, transaction respectively for ATT.
First, develop your content, the content should be educational and informational to educate your customers, it’ll help in getting attention. As much they’ll consume the content and engage with the brand, their trust in the company will get stronger and the transactions will occur effortlessly.
In the same way, good website design will help your user in remembering your brand name easily because it’ll provide them outstanding user experience with an awesome user interface.
We at DigiAvtar also specialise in providing the best website designing & development services for our customers as this is a big part of every marketing campaign.
What if you have a fully responsive mobile-friendly website and none is able to find your website on the internet? Don’t worry search engine optimisation is a solution for this, so once your website is ready focus on performing SEO tactics that include, on-page optimisation, off-page optimisation, and technical optimisation. If you’re using WordPress then there’re so many plugins that can be helpful for you in easily adding the alt text to images, optimising site speed and much more.
Search Engine Optimisation is the way of getting organic and targeted traffic if you’re focusing on the right keywords as well as on the search intent of the users.
Now, let’s move ahead to the next strategy of B2B Marketing which is
Content Marketing
Well, content is worshipped everywhere, without content no marketing campaigns can run. But why is it an important part of B2B Marketing strategies?
As we’ve aforementioned that B2B don’t purchase anything being impulsive, so before making a decision they prefer to get the information about the products and services of a particular company.
To get the information they prefer long-form articles rather than an advertisement. So, B2B marketing companies should focus more on creating content rather than spending so much on advertising. Advertising is always a part, but in b2b it should be minimal, as advertising is impulsive in nature and b2b marketing isn’t.
Your long-form article should include valuable information to help in the success and growth of the businesses. If you’re providing value, they’ll always have time to look back at it.
So, befriend with content marketing, and bring the most out of the b2b marketing campaigns.
E-Mail Marketing
Email marketing helps in getting engaged with your audience without disturbing them with the overwhelming ads. It is the best way to deliver the content you developed in the previous section directly to the inbox of your consumers.
As we all know that email marketing is the work of the person who has patience, and it takes time to show results so as with b2b marketing, the client in b2b marketing also takes time before making the decision to purchase.
So, craft your emails and segment them according to the businesses’ needs, and analyse the results. Colds are also effective in these cases as they’re also targeted according to the need of the client.
It’ll be easier for you if you include drip marketing email sequence and marketing automation in your email marketing campaigns. It’ll decrease your cost and save time. Email marketing automation will also help you in nurturing the leads faster than sending out targeted emails.
PPC Campaigns
You must be wondering I’ve aforementioned that in b2b marketing advertising doesn’t impart so much. Well, I’m still with those words, but still, you can get so much with the advertising. How, let’s discuss!
Don’t directly try to sell your products or services to businesses through PPC campaigns as it’ll show urgency that’s the form of impulsiveness and businesses wouldn’t take any action.
So, rather than directing the targeted consumers to the sales page, direct them to the blogs, or pages that can help in building their trust in your brand and products.
Don’t show them what they can buy from you but show them why they should buy from you.
Social Media
As we’ve discussed a little bit about the CATT marketing funnel, in which A represents attention and you can get attention only if people know about you. Social media can be the best tool for you to build brand awareness.
Social media is a tool which not only works as an awareness tool but also works as an engagement tool. It’s the easiest way to showcase your expertise in a particular field and establish yourself as a brand in the market. But only presenting on social media will not help you, you’ll need to be active on social media and engage with your users.
In the terms of B2B Marketing, you may gather leads with the help of social media but you need to nurture them with the help of other ways and platforms.
Over the past few years, organic reach in social media is decreasing because of user saturation and content shock. So, we always should have a budget for paid advertising on social media.
Include Reviews, Testimonial, Case Studies and Success Stories
I hope you’ve understood until now how important reviews, testimonials, case studies and success stories are. The success of b2b marketing depends on trust, and to build trust we need to show them the stories of the businesses who’ve got successful with the help of our business’s services or products.
The easiest way to show the stories are reviews, testimonials, case studies and success stories, so make these part of your marketing campaigns.
There’re many ways to get reviews and testimonials like Google My Business, Trust Pilot etc. It’s better to take reviews on platforms like these because it’s easy to manage the reviews in a single place. You can also check out the reviews of the clients on Google My Business of DigiAvtar.
On the other hand, you can publish success stories and case studies on your blogs’ Social Media channels or on YouTube. As we all know storytelling is the way through which our mind can remember everything.
So making the stories and case studies part of our b2b marketing campaigns can help in strengthening trust, and giving closer to a purchase decision.
All these things help in organic ranking and outranking the competitors in Ads Click Rates.
Well, we’ve discussed so many strategies to perform b2b marketing campaigns and make them successful by implementing small steps.
Now, let’s know what the tips are that should be remembered in b2b marketing.
Tips in b2b marketing
Research about pain points of potential customers
Researching about the customers is the best way to get ahead of the market before starting, so research a little bit about your potential customers. Know their needs, desires, and pain points. Build a customer persona on the basis of these factors. Provide the solutions to their problems with the help of your products and services.
Use Storytelling: Tell a Story
Our minds can comprehend easily a story. So, always incorporate storytelling in your marketing strategies and campaigns wherever it is possible. The story can be either product, brand, service, or customer story.
Incorporate Multimedia Content
Don’t be dependent on just text, include multimedia content in your marketing strategies and campaigns. Our eyes are more attentive to the movable content. So, it’s better if you’ve included animation in your content with the help of videos, gifs, visuals etc.
Be in Context
As we all know, content is king. But are you agree that content is a king without context? No, without context content can’t do anything, it’s just a piece of some sentences.
So, always be in context, keeping your brand voice consistent all over the marketing materials. It’s easy to imagine and comprehend the meaning of the content in context.
Use Marketing Automation
Marketing automation saves a lot of effort and time. Incorporating it will help to be available 24/7 to all of your users, it’ll feel valued when they’ll get answers on time. We can use marketing automation somewhat in every segment of our campaigns from engaging with the audience to getting leads and nurturing them to transactions.
Use Influencer Marketing
Influence marketing can be most effective in the b2b marketing strategies. As marketing is all about trust and people trust most on the public figures. So, to make influencer marketing cost-effective contact local influencers so that you’ll be able to target local audiences in a cost-effective way.
Clear CTAs in the content
If you’re not mentioning a clear call to action in your marketing content then you’re confusing your audience and moving them away from your business. If we get confused about something we just want to leave it if we can. So, if you’re providing two or more calls to action in a particular marketing material you’re moving away from your clients by confusing them.
Always keep a single call to action on what you want to make your users do with the particular content so that the chances of clicking on the CTAs will be higher.
Track Campaigns and Use Reports
It’s better to track and use reports for the improvements. As we can’t deliver a perfect product to our users, so we always need to keep improving our products and services. It’s an ever-running process, not a one-time task and you’ll be able to improve only if you’re keeping track of what you’re doing.
Well, we’ve seen a lot of strategies and tips for b2b marketing, now it’s time to reap the benefits. Let’s see what types of benefits you’ll get by implementing these strategies.
Benefits of b2b Marketing
Like any other marketing strategy, this marketing strategy also has so many benefits, here we’re pointing out some of the most valuable benefits of b2b marketing in today’s technological world.
- Improved Brand Awareness
- Identifying New Markets
- Scalability
- Improved Efficiency and Productivity
- Large Scale Ordering
- Increased Sales
- Increased Customer Life Time Value
- Makes Marketing Accountable
- Improved Return on Investment(ROI)
Launching of b2b Marketing Campaigns
Use the following steps and launch your b2b marketing campaigns with the help of these steps with no difficulty.
- Create a customer persona by performing market research
- Create a Map of your Marketing Campaigns
- Write down your marketing materials, goals, timeline, and resources
- Build the perfect team
- Implement the business-to-business (b2b) marketing strategies told in this blog post.
Well, launching the marketing campaigns takes somewhat similar steps to every marketing strategy. I hope we’ve covered every important aspect of b2b marketing in this post, so let’s conclude this article here.
Conclusion
B2B marketing is best for targeting businesses and the entities that have to take the decision like some big companies. It’s easy to scale in b2b marketing. We connect different types of businesses that open doors to new markets for our businesses. And we can implement b2b marketing strategies with some simple steps.
One thing that needs to always remember is that whether it’s a b2b marketing strategy or a b2c marketing strategy always focus on benefits rather than features. Communicate with your audience by talking about the benefits of your products and services, not about the features. When someone talks about features it seems that they’re boasting and that’s not liked by anyone.
So always describe the benefits of your product, it’ll be easier for you to perform any type of marketing tactics.
If you still have any questions related to b2b marketing, you can ask in the comment section, and for more similar blogs visit our blog.