B2B Marketing: What it takes to be Successful with your B2B Marketing
What is needed in order to be successful with B2B marketing? We recently unpacked the top 11 B2B marketing tools to help you grow your business. Maintaining a well thought out B2B marketing strategy is vital to any business's success, whether large and well-established or a start-up.
The marketing world is extensive and complicated to navigate, so what are the key components every business should focus on to ensure a successful marketing strategy? The core elements of most marketing and content marketing strategies are similar, but the focus and overall tone will differ depending on whether you are targeting businesses or individual clients.
Let's start with some basics first.
What is B2B Marketing?
Business-to-business marketing (B2B marketing) is when a corporation's marketing efforts target other organisations rather than individual customers or consumers. The purpose of B2B marketing is to promote your business and build your brand and reputation, making other companies familiar with the value of your product or service.
One of the goals of B2B Marketing could be to generate leads and ultimately turn other organisations into clients. Another goal could be to establish trust and build brand awareness or brand loyalty. To set the business up for success using thought leadership and employee advocacy could also be a goal. CONTACT US NOW!
B2B Marketing vs B2C Marketing
Marketing strategies differ significantly between B2B marketing and B2C marketing.
B2B marketing is focused on ROI, efficiency, and expertise; in establishing trust and building thought leadership resulting in sales. In contrast, B2C marketing targets consumers, and is often thought of as being 'fun' and light-hearted, offering deals that make customers feel the need to treat themselves.
Where individual customers tend to be more impulsive, businesses put a lot at risk when they rely on another company and therefore tend to be more calculating in their decisions. Large investments can be costly, and companies need reassurance that they're making the right decision.
B2B clients seek to build long-term relationships for long-term solutions, and often buy from other people, which is why thought leadership and employee advocacy are key when it comes to B2B marketing.
Key Components of B2B Marketing
The following components are key in any B2B marketing strategy:
1. Value Proposition
Your value proposition is your mission statement (an action-based statement that declares the purpose of your organisation and how you intend to serve your customers). It should be compelling and concise, and it should be geared around your unique customers and target market.
2. Positioning Statement
A positioning statement is a subset of your value proposition.
It defines your target audience, your product, the category it falls into, and specific benefits and expresses what makes your company unique from its competitors.
Having a clear positioning statement is key when it comes to standing out; your B2B marketing needs to position your company clearly and set apart from competitors in order to get results.
3. Client Prioritisation
Identifying your target audience is essential.
With limited time and financial resources, it is important to identify who you're selling to. By researching your customers and using data profiling, you can determine your company's ideal clients.
Data you'd analyse includes their age group, income, personal interests, and other factors, which could provide insight and allow you to fine-tune your marketing strategy.
If you're unsure how to get started, this free downloadable target market table template is for you. This template is designed to help you break down your target markets into categories and make your marketing campaign more effective.
4. Marketing Budget & ROI-Focussed Marketing
It is essential to have a clear Marketing Budget and plan within your marketing strategy and have a concrete idea of what success looks like for your company.
This requires a well-planned budget for all aspects of the business and a marketing strategy geared towards drawing in new customers and exponentially increasing ROI.
Knowing what each channels' KPIs are will help you determine the ROI of your marketing budget. Clear goals for each acitivity are needed in order to know whether they achieved their goal, and what the ROI is.
6. Top Elements of your B2B Marketing Strategy
Key elements of your B2B marketing strategy are the following channels:
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
Search Engine Optimisation ensures that your web content is accessible to your ideal audience and ideally shows up on the first page of relevant Google search results. The first result on the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) gets 28.5% of all clicks on average, while the second gets 15.7%, which is about half of the first. Very few people browse past the first page of results, making it essential to optimise your web content for users and for the Google "spider".
Paid Advertising
Lead generation requires an effective marketing campaign that includes paid PPC search ads, social media ads, website and display advertising, and affiliate marketing. Optimal use of multiple platforms and forms of paid advertising can effectively generate leads - not to mention platforms like Facebook provide analysis tools via Meta Business Suite, which gives insight into which your ads most influence people.
Content Marketing
This is a great way to indirectly advertise your business by providing potential clients with helpful and interesting information.
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and Twitter are great for B2B marketing, not just B2C. The latest B2B social media marketing trends include employee advocacy and User Generated Content (UGC).
Employee Advocacy and Thought Leadership
Employee advocacy means involving employees in the promotion and creating awareness of the brand, its products, and its services. The insight of employees comes across as genuine and reliable and sometimes generates more organic interest and leads than paid advertising. Subsequently, an employee advocacy campaign has the potential to be more successful than an ad campaign.
Thought Leadership marketing refers to unique brand-specific posts and other content types made by thought leaders in your business, perhaps the Exco, on social media platforms. While mainly geared towards B2C, this kind of content reassures potential customers that the company in question is reliable - one of the key factors businesses look for when forming relationships with other businesses. Although UGC is unlikely to generate leads as quickly for B2B, it can still be effective and draw interest from valuable clients over time.
There were an estimated 4.2 billion social media users worldwide as of 2021, and this number is only increasing. This makes it imperative to include content marketing in your strategy.
Websites with Multimedia and Video Content
Web visitors are more easily engaged by multimedia and video content than long-form written content. Statistically, web users have proven to stay 88% longer on web pages with videos.
Many people prefer infographics, podcasts, and videos to text. If a picture is worth 1000 words, and a video is made up of 1000 pictures, then the influence your company can have by creating meaningful video content is exponential.
Aside from being more engaging for web users, the use of video content on the homepage of your website is optimised for the Google "spider". Webpages with videos towards the top of the page are better in terms of SEO and therefore rank better on Google searches.
Email Marketing
93% of B2B marketers use email as a lead-generating tool. It is a tried-and-true method of reaching business customers. By regularly but tactfully sending out emails, you can encourage businesses to subscribe to your newsletters, fill in surveys, and leave reviews and testimonials, all while keeping them informed about your products and services.
To optimise email marketing, mailing lists must be carefully segmented according to small data sets, ensuring marketing is better targeted.
Having your emails reported as spam and having your IP address or domain blocked is one of the dangers of emailing all your clients all the time. For this reason, it's important to be tactful in your approach to email marketing.
Webinar Marketing
Webinars are a top way of reaching new customers, with most webinars converting between anything from 1-5 new costumes per webinar.
Webinars showcase thought leadership and help to identify new prospects, and establish relationships with potential customers, while showcasing your expertise, knowledge and values. CONTACT US NOW!
Contact ShiftONE digital today and we will take your B2B marketing to the next level.
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