The Ultimate Guide to B2B Marketing: Strategies, Examples, and Tactics

With the need to pass corporate red tapes and convince multiple stakeholders, the B2B marketing process is complex and time-consuming. This post gives you a comprehensive guide to address the key concerns and challenges of marketing for B2B companies. It also walks you through the process of setting up successful B2B marketing strategies.   

 

What is B2B Marketing?

B2B marketing stands for business-to-business marketing. It involves marketing to other businesses instead of everyday consumers and convincing them to choose your product or service. 

It may include a variety of B2B marketing tactics to generate demand, such as:

• Targeting business accounts through PPC ads 
• Creating informative content to provide value
• Optimizing your website to increase search visibility 
• Participating in industry events to interact with prospects 

B2B marketing is used by companies that offer solutions other companies need. This solution could be anything from a consulting service or a software platform. For instance, Oracle uses B2B marketing to promote their software solutions. Their strategy includes testimonials that highlight client success to showcase the value of their product. 

How B2B Marketing Differs from B2C Marketing

Marketing to a B2B audience isn’t as straightforward as marketing to everyday consumers. Due to the differences in the types of audiences, these two forms of marketing require different approaches.

Multiple decision-makers

B2C marketing often involves only one decision maker, i.e., the buyer. Even if they’re buying the product for others or for the entire family, you typically only have one person to convince.

Meanwhile, B2B buying decisions have to be made by multiple stakeholders. Kurve reports that 66% of B2B teams have three decision-makers. Other sources report that a typical farm having 100-500 employees will have an average of seven decision-makers. So your B2B marketing efforts have to resonate with multiple decision-makers before you can eventually convince them to buy.

Longer sales cycle

B2C consumers can quickly go from discovery to purchase within a day. For some consumer products, a B2C sales cycle can even be as short as 5 minutes.

On the other hand, B2B prospects have to pass through multiple B2B marketing funnel stages before finally converting. This is reasonable considering that B2B solutions often require significant financial investment and impact an entire company. So the back-and-forth between different departments and decision-makers results in a longer sales cycle.

Databox found that it took about 2.1 months to complete a sales cycle for most B2B companies.

Different communication strategies

B2C purchases normally don’t require extensive research or understanding. Someone might see an ad for a home décor item and impulsively buy it because they like how it looks.

So marketers can easily communicate product features and benefits in just a few minutes. Even with items like electronics that require a bit of research, marketers can share necessary info through reviews and explainer videos.

Meanwhile, B2B consumers have to conduct in-depth research to weigh their options and understand the value of a particular solution. Marketers need more detailed communication to improve understanding and provide value to their audience. So you may use webinars, case studies, demos, blog posts, testimonials, and benchmark reports to nurture and convert your audience.

How B2B Marketing Drives Business Growth

Effective B2B marketing campaigns can contribute to long-term business growth. Here are some of the main areas where your marketing efforts can drive growth.

Brand strengthening

The right B2B marketing tactics help you get your brand in front of a relevant B2B audience. So you can reach more buyers and increase brand awareness in different markets. As a result, you can build your brand presence in the industry, strengthening brand recognition in the long run.

Salesforce has built their name as a leading marketing cloud software provider largely due to a powerful B2B marketing strategy. The company uses content marketing to share high-quality, practical information that addresses the pain points of marketers and business owners. They also apply SEO best practices to make sure that their content ranks high in relevant search results, which improves visibility.

Enhanced customer relationships

B2B marketing involves sharing valuable content to improve customer understanding. It also involves nurturing your leads through consistent communication. These efforts help to strengthen your relationships with customers, allowing you to earn their loyalty.

Shopify offers valuable resources where users can gain access to ideas, tutorials, and startup tips. This is an effective B2B marketing strategy to nurture the platform’s existing user base and build a long-term relationship with them.

Increased repeat sales

B2B marketing tactics such as personalized recommendations and timely promotions help you re-engage your customers at the right time. So you can get more repeat sales and drive continued revenue for your business.

For Autodesk, B2B marketing solutions such as LinkedIn’s Conversation Ads allowed them to effectively retarget previous website traffic. The campaign involved sending previous blog traffic to specific download pages for eBooks to accelerate conversions. They ended up with a 28% increase in Lead Gen Form submission rates along with a 15% increase in cost-per-lead efficiency.

How to Develop a Winning B2B Marketing Strategy

A structured approach to B2B marketing is crucial to generate real business impact. Let’s walk you through the process of creating a winning strategy to market your B2B solutions.

Step 1: Start with a clear goal

Do you want to raise brand awareness? Generate leads? Increase adoption? Your B2B marketing efforts should focus on achieving a specific purpose. This will help you build a targeted strategy around a clear goal.

Outline your B2B marketing goals for each campaign so you know what to work toward. This will serve as the foundation for every other aspect of the campaign. It will help you determine campaign details, such as:

• Whom to target
• What content to create
• How to deliver your message
• Which platforms and channels to use

For example, if your goal is to increase adoption for your Premium plan, you may focus on convincing Basic plan users to upgrade. As such, your strategy may include sending them emails highlighting the benefits of upgrading to Premium. You may also offer limited-time discounts to further sweeten the deal.

Step 2: Define your target audience

Once you have your goal outlined, you can start thinking about the types of people to target with your campaign. Who do you want to reach? Do you want to engage practitioners? Or convince key decision-makers?

This will be a key factor influencing the channels you choose to use and the types of content you create. So make sure to get as specific as possible with your target audience definition. Lay out various characteristics of your target audience, such as:

• Job role/title
• Department
• Business size
• Industry
• Platform preferences
• Location
• Annual turnover
• Business objectives/priorities
• Pain points
• Interests and hobbies

You can even define different buyer personas to target with the same campaign. In this case, you’ll need to lay out different messaging, content, and channels to use for each persona.

Platforms like User Persona make it easy to quickly outline your target user persona. You can enter a description of your solution, and the platform will automatically generate a sample user persona for you.

Step 3: See what your competitors are doing

Looking at how others in your industry are marketing their business can give you some idea of how to market your own solutions. A comprehensive competitor analysis will reveal insights such as:

• The types of people they’re targeting
• The channels they’re using to promote their solutions
• How they’re positioning their products
• The types of content they’re creating
• How people are responding to their tactics
• Whether there are any missed opportunities you can leverage

These insights can inform how to shape your own B2B marketing plan. You’ll be able to replicate the strategies that are working and improve on them to get better results. You can even find gaps that you can fill to set yourself apart in the industry.

Say you notice that your competitors often get high engagement on their fun and informative videos, but they’re only creating one or so every month. You could ramp up your own video marketing efforts to drive more engagement. Or, say you notice that their followers are asking questions that the company doesn’t seem to address. You could use those questions to inspire your content creation. 

Use platforms like BuzzSumo to get a detailed breakdown of your competitors’ content marketing strategy. You can use this to analyze which content gets the most engagement, which networks work for them, who is sharing their content, and more. You can even see the average engagement by media type so you know what content works in your industry.

Step 4: Focus on the right promotion channels

Your choice of channels plays a crucial role in whether your B2B marketing strategy reaches the right people. It’s important to focus your efforts on channels where your audience is present.

Your audience research should reveal essential insights on which channels and platforms to focus on for your B2B digital marketing. Besides the basics such as your company blog and website, consider other popular B2B marketing channels such as:

• Email
• Social media
• Display advertising
• SEO
• Guest blogging

Get even more specific with your choice of channels by breaking down which social media platforms and display ad channels to use. Similarly, you’ll need to look into guest posting opportunities on publications that can send valuable traffic to your site.

In addition, you’ll want to figure out which offline channels to include in your B2B marketing plan. Based on your goal and target audience, you can look into options such as:

• Sponsorships
• Conferences
• Industry events
• Direct mail
• Community involvement

Step 5: Create your content

B2B consumers need education to understand the business value of your solution. And the best way to share this education is through content. As such, content serves as the backbone of effective marketing for B2B brands.

Develop a robust B2B content marketing plan that lays out:

• The pain points you need to address
• The content topics to tackle
• The media types and content formats to use
• The distribution channels to use
• The schedule to publish your content

You can use your initial research to figure out the details of your content marketing strategy. Then begin creating impactful content that gets the message across and resonates with your target audience. Regardless of what the specifics may be, your content should address your target audience’s pain points and establish the value of your product or service.

Step 6: Test, adapt, and refine your strategy

Part of B2B marketing success is ensuring that your strategy is always optimized. Monitor your performance to see what works and what doesn’t. Then use these insights to refine your strategy accordingly.

Make sure to run multiple tests to get the insights you need. Test different aspects of your strategy, such as:

• Content types
• Media types
• Content formats
• Channels
• Topics
• Ad copy
• Audience targeting

Use these results to inform your strategy and improve your results.

For example, if your LinkedIn slideshows are getting a ton of engagement, consider creating more of them. Or, if you find that a specific value positioning drives significantly more clicks on your ads, you can fine-tune your ad campaigns with it.

Key B2B Marketing Tactics to Boost Business

The following marketing tactics can help you effectively reach a B2B audience and bring in new business.

Content Marketing

With B2B audiences needing a comprehensive understanding of a solution before investing in it, content plays a crucial role in B2B inbound marketing. It helps you educate your target audience on complicated concepts to improve understanding. This establishes your expertise in the field and helps you attract high-value prospects.

This is why content marketing is the top B2B lead generation channel. The 2023 B2B Marketing Outlook Survey found that content marketing yields the highest ROI for 62% of respondents.

Content also enables you to nurture your potential clients through timely and relevant content. It’s highly effective for showcasing the value of your solution, which will eventually drive conversions.

Make sure to diversify your content to appeal to a wide variety of audiences at various stages of the buying funnel. According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), case studies and customer stories are the most effective types of B2B content. This type of content helps to establish trust by showing proof of how the product adds value for clients, so prospects can understand real-life use cases.

Videos are equally effective as they can convey information in an engaging audio-visual format. Use them to share demos, explainers, instructions, and industry insights. Thought leadership ebooks and white papers are another effective content type. You can use these types of content to share valuable insights that will showcase your expertise. 

Besides these, you can also use the following types of content to keep things diversified: 

• Blog posts
• Research reports
• Infographics
• Podcasts
• Live broadcasts
• Interactive content 

Stay on top of the latest B2B marketing trends to discover content types that are trending in your industry.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

An effective B2B SEO strategy is the key to attracting relevant prospects to your site. When B2B consumers need a solution, most of them will turn to online search. Gartner reports that online search is the third most popular way to engage with digital suppliers in the buying process. Most interactions will take place on the supplier’s website.

For people to come to your website and interact with it, they need to be able to find it on search. So it’s crucial to optimize your website for increased visibility in relevant online searches. Here are a few tips:

• Research relevant keywords and understand buyer intent. Then create content to satisfy that intent, making sure that it’s optimized with the target keywords.
• Use keyword clustering to improve your website structure and enhance crawlability. 
• Fix any technical SEO issues that could hinder organic visibility. Improve page load speed and create a mobile responsive website. Identify and fix crawl errors, use 301 redirects, and fix broken links. 
• Optimize all your product and service pages with contextually relevant links and keywords. Make sure to include high-quality images and videos, compelling headlines, and detailed product information.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

While organic efforts such as SEO bring in sustainable traffic in the long run, it takes time for them to show results. It’s important to back up your organic B2B marketing tactics with paid efforts like PPC advertising. 

When you run targeted PPC ads, you can get your brand in front of the right people. Your ad will show up prominently at the top of relevant searches with Google Ads. See how Modash dominates the search results for “influencer search tool.”

With ad platforms like LinkedIn Ads, your ad will appear among organic content in a user’s feed. You can also run PPC ads through Sponsored InMail or as banner ads on the right-hand panel of the LinkedIn page. This helps you target relevant LinkedIn users and turn them into valuable prospects.

The best part is that you only pay for clicks, so you’re not wasting valuable marketing dollars just to display your ads. Make sure to clearly define the target audience you want to reach. You can also test different targeting options to see which ones are the most effective at attracting prospects. 

Research keywords that your audience is using in their search terms and use them to create compelling ad copy. Test different versions of your ad with varying ad creative and copy to fine-tune your PPC strategy.

Social Media Marketing

The Gartner research cited earlier revealed that social media was the second most popular way for buyers to interact with suppliers during the purchase journey. It’s where they go research your brand and evaluate the value of your solution. They look at what content you’re sharing and how you’re interacting with people to assess whether they should work with you.

The CMI study even found that organic social media is one of the top three distribution channels that drive the best results for B2B marketers. So you need to ramp up your B2B social media marketing efforts to build a strong presence and connect with your prospects. 

In particular, focus on LinkedIn, which provides the best value for B2B marketers. Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram are also powerful channels to expand your reach.

Share high-quality content regularly and engage with your audience through comments and interactive posts. Make sure to share content beyond article links. Include a mix of visuals in the form of photos, original graphics, and slides as well as video. 

Showcase the people behind your brand with employee stories, office events, team activities, and interviews. This helps to humanize your brand and foster a human connection with potential clients. For instance, Slack has a strong social media marketing game with memes, original graphics, articles, and slides. They also regularly share visual testimonials from customers who use Slack within their organizations.

Email Marketing

Email is one of the top distribution channels that produce the best results for B2B marketers. It provides you with a channel to nurture your leads, keep your customers informed, and eventually drive conversions. You can use email marketing to:

• Update subscribers with the latest blog posts
• Share company and product updates
• Provide practical tips and instructions
• Send personalized recommendations
• Share exclusive offers and discounts

The best way to send B2B emails that drive results is by ensuring that your emails are relevant and valuable to each recipient. It’s important to segment your mailing list to create email campaigns that resonate with different types of people. 

For instance, you can segment your Premium, high-value customers and send them emails with exclusive perks like early bird offers and Beta testing opportunities. Meanwhile, another segment of new subscribers may receive emails with tips and tricks or discounts that would encourage them to sign up. 

See the following Groww email, which encourages recipients to start trading on the platform. It includes a list of benefits and features that users can enjoy when trading on Groww.

Influencer Marketing

Just like B2C consumers, B2B buyers turn to influential personalities to inform their buying decisions. They may discover new products and services from an article in an industry publication. Or they may check an in-depth review by a leading expert before deciding which solution to invest in. 

This is why B2B influencer marketing plays such a vital role in generating valuable leads. In fact, 40% of B2B marketers have been able to generate more leads and sales as a result of influencer marketing.

While B2B influencers may not look like traditional social media influencers, they command a huge presence in their respective fields. So what they say goes. If they vouch for your product or service, you can instantly win the trust of thousands of people who look to them for buying recommendations. In other words, they can be an effective B2B PR tool to boost brand recognition and improve your reputation.

Here are a few ideas to incorporate influencers into your B2B marketing plan:

• Get industry experts to review or feature your solution.
• Invite influencers to company events to boost publicity.
• Interview experts for your blog post or live broadcast.
• Conduct AMA sessions featuring a leading industry influencer.
• Hire an influential creator to put together sponsored content.
• Co-create content with leading creators related to your industry.
• Recruit industry publications and content creators as brand affiliates or partners.

General Electronics put together a thought leadership event where they invited leaders from various industries as speakers. “The Lean Mindset” featured prominent names such as Wolfgang Puck and David Gelb, as well as Ford’s Jim Farley and Uber’s Dara Khosrowshahi came together to discuss the business of improvement. Each of these sessions received thousands of views on YouTube. 

Referral Marketing

It’s not just influencers that B2B audiences look to for purchase recommendations. They also consider the opinions of other B2B consumers, such as industry peers and satisfied customers. This makes sense as the experiences of people who’ve used the product or service would know it best. So their recommendations hold weight, helping to build trust among potential clients. 

The B2B Marketing Outlook Survey cited earlier noted word of mouth as the fourth most effective lead generation channel. Thirty-eight percent of respondents in the survey recognized that word-of-mouth recommendations provided high ROI for B2B leads.

Encourage your happy clients to recommend your solution to their industry peers so you can expand your customer base. Set up loyalty programs where customers can earn an incentive for every successful referral. When you reward customers for referrals, it gives them an even better reason to recommend you to the right prospects.

ShipBob has a robust Affiliate Program that allows affiliates to earn attractive commissions for every opportunity. In addition to a $850 commission per opportunity, affiliates get access to powerful tracking capabilities and useful resources to promote the product.

 

Video Marketing

Video allows B2B marketers to effectively engage their audiences, combining both audio and visual elements. This combination helps you convey complex information in a format that’s easy to understand for different types of audiences. The CMI study from earlier also noted that videos produced the best results along with customer stories and testimonials.

Your B2B video marketing strategy can consist of various approaches to cater to audiences at every stage of the marketing funnel. Think of promo videos and explainers at the awareness stage or webinars and demos at the consideration stage. Meanwhile, detailed walk-throughs and training materials may help you nurture clients who are ripe for conversion.

Moz has a powerful video marketing strategy that includes actionable tips and practical insights for SEO practitioners. They publish these videos regularly through their YouTube channel and also host webinar sessions with expert presenters. 94.9k YouTube subscribers give testimony to the company’s video marketing success.

Marketing Automation

As B2B companies strive to improve efficiency, automating some aspects of their marketing becomes a crucial step. In fact, the B2B Marketing Outlook Survey revealed that 30% of respondents were planning to invest in automation tools. This makes it the third biggest MarTech investment after content creation and analytics.

A study by Columbia Business School even found that a hybrid human-automated model can boost profits by over 10% in a B2B setting. 

There are many aspects of your B2B marketing that you can automate to save time and maximize results. For instance, email automation lets you automatically personalize hundreds and thousands of emails without having to manually go through each and every one of them. Meanwhile, generative AI tools make it possible to speed up your content creation process, with content teams using them to generate ideas and outlines. You can even use AI to automatically create or optimize captions for social media.

Platforms like Salesforce offer comprehensive B2B marketing automation features. You can use it to set up multichannel automation to trigger surveys, SMS sends, and event and webinar registrations at various stages of the customer journey.

The platform also comes with AI content creation capabilities to automate the process of creating copy for your emails, subject lines, landing pages, and forms. This significantly helps you save time and scale your marketing efforts.

Industry Events Participation

When it comes to engaging a B2B audience, nothing beats live, in-person interactions. According to the CMI study, in-person events produced the best results for B2B marketers compared to other distribution channels. The B2B Marketing Outlook Survey also found that live events yielded the second highest ROI among all marketing channels. 

This is why it’s so important for companies to participate in industry events to engage their audience face-to-face. In-person events create networking opportunities where B2B marketers can build authentic connections with real people.

So make sure to sign up for major conferences, trade shows, and meetups taking place in your industry. Workshops and field events are another excellent option to foster in-person interactions. Additionally, you could even host product launch events and invite industry leaders and relevant prospects to attend.

Adobe combines several of these tactics with their annual Adobe MAX creativity conference. This conference brings together hundreds of business owners, professionals, and teams through learning opportunities and new product showcases.

How to Measure the Effectiveness of a B2B Marketing Campaign

Successful B2B marketing campaigns don’t happen on the first try. You need to see how your campaigns are paying off to understand how you can improve on them. You should also A/B test variations of your ads, emails, and landing pages to see which versions perform the best. 

This will help you streamline your efforts and maximize the impact of your marketing spend. Depending on your goal, keep track of the following metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to see how your B2B campaigns are working:

• Website traffic
• Traffic source
• Traffic-to-lead ratio
• Search ranking
• Conversion rate
• Form submission rate
• Email signups
• Demo signups
• Click-through rate
• Cost per click
• Cost per action
• Email open rate
• Unsubscribe rate
• Social media engagement
• Content marketing engagement
• Return on ad spend

Most B2B marketing platforms come with built-in analytics features that will give you comprehensive insights into your campaign performance. For instance, Mailchimp by Intuit comes with a comprehensive visual report to see how your campaigns are performing. 

You’ll be able to track click rates, revenue, and orders over time. It even comes with A/B testing features to help you test different design elements, subject lines, and content to optimize your emails.

Examples of Successful B2B Marketing

Intellectsoft

Intellectsoft was looking for a way to increase their online presence and boost digital engagement. However, this engagement needed to be on a deeper, more authentic level if they were going to build sustainable relationships with their prospects.

This would require creating useful and meaningful content to provide value to their audience. Content experts at Ninja Promo worked on developing a comprehensive content marketing strategy with a focus on informative blog posts, infographics, and videos. This significantly boosted online visibility and engagement for Intellectsoft, contributing to increased brand awareness.

Some of the most notable results were:

• 159% increase in engagement rate
• 11,000 new social media followers
• 440,000 monthly organic impressions

CBRE

CBRE noticed a gradual drop in engagement after two years of working with the same target audience, which had begun to lose interest in their ad creatives. To prevent audience burnout, the Ninja Promo team conducted regular campaign refreshes. They also sought out fresh audiences to expand the brand’s reach.

Ninja Promo took a two-stage advertising approach, starting off with identifying potential buyers on social media based on interests. This initial phase focused on driving traffic to the CBRE website, where they would then use pixel tracking to monitor user behavior. The second phase focused on targeting audiences who were similar to the website visitors.

The team also constantly monitored how these efforts were performing and adjusted the strategy according to those insights. When a lead form didn’t seem to work, they offered live chat as an alternative channel. Additionally, they also adjusted the target audience and messaging to better attract leads. By the end of the campaign, CBRE experienced the following results:

• 30,000 new potential investors through targeted ads
• 120,000 unique website visits
• 10% improvement in click-through rates
• 8% decrease in cost per lead.

Why Your Business Needs a B2B Marketing Expert: Reasons to Hire an Agency

Running a successful B2B marketing campaign is hard work. It takes time, expertise, and specialized tools to ensure that you’re putting your marketing dollars to good use. If you lack these resources in-house, it’s best to outsource your B2B marketing to professionals.

A B2B marketing agency gives you instant access to years of industry expertise and diverse skills that are expensive to acquire in-house. You can rely on them to put together impactful campaigns using proven strategies and industry best practices. And with a dedicated team to oversee your campaigns, you can trust them to constantly fine-tune the strategy to maximize results.

Not to mention the cost savings associated with MarTech investments. You won’t have to commit to platform subscriptions and expensive tech purchases since the agency already has access to sophisticated tools to execute your marketing campaigns.

Conclusion

With longer sales cycles and more decision-makers to appease, B2B marketing can be expensive and time-consuming. Trusting experts to oversee the process is your best bet at generating long-term results without sacrificing your time and workforce.

Ninja Promo has extensive experience in running successful B2B marketing campaigns across a variety of industries. Enjoy unparalleled growth with dedicated teams to help you with every aspect of your marketing—from SEO and content marketing to social media and influencer marketing. Click the button below to get started with an intro call.