Marion Barnham • December 16, 2024
What is B2B Marketing?
As the name suggests, business-to-business marketing refers to the marketing of products or services to other businesses and organisations. It holds several key distinctions from B2C marketing, which is oriented toward consumers.
In a broad sense, B2B marketing content tends to be more informational and straightforward than B2C. This is because business purchase decisions, in comparison to those of consumers, are based more on bottom-line revenue impact. Return on investment (ROI) is rarely a consideration for the everyday person — at least in a monetary sense — but it’s a primary focus for corporate decision-makers.
In the modern environment, B2B marketers often sell to buying committees with various key stakeholders. This makes for a complex and sometimes challenging landscape, but as data sources become more robust and accurate, the ability to map out committees and reach buyers with relevant, personalised information is greatly improving.
Who is B2B Marketing For?
Any company that sells to other companies. This can come in many forms: software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscriptions, security solutions, tools, accessories, office supplies, you name it. Many organizations fall under both the B2B and B2C umbrellas.
B2B marketing campaigns are aimed at any individual(s) with control or influence on purchasing decisions. This can encompass a wide variety of titles and functions, from low-level researchers up to the C-suite.
Creating a B2B Marketing Strategy
Competition for customers, and even for attention, is high. Building out a B2B strategy that delivers results requires thoughtful planning, execution, and management. Here’s a high-level look at the process B2B companies use to stand out in a crowded marketplace:
Step One: Develop an Overarching Vision
Fail to plan, plan to fail – this truism remains eternally accurate. Before any decisions are made, you’ll want to select specific and measurable business objectives, then lay out the framework for how your B2B marketing strategy will achieve them.
Step Two: Define Your Market and Buyer Persona
This is an especially vital step for B2B organisations. Whereas B2C goods often have a wider and more general audience, B2B products and services are usually marketed to a distinct set of customers with particular challenges and needs. The more narrowly you can define this audience, the better you’ll be able to speak to them directly with relevant messaging.
Create a dossier of your ideal buyer persona — by researching demographics, interviewing people in the industry, and analysing your best customers — to compile a set of attributes you can match against prospects to qualify leads.
Step Three: Identify B2B Marketing Tactics and Channels
Once you’ve established solid intel around your target audience, you’ll need to determine how and where you intend to reach them.
The knowledge you’ve attained through the previous step should help guide this one. You’ll want to answer questions like these about your ideal customers and prospects:
- Where do they spend their time online?
- What questions are they asking search engines?
- Which social media networks do they prefer?
- How can you fill opportunity gaps that your competitors are leaving open?
- What industry events do they attend?
Step Four: Create Assets and Run Campaigns
With a plan in place, it’s time to put it into motion. Follow best practices for each channel you incorporate into your strategy. Critical ingredients in effective campaigns – a message your team wants to spread that’s typically tied to the desired action – include a creative approach, useful insights, sophisticated targeting, and strong calls to action.
Step Five: Measure and Improve
This is the ongoing process that keeps you moving in the right direction. In the simplest terms, you want to figure out why your high performing content performs and why your low performing content doesn’t so that you can make smarter decisions concerning your money and time.
The more vigilant you are about consulting analytics and applying your learnings, the more likely you are to surpass your goals and grow continually. Even with a well-researched foundation, the creation of content and campaigns inherently requires a lot of guesswork until you have substantive engagement and conversion data to rely on.
Let your audience dictate your path
Consult metrics to pinpoint the channels, topics, and media that resonate most, then double-down. Meanwhile, cut or alter anything that isn’t performing.
Types of B2B Marketing
Here are a few of the most common B2B marketing types and channels:
Blogs: A mainstay for almost any content team. Regularly updated blogs provide organic visibility and drive inbound traffic to your site. Your blog can house any number of different content formats: written copy, infographics, videos, case studies, and more.
Search: SEO best practices change as often as Google’s algorithm (a lot), making this a tricky space to operate in, but any B2B marketing strategy needs to account for it. Lately, the focus has been shifting away from keywords and metadata, and more toward searcher intent signals.
Social Media: Both organic and paid should be in the mix. Social networks allow you to reach and engage prospects where they’re active. B2B buyers increasingly use these channels to research potential vendors for purchase decisions.
Whitepapers/eBooks: Standalone assets containing valuable information, these downloadable documents can either be gated (meaning a user must provide contact information or perform another action to access) or ungated.
Email: While its effectiveness is waning somewhat in the age of spam filters and inbox shock, email won’t disappear anytime soon.
Videos: This content type can be applied in several of the previous categories mentioned here (blogs, social media, emails).
B2B Marketing Best Practices
How can you set yourself up for B2B marketing success? Here are a few proven pillars that will help your team stand out and make an impact.
Be Human . The following might be the single greatest fallacy in B2B marketing, and it derives from the very name: marketing to businesses, instead of people.
Yes, you’re trying to sell to a company, but you aren’t marketing to a building or some intangible entity. You are trying to reach actual people within the company, and like any other human being, they are driven by emotional and cognitive motivations.
Don’t just learn about the companies and accounts you’re pursuing. Learn about the people within them, and make sure your marketing speaks to them. Yes, business decisions tend to be more rational and logical, but that doesn’t mean your content and tone should be robotic.
Focus on Targeting. This was mentioned earlier but bears repeating: Overly broad campaigns inevitably lead to wasted time and spend, because you’re serving content and ads to people who are either uninterested or unable to influence a buying decision. Take the time up-front to define and segment your audience. Create messaging that speaks directly to the specific people you want to see it.
Thought Leadership Makes an Impact. Research continues to show that senior-level decision-makers highly value this type of content, using it to vet both vendors and solutions.
As we’ve mentioned, personalisation and relevance are essential. You want to speak the language of your customers, but that’s not always enough. You also want to deliver content and ads that fit thematically with where they’re viewed.
For instance, shorter videos with quick hooks perform better on social media feeds, whereas a longer format is probably better suited for YouTube. It takes a different copy angle to catch someone scrolling through LinkedIn than other networks. Put yourself in the end user’s shoes and try to adopt their mindset.
Native Ads. Also known as Sponsored Content, these ads appear within LinkedIn feeds, alongside the user-generated content members come to peruse. Very useful for thought leadership, brand awareness, and driving strategic traffic.
Lead Generation. This is a primary goal against which many B2B marketers are measured. Lead Gen Forms are extremely effective for this purpose because they pre-populate based on a member’s LinkedIn profile data, and don’t force the user to navigate from the site, creating a seamless experience.
Breaking Down B2B Marketing. Summarising the most important takeaways from our exploration of modern B2B marketing, here are some key considerations to keep in mind:
- Although it’s business to business marketing, you’re still speaking to human beings. Don’t fall into the trap of being overly formal or robotic.
- The foundational steps in creating a B2B marketing strategy are developing your vision, defining your audience, identifying tactics and channels, putting content and campaigns into motion, and then continually measuring for optimisation.
- Truly effective B2B marketing is conversational, targeted, and contextually relevant. Thought leadership content is among the most effective in this category.
