Table of Contents
What is B2B Marketing?
B2B marketing (or, as it is Business-to-business marketing) means selling one company’s product or service to another. Like B2C marketing tactics, which presume the customer is the target, B2B marketing needs to compensate for all the various stakeholders, whether they are corporate decision-makers or simply influencers.
B2B marketing strategies are based on the same underlying concepts as consumer marketing, but are implemented in a particular manner. While consumers select goods based not just on quality but also on popularity, reputation, and other emotional factors, B2B customers make demand and profit-potential decisions themselves.
Difference between B2B and B2C(B2B Vs B2C)
| B2B | B2C |
| Business to Business | Business to Customer |
| Sell products or services to business | Sell products or services to customer for personal use |
B2B Marketing
For B2B marketing, you want to concentrate on the product concept and its characteristics. The buying decision requires little to no personal feeling and you want to concentrate on knowing the customers and how they function within the boundaries of the processes of their organizations. What position do they play? Who counts for them?
B2C Marketing
You want to concentrate on the advantages of the product when you’re selling to a customer. Their decision is an emotional one. Consumers are also distinctive in that they expect convenience from a number of distribution channels. Consumers are less likely to be interested in a long message about marketing and want you to get straight to the point.
When it comes to B2B enterprises, the marketing department is not being given enough priority to many firms. Yeah, marketing is an important part for a B2B business to produce leads and customers. But much more focus is placed on the divisions of sales and business growth. But if the aim is to develop the business, it is more important to give more position and responsibility to B2B marketers.
How the company’s B2B Marketers Losing Influence
Once it comes to gaining B2B leads and clients, B2B marketers face growing obstacles. We also target, for example, a very small portion of a market that needs its goods and services. It means that focus in at the right target takes a lot of time, resulting in higher marketing costs relative to the average B2C business.
Secondly, for B2B businesses the selling period is also longer. The process of turning a B2B lead into a client can sometimes take weeks, even months to complete. Many companies fail to see that this is a common challenge facing several other B2B companies. If marketers cannot generate sales within a short timeframe, their position in revenue production is perceived as something that is merely required as opposed to a position that is vital to the company’s success.
How important is B2B marketing?
B2B’s a different game of the ball. Given that the rules of the game are different here, a particular marketing approach must be extracted. Here are a few reasons why the B2B marketing is so different.
Extended sales cycle:
The selling & procurement process in B2B industry lasts longer (a few months or longer). Therefore the selling of goods and services to prospective B2B clients’ needs specific approaches and actions.
It depends on what stage of lifecycle the prospects are in at the moment. The more advanced a company is, the better it would be for your marketing campaign.
B2B Marketing talks about different buying emotions
Don’t think there’s no place here to buy emotions because you don’t target’ real people.’ Sure, the prospective customers are corporations, not individuals, but they are owned and run by humans.
So you have to hit the emotions and motivators to win your buyers ‘ confidence.
B2B Marketing has fewer research data points available
While doing business in B2C, you don’t have any analysis data points to measure or forecast a product’s performance or failure. Consequently the risk is high.
In order to get into product research and development at a BB company, it needs huge capital. Even then, there is no assurance that the findings will be correct. Very few B2B companies appreciate that luxury.
B2B marketing is important because of complex products and services
B2B products are complex, and the product features are not always easily visible.
B2B marketing must also be complex, subtle and sophisticated in order to make the content compelling and comprehensible to the consumers.
In addition, here you have small customers, not like B2C where the customer size will reach thousands. Therefore it’s very clear that they’re more difficult to locate.
Examples of B2B marketing
There are several different ways to approach B2B marketing, all of which concentrate on leveraging digital platforms to raise sales and drive revenues.
1. Email Marketing
B2B email marketing needs to understand the person who is in a business setting when reviewing the communications and makes decisions under that exceptional situation as appropriate. This is in no way similar to the effect structures that various individuals are thinking about as compelling for B2C marketing.
2. Account-based Marketing (ABM)
Account-based marketing is a highly oriented sales technique in which an individual prospect or client is handled by a marketing team as their own company. Instead of the industry as a whole, the marketing department will develop content, activities and entire campaigns devoted to the individuals associated with that account.
3. Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is a technique that uses multiple types of pull marketing-content marketing, forums, conferences, SEO, social media and more-to build awareness of the brand and attract new customers.
4. SEO
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization,” which is the method of getting traffic on search engines from the “free,” “organic,” “referral” or “social” search results.
5. Content Marketing
Content marketing is a strategic marketing strategy designed to develop and deliver useful, appropriate and reliable content to attract and maintain a clearly identified audience— and ultimately to drive successful customer action.
Content marketing is one of the easiest ways to maintain an interest in existing customers. It not only keeps your company top-of-mind, but it also empowers your purchasers to make better choices about your service or goods. Five forms of content marketing designed for customer retention and recuperation:
- Blogs
- Whitepapers and Ebooks
- Webinars
- Videos
- Social Media
👉 Read our detailed content marketing case study that increased x20 times the organic traffic for one of our customers!
6. Social Media Marketing
Social media is the new B2B billboard, which can support the brand dramatically. But I’ll let you in on a secret before you move into B2B social media marketing: choose your channels carefully, because not all social media platforms are right for every company.
7. PPC Advertising
There are a range of channels the company can effectively advertise on:
- Social Media Ad
- Search Engine Ads (SEM) – Google ads, Bing Ads, etc
- Remarketing
Advertising not only promotes your services-it can also play a significant role in driving downloads of content, improving both your knowledge and exposure.
Nevertheless, it is important to use advertisement types which are better suited to professional services. Facebook, retargeting, and other market-focused ads tend to work better, as they allow you to reach appropriate business customers more directly, leading to more sales, higher click-through levels, and lower download costs.
B2B Marketing Pain Points
Managing Lead Sources
The most widely mentioned challenge among the marketing professionals today is to generate traffic and leads. Top-of-funnel lead sources at many demand organizations include many paid and owned sources which make management a time-consuming job.
Although manual management and calculation of several different lead sources is theoretically feasible individually, it is not practical or effective.
Trying to compare the meetings, webinars, third-party lead gen vendors and call centers inputs manually in a way that leads to a 360-degree view of top-of-funnel results is time-consuming and resource intensive. Adopting technologies that simplify top-of-funnel activities and centralize lead source management will provide an effective output view for marketers.
Lead Quality Issues
This measure of poor data involves problems like:
- Duplicate records
- Invalid email or physical addresses
- Invalid formatting or values
- Missing fields
Scaling Efficiency
When marketers hit their KPIs and prove the ROI of their marketing activities on B2B, more budget can be given. Anyone granted a budget boost can recruit new staff, acquire new technologies or outsource some of their marketing efforts in the coming year.
During periods of rapid growth, the task of scaling productivity while sustaining forward momentum is not special to demanding marketers, but is general.
Technology and processes are the solution for making an ever increasing number of puzzle pieces match.
How to create successful B2B marketing campaigns
Target Audience and Situation
Mapping specific buyer-persons lets you understand better who makes buying decisions and how they make those decisions.
Clear Conversion Goals
When you understand who your potential buyers are, what they think about, and the steps they take along their buying path, it’s a great opportunity to make sense of what actions you expect them to take as a result of consuming your content.
Deliver Unique Value
Bring potential consumers with content to your company site that addresses their most important questions, solves their issues and offers insights into the business they can’t find elsewhere.
Capture Qualified Leads
When customers have advanced further down the sales funnel, gated content such as eBooks and white papers will help B2B lead generation in research-based form.
Brand Messaging
Before you know it yourself, you can’t relay your brand message to the world-that’s just common sense.
The initial step towards contributing to a B2B marketing plan for many B2B firms is to identify and illuminate key messages based on the consumers ‘ brand preferences and need.
Schedule a sales demo/consultation
Assume you have a strong understanding of your general business model with your professional leads and win them over with the unique value you bring to the table.
Final Thoughts
With the marketing world being updated each and every day with new digital/growth hacking/inbound marketing strategies and techniques, your B2B business cannot get away. Prospecting new leads everyday can (and will) increase your sales either short-term (with ads) or long-term (with SEO + Content Marketing).
