What is a B2B Marketing Strategy and How to develop it?

When it comes to developing an efficient marketing strategy, businesses and marketers have a lot to balance, especially in the face of the ongoing demands of creativity, limited budgets, and channel marketing decisions.

The most significant deciding factor is your audience, also known as the buyer persona. In the absence of adequately targeting one’s audience, business promotions are more likely to crash – no matter how good they are.

Depending on the nature of a business, some companies serve individuals. In contrast, others help businesses, so the basic variation lies between an individual consumer and business entities when it comes to the audience.

That said, marketing to individual consumers is very different from marketing to businesses, which is why an entirely different marketing method that is solely for businesses exists. The marketing strategy is known as the B2B marketing strategy.  

The basic difference between B2B and B2C marketing

Before we explore the question of what is a B2B marketing strategy and your options for developing one, we have to understand the basic difference between B2B and B2C marketing. B2B marketing stands for any marketing strategy that is intended for a business.

Source: thebalancesmb.com

B2B marketing strategies are used by companies that sell their products or services to other businesses. The primary purpose of B2B marketing is to introduce your brand to other businesses and convince them to become your customers.

B2C marketing, on the other hand, takes place between a business and a customer. The primary difference between B2B and B2C marketing lies in the difference in the buying persona, marketing strategies, application, and communication.

While B2B marketing focuses on the needs and interests of individual consumers who are making potential purchases on behalf of their business organization; thus, the business organization becomes the customer.

On the other hand, B2C marketing focuses on the needs and interests of consumers who make the potential purchases for themselves; thus, the “individual” becomes the customer.

Source: differencebetween.net

What is a B2B marketing strategy? 

Now that we have established the difference between B2B and B2C marketing, we can proceed to analyze what is a b2b marketing strategy. A good B2B marketing strategy will enable you to get more leads and appointments consistently and steadily.

A B2B marketing strategy provides a layout of how your business plans to boost brand awareness about your products and services amongst your potential buyers. Your marketing strategy includes identifying potential marketing tools and channels that you can use to get from one potential buyer to another.

The question about what is a B2B marketing strategy also includes the resources and framework that will allow you to trace the most productive market segment and the right marketing channels to raise brand awareness and generate leads with the help of successful b2b marketing strategies. 

7 B2B Marketing Strategies for B2B Businesses 

Here is exactly what you need to prioritize in your B2B marketing plan:

Paid vs. Organic B2B Strategy

The question about what is a B2B marketing strategy essentially revolves around where your business leads are coming from when it comes to generating them for your business. Now, the crucial thing here is that the different traffic sources have different strategies behind them.

Source: searchengineland.com

Essentially, some business platforms will be better for organically lead gen, and some business platforms will be a better choice for paid lead generation. Facebook and LinkedIn are two of the best examples – the key here is to really understand that different traffic sources incorporate different strategies when it comes to acquiring leads.

Some traffic sources are simply better for running paid ads, and some are better for running organic and regular content marketing. Paid traffic simply means running ads, and organic traffic means creating content and not running ads.  

Coming to the question of how to create a B2B marketing strategy, the thing is that none of these strategies is better than the other, but it is important to differentiate both B2B marketing strategies and not try running a paid strategy on an organic platform and vice versa.

That said, when it comes to developing B2B leads, there are two big players in the space where you will want to run either an organic strategy or a paid strategy – Facebook and LinkedIn.

Source:  hubspot.com

Build Your Brand First

Brand-building is one of the most powerful ways to market your business and acquire long-term growth. The B2B institute of LinkedIn has claimed the same – building a strong brand is proven to be more efficient than short-term marketing in the long run.

Source: venngage.com

According to LinkedIn, only 4% of B2B marketers calculate the impact of their marketing inputs beyond six months. And you might have guessed already that it takes more than six months to build a brand.

This aspect indicates that by taking a long-term approach and investing in your brand, you will be in a better position than more than 90% of your competitors because they are relying on short-term marketing tactics, i.e., quick-hit Facebook ads that are ideally used as a shotgun approach.

Some of the easiest ways to build a brand include the following:

• Make Videos/ Publish YouTube Videos
• Publish Blogs
• Create value-driven and informative social media posts
• Record Podcasts

B2B Video Marketing Strategy

One emerging B2B marketing trend is the use of video. You can see grand companies, such as Adobe, using vloggers to market their business.

Source: biteable.com

Now, if you look at the time spent on each social media platform, you will see that YouTube is killing everyone. If you thought that TikTok was hot, you might consider that YouTube is evidently crushing it. Do you talk about Instagram? No, YouTube is crushing that one too.

Question – why is YouTube crashing everyone? The answer is as simple as this – people love video content. Video provided people the opportunity to move from the channels that they have on their televisions – to building their own channels on YouTube.

And even though you are B2B, you can do this exactly as well. In fact, video is one of the best B2B product marketing strategy. 

Source: rhenwilson.com

Here is the thing about B2B video marketing, most B2B companies either do something outstanding, but they don’t realize it as it seems so normal to them. Or, there is a chance that B2B companies enable something that is really cool, which can be shown to people.

When it comes to video content, the kind of content that gets viral and boosts ROI, you might want to keep it sweet and short. While creating a short and sweet video, make sure to cover all essentials and benefits of your services/ products.

The right video can lead to direct conversions – it has been found that more than 70% of people prefer watching videos to learn about new products and services and make their buying decisions based on what they see. This makes video a must-have B2B marketing strategy and resolves much of what is a B2B marketing strategy. 

Here are some ways your B2B business brand can benefit from video content:

• Boost the retention rate of your target audience.
• Access clients at different spots of your B2B Sales cycle.
• Boost customer engagement.
• Support other marketing strategies, such as SEO, social media, and blogging.
• Make effective remarketing campaigns.

Source: hubspot.com 

B2B SEO Marketing Strategy 

Think about the following:

How would you find businesses that offer the very same services and products you provide?

There is a great chance that you will start your search on search engines – whether by using Google, Yahoo, or other search engines. All you need to do is to be there when people are looking for the services and products provided by your business that can send your business to unimaginable heights.

Can you think of other traffic sources that can deliver in-market traffic? In other words, can people look for your solutions completely free?

SEO is the single most effective marketing channel when it comes to B2B businesses and marketing strategy for B2B business. There is nothing better than being the first search result that is searched hundreds and thousands of times monthly.

The best thing is that this traffic doesn’t stop – it keeps coming to you every day, week, and month after month – at no expense to you at all. So, if you were to design your B2B marketing strategy and ponder about what is a B2B marketing strategy, the very next thing you should be writing down is SEO, which is also one of the best B2B digital marketing campaigns.

All you need to do is to find high-traffic keywords and strategically place them on your website. Once you have optimized your website correctly to meet the best search engine practices, if you do this and generate more exposure to your website over time, then you will soon find your business climbing up the SERPs and getting free traffic and leads.

B2B Email Marketing Strategy

Email marketing is something that is mostly completely written off by B2B businesses because they think that they are not some big business like Amazon and don’t need to send out emails to their customers. Now, this is a terrible misconception that most B2B businesses make.

Source: oberlo.com

Every B2B business should be using email marketing – now, when we find an email marketing client, we find loads of low-hanging fruit. Initially, the first thing anyone does is to have a look at the emails that are sent.

Often, the emails are just kind of generic broadcast stuff that nobody cares about. The much better take with your email marketing is to segment your audience into people who have bought from you, people who have bought particular products or services from you, and then you can tailor the stuff they are getting.

When it comes to a B2B marketing strategy, you can build automation for people who have purchased something in the past to remind them when it is time to purchase and to leave a review. You can also build automation based on particular articles that people have visited.

Simply put, by taking a mature approach to email marketing, you can make the best of it, and establish an exceptional B2B inbound marketing strategy. There are loads of opportunities in email marketing, so you might want to invest your attention there.

Source: getanewsletter.com

B2B Social Media Marketing Strategy

According to research by IDC, nearly 85% of C-level and VP-level buyers use social media for making buying decisions. People are using social media more than ever before, which is why the big company that you are trying to sell to will be scrolling their social media every day.

If the companies that you want to do business with are on social media, you should be on social media to have a connection with your audience.

You might think of the B2B buyer as someone who is kind of disconnected from what they are buying as they are doing this as part of their work and don’t care in real life – the truth, however, is that B2B buyers have a greater emotional connection with their potential vendors than B2C customers.

B2B Content Marketing Strategy

Now, for B2B businesses, content marketing is not king. Still, it is imperative – speaking of which, the particular part of content marketing that is important for B2B marketing revolves around informative, knowledge-based content and blogs.

You will often target informational terms by targeting buyers who need to go through an education process before they hit the purchase button. This aspect makes your blog or knowledge base really important.

Source: optinmonster.com

Content marketing is one of the most creative B2B marketing campaigns that you can take to all different levels. 

So, when it comes to what is a B2B marketing strategy, it includes the fact of comprehending the question that your customers might have prior to the purchase, and providing information that helps to answer those questions is a crucial part of the B2B content marketing strategy.

One classic example of B2B content marketing strategy is Shopify. Let’s look at the website of Shopify. We see that they have so much going on – they are teaching people how to build a business and teaching people about e-commerce, and since Shopify is an e-commerce platform, their website has content about how to use Shopify.

But, they (Shopify) also have stuff about how to build a bigger business – and if you look at it closely, you truly understand what they are doing here. They are trying to attract people who are in the process of setting up a business.

This way, Shopify is trying to track inspiring entrepreneurs and get them on their site because if they can do that, then when they (inspiring entrepreneurs) come to choose an e-commerce platform, they are more likely to choose Shopify, which makes content marketing one of the exceptional B2B marketing strategies for startups.

Now that you have a clear idea, you know that you can do exactly this yourself. You don’t necessarily have to get loads of social media celebrities in your website content space and compile free courses that people can sign up for.

Your focus should be more on understanding what’s going on in your customer’s mind. Whether it is specifically about the products you sell or whether it is about the step before that, or even the step after that – how can you provide information?

How can you collect the expertise you have inside your business and that you have throughout your customer base and provide this information to attract more customers onto your business website – whether they are ready to buy or not.

So, for the question of what is a B2B marketing strategy, you might want to think about what people are into and what kind of information you can give them. And this is a pure B2C marketing strategy – you see this all day from massive e-commerce brands – but this is something that works exceptionally well for B2B businesses. That said, B2B content strategy is one of the best b2b digital marketing campaigns.

Some Myths Debunked About B2B Marketing

B2B Marketing is Boring

Referring to the question of what is a B2B marketing strategy, many people think of it as boring. Just because your competitors are boring, it doesn’t mean that you have to be boring as well. A lot of the things that go on in a market are because people copy each other – you see one business doing things one way, and they grow – everyone else copies them.

This kind of perpetual cycle exists in many cases – boring marketing that is copied repeatedly. The thing is that as a b2b marketer, you don’t have to be boring. Typically, people assume that just because other niche competitors are playing it safe, they also have to.

You Are Selling to a Business

Another mindset hack about b2b marketing is that you are never selling to a business – rather, you are selling to a person. Sometimes, people buy on behalf of themselves or their company. Sometimes, people are acting as a B2C target and sometimes as a B2B target.

The thing is that they are the same people. When it comes to how to do b2b marketing strategies, we are tapping into what makes people buy and what attracts them to certain businesses. So, while there are some major differences between B2B and B2C sales cycles, actually, how we market to people doesn’t have to be as different as most B2B businesses think.

Most of the difference with B2B marketing is because a smaller target audience is targeted. There are much more specific messages to be delivered because the work is offered to a longer sales cycle.

The Takeaway

No B2B marketing strategy will be effective until you know your buying persona, and no buying persona is as volatile as business customers. 

While developing the best marketing strategy, you should keep in mind how other businesses can benefit from your business and how you can relay your successful B2B marketing strategies to reach your target audience.

Eventually, if you build your brand with the right audience, then they will eventually determine that they need the exact products and services that you offered.