A Complete Guide on B2B Marketing: Definition, Key Strategies, Examples, and Trends

If your business sells services or products to other organizations instead of end users, you will need to use specific business-to-business marketing strategies and tactics. B2B marketing is designed to generate the right leads and inform business decision-makers to grow your conversions and sales.

What is B2B marketing?

This acronym is short for business-to-business marketing, which is when your company sells products or services to other businesses instead of individuals. B2B marketing strategies are designed to attract other organizations. An example of B2B marketing would be Salesforce promoting its customer relationship management (CRM) software to other businesses through email marketing campaigns.

Why is B2B marketing important?

Organizations have different needs and pain points than the average consumer, and B2B products and services are designed to support business operations, increase efficiency, or help companies grow. B2B marketing helps other businesses become aware of your solutions. It also showcases your product’s value to win over more customers. For instance, a marketing company may use B2B content marketing strategies to find new clients or promote a new social media marketing service.

The Difference Between B2B and B2C Marketing

The main difference between B2B marketing and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing is who your business approaches. Instead of focusing on individual end users of your product or service, your marketing strategies center around organizations and their decision-makers. These businesses are often focused on improving their operational efficiency, return on investment (ROI), growing their sales, or overall performance.

Understanding the B2B Marketing Process

Though you’re dealing with other companies and not individual consumers, B2B businesses must still be aware of the buyer’s journey and how organizations will move through the sales funnel. Developing successful B2B marketing strategies requires understanding all four stages of this journey: awareness, consideration, decision, and retention.

The awareness stage is when your customer, in this case another business, recognizes they have a specific problem they need help solving. At this point, they’ll start researching their issue to better understand it and find possible solutions. This stage is at the top of your sales funnel. The next stage, consideration, occurs in the middle of your funnel as customers find and compare top solutions, evaluating them against their needs.

Customers who make a purchase do so in the decision stage, where they consider factors like their budget and your product’s value. Even after their purchase, your marketing efforts won’t end. The retention stage focuses on keeping paying customers engaged and loyal to your brand. Both the decision and retention stages occur at the bottom of your sales funnel. By understanding each stage, you can develop B2B marketing strategies that effectively target each one, helping you boost conversions with every step.

8 Key B2B Marketing Strategies and Tactics

To achieve the best results in your B2B marketing campaigns, you’ll want to follow proven tactics. Here are a few B2B marketing strategies to consider:

Define Your Target Market and Target Audience

Identifying your target market and audience isn’t just for B2C marketing. B2B businesses rely on firmographic data to learn more about their target market and businesses. This data includes the size of their company, their industry, where they’re located, annual revenue, and more. And though your customers are companies, you’re still selling to decision-making employees. That means using demographic, behavioral, or psychographic data to better understand them. Identifying your target market and audience allows you to develop more relevant and effective marketing strategies based on those most likely to become customers.

Set Marketing Goals

Before you develop a new SEO or social media campaign, your B2B company needs to know the marketing objectives you want to reach. If you want to increase lead generation, for example, having a specific, measurable goal can help plan your campaign and measure its performance.

Define Your Marketing Mix (4 P’s of Marketing)

To tailor your B2B marketing tactics and strategies, you first need to identify your four P’s of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. Defining what you’re selling, its cost, where you’re selling it, and how your customers will learn about it are crucial for effective B2B marketing campaigns.

Conduct a Competitive Analysis

Understanding what other B2B companies are in the market and who your top competitors are can help you develop your own marketing strategies. Competitive analysis allows your business to learn what platforms your competitors are on or use for marketing purposes so you can target your efforts there, too. It also provides a deeper understanding of their products or services, which can help you develop a strong value proposition and marketing plan for your own offerings.

Identify Your Brand’s Position and Write a Positioning Statement

Defining your brand identity helps you position your B2B company in a way that sets it apart from the rest of the market. Developing a position statement—where you describe your product, target market, and how it meets specific needs—helps align your marketing strategies with your value proposition and brand.

Determine Which Channels To Activate

Once you know who your target audience is and where they spend their time, you can determine which marketing channels you want to use—social media platforms, email, SMS marketing, etc. Regardless of your decision, you’ll want to track your performance to find the most effective strategies or channels for your B2B business.

Create Your Assets

After selecting your B2B marketing channels, your business needs to create campaigns for each one. Remember to follow best practices for each channel, as what works on one platform may not perform well on another. You’ll also want to incorporate customer data and other insights to help you target and personalize your campaigns more effectively.

Measure Results and Optimize Efforts

Use data to better understand your B2B marketing campaigns after the fact. Learning which campaigns were most successful and where you fell short of your goals can help guide future marketing efforts that drive ROI and B2B sales.

9 B2B Marketing Types and Examples

Here are some common types of B2B marketing channels to consider for your campaigns:

B2B Digital Marketing

This type of B2B marketing takes an omnichannel approach, promoting your business through multiple digital channels, including social media platforms, content on your website, and search engine optimization strategies, to name a few. A B2B digital marketing strategy that aligns your messaging across your channels is more effective at meeting and engaging with your target audience where they’re already active.

B2B Content Marketing

Shareable and downloadable long-form content like blog posts, whitepapers, podcasts, or case studies can help pique interest in your products or services, better inform your potential B2B customers, and build trust with decision-makers. For a B2B audience, focus on educational content such as product guides or content that shows off your expertise—like the latest industry trends or thought leadership pieces.

B2B Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to nurture and build relationships with your B2B leads. You’ll first want to build a lead capture form or page to gain subscribers, then segment them based on data, such as business size, industry, or preferences. That way, you can tailor your email marketing campaigns to better suit their needs and keep them engaged. You can use emails to help B2B customers learn more about your products, introduce new services, or even send exclusive offers.

B2B Social Media Marketing

Use research and competitive analysis to determine which social media platforms your target audience most frequently visits. From there, set up an account and develop channel-specific marketing campaigns. For example, longer thought leadership posts work best on LinkedIn, but you’ll need to focus on shorter content for X (formerly Twitter).

B2B Paid Search

Also known as pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, this method targets B2B customers based on their search intent. You’ll want to include keywords that your customers use when searching for solutions, so your ad appears on the search engine results page (SERP).

Marketing Automation

Pairing automation tools with your B2B marketing efforts helps streamline your workflows and maximize campaign performance. Automation tools, such as Podium, can help generate and capture lead data, segment your audience, or tailor marketing communications to potential buyers.

Account Based Marketing (ABM)

In this type of B2B marketing, you’ll identify and target specific high-value business accounts and their contacts by using data to determine which companies will most likely make a purchase. That way, you can create more personalized content and align your marketing and sales strategies with the right stakeholders.

B2B SEO

B2B search engine optimization helps your target audience find your content on the web by utilizing keywords and search intent your potential buyers are using to find solutions. A strong and effective SEO strategy can improve your website’s ranking, increasing brand awareness and conversions.

Referrals

Sometimes, the best B2B strategy comes from your existing customers. Consider collecting testimonials from satisfied customers who can explain how your product or service helped them. Or, offer perks to customers who refer others to your business.

5 B2B Marketing Best Practices

To get more leads and a higher ROI from your B2B marketing campaigns, follow the best practices below.

Start With a Plan

Successful B2B marketing campaigns have one thing in common: a plan. Start by determining your goals for the campaign and which key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure. Then, research your target audience to decide which marketing channels to use and how to best tailor your messaging.

Understand Your Audience

The more you know about your target audience, the more effective your B2B marketing campaigns will be. B2B customers tend to have more specific needs or challenges than B2C customers, and understanding their key issues by developing a buyer’s persona will help you create more relevant and successful marketing campaigns.

Leverage Data and Analytics

Use data to segment your potential customers and tailor your B2B marketing efforts to address their specific needs and pain points. Analytics tools can also help you evaluate your campaign performance and generate insights to improve your marketing strategies.

Personalize Your Approach

B2B buyers don’t want to feel like you’re selling to them. Instead, they want to feel like you’re helping them find a solution to the challenge they’re facing. Taking a personalized approach shows you understand their frustrations and want to be a partner that helps them succeed instead of just another sale.

Measure and Continuously Optimize

Measuring the outcomes of your B2B marketing campaigns helps you learn which strategies are working well and what needs adjusting. Calculate and evaluate metrics such as conversion rate, ROI, and engagement to measure campaign performance and optimize future efforts.

5 Major B2B Marketing Trends and Key Insights

Technology is constantly changing the way businesses operate, including B2B marketing efforts. Here are five trends to consider using in your B2B marketing strategies:

B2B Marketers are Prioritizing Revenue and Sales

B2B marketers continue to see increasing sales and ROI as the top goals of their campaigns. This trend may mean you need to try new strategies like ABM or remarketing to existing customers to grow your sales rather than cold outreach.

B2B Marketers are Leveraging AI for Various Marketing Functions

Artificial intelligence (AI) is helping B2B marketers handle tasks more efficiently. AI can help you gather lead information, segment your audience, and even generate marketing content. It’s great for handling tedious, time-consuming tasks so your marketing team can focus on more critical, revenue-generating aspects.

Decrease in Spend in Traditional Marketing

B2B companies are changing where they invest their marketing spend from traditional methods, such as direct mail or trade magazines, to digital marketing channels like SEO, social media, and email marketing.

Data Privacy Is a Top Challenge for B2B Marketers

The growth of data privacy laws like GDPR and ongoing industry regulations make it harder for B2B marketers to access critical data for strategies and campaigns. They may lack personal information about key decision-makers or not fully understand their potential customers’ challenges.

Video Content Is Becoming Increasingly Popular for B2B Marketers

Video content isn’t just for B2C marketing; more and more B2B brands are incorporating video into their marketing strategy. Take Samsung, for example, which used video ads to attract new business customers and achieved a 77% video completion rate.

Develop Strong B2B Marketing Strategies With Podium

Creating effective B2B marketing strategies is easy when you partner with Podium. Our AI Employee helps you capture more leads and develop personalized, data-driven campaigns that result in up to 30% more sales. Watch a demo to see how Podium can help improve your B2B marketing.