B2B Marketing in 2021 — The Ultimate Guide

What Is B2B Marketing?

Business to Business marketing refers to the marketing of products/services to other businesses and organizations via various marketing channels.

Who is B2B Marketing For?

Any Business that sells products or services to other Business. This can come in several forms like software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscriptions, hardware solutions, security solutions, tools, accessories, office supplies, and etc…,

Difference between B2B Marketing vs B2C Marketing;

In B2C marketing the purchase decision was made by just an individual wherein B2B marketing the purchase decision was made by multiple individuals/stakeholders.

Marketing to individual consumers is very different from marketing to business. That’s why we need to follow a different marketing method to attract B2B prospects.

B2B Marketing;

B2B Marketing targets the pain points, interests and needs of individuals who are making purchase decisions on behalf of their organization, that’s why an organization becomes the customer not the individual who made the purchase on behalf of the company.

An example of B2B company:

B2C Marketing;

B2C Marketing target the pain points, interests, and needs of individual consumers who are making purchase decisions on behalf of themselves, that’s why an individual becomes the customer.

An example of B2C company:

Top 9 effective ways to promote your B2B Business

1. Email Marketing
2. Social Media Marketing
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
4. Paid Search Advertising
5. Pay Per Click Advertising
6. Blogs
7. Events and Trade Shows
8. Content Marketing
9. Webinars

B2B Email Marketing;

Email marketing is an effective way to promote your content, nurture your leads, and progress them down the marketing funnel.

According to a survey, 84% of B2B companies use email marketing as a part of their content marketing program, and 40% of B2B marketers say email marketing is the most critical method to their content marketing success.

B2B Social Media Marketing;

Social Media Marketing is the one of the best ways to reach wider audience across various locations. Social Media platforms allow you to reach, and engage prospects where they’re active.

B2B buyers actively use these channels to research potential vendors for purchase decisions. Social Media marketing can be done by organic as well as through paid advertising.

LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are the three most used social media channels by B2B marketers.

B2B Search Engine Optimization (SEO);

SEO is a digital marketing strategy designed to help your company website pages rank higher in search engines, like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and etc.., It is an organic way to drive traffic to your company website.

B2B Paid Search Advertising;

Paid search advertising is one of the best ways to target potential customers who are actively searching for a product or service like yours via different search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

B2B Pay Per Click Advertising;

Pay Per Click is an online advertising model in which advertisers pay each time a prospect clicks on one of their online advertisements via different search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and etc…,

B2B Blogs;

Every business needs a blog page where you can create various blogs relevant to your business which can help to educate your target prospects and store all the contents you create for your website visitors to read and subscribe to your email newsletters.

B2B Trade Shows and Conferences;

Conferences and Trade Shows are events collectively organized by several companies or industrial associations. Companies from a specific industry come together to display the services, and products they offer to their potential prospects.

B2B Content Marketing;

According to a survey, 92% of marketers said their organizations values content as a critical business asset. Content marketing includes any digital marketing effort that uses content assets like (blog posts, info graphics, e-Books, videos, etc) to create brand awareness or drive clicks, leads or sales.

B2B Webinars;

B2B webinars provides companies an opportunity to target and educate the target prospects on the benefits, and advantages of their specific product or service offerings.

Webinars help to connect with a broader audience, in a single session it allows you to connect with as many prospects as possible from several locations.

Webinars provides an opportunity to have a dialogue with interested participants where the prospects can raise their business paints points, and the webinar organizer can respond to how to overcome those challenges.

According to Demand Gen research, the five most important factors for B2B buyers evaluating solutions providers were:

• Features or functionalities (73%)
• Pricing (72%),
• Reviews (59%),
• Deployment time or ease of use (56%),
• And the product or service provider’s ability to solve a pain point (47%)

Strategies for B2B Marketing

Focusing on your Target Audience is the best strategy to be successful in B2B marketing.

1. Identify your target accounts;

Identify your target accounts by using various parameters. For instance, define the industry, company size, location, annual revenue, IT budget etc.,

For example, let’s say a company selling Payment Gateway Software to Banking industry located in California, US, with an annual revenue of above 5million dollar with employee size of 20.

Now the marketer needs to create the target accounts according to the above-mentioned criteria. The target account list can be created with the help of various database marketing tools available in the market like DiscoverOrg, Reinking, ZoomInfo, Lead411, Dun and Bradstreet, etc…,

2. Define your target persona’s;

After creating the target account list based on choosing which industry you need to target, location, company size and annual revenue. Now you need to define the right set of contacts (Persona’s / Decision makers) to reach out to.

For example, let’s say a company selling Human Resource Software is identifying key decision-making roles within the select accounts. The list of key target persona’s (decision makers) might include the HR Head, Talent acquisition managers, CIO, and CTO.

The target account and target persona’s list can be created with the help of various database marketing tools available in the market like DiscoverOrg, Reinking, ZoomInfo, Lead411, Dun and Bradstreet, etc…,

3.Engage with personalized/targeted campaigns;

After identifying the target accounts and target persona’s(contacts), design and run coordinated and personalized campaigns to your target accounts. Personalized campaigns will increase your response rate.

Originally published at http://digitalthoughtz.com on March 12, 2021.