What Is a B2B Marketing Strategy?
A marketing strategy outlines how you intend to increase consumer awareness of your brand, your goods, and your services. It entails deciding on the resources you'll need to make that journey as well as the tools and channels you'll utilize to get from one to the other. In this manual, I'll provide you access to a tried-and-true B2B marketing strategy framework that will enable you to pinpoint the most lucrative market niches, your ideal clientele, and the most effective lead generation channels.
What Are the Main B2B Marketing Channels?
Let’s start by looking at some of those marketing channels and strategies, and then dive into how you create your strategy the right way.
- Website
- B2B Content marketing
- B2B Email marketing
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Social media marketing
- Pay-per-click pick (PPC) B2B advertising
- Video Marketing
- Field Marketing
- DRI (Directly Responsible Individual)
- Deadline
- Budget
- Expected outcome
- Execution, and analysis
A successful website is essential to effective marketing. More than half of all customers will visit your website and form an opinion of your business based on what they discover there. Your website must therefore be quick, safe, and pleasant to the eye. Since mobile devices now account for more than half of all visits, they must work correctly on mobile (and even B2B companies still get a significant proportion of traffic that way). Finally, your website must be more than just a virtual business card. It must point to the top of your marketing funnel, collecting user information and guiding users toward potential purchases.
High-quality content is increasingly being used as the main means of showcasing expertise. Businesses publish blogs, white papers, original research, and a variety of other types of writing on their websites and in other places. As search engines become more adept at recognizing the high-quality content that readers want to read, it is becoming increasingly important to do it well. It is a key component of collateral in many of the other forms of marketing mentioned on this list.
In the face of newer and sexier technologies, email marketing appeared as though it might disappear, but that hasn't been the case thus far. Instead, gathering email addresses to use in creating recurring newsletters and sending out notifications has grown in importance as a feature of other marketing channels. For marketers, having a strong email list is just as crucial as ever.
The significance of organic search is another item that won't change. Although the quality of the traffic can't always be assured, this is usually going to be the channel that sends the most people to your products. You're losing a lot of business if you're not set up to benefit from the searches of your potential customers.
Social media is being used for marketing more and more, and the traffic it generates is unique in that it's more likely to be people who are interested in meeting you for the first time. Additionally, social media is a terrific way to enhance and expand the business while receiving external validation. LinkedIn is the social platform that must be used for B2B marketing. Depending on the industry you're in, other sites might or might not suit your needs, but LinkedIn is essential.
Targeting your customers with a mix of organic and paid traffic is becoming more and more important on social media and search. Knowing more about your audience makes it simpler to spot those who are close to engaging and use specific language to gently push them with suggestive advertising.
The popularity of video content is skyrocketing, and professional-focused B2B video is becoming increasingly important. The other channels mentioned above are increasingly becoming venues for video content in the same way that they are for written content, and it is becoming an increasingly important component of the mix.
There was no evidence, before the pandemic, that speaking at conferences and taking positions had lost any of its effectiveness as a marketing strategy. After numerous lockdowns, it is yet to be seen how behaviors will change, but it appears likely that the impact of the events will be largely unaffected.
Identify goals, channels, and resources to support your B2B marketing strategy
Having been through that research process, you now understand what you have to market, and where you can win over your competitors. So, where to next?
Set clear goals you want to achieve
You know which market segments you want to focus on, and what you have to say to them, because of the earlier analysis. Based on that analysis of yourself and your competitors, you now need to calculate where you think you can reasonably get to. Bearing in mind that everyone else is trying to grow their market share too, what do you think is a reasonable staging post? Set milestones for success. What are the stages you need to reach each particular stage to succeed in your marketing plan?
Identify the resources to commit
The resources you commit to your marketing plan should depend on how successful you think you can practically be. The process is likely to see a lot of back and forth as you identify the ROI you expect to achieve. You should take all the marketing actions with the highest ROI first until you hit the point where the cost of acquiring the next customer is prohibitive. In practice, these budgets are likely to have more to do with existing investment than anything else. Scaling up or scaling back too rapidly is unlikely to lead to success, simply because there are significant costs associated with rapid change.
Identify the marketing channels
Now we come full circle and return to the concepts we discussed right at the start of the piece. It’s at this point, having identified which media your ideal customer profile is active on, and the tools which are going to have the most success at reaching out to your ICP, that you decide on the channels you’re going to use. In all likelihood, you’ll want to use all of them to some extent. Different channels are good for different things. But a strategy specifically involves identifying which things you’ll prioritize and which things you won’t do. A strategy that does not involve making choices is just a wish list. So a key thing is to identify which channels you think will be most effective. And not just which channels you will use, but how you will use them. Your strategy as a whole and each subsidiary element of your marketing strategy should also have these attached to it:
