Marketing for B2B is a complex and dynamic field that has undergone significant changes in recent years.
With the evolution of technology and buyer behaviour, businesses must adapt their marketing strategies to stay ahead of the competition.
What Is A B2B Marketing Strategy?
B2B marketing strategy is the carefully selected set of techniques a firm uses to reach, nurture, and sell its products and services to businesses in its target audience.
Buyers are often C-suite or director-level professionals at other companies, making B2B marketing different from other kinds of marketing.
One key difference is that when businesses buy from other businesses, the sales cycle tends to be longer—often weeks or months, and sometimes years.
These businesses are trying to solve complex business challenges, and the solutions can be expensive, often requiring a great deal of time and customization to complete.
As a result, many companies approach the selection process with care and deliberation.
The Three-Tiered Funnel
We simplify the concept of B2B marketing by thinking of it as a three-tiered funnel.
At the top tier of the marketing funnel, you have a potential universe of buyers who are generally unaware of your product and service offerings.
B2B marketing activity at this top tier employs techniques that broaden the visibility of your brand and attract the right kind of leads to engage further with your brand.
An example of B2B marketing at the top of the funnel might be having one or more experts from your firm attend, network at, and speak at a top industry conference where your firm’s potential buyers gather.
Another example is submitting a series of articles to an online publication that’s widely read by your target audience.
Engaging Your Potential Buyers
Speaking of engaging your potential buyers, that’s what the middle tier of the B2B marketing funnel is all about! If there is one section of the funnel that is underutilized, it’s this one.
Marketers can be tempted to rush potential buyers into a sales pitch. But not all buyers are ready to make a purchasing decision today—in fact, many will be months or years away.
So the middle of the funnel is where B2B marketers focus on engaging and nurturing their audience over a long period of time.
A common middle-funnel B2B marketing approach is to supply interested parties with insightful and practical educational materials.
Webinars are a great example of middle-of-the-funnel B2B marketing.
The Bottom of the Funnel
Finally, a buyer reaches the bottom of the B2B marketing funnel when they are ready to buy—though not necessarily from you!
More often than not, they are evaluating a variety of options.
Often they raise their hand and indicate that they are ready to speak with a representative from your firm about one or more of your services.
We consider this moment a true B2B marketing lead.
Top 10 B2B Marketing Strategies
B2B marketer needs to consider all three tiers of the funnel, let’s explore the ten essential B2B marketing strategies you can implement to help your firm get ahead of the competition.
Market Research
Research is the bedrock of any modern marketing program.
From marketplace research to brand research, detailed scientifically conducted studies will help you make more informed decisions.
They’ll give you an objective basis for your marketing and provide valuable baselines for measuring your results.
Niche-Driven Strategy
One of the most powerful marketing strategies is specialization and niche targeting.
Our research has repeatedly shown that the fastest-growing firms tend to be specialists in a carefully targeted niche.
Target an area of the industry that you understand thoroughly, a space in which you can become an indisputable expert and leader.
A High-Performance Website
In today’s professional services marketplace, your firm’s website is one of your most crucial assets.
It is much more than a digital billboard or brochure, as some firms believed in the past.
Instead, a successful modern website is the hub of a firm’s online presence and a place where visitors can sample a firm’s expertise before even talking with anyone.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
As we alluded to earlier, your target audience has to be able to find your website for it to be effective.
That’s where search engine optimization plays an important role.
In our studies of the best-performing organizations, most high-growth firms rate SEO as a critical digital marketing technique.
Social Media
If you need any more proof that social media is here to stay in the professional services industry, we’ve got you covered.
Our research has found that over 60% of buyers check out new service providers on social media, making it a more commonly used source of information than formal referrals and recommendations.
Advertising
There are a number of platforms on which your firm can advertise effectively.
LinkedIn, retargeting, and other industry-focused advertising tend to work best because they allow you to target appropriate industry audiences, which leads to more conversions, higher click-through rates, and lower cost per download.
Referral Marketing
Earlier we explained that the nature of professional services referrals has changed—and this has major implications for your B2B marketing strategy.
Our studies of referral marketing strategies in professional services have revealed an important new facet of the practice: over 81.5% of providers have received a referral from someone who wasn’t a client.
Marketing Automation, CRM, and Lead Nurturing
Marketing automation replaces high-touch, repetitive manual processes with automated ones enabled by technology solutions.
It brings much or all of your online marketing together in one centralized system for creating, managing, and measuring programs and campaigns.
Testing and Optimization
We started with research, but that’s only the beginning of the science of modern marketing strategy.
Testing and optimization allow you to monitor and refine your marketing efforts—so you can make in-flight decisions based on hard data rather than intuition.
Analytics and Reporting
No two B2B marketing strategies are the same, nor should they be.
Some resonate with your audience better than others.
To improve your marketing program over time, you need to monitor the right metrics, analyze what you find, and make sure the right people see these insights.
(Tip: Have the right suite of tools in place to collect accurate data on all your marketing and business development activities.)
Be bold and try new strategies!
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