Marketing Strategy for B2B

Today’s B2B marketing landscape looks nothing like what it used to, even a couple of years back. The Fourth Industrial Revolution has changed the way customers think and shop. Naturally, B2B business owners must switch their marketing strategies accordingly. If you’re treating your marketing and sales strategies like it’s 1999, it’s high time you align them to the changing market scenario. And the good news is, you can do so in three simple steps, as discussed below.

1. It All Starts with Preparation

Too many business owners start with creating a business plan. But the thing is, developing a plan without first preparing for the market is equivalent to bungee jumping without measuring the rope — by the time you realize where the problem lies, it may be too late.

The first thing you need to do is market research and analysis. Gather insights about your target audience, have a solid marketing framework to operate within, understand the three core elements of a sales-driving plan (demand generation, lead generation, and retention or recovery), and then move forward.

The modern B2B buyer’s journey is not as straightforward as it was — from the awareness to the purchase stage are involved several loops and turns like research and discovery loop, loyalty loop, etc. To cater to this multi-person online journey, business owners need to undertake six tasks –

• Identifying the problem
• Exploring solutions
• Building requirements
• Selecting suppliers
• Validation
• Creating a consensus

As a result, to survive the cut-throat competition in the digital space, adopt these 10 tried-and-tested B2B marketing strategies –

• Build a stellar website with a solid UI/UX
• Market yourself heavily across social media platforms
• Leverage the power of video content
• Don’t leave thought leadership content out of the mix
• Ensure your content is SEO-optimized
• Make the most of Google PPC ads
• Invite potential leads to virtual events
• Build solid partnerships
• Remarket whenever you can
• Automate marketing processes wherever possible

All these strategies, more or less, cover the entire buyer’s cycle, thus helping you prepare thoroughly for the next step

2. Then Moves on to Planning

Once you have understood your marketing landscape, have a proper marketing framework in place, and know the vital elements of a sales-driving plan, the next step is to create a solid business plan. This involves knowing exactly which marketing channels to leverage for successful demand generation, lead generation, and customer retention or recovery. The plan must also ensure that your B2B website is fast, secure, professionally designed, actionable, and mobile-friendly.

Now, when it comes to demand generation, you can use digital strategies such as display advertising, video marketing, content marketing, social media ads and marketing, as well as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

For successful lead generation, you can leverage marketing strategies such as PPC search ads, virtual events, remarketing, content marketing, testimonials and partnerships, and SEO. What you need to remember is that the type of content will differ in each of the stages, and a solid demand generation strategy calls for marketing automation software.

Finally, when it comes to customer retention or recovery, strategies that work include abandoned cart emails, post-purchase emails, use Gamification in your emails to make them more interactive, and improvise on your customer service, among others.

Depending upon your business growth and goals, you will need to develop a plan that includes a mix of the strategies mentioned above for each stage of the sales funnel.

3. And Finally Comes to Execution

Once you have covered the first twos steps, the final one is to execute your B2B marketing plan correctly. A misstep here could hamper progress. To execute your business plan perfectly, take the following five steps –

• Understand your target audience’s general demographics, firmographics, pain points, preferred channels of communication, and collate a marketing or contact database that brings all information in a single place.
• Identify your weak areas using digital competitive analysis. For instance — This could include website evaluation, SEO evaluation, market content assessment, evaluation of the value proposition of your product or service, online advertising evaluation, and customer satisfaction assessment.
• Then, take a look at your digital competitive analysis and identify what goals you’re setting out to achieve — where is the need to outrun competitors, more leads? Better branding?
• Next, based on your goals, choose relevant B2B marketing strategies. For instance — If more leads are your goal, then your primary focus should be to invest in lead generation strategies, and so on.
• Finally, use data analytics and set KPIs to track the performance of your campaigns, test new strategies, tweak strategies based on the results, and keep repeating the process to maintain business growth.

If you follow the three above-mentioned steps meticulously, you should be able to not just survive but thrive in the current dynamic B2B landscape. It’s all going digital, more than ever, and now is the time to pause, prepare, plan, and execute well!