What is B2B Marketing: How to Use it to Turbocharge Your Business Growth

Our daily lives wouldn’t exist if B2B companies and the supply chain didn’t exist!

B2B companies provide goods and services to other businesses, organizations, and charities.

Businesses in the business-to-business sector face unique B2B marketing challenges, including managing cash flow and maintaining customer loyalty.

Therefore, optimizing their website and reaching decision-makers through lead generation is crucial to maximizing profits and increasing the market share of their businesses.

This article will benefit business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs seeking a better understanding of the B2B business model.

What is a B2B Business

B2B is a business model where companies offer products and services to other companies and organizations.

B2B stands for “Business to Business.” Businesses that sell to other businesses include software as a service (SaaS), marketing companies, and companies that manufacture and sell different goods.

There is a high possibility that your firm will need to purchase products or services in the life cycle of your business from a B2B company, No matter what organization you work in or for.

Our goal at Brandloom is to explore the B2B business model efficiently. Also, help B2B companies maximize their market share and profits.

What is B2B Marketing?

B2B (business-to-business) marketing is a specific marketing strategy or content designed for businesses or organizations.

Companies that focus on selling to other firms or organizations (e.g., vs. consumers) usually utilize B2B marketing strategies.

B2B marketing is designed to increase awareness of your brand name and convert more prospects into customers.

Our marketing efforts at brandloom are all focused on B2B Marketing. Since our customers are other businesses, not individuals, our marketing efforts can be considered B2B.

B2B vs. B2C Marketing

A B2B marketing strategy targets the needs, interests, and challenges of individuals who purchase on behalf of or for their firms or organization (rather than for themselves). Thus making the organization the customer.

A B2C marketing strategy centered around the needs, interests, and challenges of individuals/ decision makers making a purchase decision for themselves.

Where do B2B companies stand in the supply chain?

Understanding what B2B companies contribute to the supply chain requires understanding the three economic sectors: primary, secondary, and tertiary.

In the primary market: All transactions are B2B. Oil companies and farmers are primary-sector companies responsible for extracting and producing raw materials.

A secondary market: Almost exclusively involves business-to-business transactions.

Manufacturers and assemblers on the secondary market add value to raw materials.

They buy from the primary market by turning them into new products and services. For example, plastics manufacturers or jewelers who cut and polish diamonds are examples of secondary-market assembling companies.

Sometimes, secondary-market companies use B2C models, such as farmers selling items in markets.

Tertiary market: This market encompasses both B2B and B2C companies. Many companies focus on delivering goods and services to businesses and consumers.

These include plumbers, internet retailers, floor installers, supermarkets, commercial finance brokers, home improvement specialists, tutors, and the hospitality sector.

Here are some examples of B2B companies:

• A working space that leases office spaces to remote team members and freelancers.
• An on-demand order execution, warehousing, and screen printing service.
• A marketing software company that offers social media management tools, lead generation software, and other marketing ways and tools to businesses and organizations.

B2C marketing is centered around the needs, interests, and challenges of individual consumers trying to make purchase decisions on behalf of, or for, themselves, hence making the individual the customer. 

Here are some examples of B2C companies:

• An e-commerce firm or company that sells office supplies to remote or self-employed individuals.
• A store/ shop that sells t-shirts and other clothing and accessories directly to consumers.
• A music platform that sells streaming subscriptions to listeners.

B2B marketing strategies are often associated with direct and outbound campaigns. – Messages you might send directly to customers or prospects you have identified.

The goal is audience engagement with compelling and persuasive messages to convince them of the value of your business.

Though these techniques certainly have their place in your marketing tool belt, B2B marketing strategies have expanded, and the behavior of buyers of professional services has changed.

Buyers in the professional services market are much more likely to do a Google search than to ask their friends or colleagues for suggestions or recommendations.

B2B Marketing Strategies

As mentioned above, marketing relies on the audience.

While B2B and B2C marketing are different, not every type of B2B marketing approach is the same.

This section will discuss different B2B marketing strategies you can implement to reach your specific business audience.

However, ensure you understand the B2B buyer’s journey before diving in. Pay attention to how each phase can influence your marketing strategies and how you implement them.

When you start shaping your B2B marketing strategies, there are a few steps to take before jumping straight to execution.

1. Determine your brand positioning.

You must understand your brand positioning to create an effective communication strategy fully. This is about your brand identity – and how your brand is perceived through the eyes of the customer.

Come up with a brand positioning statement that your team and potential customers can believe, and you’re ready for the next step. If you need help here, please contact our brand consultant or branding experts.

2. Identify your target audience.

Find your target audience – or those looking for your brand’s products or services. The data will help you create buyer personas and understand how they make purchasing decisions, a tool that is extremely useful for any type of marketing.

3. Conduct a competitor analysis.

Explore the market and see what other companies are marketing to your target audience with a competitive analysis. What to look for when inspecting competitors are:

• Competitors’ product offerings.
• Competitor Sales Tactics and Results.
• Competitor Marketing Content and Social Media Presence.

A general overview of these items will help you identify your competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats – otherwise known as SWOT analysis.

4. Explore marketing channels you can use.

In your competitive analysis, you can see the different marketing channels your competitors are using successfully and the channels they have not used.

Now that the previous steps have been executed to start building your B2B marketing strategy! Here’s how to diversify your B2B marketing portfolio and reach the businesses you need.

Explore and opt for channels, strategies, and tools to optimize your leads depending on your customer segments and competitive analysis.

B2B Marketing Channels that Connect you with your Target Audience.

1 B2B Email Marketing

Email marketing is a proven method of reaching individual consumers and business customers.

Did you know that 93% of B2B marketers use email? Are you one of them? You should be.

Emails lead to engagement turning subscribers into leads…then customers.

Considered B2B’s one of the most popular and successful marketing channels, email is more effective for lead nurturing than lead generation.

Most people ignore most of their inboxes, so to run a successful email campaign, you need to use content and language that directly addresses your target audience’s concerns and areas of interest the moment they receive your message.

Email marketing, like thought leadership, is best dealt with by an experienced team.

You need a writer to develop compelling marketing materials, a campaign manager to set up the calendar and list-building procedures, and an analyst to review the analytics, monitor the CRM, and recommend improvements.

A major drawback of email marketing initiatives is list building. Finding an existing and reliable list of audience members or creating a new one can be challenging.

Buying lists involves contacting cold leads, while it can take years to build a new list. However, this is a very powerful way to reactivate leads if you already have the list.

Need help? You can use our B2B Email Marketing services to maximize your returns.

2 PPC/SEM

Many B2B companies follow PPC campaigns as their go-to approach to lead generation because of the speed with which they deliver results.

Plus, Google gives users a clear picture of what works and doesn’t. It is beneficial for testing an untapped market for your items because of the fast turnaround time.

However, since you pay for every lead you generate, your costs increase in tandem with your success.

This results in higher CACs (and thus a lower ROI) than organic channels. In addition, Google increases prices for keywords that exceed expectations, resulting in a year-over-year decline in ROI.

This makes for a powerful marketing channel that needs to be applied in a limited scope, whether as a stopgap in setting up slower marketing channels with higher ROI or as a way to test new keywords before investing in an SEO campaign.

If you need help with PPC Campaigns or search engine marketing campaigns, our team at brandloom can help you.

3 Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

ABM is a high-touch but potentially high-yield channel used only for potentially large sales.

The best-suited example is researching a prospect’s favorite sports team and intimating them about the tickets to a game.

Creating such type of highly personalized campaign can be effective, but it depends on three factors:

• Obtain all relevant contact information about your top-level goals.
• Conducting an in-depth investigation of your prospects.
• and Identifying and hiring skilled salespeople who can close high-quality sales.

These processes will take a lot of time and work and quickly become expensive.

But These factors are why traditional ABM works best in industries where a small number of high-value accounts is more important than generating many low-value leads.

4 Webinars

Hosting webinars is a great way to guide potential customers through the conversion funnel as business owners look for educational opportunities for themselves and their employees.

The goal is to generate engaging and educational content rather than a transparent sales pitch, as a straightforward sales pitch would quickly fail.

However, two major challenges arise:

• Attract the right participants
• Producing a high-quality webinar

Effective webinars contain original ideas and require a high production level and the ability to convey information concisely enough to capture the attention of your target audience.

5 LinkedIn Organic

LinkedIn is the only social media network suited to B2B marketing because its subscribers actively use the platform to conduct business.

It’s also user-friendly, and you can easily adapt content from other thought leadership campaigns to post on LinkedIn, assuming you’ve adapted that content for the new channel.

As a result, you need minimal resources to start posting, and the platform should serve as a complementary marketing channel.

Reworking LinkedIn content is only a basic and added value if your company is currently doing content marketing. The difficulty and cost growth will rise significantly if you don’t already have content to reuse.

6 LinkedIn Advertising

LinkedIn Ads share many pros and cons with LinkedIn organically, with one key difference: it allows you to leverage LinkedIn’s powerful targeting options, filtering (persona) your audience/viewers by job title, company, industry, and several other parameters.

However, it does come at a significantly higher cost than the organic use of the platform, resulting in higher CACs, and cost of customer acquisitions.

7 Industry fairs

Trade shows & conferences are sometimes the only places all industry participants can meet.

They are valuable for networking and building personal connections with customers worldwide, especially if you work in an industry like SaaS that doesn’t have many opportunities to meet offline.

People visit these exhibits to learn about innovative technologies and solutions, and they can be excellent resources if you employ effective salespeople.

However, there are two drawbacks:

1. Presence can be critical. When considering renting exhibit space, developing marketing materials, planning trips, and wasting time, a single event can easily cost your business anywhere from $10,000 to $250,000.
2. The competition can be fierce. These events, of course, bring the entire industry together, and your competitors will also attend and compete with you for every prospect’s attention. These events are packed with demonstrations, speeches, and seminars, so you must do everything you can to impress.

8 Public Relations

Letting others say positive things about your company is what PR agencies specialize in.

Few things are more exciting than hearing from a reputable news source that a company is worth considering as a business partner.

Those news sources have a significantly wider reach than all but the largest B2B companies, so your post will reach far more people than if you published it yourself.

Good press is also about more than just generating new leads – it can be a great morale boost. It gives your employees a reason to be proud of their work and supports your current customers’ decision to work with you.

However, a major drawback of PR is its cost, which is typically higher than other channels discussed in this article. Working with a professional PR firm can cost anywhere from $10k to $50k per month.

9 Direct mail

Simply put, we don’t suggest direct mail for most industries (except for personal service companies such as HVAC or concierge service providers).

It is expensive. Mailing lists are often almost worthless and have low ROI. Decision makers often have their mail screened for them and rarely see your mailings.

While direct mail can be very effective in some industries, your time and budget are almost always better spent elsewhere.

Opting for the best B2B marketing channels

B2B companies are burdened with choosing a strategic combination of marketing channels to invest in, both organic and paid.

Many companies work with an experienced agency partner to make the best use of their marketing budget and continue their learning process.

Our marketing team develops and executes digital marketing campaigns for B2B companies.

We’ve run successful campaigns with 100+ B2B companies. You can contact us here if you are interested in discussing a relationship.

B2B market segmentation

Market segmentation will help you find and accurately target your customers. It can help you connect with them better than the competition. It can direct product development.

In short, market segmentation is to B2B companies what Arnie is to 80s action movies.

You can succeed without them, but why should you? The results will always be better.

Think about it—three core factors are required for a classic 80s action movie? Muscles, guns, and one-liners. And guess who does these three things better than anyone else? That’s right, Arnold himself.

And three basic principles of running a business?

• Having a product/service that solves a problem.
• Knowing who needs your solution.
• Bistinguishing yourself from competitors.

And how do you destroy those three things? By firing a bazooka and making fun of the bad guys? Unfortunately, not, or marketing would be more scenic and dramatic.

Market segmentation should be the weapon of choice.

Done right, it can improve important aspects of your sales and marketing. As Arnie almost said, “Come with me if you want to sell more.”

B2B market segmentation strategizes on finding unique audience segments by examining common characteristics.

By understanding similar traits, needs, and behaviors, marketing can better connect with potential customers. This allows teams to focus on key segments.

Without market segmentation, you risk treating everyone the same. Great when your targets are as different as a replicating Matrix agent but not as good when they are real people.

Don’t bother segmenting; your marketing won’t hook up with anyone.

A wise marketer once said, “What is marketing but segmentation?”

Example of extreme market segmentation

To illustrate how central a role segmentation can play, put on your headphones and launch your favorite music streaming app.

Chances are you’re listening to the industry leader, Spotify. How did they beat giants like Apple and Amazon when everyone offered the same music catalog?

Spotify initiated customer segmentation and took it to the extreme level. If you group together listeners into fans of all the major genres – rock, EDM, classical, rap, and RnB singing – you can recommend each other’s overlapping musical tastes.

But then Spotify moved on to segmentation. Much further. Their machine-learning algorithms now categorize music into 5,000 different genres.

In addition, they sort music by mood, style, beats per minute, energy, danceability, and positivity. Each song even has an appreciation for “liveness,” “acoustics,” and, brilliantly, “speechiness.”

All of this powers their highly sophisticated recommendation engine. It is one of their main differentiators and allows for personalized suggestions through various weekly playlists. Spotify runs one of the most advanced market segmentation near one-to-one marketing.

This guide will show you the different options to understand the differences in your customer base and how to build your strategy.

B2B matters – Why do you need a Professional Agency

Some may think that B2B is all about cold, hard facts. Dull. Boring. Not as exciting as B2C. It does possess a kernel of truth in it. After all, we talk to technical audiences, such as engineers.

But these people do care deeply about their jobs. They take their responsibility seriously. As noted, our customers have helped save lives, prevent disease, and build aerospace equipment. We consider ourselves fortunate enough to get the opportunity to work with them.

One benefit of hiring a b2b digital marketing agency is that you get access to marketing professionals who will help you develop a comprehensive marketing strategy that works.

According to coschedule.com, only 60% of marketers report achieving their marketing goals regularly.

Top B2B marketing agencies focus on developing, implementing, and tracking your marketing campaigns, so you understand what works and doesn’t with your marketing strategy.

When it comes to organizing marketing campaigns, the digital marketing agency you choose should be able to combine creativity and analytical thinking.

In addition to thinking outside the box, they should strive to achieve the most important goals.

In addition to understanding your product and goals, the agency needs to develop ways to measure whether or not the campaigns are successful.

NURTURE LEADS

Your marketing agency may be able to help you address this concern and come up with ways to nurture leads faster.

Building relationships with your leads can help you gain their trust.

Email is a popular channel for forwarding leads, although other options exist.

Sending valuable content to prospects at the right time is key to nurturing your email leads.

However, sending them too many emails is not recommended as they may unsubscribe or mark your emails as spam.

A marketing agency that provides expert digital marketing services will help you develop strategies to convert leads into customers.

SCALE CONTENT PRODUCTION TO PRODUCE QUALITY WITH B2B MARKETING FIRM

You can also produce content on a large scale by partnering with a B2B marketing agency.

An important phase of any marketing strategy is content creation and content marketing. Quality content attracts prospects to your website and increases trust and reliability.

Content that can attract viable leads that convert into customers is likely to be more valuable.

Producing content is time-consuming, and you can easily run out of hours in a day if you’re already busy. But a digital marketing agency can do your job effectively and efficiently.

BUILDING ONLINE REPUTATION

An agency that offers digital marketing services will also help you build your online reputation.

Our world is full of digital content, and there is no shortage. The most effective and efficient way to stand out from the content crowd is to build an online reputation you can rely on.

What does that mean?

The digital marketing agency comes with a content and SEO strategy, but they also come with a plan that builds your online reputation in additional ways.

TIME AND MONEY SAVED

Digital B2B marketing agencies are a great way to save valuable time and money in the long run.

A company trying to run digital marketing alone without a dedicated team risks wasting time and money.

With no experience, you could be spending money instead of making money trying to run paid ads without any expertise.

In another scenario, one could spend hours writing a blog post that you think is well-optimized for SEO, only to find that it doesn’t rank well.

An experienced digital marketing agency can help you make the right calls with your digital marketing strategy instead of simply thinking you are doing it right.

A professional marketing strategy can save you time, money, and headaches.

DEVELOPING A TOP-NOTCH B2B MARKETING GROWTH STRATEGY

B2b marketing agencies help you develop sustainable growth strategies based on your current marketing activities.

Over time, your business may change, and the needs of your target audience may also vary.

Content consumption and response to marketing materials can also change as your audience changes.

Stay tuned for these changes, or you may lose contact with your audience and lag behind your marketing efforts.

In the changing environment of your business, you need to adapt your marketing goals while working with a digital marketing agency.

In addition to planning your marketing goals quarter-to-quarter or year-to-year, they can help you track your progress.

Growth marketing strategies do not have to be planned individually. You can ensure that your digital marketing strategies are effective by employing professionals.

Conclusion: A Guide to Working Together

A B2B digital marketing company can ultimately help you implement marketing strategies that work for both you and your organization.

It is much easier to focus on growing your business if you outsource services to professional agencies.

Your best bet is to find an experienced marketing agency that works for you.

Choose a company that can meet all your needs, including content marketing, website design, and web development.

When considering digital marketing, remember that you are a business owner looking for a significant return on investment.

Engage a marketing agency that knows the value of your business and will help it grow.

It would help if you had an experienced marketing agency that understands your products, technologies, industries, markets, customers, and distribution channels. And can take on all that complexity and turn it into something that delivers results for your business.

As a B2B marketer, hiring a B2C agency would be the equivalent of having a plumber do electrical work. B2B just isn’t their thing.

If you’re marketing to industrial, manufacturing, or commercial organizations, you need a B2B agency that is passionate about the industries you serve. That can talk like an engineer. That can break down your production process into something easy for anyone to understand.

Frequently Asked Questions