July 1, 2024
Effective marketing is a concept that could be tough to understand between channel decisions, budget restrictions, and creative demands; marketers have to juggle a lot when it comes to developing a digital advertising strategy. However, the biggest determinant of effective marketing is your target audience.
Sure, out there, you can effortlessly find a majority of Software as a Service (SaaS) products dealing in the B2B segment. Accordingly, the SaaS sector can touch the worth of $623 billion by 2023. This means that there is plenty of cut-throat competition, which is only going to increase further. Hence, the only thing that can help you stand out is a SaaS marketing strategy.
If you don’t have a proper buyer persona, your advertisements and promotions are likely to fall on deaf ears. The position where the target audience varies the most is between individual businesses and consumers. While some companies target individual shoppers, others aim to cater to organizations and companies.
When it comes to the latter option, the techniques for marketing to businesses turn out to be extremely different. That is the reason why a completely different method – B2B marketing – is in existence. Thus, in this post, let’s highlight how B2B marketers can win with their perfect digital advertising strategies.
Business-to-Business (B2B) marketing refers to any content or marketing strategy that is driven toward an organization or a business’s success. Any company that is selling services or products to other businesses will be typically use B2B marketing strategies.
Generally, there are four significant types of B2B customers. Let’s have a look at them:
These are companies that offer their services to other businesses, assisting them to function effectively, enhance the process of production and improve the satisfaction rate. Infosys – an IT-managed company – is a good example of this B2B buyer type. Since they provide IT services to other organizations and companies, they don’t generally interact directly with customers.
The government of America is the biggest spender on services and products across the world. It purchases almost anything you can imagine, right from weapons to aircraft, fuel, stationery, medical services, technology, insurance, security, and more. Just like that, other governments follow suit.
However, most governments don’t have a centralized department that gets products and services. Rather, this responsibility goes to relevant government agencies.
These are the companies that resell products and services produced by other companies without changing the materials. Such wholesalers include brokers, retailers, and others who purchase from producers and manufacturers directly. And, most of these brokers, retailers, and wholesalers boast massive power in the market.
For instance, if you tie up with a nationwide retailer, they can put your services or products forth with an array of customers to dramatically increase your sales.
Companies might also seek assistance in marketing or selling their products or services to either for-profit or non-profit institutions. These comprise a variety of organizations, such as universities, colleges, civic clubs, hospitals, religious institutes, charitable organizations, and more.
Most of the non-profit institutes look for affordable products or services as they generally face a budget crunch. Thus, the lower your costs, the more you can sell.
Also Read: What Does B2B Client Mean and How to Use Lead Generation Service
As mentioned above, marketing generally is dependent on the audience. Also, not every type of B2B marketing material would be the same. So, here are some of the best B2B marketing strategies that you can use to reach a certain business audience.
Email marketing is one of the tried and tested methods of reaching business customers. Today, almost 93% of B2B marketers are using emails. If you are not one of them, it’s time to begin this activity. Emails help with engagement, which can turn into subscribers, then leads, and finally customers.
Unlike B2C customers, B2B customers try to find positive ROI and logic. Primarily, they look for ways through which your business can help them grow their business. Owing to this, email marketing should constantly resonate with their business and concentrate on things that matter to them, such as money, resources, and time.
Also, email marketing is one powerful vehicle that helps in sharing the content of your brand. Approximately 83% of B2B companies use newsletters for marketing their content, and 40% of B2B marketers find newsletters to be critical to the success of their content marketing strategy. Here are some email marketing best practices to keep in mind:
Keeping in mind that B2B customers concentrate on expertise, have a desire to gain education, and are driven by logic, what could be better than content marketing to satisfy their priorities? With an adequately penned-down content marketing strategy, you can add valuable information and notify consumers.
Along with that, content marketing also supports your SEO efforts that comprise forecasting what exactly your audience is searching for, assisting them to discover your content and website, and possibly converting them into customers. It is also important to note that content marketing is effective when you align the same with content to a variety of stages of the buyer’s journey.
In the awareness phase, effective content can educate buyers on the pain points. And then, you must also test your content. For that, you can run a test on a variety of content types, including video, eBook, and webinar. You must also understand the content format that attracts the right buyers and evaluate the same to the level of an individual human.
Talking statistically, almost 80% of business decision-makers choose an article rather than an ad to gain information. Keeping this in mind, you should put the same resources into the content marketing strategy that you would be putting in the traditional advertising strategy.
Regardless of the business and the target audience, having a digital presence is a must these days. Composing a website, search engine optimization, paid ads, and other places where your B2B company can be active, digital marketing strategies can play a huge role in overall success.
Here are a few digital marketing tactics that can help strengthen your B2B digital marketing strategy.
Undoubtedly, digital marketing cannot function properly without an engaging, informative website. More than 80% of customers visit a website before buying anything. Also, having a website is a straightforward and easy way to influence customers and share information about your services or products.
Now that the website has been mentioned, know that it has to be way more than engaging and informative. It should be discoverable. This can be done through technical SEO and on-page SEO techniques. There is an extensive range of benefits that this marketing technique offers, such as increasing organic discovery and qualitative traffic on your site, providing impressive ROI, improving trust and credibility, offering 24/7 promotion, targeting the entire marketing funnel, reaching the target audience, and more.
At last, you must also add Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising to the digital marketing strategy. By this, you will get to put your brand and content in front of new people through search engines and advertising channels, like LinkedIn, Quora, Facebook, and more. Through these platforms, it becomes extremely easier to target the right set of audiences and gain more conversions. You can also maximize the PPC investment by advertising other things than your services or products, such as company tagline, social media content, blog, brand personality, and more. One of the best ways to get ROI from paid ads is through:
When making a purchase, 84% of C-Suite executives and 75% of B2B buyers use social media. Social media marketing is not just for those brands that are targeting individual consumers. A lot of B2B organizations are making the most out of it as well. However, the process would not be easier.
Using social media to connect with B2B customers is quite hard as the sales cycle will be lengthier, and the chain of command will be longer. Mostly, social media platforms come into the picture around the beginning of your buyers’ journey. Social media is one of the powerful tools that help develop brand awareness, enabling your company to establish an online personality and humanizing the business.
Similar to email marketing, social media marketing is also an effective channel as far as sharing content and improving the brand social media experts are concerned. Although there is a chance that your social media accounts, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more may not convert frequently, they are important. In this situation, active followers are as valuable as buyers.
Apart from a variety of elements that go into a content marketing strategy, webinars can be a big thing – for both your audience and your company. The longer the webinar, the more interested people would be in it. Through these, you can offer engaging and informative experiences to your target audience. By using the research that you have conducted, you can customize the webinar content to speak to the requirements of your customers directly.
Not planning everything correctly is one of the reasons why a lot of B2B marketing strategies fail. So, here are some tips that will help you create an effective plan:
Your B2B marketing plan should start with setting goals and objectives. These goals must be specific (S), measurable (M), achievable (A), realistic (R), and time-bound (T). You must outline and define the process of measuring these goals. When doing so, make sure you keep the target audience and the current market situation in mind.
At the foundation of every B2B, a marketing plan is a precisely outlined PR and marketing strategy. To do so, make sure:
SWOT analysis is referred to as an analytical technique that is created to help discover primary challenges and issues impacting B2B marketing. This way, you can outline a strategy to overcome these issues. On a technical level, the analysis comprises the evaluation as well as an examination of the primary elements of the strategic marketing plan.
It is not necessary that a B2B marketing approach that is working for one business would work for another as well. However, that doesn’t mean you cannot learn from others’ implementations. Here are some of the B2B marketing examples of businesses that got it right.
The client is online cloud-based software that manages packaging artworks and labels. They offer world-class packaging label design approval management & artwork proofing software for brands. Their SaaS operations are in India, the UK, and the US. And, their key growth levers are search engine optimization, Google ads, and Facebook ads.
Since the client is operating in a niche market, there were low search volumes that could be used to help them generate leads. We had to be creative and use search as well as social media channels to create new demand for the product.
Considering that the CPCs in the client’s niche is high, specifically in the US, we concentrated on Google Search Ads and targeted specifically the bottom of the funnel keywords. We also crafted a dedicated campaign to target competitors so as to get relevant visibility.
We used Facebook and Google Display ads to spread information among customers regarding the need for the product and all the problems that it helps solve. Here, the concentration was on creating new demands by targeting professionals who are the potential decision-makers.
We created content across a variety of topics for the core product so as to drive organic traffic that would result in brand awareness and education. We worked with the brand to create 5 such tools that helped solve problems and showcase functionalities.
By now, you would know the fact that social media is effective when it comes to engaging the right set of audiences. Furthermore, it is also an exciting place to post eye-catching graphics and to show off the brand personality. MailChimp is excelling at both factors on Instagram. Less than half of its posts are related to MailChimp products or email marketing.
However, the team is finding new ways to make the posts relevant to the followers by featuring engaging and fun-filled videos as well as on-brand graphics. MailChimp is also using this platform to feature customer stories and testimonials, leaving a big impact on potential leads who are in the consideration and decision stages.
The owner of LeadPages attributes the consistent success to nothing but content strategy, which is a great B2B content marketing example. LeadPages come up with a variety of content resources, such as webinars, podcasts, customer stories, and blogs. The variety in such resources lets the company reach more customers.
Moreover, LeadPages is also providing a blog that talks about an array of themes, such as lead generation, A/B testing, and more topics relevant to the brand and the products. With a weekly podcast, they chat with regular entrepreneurs.
Your marketing investment will not be effective unless you have targeted the right type of audience. And, no other audience type would be as critical and fickle as business customers. Therefore, make sure that your marketing is communicating how your business is helpful to others’ businesses.
Use the strategies and tips mentioned above to comprehend the B2B audience, finalize the buyer personas and effectively implement B2B marketing strategies.
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