Marketing to other businesses or organizations to sell your product or services to gear up their productivity and improve their operations need a strategic and practical approach. The objective of the customers in the case of B2B marketing is to improve the return on investment, efficiency, and expertise. Generally, several people are involved in the purchase, and the decision power lies in the hands of C-level executives, who have to agree before making a purchase decision.
Things get a bit complicated because the people involved in the purchase differs depending on the product or service you are selling. As a business, you must outline a hypothetical process outlining every step from your marketing to the recipient’s response and how they confirm with the other decision-makers and members of the chain.
Your product must be remarkable and have a competitive edge.
B2B product marketing
Your product is the most crucial part of marketing. If your product or service is exclusive to the market, then a persuasive marketing strategy would do the work. On the contrary, if your niche has cut-throat competition or a low entry barrier, it would not be easy to convince your competitors’ customers to switch to you. You presumably won’t have a competitive edge or unique factor that could improve their return on investment tremendously.
Dig deeper into the purchase purpose in B2B marketing. You will find that the executives want to have long-term solutions with other companies like yours, get the desired result over a long period, without handling the hassle, and outsource the work.
Establishing yourself an authority in your niche could help you significantly earn the trust of your clients.
Competitive edge
In many aspects of B2B marketing, take the case of cyber security, trust, and authoritativeness become crucial driving factors in the sales process because the other company can’t afford to work with someone who has no proven track of success or reputation. In a cyber security case, there needs to be a significant exchange of credentials and access to the network that is crucial for the organization.
In such a case, working with a company that could misuse this power would affect the organization’s profits, destroy their reputation, and even drag them to lawsuits.
A similar situation is with other B2B offers as well. An organization that has sufficient funds to hire the best in the market would never settle for less.
B2B marketing should be more professional because the client’s purchase motivation is driven by logic and financial incentive rather than emotions. In such a case, the best bet could be to educate the customers and earn their trust. B2B content marketing comes into play at this stage. Also, most people go to search engines to find answers to their queries. If you had a content marketing strategy that allowed your brand to be available for your clients to answer every possible query, there is a great chance for you to earn trust and subconscious loyalty.
Email marketing is a crucial digital marketing channel for B2B growth.
Email marketing is crucial to nurture leads
Email marketing is one of the most important digital marketing channels to communicate with the audience base who has already subscribed to you and has some form of interest in your offer. The B2B sales tend to have a higher monetary value and are based on logic, and it also implies a larger sales cycle and authority being the driving factor.
Emails could be an excellent choice to nurture B2B leads by regularly delivering relevant and informative content to them. The attention span of people is considerably low. And also, many marketers will suggest you to have at least seven times communication with your audience to remain in their mind when they need an offer related to your niche.
You could segment your email list based on factors like the buying stage, industry, etc. If you could continually add value to your customers without asking for anything in return, you could set yourself apart from your competitors. You can use tables, graphs, infographics, add illustrations to ensure that your target audience understands the need for your offer and how your product or service could add considerable value to their business. However, make sure that you send relevant emails and add a personalization factor to earn the trust of your audience.
Take the following factors into consideration while sending emails to your audience:
- The subject line should be eye-catching and must persuade the recipient to open the email
- The opening paragraph is crucial to ensure that the recipient would read it further
- Segment your audience based on the factors that are critical to your business
- Have a responsive design, as the world is experiencing a mobile-first era
- Personalizing the emails is the key to success
- Ensure that you have the right call-to-action per email
Create a customer persona and empathy map to create compelling advertising campaigns
Focus on target audience
A customer persona is the fictitious representation of your ideal client who generally buys from you. It is critical to create a customer persona because the person a business wants to target would differ from business to business. Some companies would like to target C-level executives, while others would find HRs to be the ideal person. It is crucial because knowing the audience helps narrow down the target list and only focus on those who matter.
An empathy map would help you have a better insight into your customers and know the pain points, driving factors, thoughts, etc., to create ad copies that could be the most relevant to them and entice them to take action.
Focus on search engine marketing campaigns to have greater visibility in front of the right audience
Search engine marketing
Not every potential customer is at the same stage. There could be some who don’t even know about your brand, while others might be looking for alternatives in your niche on the search engine. Google and Bing are the big names.
Hence, it would be best to run search engine marketing campaigns or PPC campaigns to let your target audience view your offer and land on your landing page. SEM is the shortcut to jump at the top position of SERP for your preferred keywords. You must be careful with the target keywords, run multiple A/B campaigns, continuously track the performance and make real-time adjustments to have the best return on investment. Top digital marketing agencies like CodeDesign could help you run profitable campaigns, connect with the target audience, and be a step ahead of the competition.
There is no alternative to search engine optimization and content marketing.
Search engine marketing and content marketing is crucial to succeed
Creating quality content for your target audience would help you establish your brand authoritativeness, position yourself as the key player in your niche, and earn the trust of your audience by adding constant values to them. For B2B companies, engaging the prospects through a value-driven educational approach works the best.
More than 90% of the content doesn’t get any traffic from search engines. Search engine optimization comes into play at this stage to help your content rank higher on the search engine results page for your target keywords to connect with the prospects and get more visitors. SEO consists of three primary components, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.
On-Page SEO: It is the process of optimizing your web page’s architecture to help the crawlers understand the relevancy of your content. Optimizing the title tag, meta description, ALT tags, interlinking, quality content, schema markup, etc., could signal the bots that your content is focused on a given keyword and should rank higher on the SERP page.
Off-Page SEO: If a website links to your content, the search engine algorithm considers it a vote for the quality and relevance of your content based on the anchor text. Off page SEO is the process of earning higher authority links from relevant websites to increase your credibility in the eyes of search engines. Guest blogging, outreaching to other web admins, directory submissions, etc., are some of the practices.
Technical SEO: It is the process to ensure that the search engine crawlers are successful in crawling, indexing, rendering, and understanding your website architecture. It is focused on ensuring that your website meets the technical requirements of modern search engines.
Advertise on the social media channel preferred by your customer persona
Social media marketing
LinkedIn and Twitter are supposed to be the better platforms for B2B marketing. However, you could also use Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc., if your customer persona spends time on them to build brand awareness.
Most B2B companies use social media channels to promote content, create brand awareness, educate the audience, and build credibility and trust. A successful social media strategy needs a proper goal and clear audience understanding to make effective campaigns. You could also use the remarketing technique to convince the audience who has already visited your website.
Conclusion
In B2B marketing, try to have a professional approach in your marketing strategies that could showcase the value of your product and the financial benefits of using them. As your target audience is the people working in a company or an organization, you must educate them and create authority.
A successful B2B marketing strategy builds credibility, adds value, have a niche-based approach, and a proper client onboarding process.
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About the author:
We are Codedesign – a multi cultural, technology, award-winning digital marketing agency. We can be define as a result-led, innovative digital marketing agency specializing in Digital Marketing, Ecommerce, Online Sales, Amazon Sales with a team of experts in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click Strategy and Campaigns, Social Media, Content Marketing, Data Analytics, Ecommerce development, Software development, CRM integrations.
