B2B marketing is the promotion and selling of products and services by one business to other businesses and organizations. When you have a clear understanding of the B2B buyer’s journey, it’s time to think through the strategies that can help you.
SEO
If you can continuously pump out high-quality content,
promote your content, build links, and get your content shared, you’ll be able to create a stream of traffic that’s quite defensible from a cost perspective.
Important thing to keep in mind here: SEO is very much a long-game. Don’t give up if you don’t see immediate results — the impact of your efforts build over time.
Social media
By sharing blog content, case studies, and industry research on social media channels, you can create a presence for your brand and make your name known in a community.
Plus, social media provides a great medium to interact directly with prospects and customers. Get their feedback on your latest products, understand their frustrations, and surprise & delight them in every encounter.
Influencers
In 2019, influencers provide a great opportunity to tap into a highly-curated and active community to market your product or service towards. In the B2B space, many of these influencers have built up communities and followings online that might align with your target audience.
Referral/affiliate
Affiliate marketing is an interesting beast — it’s essentially the practice where a website joins an affiliate program and makes money by promoting another brand’s products. Think software review sites and any content sites that always seem to mention the same brands.
Does it work? Over 81% of brands and 84% of publishers leverage affiliate marketing as a part of their marketing channel mix.
PPC
Pay per click ads are a form of online ads where you pay for each instance that someone clicks on your ad.
To fully dominate organic listings, most B2B marketers employ a strategy that healthily balances both PPC and SEO. It makes sense — 66% of buyer-intent keywords are paid ads and 64% of people click on paid ads when buying a product online.
If nothing else, make sure you’re bidding on branded keywords. You don’t want your competitors stealing traffic that’s trying to get to your website to convert.
It’s still quite relevant in the B2B marketing world. 93% of B2B marketers use email to distribute content — and employees spend 13 of their working hours each week in their email inbox. With so much time spent in the inbox, it’s certainly worth a bit of your attention.
Choosing a B2B marketing strategy
Choosing a strategy can be an overwhelming task, but it really shouldn’t be. Keeping the following things in mind while selecting a B2B marketing strategy can help point you in the right direction and get the most out of your efforts.
Don’t use just one strategy
Each of the strategies on this list has its pros and cons. You’re appealing to customers with different personalities, various preferences, and unique buying behaviors.
Look at your target customer
If you don’t know your customers, you’ll never have success with any of these strategies. Talk to your customers, listen to their feedback, and use it to shape your product and marketing efforts.
Make metric-based decisions
Numbers don’t usually lie. It’s important to trust your gut on many things when it comes to marketing. But when it comes to analyzing performance, trust your data. See which channels are generating the best click-through rates, lower customer acquisition costs, and the highest-value customers for your brand.