Categories
While marketing to consumers is a challenge, marketing your products or services to another company can be even more difficult. After all, businesses are likely already aware of the various marketing tricks you will use.
Despite this challenge, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming to market to other businesses. Take a look at the best B2B marketing strategies examples that you can use in 2024 and beyond to grow your business.
As a refresher, B2B (business-to-business) marketing refers to when a business markets its products or services to a different business. An example would be a commercial cleaning company trying to get new clients who want to hire them to clean their office. Another example would be a dealership for heavy equipment trying to sell that equipment to construction companies.
Most Businesses Use B2B Marketing or Are Marketed to With It
Nearly every business will engage in B2B marketing, either as the company doing the marketing or the one receiving the marketing efforts. Retail stores, for example, are the target of B2B marketing by companies that want them to carry their products. Or manufacturers of something are the target of B2B marketing by companies who produce or sell the raw materials they need.
B2B vs. B2C Marketing
As we go through various B2B marketing strategies examples, you will notice that many of them are similar to B2C (business-to-consumer) marketing strategies. But there are some very important differences.
As an example, consider a clothing store. When it engages in B2C marketing, the store wants someone to make a single purchase or maybe a handful of purchases over time. The resulting sale is likely in the hundreds of dollars, depending on the prices of the clothes.
As we go through the various examples of B2B marketing strategies, you will notice that they fit into one of three categories.
Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing includes methods like print ads and advertising on the radio or television. This tends to be a wider strategy that includes multiple methods but excludes online/digital marketing and personal selling.
Digital Marketing
Digital marketing refers to advertising that is done online or with other digital technologies. This type of marketing takes advantage of the prevalence of the internet to appeal to other businesses. It also has the benefit of being able to track data such as ROI and conversions, saving you effort. It also tends to be the most scalable type of B2B marketing.
Personal Selling
Personal selling takes advantage of networking and creating face-to-face relationships with others. This is a very traditional method and the least scalable of all the methods.
With those categories and the definition of B2B marketing in mind, it is time to take a look at some of the best B2B marketing strategies and tips.
Before you get started developing your B2B marketing strategies, you should always take the time to make sure that you have clear goals in mind. You need to be able to measure your success or know if there is room for improvement.
If it helps, start with your general business goals for your marketing. Do you want to get more leads? Would you prefer to make more sales? Do you want long-term contracts?
From there, turn those objectives into quantitative goals. To make sure they are realistic, look at data for where you currently are or opt for a percent improvement instead of a raw number. Try to focus on just a handful of metrics that will measure your success. While you should track other data if possible, having too many goals can be overwhelming and derail your success. It could pull your team in too many directions at once.
No matter your overall B2B strategy, you should make sure that you include research into the pain points of your customers. This will give you insight into how you can market your product or service in a way that shows your customers its value.
There are plenty of ways to research the pain points of your customers. One of the most common methods is a focus group made up of customers or potential customers. These can be done in person or even online.
You can also try using surveys to research pain points. Yet another option is to look for online forums your customers frequent and see what they are talking about there. You can also get some insight from your keyword research. The most common search terms are likely focused on overcoming pain points.
As you research the pain points, make sure to also see if your customers have any preferences in terms of types of solutions. For example, if a pain point is not understanding how to use a product, do they have a preference among in-person demos, video demonstrations, and written instructions?
Your research into the pain points of potential clients will come in handy when it comes to developing client personas. These are imaginary people that represent your clients. They have the same demographics, occupation, goals, pain points, budgets, and other factors as your clients. Create as many personas as you need to accurately represent your client base.
The personas will help you with your other marketing strategies. They make it much easier to visualize how your customer will react to your marketing efforts and what will best appeal to them. For most businesses, having these concrete personas is much easier than just having a loose set of descriptive terms.
Use Real Data to Create the Personas
As you create the personas, make sure that you use real data instead of speculation, assuming that data is available. For example, look at answers to survey questions or raw data you have on the industries most of your clients are in or the members of their team you typically interact with.
As you look at B2B marketing strategies examples, you will notice that some of them focus on your brand identity and reputation. This is important as your brand is the first thing potential clients will think of when they hear your company’s name.
You may want to get professional assistance with branding, but there are also some aspects you can work on yourself.
Be Consistent
You want your branding to be consistent everywhere that your company appears. This means that the logo, color scheme, font, and other significant design choices should be the same on your website, social media pages, business cards, and everywhere else. This consistency helps people associate your brand with that color scheme or logo, improving brand recognition.
Consider Telling a Story
Depending on your type of business and brand, you may want to create your brand identity by telling a story. For example, make a page on your website dedicated to your company’s journey to where you currently are. Show potential customers that this has always been your goal, and you worked hard to get to where the company currently is. This will help you connect with potential clients.
Try Transparency
The brand strategy of transparency is growing in popularity. Companies are more likely to hire your business if they know that you will be honest with them. They want to know that they can count on you to let them know if you hit any stumbling blocks that can affect them.
You can be as transparent as you want with clients, but always keep your reputation and the effects of the information you share in mind. Essentially, carefully think about how the information you share can potentially affect your business before you share it.
Most people will want to check reviews before buying a product, but this tends to be even more important for businesses. After all, businesses’ ultimate goal is to make a profit, so they need to make sure that every dollar they spend is well-spent.
This means that gathering plenty of reviews and testimonials is an excellent marketing strategy for B2B. Those reviews will help you build up credibility and overall reputation. You can even use reviews to help you outrank the competition.
Find Ways to Encourage Customers to Leave Reviews and Share Testimonials
Of course, you should not write reviews or testimonials yourself, as this is false advertising. While you can get away with it to some degree, there is always a risk that people will find out you faked your reviews. That could cause reputation damage that is nearly impossible to overcome.
Because of that, it is best to stick to real reviews. This means encouraging your clients to leave them for you. If you offer a great product or service, some business clients will automatically want to leave reviews or share testimonials. You can improve the chances of this desire to share by providing exceptional customer service.
Even something as simple as reminding clients to leave a review or politely asking them to do so can work wonders.
You can also offer an incentive for those who leave reviews or share testimonials. Common options include a discount on their next purchase or a free product or service.
Case studies are an alternative to reviews and testimonials that you can create yourself without any moral issues or concerns about it hurting your reputation. That is because these case studies make it obvious that they are from your perspective.
At the same time, they feature many of the same elements as reviews, such as quotes from your past clients. They also deliver the same result, which is boosting your reputation and credibility.
When creating case studies, make sure to include tangible benefits that your products or services had for clients. Use figures, charts, and graphs whenever possible. Include quotes from your client. When relevant, include images. Your case studies are your chance to show potential business clients how you can transform their company and deliver amazing benefits.
In addition to using reviews and case studies, referrals are a great way to attract new clients via your existing ones. There are multiple ways to encourage referrals.
If you don’t want to spend much of your budget on it, consider sending clients satisfaction surveys occasionally. At the same time, you could ask them to refer you to other businesses if they were happy with the service.
The more effective referral method is to offer a small incentive to clients who refer you. You could offer a small discount or a free product or service in exchange for a referral. Consider also offering the company they refer a similar welcome free item or discount to encourage them to try your services.
In some ways, influencer marketing is an extension of referrals, although the person being referred does not actually know the one making the referral. For your influencer marketing strategy, look at prominent figures in your industry and see if you can work with them. Local businesses can try working with local influencers.
Depending on the industry you are in and the influencer you work with, you may pay them with free products and services or in cash.
One of the most important parts of your digital marketing strategy will always be your website. Remember that nearly all of your potential clients will look at your website before they decide to hire you. Your website not only serves as an introduction of your company to the person you sell to but to the others involved in the decision-making process.
Keep in mind that most major decisions in companies, such as whether to use your products or services, involve multiple people. Think of your website as your first chance and pitch opportunity to make a strong impression on everyone involved, even if you don’t directly interact with them.
Include Basic Information
At the very least, your website should have a small “About Us” section for your company and your contact information. Ideally, you will have a longer “About Us” section, a services or products page, detailed pages for each product or service, and examples of your past work. Those examples can come in the form of photos, videos, testimonials, and case studies.
Landing Pages
Eventually, you should create landing pages for the various keywords you target in searches as well as for your ads. Landing pages let you segment your audience and appeal to each segment’s particular interests.
Your landing pages can be divided by product or service types, location, industry, or anything else that makes sense for segmenting your customers.
For example for each of these types of segmentation, consider a commercial cleaning service. Landing pages for services could include a page for office deep cleanings, one for regular cleaning services, and one for commercial bathroom cleaning. Location landing pages could include one for each city that the company serves. The industry landing pages could include separate pages for retail stores, restaurants, warehouses, and offices.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important strategies of any digital marketing plan, including planning for B2B. Search engine optimization improves your ranking in search engine results. That, in turn, improves the likelihood that a potential client will click on your website over that of the competition.
Conveniently, you don’t have to pay Google to rank highly with SEO. However, you will have to put in a lot of effort to succeed. This typically involves hiring an SEO agency or expert to take care of your strategy. Your SEO strategy will involve gaining natural backlinks, leveraging content marketing with keywords, and other methods.
Content marketing can be part of SEO, but it is also important enough to be its own strategy. As mentioned, content marketing provides you with an opportunity to incorporate keywords into your website naturally.
At the same time, it helps you show your expertise in your industry. By publishing informative, useful content, you let potential clients know that you are familiar with the ins and outs of your industry. They will witness your knowledge, which builds credibility and helps them see you as a trusted authority. That will translate into sales, as people are more likely to hire a company that they think is a leader in the industry.
Content marketing also shows potential clients that you care about them to some extent. It helps give the impression that you care about overall customer happiness and not just about your bottom line and making a profit. This can also improve your chances of getting clients, as people want to hire companies that have their best interests at heart.
Create Shareable Content
As you work on your content marketing, prioritize creating content that people are likely to share, such as infographics or detailed guides. This will help you create natural backlinks, boosting your SEO strategy.
Use the content you create to encourage lead generation. A classic example of this is the B2B marketing strategies where you offer a free e-book or downloadable guide in exchange for a potential client’s email address.
If you don’t have content that you can offer in exchange for contact information, there are other options, as well. You can offer a discount or freebie with the first purchase. Even something as simple as a free 30-minute consultation can be enough to convince potential clients to leave their information with you.
Hosting webinars is a great way to combine elements of other B2B marketing strategies on this list. You can think of them as an alternative format to the educational content in blog posts, articles, or e-books.
At the same time, you can use them to generate leads by asking for email addresses in exchange for attending the webinars.
Webinars will also help you build a relationship with potential clients, especially if you include a Q&A session at the end.
A great supplement to content marketing is creating tools that your clients can use. Of course, this will work better for some industries than others and may require some creativity.
A simple tool idea would be a calculator of some sort of the industry. For example, you are an accounting company, you could offer invoice templates as a free tool. If you are a landscaping company, you could offer a quiz that helps clients choose the right plants for their property.
While SEO provides a long-term boost to your traffic and marketing, it is time-consuming and not guaranteed. For the best results, combine it with PPC (pay-per-click) advertising. With this type of advertising, you pay for every click you get and appear at the top of the search results. There are also other PPC ads, such as display ads and banner ads.
The most popular and useful pay-per-click advertising will be via Google Ads. The Google Display Network is vast, and most people use Google search when looking for something online. Google Ads works with an auction system. You choose a keyword and then select a bid. If you have the highest bid, you will have the first paid spot.
There are plenty of details and tips for Google Ads and PPC advertising strategies, so be sure to read more on these.
All of the best B2B marketing strategies examples will include an element of social media marketing. In today’s world, you need to have a presence on social media if you want your brand to succeed. While a Facebook account and a LinkedIn page are the minimum, the more present you are, the better.
The social media networks that you should use will depend on your company, brand image, and what you sell. LinkedIn is particularly important for B2B marketing, as it is seen as the most professional social media page. If your products or services are more visual in nature, such as creating brand logos, take advantage of Instagram to show off past works.
Stay Active
The key to being successful with social media marketing is to stay active. Figure out how frequently you can reasonably expect to post content and then stick to it. Ideally, you want to post at least a few times a week.
Vary the Types of Posts
You don’t want to make all your posts on social media obvious advertisements. Yes, you should use social media to promote sales and new products or services, but that should not be it.
Make posts about relevant industry topics or hashtags. Use your Twitter page to share industry news. Retweet other relevant posts and comment on other company’s or people’s Facebook posts.
This type of regular engagement helps potential clients feel more connected to you.
Be Responsive
Make sure that if someone contacts your company on social media, you respond quickly. This will show that you prioritize the customer experience. Additionally, people simply expect quick answers in today’s digital age, and you want to meet those expectations.
Incorporate Paid Advertising
While organic social media marketing has an important role, you will also likely want to incorporate paid marketing. Do some research and figure out which platforms you should spend a portion of your advertising budget on.
No matter the method a potential or current client uses to contact you, make sure that you respond to them promptly. This creates a strong impression, letting them know that you are there to help them.
We already mentioned this responsiveness with social media, but it should also apply to emails, phone calls, and other methods of communication. In the case of a question or concern that requires a more detailed or time-consuming answer, consider just sending a short follow-up message initially. Use that message to let them know how soon they can expect a more detailed response, so they are not left waiting and wondering.
Automation is one of the most useful B2B marketing strategies to improve your responsiveness. For example, you can set up an automated message on email or Facebook Messenger if someone contacts your business outside of operating hours.
Don’t just limit your automation to this, however. Consider using automation for other situations as well, such as an automated welcome email when someone signs up for your newsletter. Or an automated thank you email with extra tips if a company downloads a free e-book.
There are plenty of elements to your email marketing strategy. You can use email marketing to ensure current clients are satisfied, remarket to past clients, encourage referrals, announce new products, share blog posts, and more.
Appeal to Logic, Efficiency, and Profits
As you create your emails, keep in mind what your customers are focused on. They are looking for solutions that will benefit their business, such as by improving profits or efficiency. They are more likely to want facts and figures than an end-consumer would.
Don’t Send Too Much
One of the most important aspects of email marketing is to avoid sending too many emails. You don’t want potential clients to feel overwhelmed or that you are sending more messages than they want. In the worst-case scenario, this will lead to them unsubscribing from your emails and you missing out on all of their future business.
In the best-case scenario, they will still consider your company but may have a slightly worse impression of you.
In addition to limiting the number of emails you send, consider letting clients opt out of particular types of emails. For example, if you send regular newsletters with industry news, newsletters with company news, and emails with promotions and sales, offer the option to no longer receive some or all of these emails.
Remember, even if someone no longer receives your emails with sales or promotions, the fact that they receive any emails will keep your company in their mind. That alone increases the chance of future sales.
Best Practices for B2B Email Marketing
As you create your B2B emails, keep the following best practices in mind:
No matter which of the other B2B marketing strategies on this list you use, you should always be sure to track their results. You need to have metrics in mind that you will use to measure the success of a given strategy, then follow through and track them.
After all, without tracking your strategies or campaigns, you will have no way to know if they were successful. You could be wasting your money and not even realize it.
Having the right marketing strategies in 2024 will set your company up for growth, regardless of the industry you are in. Combine the above B2B marketing strategies examples in a way that makes sense for your business to help attract new clients and retain the ones you already have.
You don’t have to try to incorporate all of them at once, as using any of the above strategies should lead to some growth. Once you are confident in a few strategies, work in a few more and watch your B2B marketing become even more successful.
How much did you enjoy this article?
We will help your ad reach the right person, at the right time
Actionable insights discovered for you. Now you can do more in less time.
PPCexpo Keyword Planner will help you align your keywords with the customers’ intent.
Frequent audits will help you optimize your PPC campaign for success.
Visualizations give you the ability to instantly grasp the insights hidden in your numbers.
Experience the new revolution in reporting … click your way to insights, don’t scroll.
Calculate the number of combinations in your PPC campaign. It may surprise you.
Related articles
A landing page is a web page designed to drive specific actions. Learn the essentials of creating high-converting landing pages in our guide.
ROAS calculation can help you evaluate every PPC campaign's performance so that you know which of your campaigns are converting the best.
Discover the marketing lifecycle stages and how they shape customer relationships. You’ll understand their role in driving customer engagement and retention.
