Your Guide to B2B Marketing Basics

B2B marketing is often seen as the boring relative of B2C. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Business-to-business marketing is more of a challenge because you work with a company or group of stakeholders and the process is more complex. That’s actually what makes it exciting!

But B2B marketers are succeeding in the online space, especially since Covid-19 forced companies to pivot and adapt. The ever-changing digital landscape has offered B2B brands new ways to connect with customers.

With the global B2B ecommerce market projected to be worth nearly $19 billion by 2027, according to an Astute Analytica report, the online space is full of opportunities. This growth is due to a focus on digital experiences, the popularity of specialized B2B online marketplaces, and retail businesses migrating to online operations.

So how can you succeed in the world of B2B marketing? In this blog, we’ll provide you with a B2B marketing 101 that looks at trends, strategies, platforms, and inspiring real-world examples.

What is B2B Marketing?

B2B or business-to-business marketing is the promotion of services or goods to business buyers. It’s about selling to corporate customers rather than individuals and it requires different marketing tactics and strategies.

B2B marketing aims to increase the visibility of a product or service, drive leads and make sales. This can be done by using social media, SEO, content marketing, and many of the digital marketing techniques that are used by B2C marketers.

In recent years influencer marketing has become an important element of B2B marketing while social selling is going from strength to strength on platforms like LinkedIn.

What are the four types of B2B Markets?

There are four types of B2B markets based on the type of business involved and what each offers. These include:

1.Producers — These are companies that create something using your resources such as a restaurant, bakery, or tech solution provider. McDonald’s or Proctor and Gamble would be an example.

2.Resellers — This type of B2B company resells your product or service as it was created as a third-party provider. Examples include retailers and wholesalers like Walgreens or Target.

3.Government — This includes government agencies across the world that buy products and use them. Any national, regional, or local government agency could fall under this type, such as Gov.uk.

4.Institutions — This includes charities, nonprofits like hospitals and churches, along with educational institutions colleges. Examples include the American Red Cross and Greenpeace.

What is B2C Marketing?

As indicated by its name, business-to-consumer, B2C marketing focuses on marketing to the individual consumer. B2C marketing is seen as more transactional as its goal is to drive a customer to purchase on a site, network or app.

B2B vs B2C Marketing

Most of the time, B2B marketing is driven by logical purchasing decisions, while B2C marketing focuses on emotion-driven purchasing decisions. There is often an overlap between the two types but the difference is significant.

1. Omnichannel marketing

Due to the long sales cycle, B2B businesses need to connect with their audience across multiple channels. Omnichannel marketing enables the B2B sector to use a multi-pronged approach that not only provides different channels but enhances the customer experience and journey.

It’s important to know the difference between omnichannel marketing and multichannel. The image below from Dave Chaffey shows the various strategies and channels a business can use to reach a customer at various stages of the buying cycle. It demonstrates how complex the omnichannel journey can be but when done correctly can drive engagement, sales and revenue.

2. Influencer marketing

While influencer marketing is common for B2C brands, it has taken B2B brands a little longer to catch onto the strategy. It’s also a more complex process because B2B sales can involve multiple stakeholders so you need to find an influencer or influencers that can catch the eye of people in different roles.

But B2B influencer marketing is on the rise. ‘Growth Opportunities for Global B2B Influencer Marketing’ report found that B2B influencer marketing has the potential to generate $11.7 billion in revenue by the end of 2022, with more than 38% of B2B companies currently exploring it as a new lead-generation avenue.

The secret for B2B marketers is to find influencers with gravitas in a certain area. It’s not about finding a fresh new face or celebrity but someone who is an industry or thought leader. Think about authors or bloggers, researchers or popular podcast hosts/guests.

Download our Influencer Tracker Tool if you’re looking for a way to assess and keep track of your influencers.

3. Social media marketing

There’s an increase in B2B brands using social media and they’re not just on staple channels like LinkedIn and Facebook. Some well-known brands are making waves on the ever-popular platform TikTok to grab the attention of a young audience (more on that below!).

According to Deloitte’s 2021 CMO survey, B2B product brands will spend 14.7% of their marketing budget on social media into 2023. And that’s expected to increase by 10 points in the next 5 years.

This growth demonstrates how successful social media can be for B2B products and services. However, it’s about choosing the right channels and using a variety of organic and paid content e.g. video, blogs, and downloadable assets to engage and convert.

4. Focus on ROI

Our survey on the state of marketing in 2022, ‘The Marketing Evolution: Leadership, Transformation, Skills, Challenges & the Future’, found that ROI is a big challenge for B2B and B2C businesses.

According to one VP of Marketing in Financial Services, the greatest challenges are: “Measuring marketing effectiveness in early stages for long stage B2B sales cycles and understanding the customer journey.”

While some metrics are easy to track, such as social media ROI, measuring the effectiveness across an entire B2B cycle from engagement to sale can be difficult. The key is to set KPIs that you can track and link back to an action such as a landing page conversion or download to give a lead conversion rate.

5. Sales are going digital

Gartner, in their Future of Sales analysis predicts that by 2025, 80 percent of B2B sales interactions will be digital while the majority of B2B organizations will use data-driven selling. That’s an enormous leap for B2B organizations that relied on face-to-face sales and traditional marketing tactics such as conferences and events.

At the heart of this is streamlining sales processes to have analytics and data embedded in the process. No more relying on business cards or brochures to drive leads and sales, it will be about communicating and servicing customers through online channels.

This will also help to drive the global trend of personalization and provide opportunities using new technologies such as machine learning and AI.

B2B Marketing Platforms

The best B2B marketing platforms are used for automation, managing social media, remote communication and meetings, video conferencing, SEO, market research, customer relationship management, website optimization, and email.

• Ahrefs — An all-in-one SEO toolset, Ahrefs can audit and optimize your website, analyze competitors, find relevant keywords, learn from your industry’s top-performing content and track your ranking progress. Check out our complete guide to Ahrefs.
• Marketo — Provides automation software for account-based marketing and other marketing services and products including content creation and SEO
• BuzzSumo — This allows you to see popular and trending content to help in your content creation and helps you find the most popular channels for content types and find top influencers in your area.
• Salesforce — A well-known B2B tool, Salesforce specializes in customer relationship management software and offers applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and app development
• Buffer — This helps to automate your social media posts across channels enabling you to schedule in advance and analyze performance.
• OptinMonster — This is a lead generation tool that helps you create website pop-ups and plugins to get more subscribers and capture data.
• Intercom — This is a business messaging tool that enables B2B brands to engage and chat with customers.
• Sprout Social — A social media management and intelligence tool that helps B2B brands measure follower growth, engagement, hashtag trends, and conversions.
• Chili Pepper — A suite of automated scheduling tools designed to help B2B teams convert more leads into qualified meetings integrated with a form scheduler that offers leads a way to book a meeting or start a phone call immediately after submitting a form.
• Hot Jar — Offers a powerful website tool that tracks user behavior and combines analysis and feedback to show you how to optimize your site to increase conversions.
• MailChimp — This tool is a marketing automation platform for managing mailing lists and creating email campaigns.

There are a lot of great B2B marketing platforms out there so optimize your processes by trying one or more of them.

B2B Social Media Marketing

Social media — paid and organic — is very effective for B2B companies as a way to build brand awareness, build trust, and educate. Credibility is a determining factor for clients when deciding on a B2B company and social media offers a great opportunity to do that.

The 12th Annual B2B Content Marketing Report found that 45 percent of B2B marketers have increased their spending on paid social posts with LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube giving the best results.

The key to social media is having a distinctive brand voice. Just because you are a B2B brand doesn’t mean it has to be serious or without life. A great example of this is CRM company Zendesk which uses humor to drive engagement like in this tweet.

B2B Marketing Strategies

There are many B2B marketing strategies you can use to engage customers. You can consider both paid and organic strategies so see what will suit your company as they will not all apply depending on your business and sector.

1) Create a website or ecommerce site — This will be the shop front of your business online so it should give information about your business, offer resources, enable a way to subscribe if you have a newsletter, and a way to contact your team.

2) Use content marketing and SEO — These techniques will help you to increase online visibility and drive traffic.

3) Use an omnichannel approach — Integrate your offline and online marketing activities so you can keep track of activities and measure performance.

4) Use PPC campaigns — Paid campaigns are a great way to target a specific audience and get your brand seen.

5) Leverage social media — Social media marketing works and can help to drive brand awareness and offer a customer service channel to serve existing customers. Create custom audiences to target personas.

6) Focus on first-party data — The demise of third-party cookies means that your first-party data is even more valuable so cultivate those email marketing lists.

7) Offer self-service options — Over 70 percent of B2B buyers prefer remote human interactions and digital self-service according to McKinsey, so consider offering some of these options like webchat.

B2B Marketing Examples

Let’s take a look at some B2B companies who are doing great things in their marketing campaigns and activities.

Let’s take a look at some B2B companies who are doing great things in their marketing campaigns and activities.