In the area of marketing, we find several ways to reach prospective customers or the niche of our business. And within all these strategies we will find B2B Marketing, and we will review the most important parts of it.
One of the postmodern purposes of marketing is to take advantage of communication vehicles and information technologies (1). This is how every day more and more companies are motivated to be online.
Summary
- B2B Marketing seeks to establish a relationship between companies, attracting potential customers from your website.
- The study of choosing the best channel for B2B marketing will determine the possibilities of achieving your goals.
- We must take into account the B2B Marketing strategy to be taken in order to reach the largest possible number of future businesses with which we want to relate in the long term.
What is B2B Marketing?
The definition of B2B Marketing is the Business-to-Business relationship and not as we commonly think of Business-to-End Consumer. That is, there are companies that dedicate their strategies to obtaining other organizations as customers.
In today’s world, where we know that most advertising goes through digital; then in this case we will talk directly about B2B Marketing in the digital era.
What is the difference between B2B vs B2C Marketing?
We have already talked about Business to Business Marketing, and we know that it is the commercial relationship between companies. We should also add that B2B Marketing would not exist without B2C Marketing, so let’s summarize what it refers to.
Business-to-Customer Marketing, as its name says, is the relationship between a company and a minority buyer and not someone who is looking for products or services to offer or manufacture a finished product. We can add to this that the flow of potential buyers is greater in B2C than in B2B.
What are the B2B Marketing strategies?
Before starting with the most relevant strategies of recent times, experts ask us to understand the process or steps to follow in B2B purchases. Investigate what the problem or opportunity is, define it and take a strategic solution to achieve the objective; these are the points to take into account to choose the best B2B Marketing strategy for your company.
If you want to learn more about B2B Marketing, check out our B2B Marketing Statistics. We cover important numbers and trends within the B2B Marketing Industry.
What are the channels currently used in B2B Marketing?
B2B Marketing has obviously evolved over the years. Before we look at the most used channels for B2B marketing, we need to clarify certain concepts so that you can focus on the most used channels so far.
We have the term Outbound which refers to direct marketing, even without previous research, and this method was more used in the past. Now, with the upturn of the internet era, we can use the so-called Inbound Marketing which refers to a modern way of attracting, converting, closing and finally delighting the customer (2).
B2B Email Marketing
The use of emails in B2B Marketing is a technique that has been used for a long time, where correct and personalized segmentation must be performed. With this technique you do not manage to stay connected to your customers, sending them news and feedback on your products.
Efficiency data must be used, and a database cleaning must be carried out, quality contents must be structured, and sending software must be used. An example of software is MailChimp.
B2B digital marketing
The electronic era of B2B Marketing began a long time ago, but in this section, we are going to define a little the presence in the network; where our customers must have confidence in finding a site where they can make secure transactions.
It can be said that nowadays it is essential to have the following points in the electronic presence of your business:
- Create your website.
- Define your target audience.
- Optimize your digital presence.
- Being ethical and honest is a fundamental key to generating trust in your website (3).
B2B content marketing
In B2B Content Marketing, we can say that we focus on offering our current and future customers relevant quality information, which can help their development as companies. Then we must take into account certain aspects when generating the content, such as:
- Have a purpose
- Format
- Topics of importance to our audience (3)
- Targeting the right audience
Among the B2B companies that offer content of interest to the audience, we have Shopify, and we can not leave aside the giant Amazon, who with its AWS Acadmey program offers free courses of relevant content mainly to integrate us into Digital Marketing and the good use of its platform as Business to Business.
B2B Marketing in social networks
Social networks have had exponential growth in recent years; it is for this reason that they are now also part of the media used by B2B Marketing. One of the benefits is that we can create our community and build trust, as long as our content is of quality and relevant information according to the line of business of our current and future customers.
One of the social networks that we know that was created to generate a network of professional contacts is LinkedIn; however, it is currently known that Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, among others, are already part of B2B businesses to make themselves known to the large community that is used by social networks (4).
We cannot leave aside and say that with the proper use of social networks, we will increase our presence and thus make our brand better known. In the graph above, you can see the worldwide interaction of people on social networks.
What are the B2B Marketing trends to watch in 2022?
In the technological era, we can say that the world turns very fast and it is more than clear that in the business world, companies experience changes and must adapt to new generations. This is how every day more and more companies decide to invest in digital marketing and social networks (5). Let’s show you some trends to take into account nowadays.
Measuring ROI in B2B Marketing activities
As we already know, ROI or return on investment is a tool to measure the economic benefit obtained from the investment, in this case, it is also applied to the investments made in the platforms we use to make ourselves known as a company. Experts say that we must pay special attention to this measurement index.
Increased investment in influencer
The exponential growth of social networks has led companies to choose people with large communities and invite them to be ambassadors of our brand. In this case; companies must be careful when choosing the image that will represent their brand, according to the line of business.
Create more case studies
In the case studies, we can first learn from the experience of other companies before and after applying a strategy. This will help us understand where our organization is and apply the right strategy for us. We can not only study the competition, we must also study our most successful projects.
Increased loading speed
The access and response capacity of a website is related to user satisfaction. The more speed capacity our websites have, we can ensure that we will have even more traffic. In the giant Google you can find a tool called PageSpeed that serves to measure the responsiveness of a website (7).
Video content is the most popular
Experts tell us that the video format is the one that stands out today. LinkedIn is the network that rebounded in the statistics with its videos with B2B Marketing content (8). Experts say that after this video content network, we will find TikTok as one of the networks with the biggest rebound since the beginning of the pandemic.
Examples of B2B Marketing
Finally, we are going to tell you about several B2B Marketing practices that are used by large companies. You can incorporate them too and have one more tool to achieve your company’s goals.
Customer testimonials
Many high-end companies use customer testimonials as a powerful tool to attract more buyers. In B2B Marketing it is no different and we have several B2B companies showing in their different channels of connection with their customers, the different testimonials of satisfied customers.
To reaffirm this; you should know that many buyers, before making their purchase decision, among other aspects, review reviews from other customers to finalize their decision.
Influential employees in B2B Marketing
Within any institution, we have external and internal customers. Now we are going to focus on internal customers, who are just as important as external customers.
Some organizations apply employee influencing; because when we work on increasing affinity with our industry, we will have an ambassador outside the office. Here is an example of a company that uses this practice: IBM.
B2B Marketing Referral Program
Some large organizations are making it a good practice to try to build loyalty with their current customers and have them become brand ambassadors. This is based on incentivizing them with royalties and any other benefit to turn them into another voice of our brand.
This customer-to-customer connection can even be, in many cases, more economical than expensive advertising campaigns (6).
Invest in B2B Marketing and reach your business customers
Now that we’ve detailed some great information on B2B marketing and how you can connect with your current and future customers, you should consider what best fits your company in order to create your best B2B marketing campaign.
Well, we can understand that marketing is not your organization’s forte, so the most sensible thing to do is to look for a company that offers this type of service and, once again, we have an example of B2B Marketing.
Conclusion
We have been able to see that B2B Marketing is not very different from B2C, but we can see that the flow of transactions is going to be less than B2C. The presence of the internet is fundamental in these times and much more, after the pandemic, where we already know that the increase of online purchases increased exponentially.
In summary in this article, we are sure that you were able to find all the necessary information to better enter the world of B2B Marketing and be able to apply it to your organization finding the best strategy for you.
References
1. RODRÍGUEZ , M. T., PINEDA, D. Y., & CASTRO, C. (2020, July 23). Trends in modern marketing, a theoretical review. Retrieved August 8, 2022.
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2. Caballero Martínez, A. (2021). Application and analysis of a decision and execution model of B2B Marketing techniques. Universitat Politècnica de València. Retrieved August 10, 2022.
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3. Perdigón Llanes, R., Viltres Sala , H., & Madrigal Leiva, I. R. (2018, July 6). E-commerce and digital marketing strategies for small and medium-sized enterprises. Retrieved August 10, 2022
4. Gutiérrez Montoya, G. A., Sánchez Jiménez, M. Á., & Galiano Coronil, A. (2018).Social networks as a means of tourism promotion in Ibero-American countries.Retos Revista de Ciencias de la Administración y Economía, 15(8), 135-150. Retrieved August 10, 2022
5. Palao Pedrós, L. (2020, June 29). The future growth of social networks: Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. Retrieved August 11, 2022
6.Falcetti, A. (2019, October 25). Analyzing the effect of exposure to referral program on customer referral value: A cross national comparative research between the Netherlands and Italy. LUISSearch Additions. Retrieved August 11, 2022
7. Luque-Ortiz, S. (2021, February 18). Digital marketing strategies used by sports retail companies. Retrieved August 11, 2022
8. Guadalupe, G. (2015). Inbound Marketing in LinkedIn for brand management. Revista ICONO 14. Revista Científica De Comunicación Y Tecnologías Emergentes, 13(1), 105-124. Retrieved August 11, 2022
