9 Marketing Tactics Your B2B Brand Might Be Missing

B2B marketing is all about communicating to your prospective clients how your enterprise can help theirs grow. While B2B marketing integrates multiple tactics, it only takes one missing piece in your strategy to stall out your campaign. 

When most companies think of B2B marketing tactics, they primarily think of direct and outbound methods — communications sent directly to the clients or potential buyers they have identified. The goal is to be appealing and persuasive enough for the audience to respond to and engage with your offerings. These tactics certainly have a place in your marketing toolkit, but the field of B2B marketing has diversified with new opportunities coming to the forefront every year. 

We’re going to take a look at nine marketing tactics your brand could be missing out on and how to apply them to your own campaigns.

What Is B2B Marketing?

Business to business (B2B) marketing generally alludes to a relationship between businesses with the marketing strategy of one brand designed for and directed towards another enterprise or organization.

What Separates B2B From B2C Marketing?

Business to Business and Business to Consumer (B2C) marketing differ in their modes of operation, strategy, and communication with their audiences.

B2B marketing analyzes the organization's market, and then targets the interests, needs, and challenges presented by individuals making purchase decisions for their companies. The organization becomes the customer.

B2C marketing is targeted at the interests, needs, and challenges of individuals making independent purchase decisions for themselves. B2C business models generally feature a higher client volume but lower revenue per customer. In comparison, B2B typically involves a lower volume of clients but a higher revenue per customer with longer sales cycles.

The metrics for making purchase decisions are also different. B2B organizations cater to businesses who are focused on making purchase decisions that maximize their ROI, increase production efficiencies, and level up their personnel's expertise. B2C companies are serving individual customers with needs on a varying scale. These differences mean that their marketing models have to conform to their individual needs.

Common B2B Marketing Tactics

These are the most common B2B marketing tactics you may have encountered and probably used in your own campaigns:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If there’s one thing your digital marketing needs to achieve, it’s helping your target audience find your website. SEO is one of the most powerful tools a company can use to achieve its growth objectives.

Even though SEO is a multifaceted and dynamic discipline, it is essentially made up of two components:

• On-site SEO communicates the concepts on your website that matter to your audience using selected keyword phrases.
• Off-site SEO is the practice of getting links to your website through other avenues, such as outside engagement or guest posting in other publications. These initiatives help to establish your site's authority as a thought leader in your field. Search engines will begin to view your website as more reliable as more relevant and high-authority websites hyperlink to it, leading to higher rankings.

2. B2B Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most efficient ways of reaching any client. Up to 93% of B2B marketers use email to communicate to current and prospective customers. Emails generate recursive engagements that turn into subscribers and leads into customers.

The B2B customer is essentially asking how your business can help their business grow. Consequently, your email marketing must resonate consistently with your corporate clients and focus on matters central to their operations, such as resources, money, and time.

Email marketing is a powerful tool to share your brand content. 40% of B2B marketers report that email newsletters are pivotal in ensuring content marketing success. Now more than ever, it is necessary to write and send out effective, attractive, and enticing marketing emails, especially as our inboxes are filled with an overwhelming amount of promotional messages.

To ensure your emails gain traction:

• Write exciting subject lines that quickly capture the attention of readers. Our digital culture is rife with instant gratification, so you have only a few seconds to get people to read your email before you lose them.
• Limit your call to action to one. Quite often, you may be tempted to include multiple calls to action in your marketing email, but this can confuse your readers, who may eventually end up ignoring all of them because they’re too overwhelmed.

3. B2B Content Marketing

We've mentioned how B2B marketing is all about how and why your products can help other businesses to grow. Corporate customers demand competence, expertise, and insight as they are driven by a need to educate themselves on the best ways to maximize their ROI. Content marketing then becomes a highly essential tool to capture this niche.

While most tactics, including those prevalent in B2B models, often interrupt potential customers with promotional copy, content marketing educates the consumer and opens them up to new avenues that could solve their most pressing business challenges, which is precisely what corporate customers are looking for. Content marketing also carries the additional advantage of SEO capability, which readily anticipates what your target audience may be looking for online. This takes them to your site, generates leads, and turns them into clients.

Remember that content marketing delivers more when content is aligned to various stages of the marketing funnel. You must curate content that enlightens the buyer on their pain points right from the awareness phase.

What Tactics Are You Missing?

If successfully implemented, these lesser known B2B marketing tactics can significantly improve your ROI. If any of the following channels stand out for you, they’re definitely worth exploring and adding to your plan:

1. Research

Research is the centerpiece of every modern marketing campaign. Conducting robust scientific studies on the marketplace and brands in your field will lead to making informed decisions. Scientific research lays the groundwork for your marketing and provides valuable metrics for measuring your results.

Research helps you get to know your customers and puts you in an optimal position to serve them efficiently. Conducting market research also provides insight into how your business processes are performing. You'll be able to outline your organizational strengths and weaknesses, which will advise you on the best service package to offer.

Studies by Hinge Research on the impact of research in marketing show that businesses who conduct comprehensive research on their clients and prospects grow up to ten times faster and are twice as profitable as their peers who disregard research.

Creating client user groups is one technique to better understand your customers' demands. Customer user groups, like focus groups for new products, tap into the insights of people who are already benefiting from your services. For example, after interviewing your client user group, you may discover that focusing on the pain point of cloud security is more efficient when marketing to IT organizations. 

2. Testimonials, Precise Results, and Case Studies

Buyers aspire to be as successful as other individuals and businesses. Many B2B advertising and marketing teams often get stuck in a rut and lose sight of the fact that their product isn't the selling point...the solution is. Furthermore, stories create engagement on a personal level. The most vital foundation for establishing and maintaining credibility is a personal connection. This considered, you have to include a range of case studies, precise results, and individual testimonials (showing how you helped) in your marketing campaigns.

When a customer has a list of potential sellers, they will want to see how you performed in the past. Supplying a case study or testimonial of a similar customer could be the proof your prospects require before making a major purchase decision.

3. Storytelling Through Social Media

It's easy to underestimate the importance of having a B2B social media content strategy. B2B businesses should work on creating content that demonstrates the type of work they accomplish. Consider including client testimonials, employee profiles, and behind-the-scenes video files to show potential clients how your organization solves industry problems.

Clients will be more inclined to work with you if you post a video on LinkedIn or Twitter showing the human faces behind your product. People relate more to a personal touch.

4. Personal Interaction

In the B2B industry, we often forget that we are dealing with people. When we treat a business only as a business, we overlook the crucial role of interpersonal interaction and relationship building and miss out on essential networks. When you disregard the human connection, you may end up losing business opportunities to new organizations that make conscious efforts to build personal relationships with clients.

You could follow up with your customers after sales to gauge their level of satisfaction with your product. In this way, you will build a long-term relationship that could lead to returning customers and referrals.

5. Targeting Quality Leads

Businesses frequently fail to recognize that producing large-scale content for thousands of individuals is a long-term process. You'll have to put in some effort to get folks to consume your content. It's a bad idea to concentrate on the leads at the bottom of the funnel. Always consider a customer's lifetime value and how you can maximize it.

6. Inbound Before Outbound

Inbound tactics involve the integration of B2B lead nurturing, buyer stage-based media, and proper targeting. These aspects of the marketing process have to be taken on before any outbound efforts are initiated. For example, you can use channels like Quora and Reddit to build a following by giving answers to industry-related questions with detailed and personalized responses.

7. CRM, Marketing Automation, and Lead Nurturing

Marketing automation substitutes high-touch, repetitive manual procedures with automated processes that are backed up by technology. It combines your online marketing channels into a single centralized system for planning, monitoring, and evaluating campaigns and programs.

As with any other technology resource, it's essential to pick the correct marketing automation tools for your company. Make sure a potential solution's size, complexity, and scalability are a good fit for your requirements.

A Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) is another essential piece of software. Many businesses utilize a CRM to track and organize opportunities and customer data. No matter how complex your operations become, a CRM will help you stay organized and informed. Leadfeeder used Hubspot's CRM to generate leads, and it worked so well that it resulted in top search engine rankings.

8. Testing and Optimization

Testing is another scientific and reliable tactic. You may iterate your marketing efforts with testing and optimization and make continuous judgments based on empirical data rather than intuition. Just as research is the foundation of your marketing, testing and optimization are essential tools to build with. The best way to make use of this is to never stop testing and tinkering with your tactics.

9. Analytics and Reporting

To effectively measure results, it is critical to analyze the appropriate metrics. This requires proper tools to collect reliable statistics on all of your efforts from your website and social media to SEO.

Google Analytics is an effective tool for tracking and analyzing traffic on their website. Platforms like Hootsuite provide detailed social media statistics, while Mangools aids in analyzing and improving SEO performance.

Analytics and testing assist you in determining what is and is not working. Embrace them and put them to good use. They'll help you with turning around your marketing campaigns for the better.

Is It Time to Revise Your Marketing Plan?

Today's winners are the companies that successfully collect and use data on their performance across a diverse range of marketing initiatives. The primary goal is to remain dynamic and adaptable. To stay competitive, your company must constantly evaluate and improve its B2B marketing tactics.

The online marketing industry is changing at a tremendous pace. Some of your “ol’ reliables” are not going to be as effective anymore. If you want to reevaluate your own marketing plan and learn how to implement some of these new tactics, contact us today, and we can help! At Steel Croissant, we can create a customized plan with the best strategy for your business.