The Top Six B2B Marketing Strategies in 2021
By Melissa | Jun 10, 2021 (5 min read)
If you run a business that serves other businesses, your marketing strategy and approach to lead generation needs to be different.
When you sell to other businesses, you are selling to people who are not spending their own money but are buying on behalf of the company.
This difference means they have a unique mindset and will approach purchase decisions in a more structured, logical way. The good news is that any marketing channel you use for B2C can be adjusted to focus on a B2B marketing strategy.
If you’re not correctly targeting your B2B prospects, your marketing promotions and advertisements will likely fail.
This is why an entirely different marketing method of B2B marketing has developed. In this article, we’ll share the top 6 ways to grow your B2B marketing success. These are some of the most effective B2B marketing strategies to help convert your business audience.
How is B2B Marketing Different to B2C Marketing?
Businesses buy differently than individuals. There is more risk of loss with a B2B purchase because the business capital is tied up in the investment.
Very often, you are dealing with more than one person in a B2B sale. A group of decision-makers will need to make sure the product or service meets their requirements. A B2B sale may also need to be approved by a committee, business owner, or CEO.
The beginning of the B2B sales cycle is different, as many businesses may not be actively looking to purchase new products or services. They may not even be aware they have an issue that your business can solve for them. Or they may look at hiring someone internally to attempt to solve the problems your B2B product or service can help them with.
Here are six different types of B2B Marketing strategies that can help grow your online reach, new business leads, and business revenue.
- Email marketing
- Content marketing
- Social media marketing
- SMS marketing
- Web push marketing
- Messenger marketing
- Referral based marketing
1) B2B Email Marketing
Even in 2021, email is still a dominant force in digital marketing. Email is still the number one method of maintaining relationships with your clients and customers and informing them about business news and offers.
Statistics show that over 90% of B2B marketing uses email as a part of their strategy to establish new business relations. Cold email and email combined with other B2B marketing strategies can help to begin to build relationships.
Remember that any emails you send to B2B prospects or customers should include useful pieces of information that help solve their problems. This approach will provide your potential business partners with reasons to start connecting with you.
In every email you send, make sure to have a call-to-action (CTA) button that allows your B2B prospect to move into your sales funnel after reading the email.
2) B2B Content Marketing
Just like regular consumers, B2B customers need useful information to make purchasing decisions. If you can make your website or emails a valuable source of information on how to solve their problems, you will attract a lot of attention. High-quality website content not only helps your B2B prospects discover something new but also proves your expertise. Your content can also help with SEO to ensure new B2B clients will find your website through search engines.
It’s important to remember that most prospective customers will prefer to get new knowledge from articles over advertisements. Create a business blog with topics for your industry will provide your clients and customers with valuable information and promote your products along the way.
Blog content can also helo with lead nurturing, as you can encourage a potential customer to sign up for email newsletters or use gated content such as white papers or video courses. A simple subscription form will help your business to collect the data necessary for lead nurturing.
3) B2B Social Media Marketing
It’s not an understatement to say that social media is an integral part of modern business. While 79% of people use social media almost daily, more than 70% of B2B customers use social media to make purchases. This form of outbound marketing can be very effective in attracting a B2B buyer who is using social media for personal or business reasons.
Social media marketing (SMM) can increase your number of B2B leads and establish successful business relationships when used well. You can use a great deal of marketing automation in your B2B social media marketing.
LinkedIn is perhaps the best known social media platform for B2B marketing. Your team can easily share information about your company and business offers. By growing your volume of LinkedIn connections, you can quickly increase the level of engagement with potential partners.
Beware not to use LinkedIn to spam potential clients or customers. Use discretion when reaching out via direct messages or promoting your business via LinkedIn posts. The platform is a place to share valuable ideas and resources and to build reputation and authority.
4) Push Notification Marketing
You may have noticed that your web browser has started asking you if you will allow websites to send you notifications. These are known as web push notifications or browser notifications.
Similar to the small numbers you see on social media platforms, Web Push Notifications will let your website visitors opt-in to receive to stay updated on new content on your website. These clickable messages can then be sent to users’ devices by a website or a web app.
Web push notifications will usually include the following elements:
- Notification Title: Most brands will use their name here.
- Notification Content: The message sent. Character count varies between browsers. Shorter is better.
- Notification URL: The domain sending the web notification.
- Notification Icon: A logo or image.
According to Marketing Land, push messaging can have a high click-through rate (CTR), especially if personalized and sent at optimum times.
5) B2B Messenger Marketing
Messenger marketing through apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, has already become popular in the B2B sector.
What is the appeal of messenger marketing? Marketing messages sent via a messenger service have near 80% open rates and 20% click-through rates.
Currently, Facebook Messenger is the most popular with business people. You can use Facebook Messenger to set up auto-responses to your Facebook posts. You can also install Facebook Messenger chat widgets directly on your website to simplify communication with your potential and existing customers.
6) B2B Referral Marketing
Generating leads through word of mouth means having past or existing customers spreading your marketing message for you. If you are starting in business, it can hard to use referral marketing. However, once you have a track record of some success in serving your customers and clients, it can become the best and most cost-effective form of B2B marketing.
Referrals are relatively simple to understand. If you respect someone’s opinion, then any recommendation from them will carry a lot of weight. Referred prospects are much easier to sell your services to because they have a lot of trust in the referrer. This trust is transferred over easily.
Becoming part of local networking groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, BNI, or your industry associations can dramatically increase the volume of referrals you receive.
While you build your business online and choose a lead generation strategy, don’t forget the value of real-world relationships and connections that can help to build B2B referrals.
These six B2B marketing strategies are a good start to growing your online reach, referrals, and revenue. There are many more B2B marketing strategies, as the digital marketing landscape is continually changing. New B2B marketing methods appear and supersede the older approaches, so it is crucial to keep a finger on the pulse. To attract a B2B customer means you must adapt and evolve your marketing efforts to match their needs, and ways of doing business.
