How to Help Your Business Grow with B2B Marketing Strategies

Business to Business, or B2B, companies are organizations that provide services and sell products to companies instead of direct consumers. The B2B sales cycle is more robust and longer due to the presence of multiple key players, such as gatekeepers, influencers, and decision-makers. Hence, B2B companies require a different marketing strategy compared to Business to Consumer, or B2C, companies.

To execute B2B marketing strategies adequately, B2B companies may create an internal marketing team or employ the services of a B2B marketing agency, such as KEO Marketing. The key marketing strategies businesses can expect their marketing teams to use include:

1. Conduct A Market Research

Market research is the first step in ensuring the effective use of marketing strategies for business growth. It’s also an ongoing process that must be carried out at various business stages. This helps B2B companies to determine target businesses, pricing, and their unique business standpoint. Market research provides you with the following information:

• The current market share of potential competitors.
• Your range of services and products that are in demand.
• Discover an existing business’s weak and strong points in comparison to peer companies.
• Recognition of emerging and exploitable trends in the marketplace.

2. Make Use of A Niche-Driven Marketing Strategy

Niche-driven marketing is an effective B2B marketing strategy that must be informed by your market research and existing client base. It allows you to focus your marketing to your target market consisting of existing key accounts that have proven more likely to buy your products and services. You could also take a decisive approach to address an identified market segment that receives less emphasis by competitors.

When adopting niche-driven marketing strategies, businesses must consider target business sizes, prior engagement, and intent data. This strategy provides smaller and quantifiable marketing data that companies can leverage properly.

3. Create A High-Performance Website

In today’s highly digital world, there are two billion websites, with about twenty percent active. The vast number of existing and active websites makes it essential to distinguish your business website by the creation of a high-performance one. It shortens the B2B sales cycle by allowing the key players in the chain to share information from your website and make direct purchases. Some of the features of high-performance websites include:

• A Dynamic Homepage: This type of homepage takes full advantage of User Experience (UX) design to present business information clearly and attractively. Branding elements, new products, and upcoming events are displayed to the delight of visitors.
• An ‘About’ Page: An ‘about’ page tells your website visitors a detailed story of your business. This should include company history, mission, visions, and core values.
• Portfolio: Your business portfolio must be accessible to visitors. It’s a section that backs up the stories you might have to tell about the value your business operations add to other businesses.
• Pricing Table: Your business website must have a pricing section for visitors to see. Without a clear depiction of product and service costs, some clients are bound to be lost without any contact made.

4. Leverage Content Marketing

Content marketing is an effective marketing B2B strategy because, in huge contrast to consumers, businesses are driven by proven expertise and logic. Hence, they seek to be adequately educated on what they want to buy. Your B2B content marketing should be focused on creating and distributing high-quality content to both client and prospective businesses. Conventionally, businesses are more likely to make buying decisions based on clearly written content than an advert.

Content marketing also provides a bedrock for your website’s SEO as you can anticipate product and service information your target market is looking for. The use of keyword search tools aids the content creation process for SEO. Preferred content formats are infographics, videos, images, blog posts, and graphical presentations.

5. Invest in Search Engine Optimization 

Google records 5.6 billion searches daily, a fair share of which involves a search for services and products. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) enables your website to rank in the search queries related to your business, thereby boosting business growth. This is because it affords a cheap and almost permanent means of increasing website visibility.

SEO is mainly divided into two, namely On-page and Off-page SEO. On-page SEO focuses on keyword usage, meta-data, and SEO-friendly codes, while Off-page SEO focuses on social sharing and link building practices. The combined use of both will significantly increase business growth and conversion.

6. Take Advantage of Email Marketing

Email marketing remains an effective B2B marketing strategy. Its effectiveness depends primarily on content, design, and consistency. The contents of B2B marketing should include potential ROI and the existing business processes that provide the basis for this value. Other information that potential clients need includes promotional offers, new products, and call-to-actions.

The design of such emails should include business information, including contact and physical address details. Branding elements of a B2B company should also be attached visibly to prove business legitimacy. B2B email marketing should also avoid spamming, but a consistent message delivery to maintain relevancy should be adopted. You can add a personal touch such as the recipient’s name in the email.

7. Make Use of Social Media Marketing

The application of social media for B2B marketing is different from B2C marketing in that there’s a lower number of conversions from social media. However, it can contribute to business growth by increasing brand awareness and creating an increased online personality.

Social media marketing allows you to network and develop essential business relationships with buying influencers. Integrating social media into your operations can help you share content on a cross-platform basis with your website. This helps in driving conversations and increasing engagement. An understanding of the analytics of social media marketing can also inform areas you should place a focus on.

8. Integrate Marketing Automation with Your CRM Software

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software are commonplace in B2B companies. They’re great for tracking and organizing client information, which can lead to the identification of emerging opportunities. It allows you to draw up specific information on previous interactions.

CRM software allows you to integrate marketing automation to replace repetitive and manual marketing efforts with automated ones. Such systems create a centralized system for the creation, management, and tracking of marketing efforts and business growth. This provides vital information that can guide your business decisions.

Conclusion

Strategic B2B marketing can positively influence business growth. A good starting point is to conduct market research. The information gotten from your market research should inform your niche-driven marketing.

A high-performance website will improve the conversion rate. You can bolster your website conversion with content marketing and SEO. Take advantage of email marketing for the distribution of marketing information.

Social media provides a means to network with key decision-makers in the B2B sales cycle. Consider integrating automated marketing with your CRM software. With this, your business is geared for growth.

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