How to build a B2B marketing strategy

B2C marketing strategies and individual tactics fail in B2B. Certainly not all of them, but most do. That is simply a fact I come across very often. Last year I worked on several larger B2B projects where I mainly ran into these problems:

• No marketing was done at all. It somehow worked, and it will somehow keep working.
• Marketing was done as if it were B2C. We hired an agency that focuses on e-shops and we expect it to bring in very specific, qualified leads.

Many B2B companies still firmly believe that a salesperson is enough. They do not look at the problem from a broader perspective.

Types of B2B companies

There are several types of companies in B2B. If I had to choose one main dividing line, the most distinctive one, I would split B2B into:

• B2B companies that rely on long-term client relationships and direct sales. These companies have a longer tradition, and their acquisition process has often stood still in time because they simply do not need it.
• B2B companies that rely on online acquisition, new customers, growth and generating enquiries from the internet. These include various SaaS applications.

There is also a second, very important dividing line that reflects the nature of the company.

• SaaS (antivirus, software, CRM)
• Services (accounting, cleaning of industrial premises)
• Manufacturer
• Distributor (we make almost nothing ourselves, we only resell to retailers)

In the article, I set out 18 B2B tactics and trends you should consider when putting together your strategy. If you are interested in this topic, be sure to read my article for Digichef, where I describe which strategies and approaches to try in B2B marketing.

1. How to build a B2B strategy step by step

In this article, I take a slightly different perspective and describe one way to approach a B2B strategy. It is no secret that B2B sales funnels and customer journeys are generally much longer than B2C funnels. Make sure you understand how you acquire customers. Then break the customer journey down into further milestones so you know how customers move through the funnel. Besides the classic funnel, a customer journey map may help you even more. In it, you break down all customer touchpoints and can also assign them in parallel to stages such as awareness, acquisition, retention or customer care.

Use these signals as the basis for your key performance indicators (KPIs). You can then evaluate how your best customers behave and meet them halfway. What should you definitely measure?

• A visit to a specific page of the website
• The user filled in the contact form (lead acquired)
• Engagement with your social media channels, or the user follows you
• The user subscribed to your newsletter
• Registered for your event or workshop
• Actively enquired about your product

Do not forget to include both long-term and short-term goals in your B2B marketing strategies. Long-term goals help your team see the big picture and evaluate trends. Short-term goals make processes easier to understand and evaluate. They also break large projects down so that planning and completing tasks feels more manageable.

A very simple division into stages could look like this:

Awareness stage: The potential customer has become aware of a problem and starts learning about it and exploring solutions.

Consideration stage: The potential customer is researching solutions to their new problem and starts coming across companies that can solve it.

Decision stage: The potential customer is ready to make a purchase or actively contact a company with an enquiry.

2. Understand and describe your customers

Based on the information you have about your customers from your website and, above all, from your salespeople, you can create buyer personas. Go through your database and find out which buyer roles and positions contact you first, what they like doing, what they follow, where they spend their time and what characteristics they share. In B2B, there is also the advantage that you can meet customers at various industry events or your own events.

Understanding the buyer’s journey is essential. Try to gather qualitative information, but do not be afraid to carry out quantitative research as well if you are a larger company with a suitable target group that can be measured this way.

Research is the foundation of every modern marketing effort, yet in the Czech Republic, given the size of the market, we tend to blindly copy techniques from abroad or simply go by gut feeling. from market research to brand research. Research gives you objective input for your marketing and valuable baselines for measuring results and setting goals. It is no coincidence that one study showed that brands which conduct research systematically grow three to ten times faster and are up to twice as profitable as competitors that do not invest in research.

Even smaller B2B companies can use analytics tools, where you can find out how people came across you. Go through your sales calls and understand which questions people keep asking. Personas, or a simple document clarifying your target group, will take your B2B marketing strategies to the next level by giving you clear information about your potential customers.

Avoid paid campaigns until you are clear about what you are communicating, how and to whom. Also check the type of action you require and how well people move through the conversion funnel.

Steve Kearns

I have seen several poorly thought-out, superficial B2B campaigns that did not work from the start and burned through a lot of money.

All these items will help you build buyer personas so you can plan your B2B marketing strategies effectively. List everything they do before they become potential customers, while they go through the sales process and just before they buy. This will help you understand your clientele better and find better ways to guide them through the funnel. Many companies even give their personas names to make them feel even more human.

3. Build your brand and authority systematically

The marketing materials for your B2B marketing strategies need one clear direction, look and vision. A well-built company brand, combined with the value you provide to your audience, strengthens customer loyalty and credibility. This is a fairly obvious point that is well known and tested in B2B. This psychological effect works just as well in B2B. If you are dealing with a problem and realise that you already know one of the companies, the chance that you will choose that company is up to 10 times higher.

The study below is even more convincing. Put simply, if decision makers do not know your brand before they start researching the problem (which your company solves), your chances of success are at most 5%. And this is where a common, serious misunderstanding arises. Most B2B companies that dive into the world of digital marketing start at the performance and purchase stage, where their chances are very slim without any previous activity.

This helps grow your customer base with less marketing effort in the long run. Do your research first and only then build your brand. Start by finding common traits and patterns among your customer personas. For example, what common pain points do they all want to solve with your products and services? How do they want to be spoken to?

According to a Forrester study titled Three Myths of Statistics, 67% of the buying journey now happens digitally. Your potential customers can easily gather information and find what they are looking for, which makes it harder for your sales team to influence their decisions. This is especially true if you are a B2B company whose potential market includes more than hundreds of possible companies.

Forrester

By using content marketing together with the other tactics in this list, you can build a brand with a wider reputation as an expert in your field, and an understanding of your expertise even among audiences that have not worked with you directly. This brand recognition can lead to referrals and new business. Simply do not try to fake anything with your brand. Be authentic and talk about it.

3.1 Choose what you are best at

One of the most important aspects of your business is specialisation and targeting a narrow niche. Research from the USA repeatedly shows that the fastest-growing companies are usually specialists in a carefully targeted business niche. It should be an area of the field you understand thoroughly, a space in which you can become an undisputed expert and leader.

Specialisation makes all your marketing efforts easier, because it tends to define precisely what you do and immediately sets you apart from the competition. Specialisation is a differentiator that pays off. Of course, brands that grow from their product have it easier than those growing on the basis of marketing.

4. Be where your customers are

A key part of your B2B marketing strategies will be working out where you should focus your efforts. Is it trade fairs, or is it more effective to target through your website? To answer this, you can go back to your buyer personas. Do you know where your customers come from and which traffic sources matter? In B2B, for example, being findable in search engines is more important than in B2C, yet far fewer people work on it. Investing in SEO definitely pays off. Keyword research can also be a good foundation for B2B companies. But be careful. It does not suit every brand or industry. If, as a B2B company, you solve a particular problem, try to have an answer on your website for every variation of that problem. In the same way, work on your inbound marketing and your website UX.

Also analyse the data you gather from your marketing activities. Invest your time in the channels that bring in customers and drop the ones that do not.

Do your customers attend a particular event every year where you could exhibit? Great! Build on that with the right B2B marketing strategies.

It is very important that you develop a deep understanding of what your target customers do before they become a lead and after they become one. This understanding will help you meet them where they are at any point in the funnel. Once you manage this, you will be answering questions your prospective customers did not even know they had.