Did you know that 77 percent of B2B buyers say their latest purchase was complex or difficult?

That’s a big opportunity for marketers like you. Make that journey a little easier and reap the rewards of connecting with your target audience and driving conversions.

A winning business-to-business (B2B) marketing strategy makes all the difference in landing loyal customers. I’m here to help you take your B2B game to the next level with this definitive B2B marketing guide.

By the time you’ve finished reading, you’ll understand how B2B marketing works and how to use different B2B marketing strategies. I’ll review some B2B marketing best practices so you can hit the ground running.

Get ready to win at B2B.

What Is B2B Marketing?

B2B marketing is where a business sells products or services to other companies. It could be marketing something like software, web hosting services, or cloud computing packages.

In practice, this means reaching out to other businesses, developing relationships, and selling your products or services to them.

To position themselves as the best solution, B2B businesses might write post blogs, white papers, case studies, or display ads to appeal to their ideal clients.

Additionally, research from LinkedIn shows B2B marketing leaders are increasingly turning to in-person events (60 percent), video (59 percent), and thought leadership content (57 percent) to generate leads and grow their businesses.

Embracing B2B marketing can help you:

• Boost exposure: B2B tactics help businesses build brand awareness and build a strong brand reputation by sharing valuable expertise and insights on products and services.
• Build loyalty and trust: Developing targeted content is a great way to build enduring relationships with current and potential customers alike. Win them over by addressing their pain points and providing them solutions to those problems. This allows you to position your brand as their go-to for anything in your niche—and there’s a lot of long-lasting value to that.
• Target your marketing efforts: B2B marketing allows businesses to focus their efforts on a specific target audience, ideally decision-makers within companies. This helps businesses key in on the right people with their messaging and strategies.

Examples of B2B companies that nail B2B marketing include HubSpot, Dropbox, and Stripe. I’ll tell you more about what each does well—and how you can learn from their success—later in this piece.

B2C vs. B2B Marketing

As you might expect, B2B and B2C marketing have different approaches to reaching customers.

B2C businesses usually aim to connect with their customers emotionally by addressing their needs, desires, and pain points. B2B marketing focuses more on practical needs like cost-cutting, improving efficiency, and security, though focusing on a prospective client’s pain points does pay off.

The way you build relationships with customers is also different in learning how to market B2B. B2C businesses are more transactional, while B2B businesses focus on building relationships, networking, and direct outreach.

The B2B and B2B sales cycles also vary. B2C sales cycles are usually shorter, as they rely on customers making quick decisions rooted in emotion. B2B sales, on the other hand, take longer since the decision-making process is more complex—filled with pitches, product demos, and relationship-building.

Developing Your B2B Marketing Strategy

Creating the right B2B marketing strategies can be a major challenge. Whether you’re learning how to market B2B products or how to market B2B services, it’s especially important to identify the best tactics and techniques to reach your target audience.

In this section, I’ll explain how to approach your B2B content marketing strategy so it resonates with your customers and helps you achieve your business goals.

Define Clear Objectives

If you want a solid guide for your digital marketing strategy, it all begins with setting clear objectives. If you don’t know what you’re hoping to achieve, you’ll have no idea if you’re on the way to achieving it.

Is your company just starting out and looking to build brand awareness around your products and services? Are you somewhat established and looking to pick up the pace of growth? Each scenario will call for different objectives.

Be specific and realistic with your goals, and make sure they make sense for your business. For instance, don’t shoot for crazy growth numbers like increasing leads by 60% in a quarter or tripling your social media following in a month.

Those goals might make perfect sense for your business, but they’ll be all but impossible to achieve. In marketing, we talk a lot about SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound).

For instance, following the SMART method, your B2B marketing goals might look like this:

• Specific: Increase the number of memberships you sell by 20 percent.
• Measurable: To ensure you’re on track, you can monitor your progress using monthly sales figures.
• Attainable: Based on historical data, a 20 percent increase is realistic and would help you meet your overall goal of increasing revenue.
• Relevant: Selling more memberships fits with the larger objective of increasing revenue.
• Time-bound: To stay on target, you plan to achieve this 20 percent increase within the next six months.

This SMART goal is a great tool for keeping your efforts focused and effective while providing clear criteria for measuring your progress along the way.

Create Multiple Buyer Personas for Effective Targeting

To make sure you’re pursuing the right potential customers, it pays to create customer personas. After all, the most important part of any B2B marketing approach is understanding whom you’re targeting.

In a B2B sense, a buyer persona is a fictional prospect within a company whose traits match those of your ideal buyer. Think everything from their title to the level of autonomy they have to make decisions on behalf of their company. I like to think of personas kind of like characters in a book.

How do you work them into your B2B marketing strategy? By developing multiple buyer personas according to where your customers are in your B2B marketing funnel—in other words, whether they’re just becoming aware of your product or service, considering it, or ready to make a decision.

Doing so allows you to identify the unique needs and pain points of your different customer segments. With that comes a better customer journey. In fact, a successful personalization program boosts customer satisfaction by 20 percent and sales conversion rates by as much as 15 percent.

With these detailed profiles, you can personalize your B2B marketing strategies to resonate with each customer group, craft more compelling messages, and better position your products and services.

Key traits to work into your buyer personas include:

• Age
• Gender
• Income
• Occupation
• Marital status
• Education
• Geographical location
• Challenges
• Hobbies and interests
• Goals
• Fears
• Pain points
• Values

Ready to start crafting your personas? HubSpot has some free templates to help get your project off the ground.

Identify Your Buyer’s Journey

What steps does a potential customer go through during the decision-making process? Once you answer that question, you can use that as a definitive B2B marketing guide and create content around it.

Your sales reps get only 5 percent of a customer’s time during the B2B buyer’s journey. That’s why developing content that speaks to them at every stage of the journey is essential.

Much like the B2B marketing funnel, the buyer’s journey starts with awareness, moves on to consideration, and finishes with a buyer pulling the trigger on a purchase.

To personalize your B2B marketing strategies to each stage of the buyer’s journey, create a customer journey map. This is a visual representation of the steps and touchpoints customers go through when interacting with a company.

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