Introduction:
If business strategies are the movie’s central character called ‘How the business market works,’ monotonous policies are the antagonist. So, here is a complete guide to the rather popular ‘Business-to-Business’ aka, B2B marketing Strategy(“OMG right?”) and the B2B marketing strategy trends in 2021.
What is B2B Marketing:
When you run a company or organization, customers’ wants and needs become a pivotal factor, and basically, every business strategy is chalked out according to this only.
Customers’ needs and how the company works towards fulfilling them are the basis of the business-to-business (B2B)definition. For running a successful business, you must establish a customer relationship and enrich it with time and an increase in resources. That is why adapting to business strategy for carrying out operations is extremely important, and one such popular strategy is B2B marketing.
B2B stands for Business to Business. In the business universe, one organization is always in competition with other such organizations. Business to Business marketing strategy indicates a buyer-seller relationship between two distinct companies where one of them sells its commodities to the other for various purposes.
Any company that has business ties with another company and offers policies that serve the buyer companies adapt to B2B or Business to Business strategy and trends.
B2B marketing trends in 2021 primarily focuses on services and policies that any business organization can utilize. Such services include several machines and other supplies for manufacturers or software or SAAS(Software As a Service) products for companies to have a more centralized database for their company details.
Small companies that have just been started usually establish ties B2B marketing with companies with higher revenues to get a kickstart in the market. When a company works on B2B marketing, every stakeholder is concerned with purchases regarding the business.
Compared with marketing strategies where customers as separate entities are concerned, companies that have business ties directly to other organizations have to keep several points in mind while chalking out a presentation for their target audience.
A properly curated B2B marketing strategy is required for vivid organizational improvement, like increasing audience engagement, purchase, sales, and revenues.
Also, impromptu decisions are the enemy of B2B marketing trends in 2021. When you want another organization to invest a large amount of money in a product your organization is offering, the most important things they would inevitably consider are how much can your organization’s product actually serve its purpose, whether the product is going to help them grow, the ethics and goals and infrastructure of your organization. That is why a plan is extremely required to establish Business to Business marketing ties, especially when the competition in the market is rising day by day at an alarming rate.
The journey of B2B marketing starts when a company discovers your company’s product that you want to sell to other organizations. The finishing point is when they make a purchase and, more importantly, when they become a regular buyer of your organization’s service.
For every company, the approach should be different, depending on what they require and whether your organization would fulfill that. Such changes include providing the different communication they aspire to see to trust the company and make a purchase time and again.
Let’s go through the steps to adapt to Business Business Marketing strategy trends in 2021.
B2B Marketing Funnel
B2B marketing funnel is a diagrammatic expression of a ‘Buyer’s journey’ since they discover your company’s product and the steps they take until a purchase is made.
Since different companies require different selling approaches, your company’s business acumen is the game changer to make sure sales go high. These steps are collectively called a marketing funnel which looks like this-
Every step of this funnel is what your organization should address when a company discovers your organization’s name in the market. These different marketing tactics help an organization to get a more detailed insight into the customer organization’s thought process till the purchase.
The steps involved are:
1. Awareness:
The very first step of business-to-business (B2B)marketing starts when an organization gets to know about a certain company because of a product listing. The awareness stage does not involve any buying or selling of services.
The awareness stage is why social media marketing has been spreading like wildfire, and organizations with competitive social media marketing strategies are soaring high. With the year being run by apps like Instagram, organizations are more likely to come across your social media handle before getting to your website because the deal is usually made between teams of people, including social media influencers.
Also Read: B2B Influencer Marketing: The Ultimate Guide 2021
This stage is all about making your target company realize either shortcoming and how your company’s product will help them. Campaigns, presentations, and portfolios are very important aspects of this stage. Companies often avail paid media and online paid social media promotion to increase their reach and traffic.
2. Consideration:
Consideration is the second stage of the funnel when the target company has realized their problem and has discovered your product as well. Proper campaigning might as well seal the deal at this stage. As mentioned before, the B2B marketing strategy for every company is different. It is the stage where the selling company should look out for loopholes that might catch the buyer organization’s attention.
By this time, your company has made a thorough study of what the target company is looking for, and that would help you make promotional content solely for your target audience at this stage. An email marketing campaign like a follow-up email is an example of campaigning during the consideration stage of the B2B marketing funnel.
Also Read: 7 Ways to use Email Automation for B2B campaigns
3. Decision:
This step in the business-to-business (B2B) marketing campaign denotes the part of the customer journey or where the organization ultimately makes a final decision, and a purchase is made. The target organization is happy with the content and aim of your company.
The most effective way that most organizations with a business-to-business (B2B) marketing strategy adapt is to provide their unique brand value and focus intently on building a relationship with the same organization for a number of further future purchases, besides the sales purchase data.
4. Loyalty:
Like lifecycle marketing, building a customer relationship is one of the key points of business to business(B2B) marketing strategy. They keep coming back to purchase items from the organization. Business to business(B2B) marketing campaigns focus more on repetitive customers than bringing in new ones.
It is more about the organization’s overall experience with the organization than just the purchasing part. Processes like follow-up emails from time to time, notifications, and messages about new arrivals and offers are many aspects of this particular step of business to business(B2B) marketing.
5. Advocacy:
After a purchase is made, companies that follow a business-to-business (B2B) marketing campaign try to engage the organizations they have established business ties with to promote on their behalf on third-party websites and encourage them to help other such companies with questions they might have.
Instagram pages dedicated to business content influencers promote on behalf of such organizations. The organization chooses one of its customer organizations to use its social media reach and followers to promote its product. Public reviews are very much encouraged by organizations to increase user reach and increase customer engagement.
Creating a B2B Marketing Strategy
Every B2B Marketing Strategy has two primary components- Channels and Messaging. Channel is basically a platform where a company willing to sell interacts with its potential customer. It can be through system-generated messages, follow-up emails, or social media platforms. The Messaging component denotes what the content on the platform conveys.
The content might be educational, something regarding the latest offers and other services the company is offering, or simply a follow-up message. Creating a strategy is dependent on the target audience and the company that is selling the products.
The selling organizations curate their messages depending on the cycle of their sales process. Messaging part of creating a B2B marketing strategy as per the B2B marketing strategy trend in 2021 is heavily influenced by the company’s demography and the type and aim of the product it sells. Companies in the finance industry that follow B2B marketing strategy tend to sound more to the point with a corporate tone and fixates mainly on logic and data.
Being believers of what the appearance conveys, advertising agencies concentrate on a more catchy and humorous tone in their messaging sphere, no matter what the channel is.
You can create a B2B marketing strategy both online and offline. Offline platforms include the traditional in-person meeting and business conducted over phone calls and communicating via hard copies of messages like fax and mail.
Online platforms or channels include social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, Twitter, emails, and messages – the communication being conducted entirely;y digitally.
As far as B2B marketing strategy trends in 2021 are concerned, most companies create their business to business marketing strategy digitally and rely on online channels.
While creating the strategy, the selling company decides how to keep a count on the following factors.
- Web Visitors: the number of visits the company’s official website encountered.
- Leads: the list or target organizations the selling company has the necessary details.
- MQL: Business organizations that have either contacted your organization or appear to be potential customers according to your company’s database.
- SQL: The count of business organizations that your organization’s sales team has approached.
- Sales Opportunities: The number of target companies that have communicated with your organization to make a deal about a possible purchase that would interest them.
- Customer: the final step when a potential customer or target organization ultimately makes a purchase makes a customer.
These parameters must be kept in mind at each stage of the funnel while creating a B2B marketing strategy.
B2B v/s B2C Marketing Strategy
The main difference between B2B(Business to Business) and B2C(Business to Customer) strategy is that, while B2B is concerned with the buyer-seller relationship between two discrete organizations, in B2C, the organization takes every individual customer’s needs and requirements into consideration and is concerned with individual customers.
Since B2B strategies carry out the purchase between two organizations, the price limit is high because stakeholders and the company’s security fall into the picture. Since individual customers make purchases in the B2C marketing strategy, the price limit is much lower.
The commitment is intense in the B2B marketing strategy since two organizations with formidable revenue and valuations are concerned. The purchase cycle takes a much longer time than in the B2C marketing strategy. In this strategy, the consumer is an individual customer who wants to purchase from a company offering a certain product of their interest.
Top B2B Marketing Strategies
Let’s discuss several B2B marketing strategies one can implement to reach the targeted audience. Some of the B2B marketing trends 2021 are mentioned below, along with B2B marketing strategies examples.
1. B2B Email Marketing
A search shows that 93% of B2B marketers use email.
Hence, you can leverage emails to target a large audience for engagement.
In B2C, email marketing is used to provide customers with offers, personalization of emails may help improve engagement. On the other hand, in B2B email marketing, B2B customers look for logic and a positive return on investment.
To achieve the best email marketing in the B2B market, a business should –
- Write exciting Subject Line: Businesses should devote more attention to email subject lines than the main context of emails.
- One CTA: Businesses should focus and stick to one CTA to avoid confusing the readers. CTA should be precise and focus on one action only.
- Email Segmentation: Not all emails you send would be suitable for all on your mailing list. Your newsletter subscribers might be at various stages of the B2B buyer’s journey or watching for different alternatives. At this stage, email segmentation should be used. It helps businesses engage with their readers better, but it also delivers your emails with personalization.
- Attractive Email Designs: Over 80% of email clients check their mailboxes via smartphones, and emails do not appear appropriately on smartphones and are often erased in three seconds. So, businesses should keep in mind that one must publish emails that are appealing to read.
- Cold email marketing: Cold email marketing is a method of interacting with a targeted audience through emails as the primary mode of engagement. A good cold email approach includes having your clients’ email seen by your clients and gaining some responses.
EXAMPLE –
GIF Email from Moo
GIFs are popular in the B2C market, but B2B firms may utilize these animations in their email communications too, and Moo is one example. They utilize a GIF in this email to attract more viewers and mystery to one of their items.
2. B2B Digital Marketing
B2B digital marketing includes paid ads, search engine optimization, company websites and other places where B2B need to have their presence. The best way to strengthen B2B digital marketing strategy is mentioned below –
- Having a targeted audience: Businesses must establish a targeted audience. The demographic and psychographic, and other important data of the targeted audience will help the business to know whether their content is observed and heard by the right people.
- Get a website: How your customers will trust you if you don’t have a website. We are breathing in a digital time, and people search for things on the internet before approaching a business. It is observed that over 80% of the buyers look for a website before approaching your business.
- SEO Optimization: For ranking on search engines, your website should be optimized. Unlike B2C SEO, B2B SEO focuses on keywords. An effective B2B SEO strategy places a company’s website in front of individuals who are actively searching to participate in the services provided by the business or purchase the products the business sells. Almost 25% of companies invest in mobile optimization as the best SEO strategy.
- Campaigns: Furthermore, complement your digital presence with pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, which allows you to bring your brand’s content in front of new consumers through search engines like Google and other PPC advertising like Facebook. Businesses should maximize their PPC expenditure by promoting more than particular products or services, like blogs or social media posts, etc.
Also Read: B2B Facebook Advertising – The Complete Guide to Optimizing Cost
The most effective strategy to apply in sponsored advertisements is to include the demographics of the targeted audience and promote engaging content.
EXAMPLE –
Omega Enterprise Gateway operates on Windows 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to provide continuous data service so that you may access your data from anywhere, at any time. You will be able to do analytics with this data to resolve issues as they develop or analyze your past data to improve your procedure continually.
The B2B digital advertising campaign example demonstrates how Omega is intended to assist you in gaining optimum solutions and insights into the process.
3. B2B Content Marketing
We’ve discussed how B2B clients value knowledge, are motivated by reasoning and want to be informed. It is a creative approach to meet such objectives.
One of the most innovative B2B marketing strategies is content marketing. A content marketing approach provides crucial information and educates the buyer on exactly what B2B consumers crave. Content marketing aids SEO Optimization efforts by predicting what your clients are looking for, assisting them in discovering your website, and content converting them to B2B consumers.
It’s worth noting that content marketing works best when it’s tailored to different B2B buyer’s journey stages.
Franchell adds, “Additionally, B2B companies should test content. Run a test on an incentive and vary the type of content – use a webinar, an eBook, or a video. Understand what content format attracts the right types of buyers and measure it down to an individual human level.”
Businesses should focus more on Content marketing strategies like blog articles for your business website.
Nearly 40% of marketers say content marketing is a very important part of their overall marketing strategy.
EXAMPLE –
SecureWorks: This cybersecurity firm focuses on assisting businesses in detecting possible sources of cyber-attack.
SecureWorks focused on developing personas so that their content could better address problems for their consumers to convert visitors into leads by incorporating a dedicated blog for answering questions concerning compliance and information security. Webinars, testimonials, datasheets, and videos are examples of core materials.
SecureWorks could convert one out of every two qualifying leads into opportunities, more than doubling their conversion rate.
4. B2B Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing isn’t simply for companies that need to reach out to consumers.
Many B2B companies face challenges with social media marketing. It is challenging to use social media to engage with corporate clients, primarily because it involves a longer sales cycle.
Somewhat, B2B social media marketing is not where you produce more leads. It is possible to arrive into effect around the start of your B2B buyer journey.
Social media is a strong tool for increasing brand recognition, giving your firm an online position, and refining your organization – all of which are important considerations in marketing and interacting with potential consumers.
Social networking, like email marketing, is a thriving platform for scattering your content and enhancing brand awareness, both of which we know B2B consumers value.
Social media accounts may not transform as regularly as content or email marketing, but they are significant. In this instance, followers are equally as important as leads or customers since you never know if they will convert.
Social listening is the number one tactic used by marketers.
EXAMPLE –
Dell’s social media strategy was conceived in 2006. Discussions about Dell prompted the business to learn how to communicate with consumers and implant social into the thread of the firm.
Dell was recognized for its targeted LinkedIn advertising. The effort entailed establishing a close network of IT specialists who would be targeted for its primary goods.
Dell’s efforts centered on utilizing a natural LinkedIn capability — custom groups. A continuation of Dell’s social media b2b initiative following its prior campaign on Twitter to promote the Dell Vostro, where users contributed their trade secrets through a hashtag.
Dell is highly renowned for being innovative with its social strategy, as seen by many prominent B2B Twitter accounts it manages.
Some are in charge of corporate news and announcements, while others are in charge of resolving customer support questions. Dell Cares PRO offers worldwide assistance 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and Dell for Business handles issues from small and medium-sized enterprises.
Different channels connect with others to ensure that client inquiries are appropriately handled.
Dell’s social media command center combines consumer interactions from across the globe to ensure it stays on good terms. This helps the organization to discover issues and resolve them.
Conclusion:
As mentioned earlier in this article, B2B marketing is very distinct from B2C marketing. The major emphasis is on selecting the target audience and engaging it straight with narrower and more focused actions. Personal interaction and a pure corporate image are also essential. Furthermore, any promotion should not be excessive, particularly if you stand to achieve new consumers.
B2B Customers may discover whatever knowledge they need via B2B platforms and the firm’s official business website if a business and its offering are known. Social media can assist in creating leads, but it will mainly support content and SEO optimization efforts.
Now that you have come across the various event B2B marketing strategies, you would understand how they play a major role in their respective ways.
Companies like Bizprospex have a team of experts who can help you curate the right B2B marketing strategies for your business with the help of email appending services, web scraping services, etc.