Create an effective b2b marketing strategy
Building a marketing strategy is crafting a long-term plan to achieve sustainable business goals. B2B (business to business) marketing is the type of marketing that targets a business or company. B2B marketing and B2C (business to consumer) marketing have distinctive strategies regarding the tactics, the message, the audience, the initiative, and more. The most significant distinction between B2B and B2C marketing: is volume.
B2C products are consumer-facing and help users solve their personal needs. B2C marketing focuses on persuading consumers to buy something. These decisions are often made by an individual, and the buyer's journey is typically short.
B2B marketing targets individuals that are representing a company or organization to buy a product or a service. The decisions are made by one or more people, and the buyer’s journey is often longer and more complicated.
- Define your product's unique selling point and communicate a clear marketing message to the target market.
- Create a buyer persona for each market segment.
- Look out for your product's potential, and resources and run a competitive analysis.
- Design marketing scenarios for each buyer's journey touchpoints.
- Create marketing tactics for forecasted strategies.
- Evaluate every marketing activity and adjust if necessary.
USP for the specific target market
A unique selling proposition (USP) is an instrument to communicate your product value that differentiator from the competitors. USP is commonly used in the sales process of telling your customer of “What is your product is used for” and “Better from X, Y or Z because”.
To formulate a USP, you can start by asking yourself questions:
- What is your product?
- What is the unique feature?
- Who is your ideal customer?
- What is your product value?
- What is the user’s pain you want to solve?
- How your product is different from your competitors?
A USP is not just a marketing communication or some ad copy of your campaign. By defining a memorable, true, and clear USP, you can easily respond to a customer question like “why should I buy from you?”
Example:
- Basecamp “The All-In-One Toolkit for Working Remotely.”
- Tableau “Connect, analyze, and visualize any data.”
- Mixpanel “Product Analytics for Mobile, Web, & More.”
When your product or service has more than one market segment, you need to define USP for each segment. Example: Udemy’s general audience USP’s “Online Courses — Learn Anything, On Your Schedule” while Udemy's business is b2b and targets companies that use “The destination for workplace learning”. The marketing strategy for each segment should also be different.
Buyer persona
Market segmentation is necessary to create a group of customers that have the same characteristics. With segmentation, you can create specific, targeted & clear marketing messages for each segment. A buyer persona is a fictional profile as the representation of your ideal customer. Defining your buyer persona by creating characteristics such as:
- Demographic information (age, gender)
- Education background
- Business background (company industry, company size, company revenue
- Interest & Goals
- Social Information (social media channel, community involvement, social activity)
By looking at those characteristics, you can understand how your target audience is making the decision, know how their motive on how they make an assessment of a product, and how they think logically and emotionally.
Product potential & competitive analysis
In order to win the fierce competition, you must first look into your assets. Understanding your strengths, weaknesses, or limitations in terms of budget, time, and the team can be beneficial in determining your best strategies. Product potential is about what is the product's capabilities to serve the customer's needs. The term product-market fit has been around for a while. In order to achieve product-market fit, a product must answer customer needs, i.e., it must be built with the right features that address a user’s problem.
So what attributes do successful products have? I’ve listed the following traits:
- Fulfills the user's needs.
- Provides value.
- Strong value proposition.
- Meet the product-market fit.
- High usability.
- Having great aftersales support.
- Iterate by user’s feedback.
In order to achieve product-market fit, we can outline the value proposition canvas which Dr. Alexander Osterwalder first introduced in the book titled Value Proposition Design. You can read more about the value proposition canvas here.
Below is an example of a Value Proposition Design for Airbnb.
Once you have outlined your product’s strengths and weaknesses, you need to analyze your competitors. Having complete information of what is your competitor's best feature, their target market & segment, their pricing, their marketing tactics, and their product limitation could give you a better insight into how will you play to win.
There is a handful of tools to evaluate your competitors online. Similarweb, Moz, Ahrefs & SEMRush are the most reputable source when discovering your competitor's online content, SEO, keywords, traffic sources, and more. Socialblade, Sproutsocial, & Sociality is some of the social media analytics that can give you an overview of your brand or your competitors.
Design a marketing scenario for each buyer journey touchpoint
The buyer journey is the customer process starting from getting notice of your brand or the awareness, making consideration of your product to the final purchase.
The buying journey used to be very simple: customers purchased goods from brick-and-mortar businesses, catalogs, or the internet. B2B buyers booked demos, attended pitch meetings, and attended trade exhibitions.
Webinars, email, mobile applications, social media platforms, sharing platforms, blogs and websites, and dozens more are just a few of the many touchpoints available to customers today. Here is Gartner’s mapping of the b2b buyer’s journey that isn’t linear.
To maximize customer success, it is crucial to segment the customer journey into phases, match each phase with a goal, and reorganize your touchpoints accordingly.
Mapping the buyer journey is guiding the prospective clients from point A to point B. Here is an example:
After creating the customer journey map, you can clearly define each phase's marketing strategy. Not every customer segment is the same in the marketing initiative, content, channels, and message. Crafting targeted and relevant content can highly improve your goal.
Marketing tactics
This article is about strategy, and how it's different from tactics?
A strategy is a long-term plan with a defined goal, while a tactic is a short-term actionable initiative that supports the strategy.
Example:
Strategy: Since your paid users mostly come from the trial user, you want to increase the number of trial users and improve the conversion rate.
Tactic:
- Promote trial in social media ads.
- Hold a free webinar and invite all the audience as trial users.
- Implement a popup message to purchase/subscribe on the trial page.
Marketing tactics are strategic actions.
There are several ways of doing marketing in b2b. Social media, Website, and Email marketing are the most crucial channel in b2b according to the State of Marketing Trends Report 2022.
Social Media
Social Buying Study from International Data Corporation (IDC) concludes that 75% of the business-to-business (B2B) buyers studied and 84% of C-level/vice president executives use social media to support purchase decisions.
Tactics:
- Build company page on social media.
- Create educative content.
- Share company culture.
- Post different types — text, image, video.
- Presents on group & communities.
Social media are a great channel for marketing, according to the benefits of B2B content marketing there are three goals for marketers; Creating brand awareness (86%), Educating audiences (79%), and Building credibility and trust (75%).
Content Marketing
The goal of content marketing is to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience while providing valuable, relevant, and consistent material with the intention of motivating profitable customer action.
The goals of content marketing are:
- Brand awareness
- Building a subscribed audience
- Lead generation
- Driving loyalty
- Increasing sales and profitability
Tactics:
- Email Marketing
- Blogging
- Ebook & whitepapers
- Case Studies
- Virtual Events/Webinars/Online Courses
- Infographics/Charts/Photos
- Video
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a strategy used by companies to advertise their products by receiving recommendations or endorsements from online influencers and content producers. A collaboration with well-known and renowned experts in your sector or market to achieve win-win results.
The main goals of influencer marketing are:
- Increasing brand awareness and expanding audiences
- enhancing brand image
- Expanding your brand’s network and social media presence
- Boosting sales and revenue
- Growing consumer loyalty
a 2022 study shows, that 88% of brands have a dedicated influencer marketing budget.
Tactics:
- Content co-creation
- Review & endorsement
- Leverage Micro-Influencers
Final Words
Despite the fact that it is business-to-business marketing, you are still communicating with people, therefore creating a deep connection at the human level is the key. The most successful B2B marketers blend logic and emotion. Defining your vision, defining your audience, choosing methods and channels, launching content and campaigns, and then continuously measuring for optimization are the fundamental steps in developing a B2B marketing plan. In B2B marketing, context is important. Conversational, targeted, and relevant in B2B marketing is the gold standard.
