Although the same fundamental practices are similar between a successful B2B marketing vs a B2C marketing strategy, there are some key components that you should consider when you are marketing to other businesses rather than directly to consumers. Check out our list of must haves to drive results for your business and become a thought leader in your field online and offline.
 

Using Your Sales Funnel in Your Marketing Strategy

The core of your successful B2B marketing strategy is going to be your sales funnel. Take a look at your business, your customers or clients, and then establish what that relationship looks like. How do people typically interact with your business? What usually happens from beginning to end in your unique sales process? Similar to some of our clients, you probably have several different sales funnels built to target different industries. The funnels themselves will help you to build and maintain a successful b2b marketing strategy.

To learn more about sales funnels, read our previous blog post on “Building your B2B Sales Funnel.”

Therefore, to keep it simple, start by asking yourself, what are you selling? Who are you selling to? And finally, when a visitor interacts with any of your marketing pieces – what do you want them to do? That brings us to our next key component, lead generation.
 

Attracting Leads

For a sales funnel to even exist, you will need leads! Whether it’s a blog post, a free download incentive such as a white paper, a post on your social media accounts or a landing page showcasing a specific product or service, the most important aspect of your marketing strategy is lead generation. After your visitor finds themselves on your blog post, then what? Most of the time, you will want to provide a form or a call to action on your marketing piece as an effort to convert a new lead. This way, you can open the doors for communication or include them into your audience for any potential sales opportunities in the future. Basically, if you are going to market something, make sure there is a goal attached to it to maximize lead generation efforts. The second step is making sure you get what you need from your prospect to take them through the funnel.
 

Content

As you may already know, the purchase process for a B2B company is much more complex than the straight forward transaction of a B2C sale. Since your customers are using your solution for their own business, decisions take much longer and require careful consideration. Based on this fact, the main purpose of your content should educate your client. Before they sign on with you, they will want to do some research. An easy way to do this is perhaps use your blog as the place to highlight some of your most frequently asked questions or sales objections in more detail. What are some misconceptions your prospects might have? Clear them up! Your content should empower your client or customer.

• Some tips include:
  Partner up with leaders in your industry. Collaborate with one another to build brand awareness but also build trust with your customers.
• Use different content for different audiences you may have. This goes back to your sales funnels. If you have a few different industries you are targeting, break it down. Tailor blogs, separate email marketing campaigns and posts to speak to them specifically. Not all of your customers will have the same needs or be interested in the same service offerings that you provide.
• White-papers, webinars, video, how-to’s : Invest time in developing a few or a library of key supporting documents that new customers can learn from and existing customers can always refer to. It is a wonderful way to give people a taste of your expertise and boost your traffic.
• Consistency in your Social Media marketing strategy: In our experience, social media strategies are very personal and there is no exact formula for every single B2B we work with. The most important thing to remember is consistency. You should be posting regularly no matter which channel is most appropriate for your business. Check out tips from our top sales expert, Randy, “5 Tips for Getting Noticed on Social Media”

Your Website and Online Presence

This item is pretty straight forward and one that you may be aware of. With so many new user friendly platforms, the possibility of creating a great looking website is within your reach, more-so now than ever before. An easy to use, updated website will drastically help with conversions and the overall success of any marketing strategy. Have you ever visited a website and had troubles finding what you needed quickly? Oftentimes people’s attention spans will short fuse and they will almost instantly click away if your website is difficult to navigate. Ask around and do some tests to receive some user feedback if you’re unsure. You may be doing everything right in your marketing efforts but your website could be outdated, slow or too complicated which will jeopardize generating leads.
 

Visibility

Last, but not least is thinking about building your Search Engine Optimization, together with your Search Engine Marketing strategy, if you want a chance at showing up in the top search results on Google. Ensuring that you have the right keywords in place in your website and content will help your prospects find your content useful and increase the likelihood of converting an interested lead. High levels of traffic will not be entirely beneficial if that traffic is engaging with your content without intent. For sometime you may have heard of the importance of SEO without truly understanding how to incorporate it into your marketing strategy and it is a topic that is constantly evolving. Need help getting started? Here’s a checklist shared by SEO tool Moz to help you bring SEO into the fold for 2019.