7 Proven B2B Marketing Strategies Can Work for Your Business

Working in B2B marketing is another level of complexity from B2C marketing. When your clients are big companies and corporations, you need marketing strategy consultant levels of ingenuity to keep up. That is why finding the right approach for you is fundamental to success.

This guide looks at seven proven B2B marketing strategies that you should not overlook:

1. Learn as much as you can about customers
2. Find a niche and offer specialized solutions
3. Start investing in paid advertising campaigns
4. Build a strong presence on social media apps
5. Overhaul your website’s design and strategy
6. Encourage customers to send over referrals
7. Generate leads with marketing automation

There’s a lot to discuss, so get ready to take notes.

Let’s go!

Watch this video to find out more about how Digital Authority Partners can create a great marketing strategy for you!

1. Learn as Much as You Can About Customers

The first thing you should do to improve your B2B marketing strategy is go back to the basics. Start by reviewing what you know (or think you know) about your target market. Maybe you already have clients or are on the verge of having them. But what do you really know about them?

Information is foundational to a good marketing strategy because it enables you to allocate your resources properly. Even the best types of digital marketing rely on robust data to help your business. Here are some key points that you should aim to define during your market research:

• What are my customers’ primary concerns? Which ones are the most important to them?
• How can my product or service help them? Are my solutions actually useful for clients?
• Am I thinking too big with my approach? Is there a niche that only my business can fill?

2. Find a Niche and Offer Specialized Solutions 

Sometimes, the “go big or go home” mentality hurts your business more than it helps it. Starting with a niche is a great, but more importantly realistic, way of building your business. Uber, for example, started as a ride-hailing app, filling a niche for relatively cheaper transportation.

It eventually expanded into food, package, and freight delivery. Niches are also more sensible from a marketing standpoint because imagine how complicated a digital strategy for launching products that do everything would be. It sounds extremely impractical because it actually is.

Another reason why specialization benefits your business is that you slowly become an authority in your chosen niche. Over time, you become a thought leader as well. Think of being a thought leader as similar to how many companies look to Apple for product or design ideas that sell.

3. Start Investing in Paid Advertising Campaigns

Paid advertising is one of the most recognizable and proven marketing strategies to date. If you have any doubts, think of how much money large corporations are willing to invest in Super Bowl ads year after year. The only difference is that B2B’s Super Bowl is an app — LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is the best place for B2B marketing in general, but that also means it is the number one place for paid ads. For one, no other social media currently has a primary target market of companies and professionals. There is no better way to peddle solutions than directly to users.

And directly reaching users is what LinkedIn’s ad platform excels at. You can narrow your audience down according to role, industry, and work experience for better targeting and retargeting. All in all, your business gains more than just visibility and reach with a clever pay-per-click (PPC) ad.

4. Build a Strong Presence on Social Media Apps

While LinkedIn is the preferred B2B platform of a marketing strategy consultant, it is not the only one that can work for your business. After all, your target market is not exclusive to one app. Other social media platforms present new opportunities for you to reach your market.

While probably a stretch and an outlier, Wendy’s rose to new heights of popularity (or notoriety) thanks to its sassy and crafty tweets back in 2017. The point here, though, is that when used correctly, social media apps have the power to get people talking about your brand. Here is how:

• Find out what matters to your customers by speaking and interacting directly with them.
• Publish content that appeals to your target market. Use it as a chance to experiment.
• Make people feel seen and heard. Respond to comments and even to critical feedback.

5. Overhaul Your Website’s Design and Strategy

You need your customers just as much as they need you. However, the moment you become a hindrance instead of a solution, they leave you for another company that treats customers well. That all starts with your website; if you make it a maze for them, do not expect them to stay.

Content is part of this, too, because people need information about your products and services. One solution to this is to hire an SEO agency or a marketing strategy consultant to assess how your website and content measure up to best practices. Critical points to address here are:

• Your homepage is central to navigating your website. Connect it to the relevant pages.
• Landing pages should fit their role in your marketing strategy. Design them accordingly.
• Publish high-quality content to boost your website’s online visibility and performance.

6. Encourage Customers To Send Over Referrals

Amazing products, services, and customer care are excellent for your business, but they do not guarantee that your clients will bring in referrals. What you can do to remedy this is to build a sound referral marketing strategy and system that incentivizes customers to help you reach your goals.

Developing a referral system should follow a set of guidelines that clearly lay out how it benefits all of the parties involved. Of course, compensation is an important one, but here are others:

1. Is your business’s referral system easy to understand? Are the conditions clearly stated?
2. Do you have a plan for smooth implementation of the referral system from start to finish?
3. Does your system encourage genuine referrals, or are clients joining for personal gain?
4. Is building customer relationships and providing good, high-quality services at its core?

7.  Generate Leads With Marketing Automation

If you already use customer relationship management (CRM) software to track your leads and conversions, then marketing automation should be next on your list of strategies. Some CRMs have marketing automation available, but for the sake of clarity, let us briefly define both terms.

• CRMs, as the name suggests, are for managing customer relationships, which include tracking leads and their movement along your sales funnel. The operative word here is sales because that is the primary concern of CRM software. Streamline making sales.
• On the other hand, marketing automation uses intelligent systems to assist you in lead generation and reaching potential customers. B2B companies use marketing automation to create marketing emails, monitor engagement data, and maintain client relationships.

Summing Up

B2B marketing strategies are numerous and diverse, but some are more useful than others. For instance, leveraging technology such as CRMs and marketing automation removes a lot of burden from your business team. Features such as scheduled emails cut down on busy work.

Referral marketing, on the other hand, is great for developing better relationships with clients while benefiting everyone involved. Hiring a marketing strategy consultant further improves results because they have their expertise and firsthand knowledge to call on for better insight.

Need help improving your B2B marketing strategy? Contact Digital Authority Partners to learn what we can do to help.