B2B Marketing: How to Define Your Strategy

The essence of B2B marketing is communicating how your business fulfils the needs of your target audience. The audience is made up of institutions, other businesses and wholesalers and therefore your marketing efforts need to be geared towards them. In this article, we’re breaking down the key focal points of marketing for success, as well as developing a strategy that works.

Let’s begin with setting the landscape of B2B marketing. Unlike marketing to the masses, you’ll have fewer customers that you work with, who tend to purchase more goods and services that are of great value. With that being the case, it is clear to see why there are longer purchasing decision turnaround times and sales cycles. To achieve success, your business will need to put emphasis on the consultation phases.

When deciding on your B2B marketing strategy, a great starting point is to answer basic questions of “what? Who? And how?” Your target market needs to be clearly defined and understood, as well as your solutions and unique offering for them. How you achieve that through marketing will take into consideration your defined KPI’s and strategy.

Relationships

Relationships are the benchmark for B2B marketing. This needs to remain the key focal point throughout, from developing to nurturing relations with your target audience. By understanding your audience, you can cater to their decision making processes which are steeped in logic, efficiency and their own bottom line in the long run.

While it may be tempting to be results driven, it pays to be people driven above all. Rather than looking at your audience as businesses, there has been an industry change in how you target them, by looking at the people instead - the buyers and business execs. With this in mind, your marketing efforts can be less rigid and have a human appeal in your content and brand voice. Having a more conversational style, for instance, can help create better bonds and relationships with those you target.

B2B marketing strategy

Vision: Begin from within and ensure that your vision, mission and goals have been firmly established. This will ensure that your marketing strategy is aligned. This process will define what your unique value proposition is. It is helpful to employ techniques like a SWOT analysis to determine areas in which you can improve and others which you can bank on.

Target Audience: Your target audiences are the reason for all of these marketing efforts, so they need to be clearly identified and catered towards. It is important to understand that within the B2B context, your audience has a desire to be educated. Therefore it is up to you to facilitate the learning processes by means of content and standardised messaging. Another important aspect is to be open to feedback and adapt accordingly where necessary.

Offering: Your marketing offering should be geared towards creating value for your audience. Your business offers this through its online resources, namely your website and social media channels. The goal is to showcase your industry expertise through content, as this is what will create new sales opportunities and conversions.  When reaching for new leads, consider PPC advertising, as this can increase the traffic to your website. This is also where the importance of keywords come into play. Once you have people on your website, you need to hold their interest.

It is therefore important to ensure that your foundations are solid. For example, is your website creating a favourable user experience? Ensure that it is optimised and responsive. There needs to be informative landing pages that can be viewed across multiple devices. Your messaging needs to be clear and you need to utilise the opportunity to share testimonials.

In the modern world, business favours collaborations over secrecy. You can use this to your advantage by working with other related industry professionals, which can build strong cross-linked relationships. Another way to achieve this is to work with influencers - yes, these exist in the world of B2B marketing too. Work with people who create content reviews or demonstrations online within your niche. The overriding goal with these strategies is to build the perception of your brand being an industry leader.

Finally, to sustain the interest people have when they’re dealing with your business, you need to ensure that you have content which offers insight and answers questions they have or topics that they are interested in. By implementing Search Engine Optimization techniques, you will be able to generate leads from publishing content.  Having informative content can take many forms - find the best fit for you, depending on the topic at hand. You could, for instance, make use of infographics and animated videos. Finally, ensure that you have various ‘call to action’ opportunities available on your website. Encourage the viewer to book a virtual meeting, download a helpful document or enquire about a specific quote.

By changing your B2B marketing outlook to one that is driven by people, you will be able to cultivate better relationships. Utilise this when defining your marketing strategy in order to garner maximum success. We at Nexa can assist with developing your marketing strategy. Contact us to get started.