Tips for Your B2B Marketing Strategy

The B2B marketing landscape is a complex and constantly evolving space with its own unique challenges and opportunities. To navigate it effectively, you need well-thought-out strategies and tactics. With so many digital channels available to promote your business, what are the best ways to connect, engage, and convert leads?

What does B2B marketing look like right now?

It's a very confusing field. Being seen and heard is harder than ever. The decision makers are inaccessible. They are bombarded with gimmicks, offers, specials and false promises day in and day out. 

Most decision makers don't like questionable offers, so we're seeing a shift towards more authenticity and honesty in B2B marketing. Word-of-mouth is still considered the most powerful tool for generating new business, so you need to make the best effort to get users to want to talk about your product.

Clear communication

Successful B2B marketing is built on making meaningful connections - people talking to people.That's one reason why it's so important to articulate and communicate your company's core values. Decisions are made by people, not business entities, so it's important to clearly communicate your mission, vision, and values. This way, you'll give decision makers the opportunity to form an emotional connection to your brand.

Don't be afraid to take a stand on social or political issues if they really mean something to you. Decision makers want authenticity, not politically correct nonsense that means nothing. Taking a stand is a bold move that will help your business stand out from the competition and attract more customers who will follow you and share your values.

High personalization

Building meaningful relationships with consumers is important, which is why "personalization" is such a buzzword these days. But what does it really mean to personalize your marketing strategy? It's not just including an amalgamation tag with a customer's name in the subject line of an email or showing an ad to a LinkedIn user based on what they've viewed on your site or a competitor's site.

Personalization means treating each potential new customer as a unique being with unique needs and adjusting your marketing strategy based on those needs. To do this at scale, many companies are using artificial intelligence. But even if you don't have big budgets or a huge staff, there are some proven strategies that can help even the smallest companies personalize their marketing: hyper-segmenting email lists, developing and distributing highly specialized content that meets the unique needs and challenges of certain audience segments.

We believe that access to artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies will play a big role in how companies compete in the future. Large companies are already using sophisticated AI-based solutions to outperform their competitors. However, there have long been AI-based products in our toolkit that are available to all businesses - we just haven't called them "AI." For example, Ahrefs or Semrush, which can tell you how to improve SEO performance. 

Maintaining customer engagement at different stages of the customer journey

Buying cycles in B2B are often long and complex. Sales cycles get longer as the years go by. Nowadays, the average user makes 5-8 touches with your product before making a purchase, and in the B2B world, it's usually much more than that.

1. Once a client identifies a need for a new product or service, they start exploring options. He may ask for recommendations from colleagues or simply go online and start searching. SEO and pay-per-click advertising come into play at this stage, but real customer engagement requires more than that: a well-promoted website, a user-friendly interface, perhaps a chatbot with artificial intelligence to communicate with consumers in real time, high-quality content that demonstrates your expertise in the industry, and most importantly, compelling calls to action. Emphasize the word "compelling."

2. You should also be active on social media, posting informative, educational and non-promotional content that reaffirms your authority and expertise in the industry. You can add success cases that highlight the results your product or service has achieved for existing customers, and even some customer testimonials, but 90% of your content should be non-promotional.

When adding a new customer to your CRM, be sure to include all the information available about them: industry, geography, specific products or services they've expressed interest in - anything that makes sense. Be as detailed as possible.

There is some debate about the best way to send emails. Some experts advise sending emails daily. Others take a less aggressive approach. Here's what the experts advise and the strategy we at ReStaffy follow: first, send a personal email written by someone on your team specifically for the client you're reaching out to. Find them on LinkedIn, find some personal information to tie into your appeal, research their company, and send a short but well-crafted letter thanking them for being a part of your business. Connect a few key benefits of your product or service to specific pain points they may be facing in their company, add a few relevant results, and let them know how they can contact you for more information.

Then, launch a strategically crafted email campaign that should include 3-4 emails at two-week intervals with additional information about the product or service they've expressed interest in. It wouldn't be unreasonable to include a special offer if you have one. Once the chain is complete, the customer will continue to receive generic (but still personalized) audience-specific emails that you already send to your segments.

Email marketing is a powerful tool when used correctly. Sending out emails costs almost nothing, but when they arrive at the right time and with the right message - sometimes that's all it takes to convert a potential customer.

3. Another way to keep your customers engaged throughout the sales cycle is through retargeting with branded ads on Facebook and Instagram. If you can run 2-3 simultaneous retargeting campaigns, do it! Change creatives about every ten days, and to avoid limitations during the learning phase, create a library of 12 or more ads that can be turned on and off in rotation.

The sales cycle can be long these days, and maintaining engagement is a matter of strategically getting in front of your customers and being patient.

Personalization in B2B marketing

As we said above, tagging contacts in as many ways as possible is the first step to personalizing your marketing communications. Being able to differentiate between potential customers who are interested in specific products, are in certain areas, or work in certain industries can help you personalize your marketing efforts across the board.

Depending on your budget, you can invest in artificial intelligence tools that can really help you drill down into marketing. AI can do incredible things like recommend products, customize social media targeting, and even determine when to send emails to each individual.

Retargeting social media ads can be another effective way to keep your product or service at the forefront of your audience's mind.

The most important aspect of personalization, however, is changing the way you think about what personalization really means. You have to think of your customers as people. You must identify their unique pain points and needs. And as much as possible, you should reach out to them personally, not with a mass email that blends their name into a greeting, but with human content that will make them feel like they're actually being seen and heard.

5 tips for your B2B marketing strategy that will help you beat the competition

• Invest in branding

Not just your logo, website and promotional materials, although each of these tools plays an important role. Invest in brand recognition. Make sure your brand is present wherever your consumers are. This is a daunting task for many SMBs who want to see a measurable ROI for every dollar spent. Outside of metrics like reach and impression, it's hard to measure the return on brand awareness initiatives, but if you're not in the spotlight, you're not on top of the game.

B2B companies tend to shy away from brand marketing and focus more on traditional and measurable strategies. You can build brand awareness by posting regularly on social media - particularly LinkedIn, but also Facebook, Instagram, and even TikTok.

Running ads on Facebook and Instagram can also be very effective, especially if you use lists of existing customers to create similar audiences and use the pixel to retarget website visitors who are already familiar with your brand. Remember, a user makes 5-8 points of contact before making a purchase!

If your budget allows, you may even consider running Google ads for brand-specific keywords. This may seem like a waste of money - after all, if someone searches specifically for your brand, have you already gotten a customer? But that's not entirely true. If a potential customer types your company name into Google, and the first two results are sponsored ads from two of your competitors, followed by three sponsored "Maps" ads from the same competitors, there's a big chance you'll lose the attention of a potential new customer.

• Communicate your mission end-to-end

Clearly articulate your mission, vision and core values. What is important to your business? What social issues matter to you? Not only will this give decision makers something they can connect with on an emotional level, but it will help you attract your ideal customer and even increase employee loyalty.

• Hard sales are dead

Decision makers get sold to all day long. They receive numerous cold emails daily, offering various services - only a few of which are beneficial to them. They usually don't pay any attention to this. Such emails are marked as unwanted and deleted. 

Today's decision maker needs to take their time, do their research, build trust in your brand and familiarize themselves with your products and services. Your marketing strategy needs to work in tandem with their process, no matter how slow and painstaking it may seem. And your strategy MUST be highly personalized.

• Understand what "personalization" means and the damage that inauthentic communication can do 

While there are many artificial intelligence tools that can help companies personalize their marketing efforts, the most effective personalization is human.

Treat your customers like human beings, it's very simple.

Decision makers can spot fake content a mile away, so take the time and put some effort into building a relationship with your customers.

• Stories still sell

If you can't tell it, you can't sell it. Answer these questions for yourself: what stories do you tell over and over again during the sales cycle? What questions do you get asked on a regular basis? What case studies do you regularly demonstrate? What results, features and benefits do you consistently emphasize? These are the stories you need to tell.

We call them "stories" rather than "messages." Again, it has to do with personalization and authenticity. Saying, "We helped Company X increase productivity by 87%" is a strong message, but not a compelling story. Build the scene, identify the beginning, middle and end. How did it happen, what happened and what is happening now?

The best platform for storytelling is video, of course, but stories also make great case studies, blogs, podcasts, emails and social content.

The most effective digital channels to reach your target audience.

Think back to our 5-8 touchpoints before making a purchase. This requires more than just one or two digital channels.

The most effective channels for reaching a specific target group are:

• search engine marketing and optimization;
• pay-per-click;
• social media.

1. In terms of reaching a specific target audience, search engine marketing and optimization, pay per click and social media are the most effective digital strategies and channels.
2. In terms of search engine marketing, don't underestimate the importance of a Google My Business profile. Reviews on Google are ten times more valuable than gold. As for SEO, be careful about using artificial intelligence-generated content on your website. AI can help you start writing, but the real content and expertise has to come from you, and it has to be unique.
3. To be competitive in pay-per-click advertising - especially if you're up against the big players in the industry - requires constant management and maintenance. Competition is often budget-driven, but even if you can't spend as much as your competitors, you can still find and fill gaps in their strategy. For example, some larger companies pause displaying ads on weekends or holidays, allowing smaller companies to rack up clicks on those days.

Thus, even with a small budget, small and medium-sized businesses can effectively promote themselves in the B2B sphere. The main thing to remember is that your customers are people too, and the most important part of your marketing strategy is not to forget about your unique experience and to personalize your approach to your customers as much as possible. 

And to increase your presence in the digital space and create an additional touchpoint with your potential users, use our platform. With ReStaffy, create a free page for your company and your services that will index in search and further increase the reach of your business.