6 B2B Marketing Strategies That Work
Researching B2B marketing strategies often results in a list of disparate marketing tactics that you are expected to implement. While these are helpful, without an overarching strategy, you’ll quickly find your budget drained and little results achieved. Instead, choose a marketing strategy that aligns with your brand, your goals, your mission, and your budget. Read on to learn about 6 different B2B marketing strategies that you can use to grow your business.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is a strategy that attracts potential customers to your business, specifically to your website. Hubspot, one of the biggest advocates for inbound marketing, defines it as “a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them.” The key word in this definition is content. Inbound marketing relies heavily on using content to answer questions that buyers are trying to solve. Many companies create blogs as their first step in inbound marketing, but there are many other content marketing tactics that B2B marketers successfully use as well.
Because inbound marketing’s goal is to drive potential customers to your website and build long-term relationships, this is a long-term approach to marketing. Studies show that it can take at least 6 months to start to see the results of an inbound approach. This assumes that you consistently create quality content. If you don’t create consistent content, the process will take longer.
How to Implement Inbound Marketing
As with all marketing strategies, you should focus on your customer personas and address their needs at each stage of the Buyer’s Journey. The key to a successful inbound marketing strategy is to develop a content creation plan first and then create the content. Without a higher level content strategy, you’ll find that you’re creating content that isn’t being read or doesn’t achieve your goals.
Perfect if: Your goal is to position your company as an expert and thought leader through high-value content.
Avoid if: You don’t have the time or money to invest in a long-term content-based strategy.
Outbound Marketing
While inbound marketing attracts potential customers through high-value content, outbound marketing focuses on reaching customers they spend their time. Outbound marketing tends to rely more on advertising as opposed to content creation. The goal is to introduce customers to your brand and encourage them to learn more. Outbound marketing tactics include advertising, cold outreach, direct mail, generic email blasts, and some events.
How to Implement Outbound Marketing
Similar to inbound marketing, you should first develop your customer personas, and determine where they spend their time. Outbound marketing’s goal is to meet customers where they are, so you should truly understand where customers spend time in order to create an outbound marketing strategy that works. For example, if you’re targeting buyers who use public transportation every day to get to work, taking out an ad on their train route might be a way to raise awareness. Or they might read Fast Company every day at lunch, which means you should learn about advertising opportunities there.
Once you know where your target customers spend their time, develop a budget and marketing goals. Outbound marketing can quickly get expensive since much of it will involve paying other companies to speak to their audience. If you have specific goals with these tactics, you’ll achieve the best results.
Of course, you should also develop tactics for each stage of the buyer’s journey as well.
Perfect if: You have an intimate understanding of your target clients, where they spend their time, and a budget to reach them.
Avoid if: You have a limited budget.
Digital Marketing
A digital marketing approach typically combines elements from both inbound and outbound marketing strategies. With a digital marketing strategy, you rely on online marketing tactics to reach your target customers. Since most buyers spend time online each day and 60% of B2B buyers reporting that mobile played a significant role in a recent purchase, this strategy can help you reach a wide audience where they spend their time. For a digital marketing strategy, you must have a high quality website in place with the technologies and tools to gather data to track your marketing efforts.
How to Implement Digital Marketing
For a solid digital marketing strategy, you should first start with the goals you want to achieve and your budget for achieving them. Once that’s determined, create a tactical plan moving your customers through the marketing funnel and along the buyer’s journey. In general, outbound tactics tend to work best higher in the funnel to raise awareness of your company. Inbound techniques work at all stages.
Perfect if: Your target customers are tech-savvy and take to online searching to solve their business challenges.
Avoid if: Your target customers don’t spend much time online or prefer to only do business with people they know.
Account Based Marketing (ABM)
Account based marketing (ABM) is a marketing strategy that focuses on specific targeted accounts rather than attracting any unknown potential customers to your business. Marketo defines ABM as an “alternative B2B strategy that concentrates sales and marketing resources on a clearly defined set of target accounts within a market and employs personalized campaigns designed to resonate with each account.”
ABM creates direct alignment between marketing and sales. With ABM, marketers create campaigns tailored to each specific account, which results in highly personalized marketing efforts. Because you’re targeting specific customers, you can easily tell if your marketing campaigns are working because you’ll know if that specific customer signs a contract with your business.
How to Implement Account Based Marketing
Step one with ABM is to determine a list of key accounts to target with campaigns. These should be high-value accounts that will make a significant impact on your business. Once you have the accounts created, you’ll identify the key decision makers at those accounts, and develop campaigns that target them. You will still leverage the buyer’s journey for creating campaigns, but all content, such as advertisements, emails, and articles, should be highly tailored to the account. This means you aren’t likely to be able to reuse content for different customers because it needs to be very customized.
Perfect if: You have a list of key accounts that you’ve been trying to tap into but haven’t found success yet.
Avoid if: Most of your projects are low-value, and you don’t have the resources to invest in highly tailored campaigns for individual accounts.
Word-of-Mouth/Relationship Marketing
Both word-of-mouth and relationship marketing can be standalone marketing strategies, but because they are so closely related, let’s group them into one. With this approach to marketing, your focus is solely on the relationships you create. The core of both word-of-mouth and relationship marketing strategies is to provide a high quality customer experience to encourage repeat customers, referrals, and stellar testimonials.
This approach to marketing also relies heavily on networking. To generate word-of-mouth marketing, you need a network beyond your customers to talk about your brand. This means forming partnerships with other businesses, attending networking events to talk about your company, and being present at industry events where your potential customers might be. You should also use social media and other possible outlets to highlight positive customer experiences.
Since this approach depends on relationships, it can take longer to implement than the other tactics. Also, you can’t guarantee that your network will know of a potential customer who might be in need of your services. This makes it harder to predict sales than other strategies on this list.
Perfect if: You have a book of clients or a large network that you can tap into for future clients.
Avoid if: You need fast results and want a more predictable approach to acquiring new clients.
Combination Marketing Strategy
This final marketing strategy allows you to combine the different approaches on this list into one large marketing strategy. Instead of immediately opting for a combination approach, think about your target audience and determine if one of the above strategies will work best for them. If that’s the case, focus on implementing that one strategy really well before moving on to another approach. If you try to implement too many different strategies at once, you’ll find that you end up doing none of them well unless you have a large marketing department who can handle different approaches at once.
Perfect if: You have a large marketing department and many different customer personas who need different strategies.
Avoid if: You have a small marketing budget and resources or if you have a very specific group of customer personas who can be reached using one approach.
How to Implement Marketing Strategies
Once you choose your marketing strategy, you can follow the steps below to establish and implement your marketing strategy.
Define your marketing goals
Define your customer personas
Determine the best strategy to achieve those goals
Develop tactics at each stage of the buyer’s journey
Execute tactics
Review and Revise
Conclusion
Determining the right marketing strategy for your business can be time consuming and overwhelming, but once you decide on the best strategy, you’ll be able to focus your time and resources on executing that one approach. Your marketing efforts will be aligned and more likely to achieve your goals.