What is B2B Marketing?

Did you know that the proximity of the B2B marketplace has been valued at USD 6.64 trillion?

Not only that, the marketplace is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 18.7 % from the current year 2021 to 2028.

The statistics mentioned above move us towards the marketing aspect of selling to businesses, i.e., business to business marketing (B2B).

B2B marketing has become one of the crucial tactics businesses use to manufacture and sell specific products and services by utilizing other companies' output.

It is as simple as a commercial construction company attempting to market and establish a contract to build office space for a law firm.

Another example might be a heavy equipment dealership attempting to market and sell industrial equipment to a construction company.

In one way or the other, one business utilizes the resources from another business to maintain and improve its business operations.

However, selling to businesses requires different processes and strategies to ideate on marketing other businesses.

In this article, we are covering an in-depth guide to B2B marketing, along with the aspects as follows:

• What is B2B Marketing?

• Who is the target group under B2B Marketing?

• How important is B2B Marketing?

• How is B2B Marketing different from B2C Marketing?

• What are the effective B2B Marketing Strategies

• How to create a successful B2B marketing strategy

• What are best B2B Marketing tools

• Popular B2B examples to get inspired

What is B2B Marketing?

Business to Business (B2B) marketing refers to the process of one business marketing its product or services to another business. B2B marketing is used by businesses to manufacture specific products like plastic, steel machinery, and fabrics or provide a set of services like project management or Search Engine optimization.

One important thing to note under B2B Marketing is that the company that will take over the business responsibilities should be willing to offer its services to different organizations. Usually, the B2B marketing activities are run through B2B Marketing agencies, third-party companies specializing in tailoring the business marketing message to different companies. The agency is led by a team of B2B marketing experts who understand the factors of decision making and understand customers' viewpoint for the premium price products and services.

Who is the target group under B2B Marketing?

The target group under B2B marketing is the companies willing to sell their products and services to other companies.

It can be in the form of software as a service (SaaS) subscription, tools, accessories, or office supplies.

Let's take a look at four of the standard target groups who provide a range of B2B Marketing Services for companies and help them to promote their products and services:

1. Office suppliers
2. Software companies
3. Marketing Agencies
4. Bookkeeping and Accounting

1. Office suppliers

This is one of the most used and common business B2B marketing groups that supply a set of items to create workspaces in offices and buildings. It covers products like furniture, security cameras, phone systems, printer paper and ink, ID badges required in the work environment.

2. Software companies

Software companies help businesses to satisfy their customers and operate on a more efficient scale. The software companies help in the marketing and fostering collaboration with the help of project management tools. It also keeps track of work hours, expenses and manages the entire system through its solutions.

3. Marketing Agencies

Marketing agencies help businesses by offering them digital marketing Services and promoting their business online. This particular target group has given rise to many agencies worldwide responsible for building websites, boosting results in search engine rankings, and streamlining the E-Commerce checkout processes.

4. Bookkeeping and Accounting

A business needs to complete all the formalities related to accounting and tax preparation. These activities are tedious in terms of work and take much of the company's time. This is why businesses prefer to market the services to a large stream of accountants who use powerful software and connect the respective clients through B2B marketing.

These are a few targeted groups who offer the B2B Marketing Services to the companies and developed a massive scope towards the B2B business marketplace.

Deskera is also among the targeted groups that offer services to various businesses.

Deskera is an all-in-one cloud-based accounting software that helps small businesses run their business efficiently anytime, anywhere, on any device. It is a full-featured business solution to manage accounting, bookkeeping, invoicing, and much more.  

How important is B2B Marketing?

With the current scenario, the B2B marketing strategy has become a prominent marketing technique businesses use to achieve success. Many companies are making it a part of the active marketing plan to survive in the marketplace.

Well, the importance of B2B marketing can be explained through the following three points:

1. It talks about buying emotions
2. It helps in extending the sales cycle
3. It helps in linking social media for marketing

1. It talks about buying emotions

B2B marketing can be excelled by winning the buyers' trust and touching the key emotions of people. The fastest and most seamless way to achieve this is by involving a eminent B2B marketing agency. With the help of B2B marketing, the businesses can research the Buyers Persona and pitch target customers after seeking and evaluating information.

It is crucial to consider the research accurately, especially for the manufacturers, products, and solution providers.

2. It helps in extending the sales cycle

In B2B marketing, one of the most significant advantages is the long sales cycle duration. Companies can market their products and services to their respective clients by applying different strategies and actions.

Since B2B marketing focuses on providing solutions and values, it allows the buyer to decide rationally.

3. It helps in linking social media for marketing

In B2B marketing, the businesses get the advantage of link building using social media to generate traffic over the website.

The business can use different social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook to drive brand awareness.

With the help of B2B marketing, you can get responses from viewers across the globe. As a result, you can showcase the business in front of a larger audience and boost the marketing activities.

After reading the importance of B2B marketing, it is clear that B2B marketing helps businesses promote complex products and services and design them for the prospects, with the motive to convert them into customers.

By combining traditional and modern strategies with the help of digital tools, businesses can nurture themselves in building critical relationships without losing the personal touch.

How is B2B Marketing different from B2C Marketing?

B2B marketing and B2C marketing are different in terms of strategies, thinking, goals and objectives.

Let's look at the fundamental differences between B2B marketing and B2C marketing, considering points for each type.

Difference between B2B Marketing and B2C Marketing

This table summarizes the differences between B2B and B2C marketing. Though both marketing techniques are driven to generate revenues, the approaches are entirely different.

What are the effective B2B Marketing Strategies?

There are lots of B2B marketing strategies recommended by experts. Some prefer persuasive strategy, and some refer to providing the best solutions.

The B2B marketing strategies bring impressive results, but it depends on how well a business uses it to its best advantage.

Let's take a look at the five popular B2B marketing strategies:

1. Content Marketing
2. Social Media Marketing
3. Email marketing
4. Messenger Marketing
5. SMS Marketing

1. Content Marketing

B2B customers lookout for expertise and valuable information and a desire to be well updated and educated. They always look for study materials like blogs and articles related to the industry to enhance their knowledge.

Here, the content marketing strategy holds the command in anticipating the audience search and discovering the exact content to the various stages of the buyers' journey.

Content marketing also helps create awareness about the business and educate the buyers on their pain points.

2. Social Media Marketing

Social media has become an integral part of the business. With over 70% of B2B customers using social media, the impact has turned immensely with the increased number of leads and established fruitful business.

With the help of social media marketing, you can share a lot of information about the company's achievements and increase engagement with potential buyers and customers.

With the increased percentage of marketing campaigns, businesses have a chance to establish relationships with the customers leading towards an increase in brand loyalty.

3. Email marketing

Emails are best known for reaching prospective clients, maintaining relationships with your partner's and informing them about the news and updates.

Email marketing helps you to include valuable pieces of information and share the benefits of your service to the respective prospects and clients altogether.

Email marketing is considered one of the popular marketing strategies used by B2B marketing specialists to establish business relations.

4. Messenger Marketing

Messenger marketing has become popular in the B2B sector industry, having an open rate of 80%. One of the most famous examples of messenger marketing is through Facebook.

Facebook messenger marketing provides various opportunities to create fantastic marketing campaigns and simplify communication with potential and existing partners.

You can also set up auto-responses to your post to help you connect with the business people easily.

5. SMS Marketing

SMS marketing is a new type of B2B marketing technique implemented by the business. One of the primary reasons for using SMS marketing is that the SMS messages have an open rate of 98%.

By personalizing the text messages and utilizing your client's information, the businesses can inform the partner's about the discounts or special events organized by the company.

Well, there are many other B2B marketing strategies used by businesses. But among all of them, the five strategies mentioned above are effective in terms of results and help develop a competitive edge.

Since marketing strategies keep changing at a constant rate, the traditional methods are being scrapped, and new practices are considered.

Rest it depends on how well the business can pull the marketing strategy that works.

Businesses can also use marketing strategies to solve their purpose.

How to create a successful B2B marketing strategy

While creating a successful B2B marketing strategy, the businesses need to invest time in detailed planning, accurate management, and correct execution.

Following is a four step-by-step guide that will help you to proceed and succeed with your B2B marketing strategy:

1. Develop a goal and vision
2. Define the target market
3. Define marketing tactics and channels
4. Launch your marketing campaign

1. Develop a goal and vision

Developing a business vision is the first step towards creating your B2B marketing strategy. The vision should include measurable business goals and then align them with the strategy. It is recommended that the business set up realistic goals that can give them results.

Well, your B2B marketing strategy should answer the following questions:

• Who is your target audience?
• What are the kinds of marketing campaigns you will hold in the future?
• What kind of tools you will use
• What are the engagement strategies to build your audience
• What are the metrics for measuring your success?
• What are the strategies you will use to increase the engagement level?

The answers to these questions involve in-depth research analysis of the market.

2. Define the target market

Defining your target market is a second and crucial step for conducting B2B marketing. The target market means qualifying the types of customers who will be needing your products and services based on their needs and problems.

It is exceptionally viable to create a buyer Persona by gathering information about the needs of your prospects and clients.

It will not only help you to connect with loyal buyers but will also give you a better picture of the audience.

3. Define marketing tactics and channels

After you are done with developing a business vision and identifying the target market, the next step is to define and select the types of marketing tactics that you will use to reach a prospective client.

Before reaching out to the prospective client, make sure you have answers to the following questions:

• Which do our clients spend on the social media platform?
• What kind of events do they prefer?
• What are their problems and then, developing your solutions?

After discovering solutions to these questions, the next step is to choose the best marketing tactics and channels to proceed with.

You can also consult B2B marketing professionals who can guide you with the different marketing strategies having the best effectiveness and conversion rates.

4. Launch your marketing campaign

After going through the first three steps and deciding your plan, the next step is to launch the marketing campaign to satisfy the prospective clients.

Using best marketing practices and tips, you can focus on the target audience and provide them information, who may become your business partners in the future.

The B2B marketing strategies should be evaluated at different levels to ensure progress and draw relevant inferences from it.

It is important to note that effective B2B marketing strategies are followed by creative demands, budget, and channel decisions.

If you have found your right determinant, i.e., your target audience, you can tap, pitch and convert them by applying the marketing strategy.

What are the best B2B Marketing tools?

The best B2B marketing tools can help you manage everything from content marketing to lead generation and even beyond.

There are a lot of B2B marketing tools used by the businesses, but there are few of them that are considered as the best pick for each category of functions coming under B2B marketing:

These are as follows:

• For Content Marketing

1. Adobe Stock for stock photography and generating online content
2. Canva for designing headers, images, infographics, and social media templates
3. ClearScope for creating block content and ranking in the search results

• For email marketing

1. Activecampaign to blend marketing automation, CRM, and support tools for effective run and management of campaigns
2. Mailchimp for marketing automation features like a content studio and personalized recommendations

• For lead generation

1. Sumo to capture the people's email addresses and customize the website to make a list of features like pop-up, intelligent bars, and welcome mats
2. Unbounce to create custom landing pages and convert more leads

• For Market Intelligence & Research

1. Databox to bring all the KPIs and metrics together in one place and evaluate the company's performance
2. BuzzSumo for understanding the trending content and generating ideas for the high-performing content.

• For Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

1. Semrush manages Search Engine Optimisation and runs audits, tracks search engine rankings, and analyzes the backlink profile.
2. Ubersuggest to get started with SEO and content Optimisation. It also assists in optimizing the content and analyzing the website.

• For social media management

1. Hootsuite to manage multiple social media platforms and accounts.
2. Buffer for authentic engagement and assisting with publishing and analyzing the content with ease.
3. Sprout Social for social listening and in-depth ways to surface the relevant content and conversations using keywords and hashtags.

• For collaboration

1. Slack to work together with people on a remote basis
2. Zoom to connect with people and chat in real-time

• Website Tools

1. Google Analytics to gain an understanding of the website visitors and interaction
2. ServiceBell to communicate the website visitors through live video

Based on different functions of B2B marketing, the businesses need to align their goals, campaigns, and tools applicable to build the customer experience.

The businesses choose to select any of the alternatives that can act as a game-changer for them.

All tools at glance based on functions

Popular B2B Marketing examples to get inspired

In the fast-moving world of marketing, popular brands and companies opted for B2B marketing and gave a dose of inspiration for creating the marketing campaign to other businesses.

Let's take a look at the popular 3 B2B marketing examples:

1. FedEx followers gain on social media
2. LinkedIn campaign to expand the audience
3. Raise the Bar Email Marketing Campaign

1. FedEx followers gain on social media

FedEx expanded its reach to over 2 lakh followers by leveraging the advantage of changing its webpage to an immersive travel experience. Various photos showcasing FedEx planes and vehicles going to exotic locations and cities helped the brand market itself in the audience's eyes.

FedEx leveraged the advantage of social media marketing, and as a result, their social feed turned into a travel blog, keeping the audience hooked with their next destination place.

2. LinkedIn campaign to expand the audience

LinkedIn as a platform is a significant business social network connecting professionals worldwide. To emphasize the platform, LinkedIn created a campaign called "In it together" to appreciate the success of every individual for all industries and professions.

By leveraging the power of marketing campaigns, LinkedIn widened its potential customer base. It helped break down the barrier of people who thought of LinkedIn as a job platform rather than a connecting platform.

3. Raise the Bar Email Marketing Campaign

Raise the Bar is a hand-curated newsletter compiled daily to bring insights from sales growth engineering and marketing leaders. The company is known for solving complex newsletters and sharing valuable information in an elaborated way.

This is an excellent example of B2B email marketing because it mainly focuses on educating the subscribers without directly selling them.

So these were the fantastic and must-shared examples of inspiring B2B marketing approaches used by the businesses. It gave them the exposure to reach customers and helped them build the desired brand image.

How Deskera Can Assist You?

Whether you are a sales manager or running your own business, there are tons of duties and responsibilities that you have to fulfill. Using the Deskera CRM system, you can manage your contacts, leads and sales deals. You can use the CRM system to manage all customer data and manage your leads, sales negotiations and deals.

Doing so will help you to save the time taken in transferring customer data between the different systems. Having a good CRM system will help you manage your financial and sales reports and be prepared to kick-off your meetings.

Deskera can also assist you with real-time updates about your business like cash flow status, customer satisfaction, inventory management, sales, purchases, purchase orders, customer tickets, customer satisfaction, managing leads, revenues, profit, and loss statements, and balance sheets.

Moreover, it would also help in integrating sales methodology across different platforms onto one system so that you have a consolidated list for email campaigns, leads management, and sales pipeline to mention a few.

It will also help you to sync between your orders, payments, taxes, refunds, product variants, sending out invoices and reminders, facilitating invoice management, and even undertaking follow-ups and advertisement campaigns.

Such a consolidated platform will help you to improve your sales through building effective sales compensation plans and also facilitate faster and well-informed decision-making. It will help you in strengthening your opportunities and being braced for the threats.

Deskera books and Deskera CRM will also be able to ensure the highest customer satisfaction and thereby an increase in net revenues and net profits.

Conclusion

B2B marketing is all about targeting your audience and communicating how your business can help them. Being customer-focused is one of the best ways to rule marketing and treat your customers like VIPs.

With the help of practical strategies and plans, the brands can leverage the B2B marketing and cater their services to companies and organizations.

Key Takeaways

This detailed guide of B2B marketing clearly shows that a company needs to use B2B marketing for its operations. It also helps to play a crucial role towards fostering business growth.

Companies can implement the tips and thoughts right and get started with B2B marketing by considering the suggestions and opinions.

Let's take a look at the key takeaways of the article:

• Business-to-Business marketing refers to a process of 1 business marketing is product or services to another business
• Four common target groups provide a range of B2B marketing services for companies
• The target groups include office suppliers, software companies, marketing agencies, and bookkeeping and accounting companies
• The B2B marketing strategy has become a prominent technique businesses use to achieve success
• The importance of B2B marketing talks about buying emotions, extending the sales cycle, and linking social media for effective marketing
• B2B marketing and B2C marketing are different in terms of strategies and thinking processes
• There are a lot of B2B marketing strategies recommended by experts, but among them, there are five popular B2B marketing strategies that bring impressive results
• The five popular B2B marketing strategies are content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, messenger marketing, and SMS marketing
• For creating a successful B2B marketing strategy, there is a four-step by step guide for you to refer to and proceed
• The four-step plan is as follows:
• Develop a goal and vision
• Define the target market
• Define marketing tactics and channels
• Launching a marketing campaign
• A list of the best B2B marketing tools can help you manage everything from content marketing to lead generation
• Some popular brands and companies opted for B2B marketing and gave us a boost of inspiration
• The famous B2B marketing examples are FedEx, LinkedIn, and Raise the bar

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