Marketing has changed over the years and this is due to technology. Technology has changed every facet of our lives and how we operate. Brands in the business of selling to other businesses have not been left behind. Nowadays, marketers are working their best to create highly integrated marketing communications to ensure that they reach their target audiences wherever they are and their preferred means of communication. The business-to-business marketing approach has immensely changed too. This is why we have a variety of B2B digital marketing strategies brands can tap into to attract and retain their customers.
What is Business-to-business (B2B) Marketing?
Whatever activity a business plans to use to make its brand, product or service attract attention, build its reputation, sell and satisfy its target audience is marketing. Having understood marketing, B2B marketing is the process of a business marketing its products and services to another business. An example is a business with a warehouse marketing their spaces and offers to businesses who are in need of storage facilities for their mass production or imported goods.
What are the B2B digital marketing strategies that work?
A marketing strategy is meant to help a B2B business reach its intended audience. These strategies can be short-term or long-term and they are meant to help the brand achieve their marketing goals. The goals can be to create awareness and relationships with the target audience, build brand reputation, generate traffic to the websites or physical location, generate leads, and increase sales.
Which strategies actually work? Every business needs to integrate all marketing strategies that help its B2B database grow.
Online B2B Marketing Strategies
There are many strategies out there that work for B2B brands. These are the major marketing strategies you can employ for any type of B2B brand and gain more from the digital spaces.
1. High-Performance website and Email Marketing
Websites are crucial in the life cycle of a Business to Business brand. A website is a great point of contact for digital customers looking into understanding more about your business. Unlike social media which makes it hard to scroll for content shared years earlier, a website makes it easier to get all the information in segmented pages. This can be in the form of blogs, reports, products, testimonials, client portfolios among others. This is the reason to why B2B businesses ought to work on high-performance websites in terms of speed, visualization and maneuvering.
High-performance websites also encourage newsletter signups which are crucial when doing email marketing. Email marketing is also a strategy that can help B2B brands stay connected with the customers and prospects who sign up for their newsletters, attend their events and reach out for more information about their business.
2. Content Marketing
Unlike how we used to relate content marketing to blogs, it has widened. But before we continue on how B2B can tap into content marketing, let’s understand what content marketing is.
In digital marketing, content marketing is a strategy that aims to generate attention and interest in your brand. It involves creating relevant content and sharing it on the platforms where your target audience hangs out.
B2B brands can leverage on this by packaging their content in blog posts, ebooks, reports, surveys, podcasts, YouTube videos and even community conversations such as recorded Twitter Space.
3. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) & Advertising
Search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo are crucial when you want to drive both organic and paid-for traffic to your business website. A well-optimized business website can drive organic traffic with the aim of solving the customers’ pain points.
In order to win in SEM, businesses ought to invest in these strategies:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Select keywords and phrases people are likely to be searching and optimize your website with them for the possibility to be ranked among the top pages.
- Google will love you if people love you first. Give the solutions they are searching for.
- Create a blog page and update it with content that is helpful, informative, educative and responds to the questions of the target audience.
- Create Google Ads to help you increase visibility and website traffic to your preferred landing page.
4. Social Media Marketing
Social media can be used strategically to achieve various business objectives, such as increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, generating leads, improving customer support, and ultimately boosting sales and revenue. B2B businesses can make use of LinkedIn pages, Meta advertising and other platforms to specifically target their audiences for leads and sales for their business.
Businesses can employ these activities to market their products and services:
- Host B2B social media lives to have conversations on niche topics or trends in their space. LinkedIn and Twitter Spaces are perfect for this.
- Create exclusive groups for people in the B2B space
- Create and share testimonial videos. Publish longer versions on YouTube and the shorter versions on other social media platforms
- Advertise to reach the target audience. Brands can also collaborate with relevant influencers to help them increase their reach, and increase engagements, traffic, leads and sales.
- Joining niche community conversations to build brand visibility
5. Industry Surveys & Reports
Businesses that target other businesses as their customers can take the lead to do research, surveys and reports about the industry and share them publicly for free or on paid subscription.
A good example is doing a report on market feedback. The reports can feature:
- Tools B2B brands within Kenya are using to better their operations
- Market survey on customer response rate when it comes to the B2B sector
- Digital transformation in the b2b space and the top emerging trends in the sector
- Expert advice on the top innovations and technology solutions in the B2B market landscape.
B2B brands aim to establish themselves as the industry leaders and reports and surveys are the perfect B2B digital marketing strategies to help achieve that.
6. Analytic and Reporting
Above all, there’s a need to constantly audit your websites and social media marketing channels for your B2B brand to ensure that what you are putting out is in line with the audience’s needs. This will also help you optimize your customer experience digitally. Constantly collect your data and analyze it so as to create better content and strategy strategies that work for the target audience and your business’s return on investment.
Final Thoughts
Your business is as good as your team, your marketing strategy and the customers it brings. Be up to date with the B2B digital marketing strategies so as to not only connect with the customers the right way but also to garner a great return on investment for the money and effort you put into marketing and advertising your B2B brand. Above all, a satisfied customer is a great marketing strategy.
We are ALP Warehouses and we help businesses have access to modern and high-quality warehouses in Nairobi to store their goods. Read about us and what we offer.
