How To Develop A Winning B2B Marketing Strategy That Works

Intro

To drive business growth in today’s competitive online business world, you need to learn how to develop a winning B2B marketing strategy to build brand awareness and generate more demand for your products from your target businesses.

But this can be challenging.

Figure out this. According to a McKinsey & Company survey, 65% of B2B marketers are exclusively selling online:

(Source)

What does this mean?

The competition in the B2B marketing world is insane.

To stand out from the crowded B2B market, you need to up your marketing game.

But with so many different marketing techniques, it can be challenging to know what effective B2B marketing strategies to use.

In this in-depth blog post, I’ll discuss 14 effective B2B marketing strategies that can help you reach your target audience, generate more leads, and grow your business.

So if you want to learn how to develop a winning B2B marketing strategy, this guide is for you.

Let’s get started.

How to Develop a Winning B2B Marketing Strategy Step by Step

Here is the list of the best B2B marketing techniques you can use today to launch a fruitful B2B marketing strategy:

1. Establish Your B2B Marketing Goals

The most important thing to do to create a solid B2B marketing strategy is to create specific, realistic, and measurable goals for your marketing campaigns.

Remember that even though you’re going to launch multiple campaigns each with its own purpose, the overall goal is to help your target audience move further along the buyer’s journey.

Setting B2B marketing goals from the onset is important for driving business growth.

Goals offer clear direction toward better results.

Besides, setting goals can help you determine whether or not your marketing campaigns are successful or if you need to make any changes.

In a nutshell, you cannot launch successful B2B marketing campaigns if you don’t know what you intend to achieve.

Some common B2B marketing goals may include:

• Creating brand awareness.
• Building brand loyalty.
• Lead generation.
• Converting leads into customers.
• etc.

Remember that each of these goals requires explicit marketing campaigns so you need to be clear from the onset.

Determining your marketing goals isn’t always easy. Setting the wrong goals can negatively impact your conversion rates thus hindering business growth.

Here are tips for creating marketing goals for your B2B business:

• Determine your overall business goals.
• Understand your target buyer’s needs.
• Set SMART goals.
• Base your goals on previously gathered data. For B2B businesses that have huge amounts of information about their target customers. If you don’t have the necessary info to hand in-house, then you can secure and interpret buyer intent data from B2B prospects via third party platforms. This will bring your marketing goals within reach faster than you might have thought possible.

2. Research Your Buyer’s Pain Points

Market research is one of the most effective B2B marketing strategies that can help you in many ways:

For instance, research helps you:

• Understand your buyers better including what they need.
• Know the environment that impacts their needs.
• Understand how your competition might pose a challenge to your marketing efforts.
• Gain new perspectives around buyers’ pain points.
• Uncover new revenue growth opportunities.
• Tailor your marketing messages to the right audience.

No matter how great your product or service is, buyers will not come running.

You need to figure out what drives the demand for your offer and how you can set yourself apart from other competing businesses.

Here, you want to collect information from current, previous, or potential buyers as well as competitors.

To better understand your buyer’s needs, you need to form buyer user groups. Here, you will need to research customers who are already benefiting from the product or service you’re offering.

Here are tips to uncover your buyer’s pain points:

• Launch surveys that reveal the pain points buyers looking for your solution have.
• Conduct keyword research to uncover organic search demand.
• Conduct both online and offline research.

3. Build a Beautiful B2B Website

Building a company website is one of the most effective strategies to use when learning how to develop a winning B2B marketing strategy.

But why?

It’s your business’s first point of contact with your target buyers.

According to Salesforce State of Marketing research, 88% of B2B marketers say a website is their customer/prospect communication channel:

(Source)

That’s why 41% of B2B marketers are spending big on website development:

(Source)

What’s more?

39% of B2B buyers say vendor websites are one of the first three resources that inform them about a solution they are looking for:

(Source)

Building an aesthetically pleasing and informative website can benefit your business in many ways as below:

• Helps you reach customers faster and easier by improving your business’s online visibility.
• Improves efficiency.
• Informs buyers about your products, services, and brand story.
• It’s a 24/7 selling tool.
• A well-optimized website can improve user experience.
• Improves sales.
• Improves brand identity.

As a rule, your website must demonstrate your expertise and provide solutions to potential customers.

To stand out from the crowd, your website must be an industry resource that tells potential clients exactly what you do without them having to dig deep into the pages.

Most importantly, a B2B website must:

• Be optimized for both mobile and desktop devices.
• Be relevant to your target customers.
• Include clear CTAs that tell users exactly what to do. E.g. make a call, request a quote, etc.
• Feature recent testimonials and user reviews.
• Contain a blog with up-to-date and engaging content.
• Include links to your social media pages.
• Generate quality and credible backlinks to drive relevant traffic.

Hootsuite is one of the great example of B2B websites that checks all the boxes above:

(Source)

4. Do a Detailed B2B Competitor Analysis

When figuring out how to develop a winning B2B marketing strategy, you need to know exactly where you stand against other competing businesses.

If you think you know your competitors because you follow their social media pages and read their blogs, think again because that’s not enough.

To learn how to develop a winning B2B marketing strategy, you need to figure out your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses.

When you do a detailed B2B competitive analysis, you understand:

• Exactly who your competitors are.
• What strategy is working for them and what’s not.
• Their product’s or service’s strengths and weaknesses.
• Their customer needs, including those that aren’t met.
• What keywords their websites are ranking for.
• The type of content they publish on their websites.
• Their content publishing frequency.
• Etc.

Uncovering this valuable information can help you to better market your products or services to your shared audience.

Here are tips to perform a detailed B2B competitor analysis:

• Identify and categorize your main competitors.
• Evaluate their social media and content marketing strategy.
• Analyze their sales tactics, results, and marketing efforts.
• Do a SWOT analysis.

You can use Google Analytics, SEMrush, and others for your competitor analysis.

5. Invest in Data-Driven B2B Content Marketing

To build a powerful B2B marketing strategy, you need to invest in high-value data-driven content.

By creating content tailored to customer needs, B2B brands can:

• Reach your target audience.
• Create brand awareness.
• Drive traffic to your website
• Build brand credibility.
• Build loyalty with your target audience.
• Generate interest and leads.
• Generate sales.

Yet according to Content Marketing Institute research, only 40% of B2B marketers currently have a documented content marketing strategy:

(Source)

To achieve maximum B2B success, brands should create a data-driven and adaptable content marketing strategy.

Even better, you should capitalize on creating various content types across various lead source channels.

Here are the B2B content assets that produce great results according to the research mentioned above:

(Source)

Note that B2B content marketing is different from B2C content marketing since B2B buyers want dynamic content that provides actionable guidelines.

Here are the guidelines for creating actionable B2B content:

• It must be easy to read, valuable, and to the point.
• B2B content must be unique, professional, and targeted.
• B2B content must be based on analytics.
• It must tie into your business’s overall marketing strategy and goals.

Here are the steps to develop a successful B2B content strategy:

• Identify your target businesses and their needs.
• Research competitors in your industry.
• Establish your B2B content marketing goals.
• Brainstorm hot content ideas.
• Come up with amazing topics.
• Identify the types of content to create and distribution platforms to use.
• Create multi-layered content.
• Promote your content across various platforms.
• Measure the results and adapt.

HubSpot, one of the largest B2B platforms has invested heavily in content marketing to drive brand awareness, improve engagement, and attract more traffic:

(Source)

6. Use B2B SEO

No doubt search engine optimization is a valuable strategy for your B2B business success.

Think about it:

Google boasts 84.08% of the search engine market share:

(Source)

According to a 2022 Demand Gen B2B Buyer Behavior survey, 52% of B2B buyers say they use web search to learn more about a solution they are looking for:

(Source)

Besides, organic search is responsible for 53% of all internet traffic:

(Source)

And that’s not all:

Gartner research shows that B2B buyers spend 27% of their time researching independently online when considering a purchase:

(Source)

What’s more?

A Twitter poll conducted by Search Engine Journal suggests that organic search is the digital marketing channel with the highest ROI for 48.7% of marketers:

(Source)

What does this mean?

• SEO drives organic traffic to your website.
• SEO is the primary source of web traffic.
• B2B SEO can help to build brand awareness.
• SEO is an effective B2B lead generationstrategy.
• Optimizing your B2B marketing efforts for SEO can help to shorten the sales cycle.
• A successful B2B SEO strategy can help to build trust and credibility.

B2B SEO is a powerful digital marketing strategy that encompasses optimizing web content to help your website rank high in Google search results.

B2B SEO involves the following elements:

• Technical SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Local SEO
• International SEO
• On-page SEO

When done well, B2B SEO can improve your website’s visibility to other businesses researching the product or service you offer. This helps to supercharge your marketing efforts which ultimately accelerates your business growth.

To be successful with B2B SEO you need to stay on top of algorithm updates, optimize website navigation for mobile, and keep your messaging consistent across your website and other channels.

Here is how to create an effective B2B SEO strategy:

• Define your objectives for creating a B2B SEO strategy.
• Develop detailed B2B buyer personas.
• Understand your B2B marketing funnel.
• Perform B2B keyword research around your personas.
• Understand the B2B search intent behind your keywords.
• Develop topic clusters.
• Develop a winning B2B content strategy.
• Optimize your web pages, content, and other elements.
• Measure the success of your B2B SEO strategy.

Canva is a good example of B2B companies that leverage B2B SEO to their advantage:

(Source)

Currently, the website ranks #1 in Google for keywords like “brochure”, “YouTube banner”, and “free templates”

You can use Ranktracker to research keywords to target your audience with, spy on your competitor’s keywords, track your search engine rankings, and more:

(Source)

7. Utilize B2B Data for Better Targeting

Google intends to begin phasing out third-party cookies in Chrome in the second half of 2024.

This means that precise targeting will get even more challenging hence marketers need to figure out new ways to gather data to run successful B2B marketing campaigns.

This is where using B2B data-driven marketing becomes helpful.

Generally, B2B data involves relevant pieces of information you collect about other businesses and people you want to target with your marketing campaigns.

The data could include past interactions with your business, contact information, company or account data, etc.

The more accurate the data you collect about your target businesses the better you will be able to make better decisions.

The leading B2B businesses use data to drive business decisions. In fact, B2B sales and marketing teams use this type of data to develop effective marketing strategies and enhance their buyer journeys.

Here are some of the benefits of using B2B data:

• Helps to identify the right accounts for account-based marketing.
• Helps to predict what buyers will do next.
• Helps marketers to generate quality leads.
• Helps you to personalize your B2B campaigns.
• Helps you design an engaging user experience.
• Craft compelling and targeted content.
• Helps to maximize your marketing ROI.
• Improve account-based marketing(ABM)

Here are popular tactics to use data to precisely target B2B buyers:

• Refresh existing third-party data to launch retargeting campaigns.
• Boost gated content lead generation campaigns with paid ads.
• Explore LinkedIn user demographics.
• Ensure data is compliant and secure.
• Keep data up-to-date and clean.
• Use credible third-party data sources.

8. Target Millennials and Gen Z

If you think millennials don’t hold influential buying roles, think again.

According to a Demand Gen millennia buyer survey report, 41% of millennials say they play the role of primary decision-maker in notable purchase decisions:

(Source)

What’s more?

In another TrustRadius study, 60% of B2B tech buyers are millennials:

(Source)

To achieve B2B business success, you need to understand, enable, and accelerate the millennial buyer’s journey.

In other words, when launching your B2B marketing strategy, you need to consider millennials and Gen Z priorities.

According to the TrustRadius mentioned above, how Gen Z and millennials discover products is different:

(Source)

According to the Demand Gen report, 61% of millennials say user reviews are one of the top-three content formats that help them when making business buying decisions:

(Source)

Here are B2B marketing tactics to help you appeal to Gen Z and millennials buyers:

• Speed up your response with live chat features.
• Optimize your marketing efforts for mobile users.
• Leverage social media engagement both on LinkedIn and other social networks like TikTok.
• Use less traditional marketing approaches.
• Leverage influencer marketing.
• Keep your marketing campaigns transparent and trustworthy.
• Use cause-based marketing.

9. Cater to a Longer Buyer’s Journey

Unlike B2C, B2B marketing has a longer buyer’s journey.

20% of B2B buyers say that the length of their B2B purchase cycle has increased significantly and 35% say it has increased somewhat compared to last year:

(Source)

The change in the length of the B2B purchase cycle is caused by several factors such as:

• The ever-changing business needs.
• Budgets are becoming tighter.
• Buyers are looking for more hands-on engagement from B2B sellers.
• Etc.

Here are practical tips to cater to a lengthy buyer’s journey:

• Create content that supports buyer research such as case studies, testimonials, etc.
• Mix inbound and outbound marketing strategies when creating content.
• Give potential buyers the resources they need to make purchase decisions at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

10. Leverage Email Marketing

Email is one of the top owned-media platforms 67% of B2B marketers use to distribute content:

(Source)

It is also listed among the top 10 channels decision-makers use during their decision journeys:

(Source)

If you’re not using B2B email marketing, then you are giving your competition the edge over you.

You are also not utilizing the most effective revenue-driving sales model according to 14% of respondents of a McKinsey & Company study:

(Source)

You can use email marketing to:

• Reach and connect with your target audience in a personalized way.
• Generate leads.
• Drive interest in your product or service.
• Convert opportunities throughout the marketing funnel.
• Distribute content.

With email marketing, you can send newsletters, cold emails, and welcome emails, as well as nurture campaigns.

In fact, many B2B marketers say triggered emails and nurture campaigns are very powerful.

To make the most out of these types of emails, you need to invest in email automation to get the timing of your emails right.

According to a 2021 Litmus state of email report, 82% of marketers say they use automation for triggered emails and 67% when sending drip or nurture campaigns:

(Source)

To launch successful email marketing campaigns, you can use B2B data to uncover vital marketing triggers for your niche.

This will help you to send out hyper-personalized emails to the right audience at the right time.

Here are tips for a successful B2B email marketing strategy:

• Craft email subject lines that generate interest.
• Increase email click-through rates with video emails.
• Use both visual and plain text emails.
• Personalize your email messages.
• Include a relevant call to action.
• Segment your email list based on interest levels.
• Use an email campaign management tool.
• Measure your email marketing success.

11. Use The Right B2B Marketing Tools

All these B2B marketing strategies aren’t effective without the right tools. And if you aren’t using any kind of marketing tool, then your competitor is probably ahead of you.

In fact, you will be wasting your time to learn how to develop a winning B2B marketing strategy if you aren’t leveraging any tools.

Consider this:

84% of B2B organizations use Analytics tools. 71% of social media publishing tools. Besides, 68% of them use email marketing software.

And the list goes on:

(Source)

With the right B2B marketing tools and software, you can simplify, streamline, and enhance all your B2B marketing efforts.

Besides, these tools can provide valuable insights and data about your target businesses and the overall market to help you launch effective marketing campaigns.

You will realize that as your business grows, keeping track of things will start to become challenging. This is where B2B marketing tools can come in handy.

These tools can help you with the following:

• CRM
• Social media management
• Lead capture, generation, and conversion
• Content creation and design
• Online advertising
• Email and marketing automation
• Etc.

HubSpot is one of the powerful B2B marketing solutions for all your inbound marketing, sales, and customer service needs. With this tool, you can track, classify your leads, and build better customer relationships.

For a successful B2B marketing strategy, consider using a combination of these tools. For instance, you can combine automation and artificial intelligence to launch optimized marketing campaigns.

You can try the free options if you’re just getting started or combine both free and paid tools.

12. Leverage B2B Influencer Marketing

Leveraging B2B influencer marketing can enhance your brand’s marketing effort greatly. This type of marketing can help to tap into the buying power of loyal followers of well-known public figures in your industry.

When done well, influencer marketing can help to build trust and enhance connections with your target audience.

A State of Inbound Marketing Trends research shows that 34% of B2B marketers are already leveraging influencer marketing:

(Source)

According to a 2022 TopRank Marketing B2B Influencer Marketing Research report, 86% of respondents say their programs are either moderately or very successful:

(Source)

Generally, influencer marketing is a strategy where brands partner or collaborate with influential or well-known people to promote your products, brand, or services.

What is the best influencer marketing platform for B2B?

You can find influencers on the most popular social media platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

There are many benefits of using influencers to supercharge your B2B marketing strategy.

Here are just a few benefits of B2B influencer marketing:

• Can help to tap into new audiences.
• Gain loyal customers.
• Can add credibility and authenticity to your brand and content.
• Influencer marketing can help to accelerate content production and promotion.
• Help to build brand thought leadership.

Here are a few steps to build a successful B2B influencer marketing strategy:

• Define your goals and KPIs before you start choosing influencers.
• Establish a content strategy that will excite B2B influencers.
• Set your budget.
• Find existing influencers in your industry.
• Focus on your target audience as well as the influencer.
• Find influencers your audience already follows.
• Invest in long-term partnerships.

13. Use B2B Referral Marketing

Referrals have been known to generate leads and sales for B2C businesses, thus, it can be tempting to overlook referral marketing when launching your B2B referral marketing strategy.

Think about it:

Before making a purchase, B2B buyers usually follow a long decision-making process consulting multiple stakeholders and resources including review sites, vendor websites, and more.

This is where referral marketing becomes useful. Because it enables you to tap into businesses that are already using your products or services. Call it word-of-mouth marketing.

What’s more?

Launching a B2B referral marketing program can help you generate signups, boost conversions, and reduce customer churn.

To encourage referral marketing, you need to determine what incentives to offer to businesses that refer new businesses to you.

Your incentives could be discounts, free products, and other encouraging rewards.

Bench Account, a B2B fintech company that offers online bookkeeping services to small businesses offers up to a $150 Visa gift card and one free month of bookkeeping for each referral an existing business provides:

(Source)

Here are five benefits of launching a B2B referral program:

• Improves brand awareness.
• Improves conversion rates.
• Increases customer lifetime value by improving engagement and loyalty to your business.
• Reduces customer acquisition costs.
• Minimizes customer churn rates.

Here is how to create an effective B2B referral program:

• Make your business worth referring to.
• Develop and nurture strong relationships with your current customers.
• Decide what businesses to engage in your referral program.
• Decide what referral incentives to offer.
• Make your referral program easy to share.
• Promote your program.
• Automate your referral program with B2B referral software.
• Reward businesses that refer other businesses to you.
• Track and measure the success of your referral program.

14. Measure the Success of Your B2B Marketing Strategies

Learning how to develop a winning B2B marketing strategy is half the battle.

You also need to see whether your strategies are bringing any results

As a rule, before you create any strategy discussed here, you need to establish a system for measuring its effectiveness.

For instance, when launching a B2B SEO strategy, you need to define what metrics you will track to determine its effectiveness.

Here, you could track organic traffic generated, rankings, conversions, etc.

For performance tracking, you can use CRM software like HubSpot or Google Analytics.

The good thing about tracking the performance of your B2B marketing strategies is that you gain insights into what’s working and what’s not as well as what to improve.

Conclusion

There you have it. 14 Effective B2B marketing strategies that actually work. When implemented well, these strategies can help you build brand awareness, drive more traffic to your website, generate leads, increase sales, and grow your business.

For better results, start with a few strategies then try to mix and match different strategies to see which ones are effective.

Remember to stay on top of the latest trends in the B2B marketing landscape so you aren’t left behind.