15November 2023
B2B marketing includes a variety of strategies that can support your company’s growth. Using paid search, for example, can help you target ads to buyers who are looking for solutions to ongoing frustrations.
Use empathetic brand voice to connect with buyers and inspire their trust in your business solutions. Draw from customer language to craft compelling email captions, video scripts and long-form content.
Target Audience
The B2B target audience is a group of people that have problems or needs that can be solved with your products and services. This group also includes ideal customers or people that are close enough and match all the qualification criteria to become your customers.
You can use different market segmentation techniques to identify and categorize your target audience. These include geographic, behavioral, firmographic, and psychographic segments. These different types of segments can help you create more targeted marketing campaigns that are more likely to convert potential customers into buyers.
You can also use competitor research to find out who your competitors are targeting. This will help you get a better idea of the size of your target audience, which marketing channels are most effective, and what type of content is most appealing to your competitors’ audiences. You can then use this information to improve your own campaign targeting. This will help you achieve a higher ROI on your advertising dollars.
The Marketing Funnel
The marketing funnel is an essential tool for generating and nurturing leads throughout the sales cycle. A good strategy will attract a high volume of qualified prospects and successfully nudge them through each stage until they become customers.
Prospects in the awareness stage are looking for general information about your brand, products and services. You can connect with them with content like blog posts, email campaigns and webinars. Content at this stage should be informative and educational, rather than pushy or sales-oriented.
Prospects in the middle of the funnel are evaluating solutions and deciding if your products are right for them. You can connect with them with content that focuses on specific pain points, product demos and case studies.
The B2B Buying Cycle
The B2B buying cycle is often much longer than the consumer version, and there are many more people involved in making a purchase decision. This is because businesses are risk-averse, and they need to be convinced that a new product will help them achieve their business goals.
During the research phase, buyers gather information about potential solutions and suppliers. This information may come from a variety of sources, including search engines; reviews and testimonials; subject matter experts; industry websites; social media; webinars; and company representatives.
Marketers must make it easy for buyers to complete their research by focusing on providing useful information that makes the purchase process easier and less time-consuming. This is called buyer enablement, and it is a key strategy for maximizing the value of limited interactions with sales representatives. Buyers also consider supplier capacity and ability to meet delivery deadlines when making purchasing decisions. This is especially important when deciding to invest in high-ticket items, such as an MRI machine.
The B2B Buyer’s Journey
The B2B buyer’s journey is a complex, multi-faceted beast. It involves a group of people who often have different priorities, from purchasing executives looking for great value to production managers who want efficiency to health and safety reps who are concerned with risk minimisation.
Getting marketing and sales teams on the same page about buyers and their needs is vital for a smooth-running, effective campaign. It’s also key to creating a content strategy that can address the needs of the buyers at each stage of the buyer journey, from awareness to conversion and beyond.
Without a clear view of the buyer’s journey, companies can put too much emphasis on lead generation and end up missing opportunities to build awareness or move the buying process along. They can also make trade-offs between investing in brand or lead generation and forget that both impact the buyer decision at different stages of the journey. The right approach to the buyer’s journey can transform marketing from an events-heavy, sales support function into a genuine driver of commercial growth.