You must have often heard that one of the basic measures of effective marketing is knowing and understanding your target audience. And more often than not, your target audience is individual shoppers/ customers.

But what about when the customer is not an individual person but an entire business? A company or an organisation. To understand how you can position your brand to businesses, we will discuss B2B or business-to-business marketing in this blog.

Defining B2B Marketing

So, what is B2B Marketing?

In simple language, B2B marketing refers to a business selling its products or services to another business. This company that you are selling the service to can resell it to their customers or use it support their own organisation.

This helps both the companies to promote their respective businesses and generate more revenue.

Unlike consumer purchasing, wherein customers buy products based on price, popularity, emotional triggers, etc, B2B purchasers choose products on profit and potential value alone.

Who is Involved in B2B Marketing?

What kind of businesses are involved in this whole mutual profit process? Who usually employs these marketing strategies and who is the target audience exactly?

This particular type of marketing is usually done by businesses that create products which customers don’t directly have any relation with.

The most common and traditional example of this is automobile manufacturing. What a customer cares about is the final product i.e the design of the car, its features, the brand, etc. But the parts of that brand’s car will have been bought from various different steel, iron brands.

The kind of customers that B2B marketers target usually are organisations that have a business model which can resell the product or service. For example, a property owner will target a broker. Medical and educational institutions are again important targets as these require a lot of types of equipment to operate.

Examples of Business to Business Marketing

In the digital marketing space, the approach to B2B marketing is a little different. Here, the main objective is to bring in leads and increase revenue without actually contacting leads manually.

In order to do that, techniques like inbound marketing, SEO, content marketing is done rather than cold calling or directly approaching a customer.

Through inbound marketing, you generate and create content that is useful for your target audience. You can write blogs, make tutorial videos, ebooks, social media campaigns, etc.

62% of B2B buyers make purchasing decisions based on online content alone.

BlueCorona

Creating good content and sharing these on social media pages helps you put your brand in front of thousands of people who hadn’t heard about you yet. This enables you to reach out to a wider audience without directly or manually contacting them.

Strategies for B2B Marketing

How can you create an effective B2B marketing strategy that will enable you to reach the kind of target audience you’re hoping for?

Map Out a Plan of Action

Before you venture into a field, it is crucial that you understand completely and fully about it. To have a great B2B business, it is important that you have a clear vision of what it is that you can provide to your customers. Build a plan of action around it. Take surveys, gather knowledge about how pioneers in the field are doing it.

Identify and Distinguish your Buyer Persona

Before you start building your product, find out as much as you can about the people i.e your target audience. Since you’re a B2B business, your customer base won’t be as wide and common as a B2C business’. Your target audience’s requirements will be a lot more narrowed down and specific.

Therefore, once you have figured out and established the B2B buyers’ needs and requirements, you will be better equipped to cater to it.

Know Your Competitors

If you’re already in a business, you know the importance of this step. Conducting a competitor analysis will allow you to find out the other top players are in the field and who their customers are. In addition to this, it will also help you understand what is being already done in the market and if there’s something new that you can provide. It might be cheaper pricing or adding more features.

Employ B2B Marketing Tools

Once you’ve gathered information about your target audience and competitors, you need to get moving. Now you need to find out how you can reach this audience. You have to understand which channels do they use to communicate or what are they searching for online. You can create surveys and forums asking your audience what do they specifically need.

Analyse Metrics

Once you’ve set your plan to motion, you need to keep checking what’s working and what’s not. If you’re running campaigns, you can check the click rate or conversion rate through analysis tools. You can analyse how many new visitors have come to your site after you made a new addition on your website.

This step is probably the most important one. It’s so because it will help you understand the effectiveness of each of your strategy. If something works, you continue doing it. Similarly, if something isn’t showing the desired result, you need to figure out how you can change its usefulness.

Conclusion

Now that you know what is B2B marketing, you can create a strategy that works for your business and reach out to your target audience effectively.