B2B Marketing Strategies: The Pro’s Guide to Getting It Right

But, we know it’s not that easy 😭

The B2B marketing game is complex and winning requires focused lead generation, skills in finding the right buyers, and lots of practice in tracking those buyers through the funnel. It’s all about connecting with and converting your audience at the perfect moment. 

So, how can you be sure you’re building effective marketing strategies for the business-to-business market? Before we dive into our top methods for generating demand, qualifying leads, and all that other fun stuff, let's go back to the basics. 

What is B2B marketing? And, how have changes in the industry impacted how strategies are created for this market in recent years? Let’s get into it.

What is B2B marketing? 

B2B marketing refers to the strategies companies use to sell products or services to other businesses or organizations. This might include selling sales and marketing software, offering manufacturing machines to businesses, or offering business consulting services. 

Basically, if your customers are other B2B businesses, you will want to use marketing strategies for the business-to-business market to drive growth. 

It's also worth noting the B2B customer lifecycle and buyer journey has changed dramatically in recent years. The traditional B2B marketing → lead gen → sales → close process is no longer the path to instant success it was a decade ago. Businesses have more options than ever. 

To win at marketing and build successful B2B marketing strategies, you need to focus on generating demand and getting in front of your buyers on the platforms they’re engaging on—not hiding behind lead capture forms.

Note: Want to know what companies visit your website—even if they don’t fill out a form? Try Leadfeeder free for 14 days and see who is on your site and what pages they visit. 

How do B2B marketing techniques differ from B2C strategies?

Business to consumer (B2C) marketing focuses on encouraging people to make a purchase decision. Those decisions are primarily made by one person and are generally lower-cost purchases (though not always.)

Marketing strategies for the business-to-business market focuses more on the buyer journey, which is longer, more complicated, and includes more people than ever before.

B2B marketing has unique challenges B2C doesn't have to deal with, including:

• More decision-makers: The average B2B buying decision has an average of seven people.

• Longer sales cycle: The average sales cycle in B2B takes between four and eight months.

• Different platforms: B2B marketing methods primarily focus on strategies like SEO, content marketing, email, and LinkedIn. B2C companies have more platforms to engage on, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. (Of course, some of those platforms can be used for B2B, but only do well in certain industries.)

That's really just the tip of the iceberg on the differences, but you get the idea. The B2B cycle is longer, more complex, and harder to navigate. This means the same strategies simply won't work for both audiences.

B2B marketing tactics vs B2B marketing strategies: What’s the difference? 

There’s a lot of confusion in the marketing world between “tactics” and “strategies.” Even seasoned marketers talk about or search for marketing strategies for B2B when they’re really looking for tactics—and vice versa.

If you fall into that boat, too, here’s a simple way to think about it:

• A strategy is a plan

• A tactic is a tool that helps make that plan a reality

In B2B marketing, the strategy lays out your goals for marketing, how you’ll measure success, as well as who you’ll target, where you’ll target them, and how you’ll target them. The main difference between B2B marketing strategies and tactics, is that marketing tactics only deal with that last ‘how’ piece.

For example, a basic B2B marketing strategy might say:

"Our goal is to grow signups to one million over the next 12 months. We’ll do this by targeting tech-savvy salespeople between the ages of 20-50.

We’ll target these people across the web by utilizing email marketing campaigns, social media advertising, and paid search engine ads."

In this example, your B2B marketing strategy calls for three different marketing tactics:

• Email marketing

• Social media advertising

• Paid search ads

A full-fledged marketing strategy would then go into depth on the strategy underlying how you’ll use these three tactics—creating an email marketing strategy, a social media strategy, and a search strategy.

8 steps to developing a targeted B2B marketing plan

Now that we've answered the question "What is B2B marketing" let's talk about how to do it. Remember, B2B marketing strategies must be created with your specific customers in mind.

You'll need to consider your business, your positioning, and unique value proposition, and the resources (financial, team, and otherwise) you have available for marketing. You'll also want to consider how to target and reach your specific audience.

And it needs to flow from your current position and situation as a company.

It doesn't sound very easy, we know.

To make your life easy, we've created this eight-step process for smooth B2B marketing planning:

• Understand the B2B buyer journey

• Lay out your position in the market

• Explain your target audience and buyer personas

• Set goals

• Choose your channels

• Outline your marketing framework and tactics

• Create relevant content

• Analyze your strategy

B2B marketing gets a bad rap—and there's no doubt it's gotten more complicated in recent years.

But it doesn’t have to be overwhelming or time-consuming.

For most B2B marketers, developing a marketing strategy is mostly just writing down and solidifying the information you already have and use in your marketing efforts every day.

For that reason, we won’t go into too much depth on researching and surfacing this information. Instead, we're offering eight pain-free steps to creating effective B2B marketing strategies.

Step 1: Understand the B2B buyer journey

The decision to buy rarely comes out of nowhere, and considering everything that precedes a sale is particularly important here. In the B2B world, buyers have operational budgets to balance, KPIs to hit, reports to complete, and—perhaps most importantly—a lot to lose.

After all, taking the wrong call on a B2B investment has the potential to stymie or even end a career. Solo operators and entrenched upper-ups aside, those tasked with sourcing B2B solutions tend to face oversight requiring them to justify the purchases they propose. They don’t make snap purchases: they schedule demos.

Remember that the journey to a B2B purchase typically begins with the buyer actively seeking a solution to a business problem. Instead of casting a wide net, then, think about how you can be in the right place at the right time with the right message when the right person begins their search.

If you’re not sure how to figure this out, start by reviewing how you’ve made sales before, then consult the people you hope to reach to ask them how they find B2B solutions. 

Search engines? Social media platforms? Personal recommendations? The more you learn, the more effectively you can shape your marketing.

Step 2: Lay out your positioning in the market

Your business doesn’t operate in a vacuum, so you need to know what’s going on around it, and—crucially—what makes its value proposition stand out. 

Highlight a positioning in the market that fits your operation and suits realistic goals. (In other words, don’t simply say “Oh, we should be #1 in all categories”.)

And take time to understand the market you’re operating in. That includes::

• Competitors: Their positioning in the market and their strengths and weaknesses

• Unique value proposition: What makes your business different? Do you offer transparent pricing, better customer service, or more accurate data? What problem does that solve? 

• Your current position: Where does your company land among the patchwork of companies in the market? 

Your competitive analysis may identify a particular opportunity in the market (price, for example) that only your business solves. That’s your unique selling proposition.

Is your business a dominant brand, a challenger brand, or a relative unknown? Do you offer premium products and/or services, or do you hit compelling price points? Can you lay claim to offering innovation that your main competitors can’t match? This is all about finding a role that highlights strengths and hides weaknesses.

Step 3: Define your ideal customer profile and target audience

Once you’ve sketched out a buyer journey and determined how best to frame your business, you can start building the resources you’ll need to run effective marketing.  

Approach this from the perspective of the person or people tasked with producing the marketing materials. What will make their work easier?

Buyer personas are popular here, and for good reason. A buyer persona describes the circumstances, needs, and preferences of a hypothetical buyer, making it easier to track how things should be framed. 

​You should have or find answers to:

• Who are you marketing to? How old are they? Where do they live?

• What do you know about them? What are their pain points? How does your business solve those?

• Are they all similar, or do they fall into separate buckets or personas?

• Are they different from the companies your competitors target? How?

• Where do they hang out? Where can you reach them, both on- and offline?

Commit to producing every marketing element with specific intent. When you lose specificity uniquely selected for the people you’re trying to sell to, you lose impact.

For example, if you’re trying to sell to people who are cash-rich but time-poor, you should focus your marketing on how quickly you can help them, rather than how economically. Include as much detail as you can within your buyer personas, and be sure to update them as the market changes around your business.

Step 4: Set your B2B marketing goals 

A marketing project without goals is unmoored, and having “earn more sales” as a goal isn’t good enough. The SMART rubric (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) is a reliable B2B marketing guide. Marketing is a never-ending process that mostly improves through iteration, so you don’t need to nail it out the gate.

Since having measurable goals doesn’t benefit you if you don’t carry out the measurement, though, you must ensure that suitable analytics systems are in place. Even if it’s possible to manually dredge up the data down the line, the scope and complexity of B2B sales (with countless possible funnel stages) makes it unwise.

Thankfully, modern marketing platforms offer numerous ways to configure tracking, allowing you to get as detailed as you’d like. Take advantage of all systems available to you. 

The more prep work you manage, the more you’ll benefit later. And do so in conjunction with the sales team. Sales operates downstream of marketing, so you need to collaborate to deliver an effective one-two punch.

Step 5: Choose your channels

There are more ways to market something today than ever before, and all channels—no matter how informal or non-professional—are viable for B2B marketing. If approached correctly, that is.

 To give your marketing the best chance of succeeding, you’ll want to pick out 1-3 channels that really suit your goals.

Think about the B2B buyer journey: 

• Is your target audience likely to source information and suggestions about viable solutions?

• Which channels and tactics are your competitors using? 

• Which routes are saturated? 

• Where can you put your best foot forward?

You may want to pair one or two tried-and-tested channels (such as YouTube for video tutorials or X for general visibility and engagement) with something more experimental such as TikTok. 

If you can devise a strong short-form video marketing campaign, for instance, you might find that a lack of competitor presence gives you a golden opportunity to capture a new pool of prospects.

Step 6: Outline your chosen B2B marketing strategy framework and tactics

The last step before entering production. This is the point where you need to get everything set up. 

Aim to produce an overarching project document to serve as the single source of reference. This document should be detailed, yes, but also accessible enough for everyone to understand.

In this document, introduce the tactics you’ll be using and explain why you’re using them, covering the objectives and any challenges you anticipate. It’s also helpful to cite examples of comparable marketing campaigns that have succeeded or failed in ways that can help yours.

Next, chart all applicable paths from the first point of contact to conversion. With few exceptions, money put into marketing that doesn’t convert is wasted, so everything needs to be keenly targeted. 

And remember what we said about sales team collaboration? Liaise with them to get the messaging standardized. When they get leads prompted by your marketing, they need to know how to capitalize on the foundation you built.

Ideally, the completed document will be sufficiently thorough that you could pass it to someone unfamiliar with your business and they’d have enough of a foundation that they could start producing high-quality marketing materials for you. If it falls short initially, though, don’t worry. You can refine it over time.

Step 7: Create relevant content

The best B2B marketing strategy in the world can amount to nothing if the delivery phase isn’t up to par, so having a talented and reliable content team is absolutely vital. 

And given how much awareness it can take for a target audience to take a previously unknown B2B company seriously, consistency is key. You may need to produce hundreds of pieces to see the returns you’re looking for.

Start by looking for quick wins. If there’s a clear gap in the market, such as a high-value keyword your nearest rivals have somehow overlooked, then take advantage. Or if you’re using a technology others in your industry have yet to embrace, you can build around that as a way to get noticed.

At the same time, though, you should consider working on in-depth evergreen content as a background project. Expertise is a huge asset in the B2B world, as a product or service from a well-respected company will be perceived as more reliable and worthy of investment. 

Step 8: Analyze your strategy

No strategy is perfect from the outset. In fact, even the best B2B marketing strategies will need fine-tuning. 

Early success can actually cause problems for new marketers. You might start thinking you’ve cracked the code and need only keep going. So regardless of how well (or poorly) your B2B marketing strategies work to begin with, you must dig into the metrics and come away with positives and negatives.

Your tactics and goals are an evolving mix that should be forever tested, tweaked, and optimized.

Where you’ve done well, expand your efforts. Add budget to a PPC campaign that’s hitting excellent ROI, or commission more guides for a series that’s already resonated with people. 

And where you’ve missed the mark, you can figure out what’s gone wrong. Failure is the best teacher, after all.

B2B marketing strategies: examples and best practices

Before you begin your marketing efforts, you need the right tools. In other words, you need to know what kind of channels you need to cover and then how to use them. Here's the breakdown of the top B2B marketing channels you should consider using:

Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the most popular examples of B2B marketing strategies. It involves creating relevant content for your target audience to establish your brand as an expert in the field (e.g. video content, white papers, ultimate guides, podcasts, case studies, blog articles).

One of the biggest strengths of content marketing is that one piece (a guide, for instance) can be adapted into other formats, so you get further value without additional time or effort. When a video proves popular, you can turn the script into a blog post and promote it alongside the video. When a case study makes an impact, you can make it into an infographic for social media.

The main challenge of content marketing lies in production. Ideation alone is tough given the need for the long-term content calendars. And with algorithms across the board demanding regular releases (wanting to promote channels and websites likely to continue performing), maintaining a content marketing department can be challenging.

It can also be tough to tell what people are going to respond to. Simply copying what others have done will only get you so far, and something new can simply bomb, failing to get noticed at all. 

But if you carefully study your target audience (as suggested earlier), and even reach out for feedback, you can establish a content format that suits your business and maintains a solid level of popularity.

Email Marketing

Email is one of the best ways to turn leads into customers. It's quick, it's easy, and it's personal. It's often used in conjunction with other types of marketing strategies, such as content marketing and social media marketing.

For example, if you're selling software to businesses, you could use social media to get them interested in your product and then use email to follow up with them when they visit your website or download one of your free resources.

That said,use email marketing carefully and precisely. If you begin to frustrate prospects on your email list by seeming spammy, emailing too frequently, offering insufficient value, or making embarrassing mistakes (e.g. “Hey [FIRSTNAME!”), they’ll start to unsubscribe and view your brand less positively.

Treat every email as an opportunity to impress the recipient with the depth of your knowledge and the generosity of the business. The more insight and information you give them, the more willing they’ll be to invest in your value proposition. 

Product Marketing

Product marketing involves creating marketing materials that focus on the product (or service) you’re trying to sell. For instance, a business offering a software solution could create a comprehensive user guide or design an infographic to positively compare the learning curve of the system to that of its main alternatives. This form of marketing is direct, brazen, and reliant upon confidence and slick presentation.

Hosting an introductory webinar is a common product marketing tactic, as it doesn’t cost much and provides great opportunities to engage with prospective buyers. Case studies can also be powerful if framed well; client participation is vital, as hearing glowing testimonials first-hand makes them much harder to doubt.

Paid Search/PPC

Paid search is another popular B2B marketing channel. It involves paying Google or other search engines to display your ad next to certain keywords when someone searches for them online. This can be effective because it allows you to target specific groups of people who have already shown an interest in what you're selling (or trying to sell).

The relatively niche nature of B2B marketing makes it essential to draw upon all available PPC targeting options here, as obvious action-oriented bottom-of-funnel keywords (e.g. “buy blue cotton blouse online”) are far more common in B2C. To show the right ad at the right time, you need to know the buyer's journey well.

If you’re working with a complex value proposition, you might benefit from using sequential ads. An ad sequence will appear in order such that ad #2 will only appear to someone who’s already been shown #1. 

You can’t know when a recipient actually noticed an ad, of course, but ad sequences that do get noticed can prove much more impactful than sets of interchangeable ads. If you use PPC, try experimenting with various platforms and tactics. When you’re paying per click, a failed experiment won’t cost you much.

Campaign Marketing

Campaign marketing involves the creation of advertising campaigns that typically focus on particular themes, slogans, achievements and/or features. For example, if you were trying to market a B2B solution that had recently won an industry award, you could devise a promotional campaign intended largely to popularize that win.

The benefit of campaign marketing is that a unifying theme can more easily prove memorable—and being remembered is one of the biggest marketing challenges. Consider the monumental global impact Nike generated around three core words: “Just do it”. 

Get that initial hook right and everything that follows is easier.

Admittedly, B2B marketing doesn’t often gel with catchy slogans, what with its complicated products and discerning buyers. But don’t rule this tactic out. If you can somehow come up with a suitable theme, run with it.

Partner Marketing

Partner marketing involves working with other companies who already have established relationships with your target audience so that they'll promote your product or service through their own channels.

This can actually prove more effective in B2B than in B2C due to the increased power of an endorsement from a trusted provider. And with reciprocal marketing often being the cost, sticking to businesses you’d endorse regardless allows you to benefit without doing anything to damage your reputation.

Of course, the tough part is finding businesses that have similar customers without overlapping your value proposition.But a good way to do this is to query the businesses you’ve sold to about the other solutions they use, then pick out the ones you rate highly. 

Look for maximum compatibility. If you offer computer hardware, for instance, aim to partner with software companies.

And if the mutual recommendations prove effective, you can even partner more broadly to offer shared bundles or host events. There’s a lot to be gained here, so give it some serious consideration.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO helps increase visibility on search engines like Google and Bing so that more people find your website when they're looking for information related to your industry or products/services.

The goal of SEO is to make sure that when people are searching for things relevant to your business, like "web analytics tool", your website appears at the top of the results. That's how people will find you, and if you're not ranking high enough, you might lose out on potential customers!

There are many factors that contribute to SEO, so this form of marketing can be as in-depth as you’d like. Content length, heading formatting, keyword use, page speed, average time on page, hyperlink distribution… Each of these things can impact how likely your pages are to appear prominently in search results.

But if you’re unsure about the value of SEO and want to dip your toe in the water, start by simply looking at the top pages (aside from yours) that appear when you search for terms you expect your customers to use. 

What do you like about them? Are they visually appealing? Full of useful information? What do you dislike about them? Perhaps they’re overly wordy or use outdated page designs.

If you do nothing else for SEO, at least make an effort to improve your website and make it a superior experience for your target audience. It will assuredly pay off.

Social Media

Social media is an effective B2B marketing strategy example that allows businesses to interact with their customers. It is a great way to engage with your audience, learn what they want, and get feedback on your products. The most popular social media platforms for B2B are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Each platform has its own unique features that make it ideal for different types of businesses and audiences.

Start by thinking about where you’re most likely to find the people you want to reach. If you’re targeting managerial types with big budgets intended to solve serious problems, making frivolous videos on TikTok is unlikely to get you anywhere. 

A quick way to gather information is to go across a range of platforms and search for your key terms to see what comes up and which terms (if any) gather traffic.

When you know where you can reach people, consider how you want your brand to come across. Should you be known for absolute professionalism? Dry sarcasm? Peppy optimism? B2B operations tend to do best with classic professionalism, but if there’s room to stand out through showing some personality then give it a shot.

The most important element of B2B social media marketing, though, is community management. 

The more people rely on whatever you offer, the more support they’ll need when things go wrong (as they inevitably will). Maintaining a clear and reliable support presence through social media will mitigate the impact of any frustrations and give you ample opportunity to turn dissatisfied customers into advocates.

Referral Marketing

B2B referral marketing is a great channel to leverage your existing customer base. You can ask them to refer your business to others, and in turn, you offer incentives for those referrals. By doing this, you're able to increase your reach and grow your business without spending money on advertising.

A referral rate of 2% is considered good in most industries, although some will go as high as 5%. It’s also become common for businesses to provide a referral discount to referrers and referees alike (this helps push the referees to convert). 

If you prioritize referral marketing, though, make sure your customer support is on point. If your reputation starts to decline while people are trying to drive referrals, the incentives may start to seem desperate.

You can take referral marketing to the next level by drawing upon influencers. If you can find people with audiences that overlap yours, you can pay them to promote your business. 

Social media platforms are rife with this form of advertising. It can prove remarkably effective, but only if handled properly.So only attempt it if you can find a reliable influencer with a hyper-relevant audience and reasonable rates.

Performance Marketing

Just as PPC only costs you when someone clicks, performance marketing only pays off for the marketers involved when agreed metrics are met. These metrics usually involve conversions or major milestones leading up to them.

If you’re outsourcing your B2B marketing and want to avoid putting money towards campaigning that doesn’t pay off, you can look for marketers willing to go for this type of arrangement. You’ll likely see a high cost per action, as that’s the only way it can be a worthwhile gamble for the marketer, but you’ll avoid risk.

How to measure the hidden impact of your B2B marketing approach

At some point, you’ll start to see inbound traffic to your website. Well, hopefully. 

But the reality is that conversion rates for the average B2B company hover around 2%, so most of that traffic won’t convert. Those companies may disappear into the ether and you’ll never even know they visited the site.

To gauge your marketing strategy's efficacy, you need to know who these companies are. 

Are they best-fit companies? Do they fit your buyer persona? Why didn't they convert? How can you tweak your tactics to get them to convert?

We built Leadfeeder, in part, to solve for that missing 98% of website visitors and enable B2B marketers to tie them back to the tactics that brought them to the website in the first place.

With our visitor identification tool, you can see all the companies who didn’t convert—right alongside the ones who did. 

You’ll also see in-depth company details, source and campaign data, and behavioral info on the pages they looked at, how long they spent there, and how many employees from the company have visited your site.

You can use that data to turn those missed visits into leads—or adjust your marketing strategy if you see a ton of visits from companies that don't fit your ICP. 

What is B2B marketing? It relies on intent, not just bland strategies 

Most B2B marketing articles just spoon-feed you generic marketing tactics, but that isn’t a recipe for long-term success. Neither are strategies from five years ago. 

Every strategy and tactic you employ should be based on finding prospects with intent to purchase and guiding them through the buying process, not just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what might stick. 

Note: Leadfeeder is a B2B marketing tool that identifies companies visiting your site. Sign up for a free trial and start seeing leads in an hour (or less.)

FAQs

What is a B2B marketing strategy?

A B2B marketing strategy is a plan detailing methods for promoting one business to others. B2B accordingly stands for business-to-business, with the main alternative being B2C, or business-to-consumer.

What makes a business-to-business marketing strategy different is that many methods common to the B2C world aren’t effective when aimed at companies. This is why there are dedicated B2B marketing experts available for consultation.

Why is it important to have a B2B marketing plan?

B2B operations rely on sales that are large and long-term but infrequent, with the average sale following a lengthy and complicated process. Where B2C companies can be more experimental and agile, then, a B2B business can quickly become unsustainable without a thorough business-to-business marketing plan.

Designed and implemented correctly, the best B2B marketing tactics will deliver steady growth and ensure the development of the stable brand reputation needed for a B2B company to become an industry staple.

How to create a B2B marketing strategy?

The core thing you should focus on is being crystal clear about your value proposition. Gimmicks and creative ads can earn purchases in the B2C world where prices are lower and one-off buys are common. But B2B sales demand sensible positioning.

And if you can’t identify a value proposition strong enough to serve as the core of a worthwhile marketing strategy for B2B, your business model needs work before you can proceed. Take the time you need to lay a proper foundation.

How to market to B2B buyers?

B2B buyers are more discerning, careful, and rational. They’ll do a lot more research than their B2C counterparts, read through technical details, and take their time to decide how best to proceed. And since they’re not generally driven by impulse, they may well decide that they’re best served not buying anything at all.

Due to this, your B2B marketing must be appropriately serious and professional. If you present your business in a flattering light compared to its competitors, back it up with stats, metrics, testimonials and/or feature comparisons. 

What are the best B2B marketing channels?

While any marketing channel can work well if used correctly, some are typically more suited to B2B marketing than others. Product marketing, for instance, is an excellent fit for any business with a complicated value proposition, especially since B2B buyers are more willing to engage with provided resources.

The sheer power and reach of social media makes it an obvious pick, but only if you use the right platform(s).

Meanwhile, email marketing provides excellent opportunities to show expertise, and paid sequential advertising can do much to support the full lead nurturing process.