Effective marketing is the most crucial factor business owners can do to establish their business and stay in the long run. Marketing builds brand awareness among people and helps businesses increase their conversion rates and revenue. Business-to-Business (B2B) digital marketing is quite different and complicated from marketing to individual customers.
Marketing is integral for any modern business, and the most important factor of business marketing is your audience. If you are not properly targeting your potential audience, your promotions and business strategies are likelier to go wain.
That’s why you need an entirely different marketing method to promote your business and achieve your revenue goals. Business-to-business (B2B) marketing is a productive marketing tactic that businesses can use to manufacture and sell products/services by utilizing the output of another business.
You would be surprised to know that business to business (B2B) marketplace has been valued at about $6.64 trillion, which is expected to grow by 18.7% by 2028. These statistics of the B2B marketplace encourage businesses to move towards this marketing aspect of selling.
B2B (business-to-business) digital marketing is a strategy or content that involves selling products manufactured by one company to another. Most reputable companies use B2B marketing strategies to manufacture and sell their products at profitable rates.
These business strategies help you convert your brand’s services into customers and improve your revenue. B2B marketing introduces your business to other brands at the international level and increases the value of your services and products.
B2B marketing activities are usually administrated by B2B marketing agencies led by teams of experts. The B2B marketers understand the customers’ viewpoints and target them accordingly. The target group of B2B marketing can be in the form of accessories, tools, office supplies, or software as a service (SaaS). Mainly, the following four standard groups provide B2B marketing services and help businesses promote their products/services more effectively;
- Marketing Agencies
- Office Suppliers
- Software Companies
- Bookkeeping and Accounting
Benefits of B2B Digital Marketing
Business-to-business (B2B) marketing strategies provide you with all the perks you need to reach your business at a higher level. Some of the benefits of B2B digital marketing include the following;
Drive Qualified Leads
One of the significant reasons businesses invest in the business to business (B2B) marketing is that it helps you reach more qualified leads. Every penny you spend on your business marketing efforts counts. No one wants to waste their precious marketing dollars on an ineffective channel.
Many businesses don’t get tailored results from their marketing efforts because they’re wasting time and money on ineffective marketing channels. B2B marketing services help you target the audience precisely after ensuring that your targeted leads are interested in your offerings.
The search engine optimization (SEO) tactic of B2B marketing enables you to embed specific and relevant keywords to your content to help the audience find your business easily. By embedding specific keywords, you can reach a more qualified audience searching for those keywords.
Drive Leads to Your Business
One of the prime factors why businesses prefer B2B marketing is that it helps you drive leads instead of reaching out to them. Many businesses face challenges when reaching their target audience through cold calls or other marketing channels. Customers often ignore your cold calls, marking emails, or other promotional content, making your marketing efforts fruitless.
Unlike traditional marketing strategies, B2B marketing enables clients to reach out to your business. The B2B marketing agencies actively search for the companies that offer the products/services you offer. They ensure that if someone is reaching you via email or other resources, they are interested in your offerings. B2B digital marketing tactics take the guesswork out of targeting leads and enable businesses to work more efficiently.
Nurture Relationships with Clients
With business-to-business (B2B) marketing strategies, you can nurture relationships with your customers and client. It gives you numerous touchpoints to engage leads with your business activities and help them learn more about your products/services.
B2B digital marketing tactics, such as email marketing, enable you to send personalized and direct proposals to decision-makers, keeping your business at the top of their list. These strategies help you make direct connections and nurture your relationships with the clients. Once you have built a loyal and friendly relationship with the decision-makers, you can nudge them to move toward your business. B2B marketing also allows you to send valuable information to your target audience and convert leads to sales.
Increase Traffic to Your Business Site
One of the significant benefits of business-to-business (B2B) marketing is that it allows you to increase traffic to your business website. Website is the most integral aspect of your business which needs an audience/visitors to give you tailored results. B2B marketing makes your brand more visible and increases the audience/visitors to your business website.
It helps you optimize your website by using different marketing strategies, such as SEO, to drive more traffic to your website. B2B marketing also enables you to improve user experience and focus on targeted keywords to keep visitors on your website for longer.
The effective tactics of B2B marketing help you appear in front of targeted leads, provide them with valuable information about your products/services and increase traffic to your business website, resulting in increased conversion rates.
Improve Brand Exposure
Increasing your brand exposure in the competitive business market doesn’t seem easy. Fortunately, business-to-business (B2B) marketing allows you to improve your brand’s awareness through different marketing channels. Investing in business-to-business marketing services enables you to use different marketing channels to help interested leads find your products/services.
Having a presence on different marketing channels, such as social media platforms, increase the chances for decision-makers to find your brand. B2B marketing improves your brand’s appearance in search engines and social media platforms to reach a higher audience.
Increasing brand awareness helps decision-makers and leads learn about your offerings. It encourages leads to choose your business/brand as they know more about it.
B2B Buyer’s Journey
Before implementing any B2B digital marketing strategy in your business plan, you need to know about the buyer’s journey. You must address the three stages to understand your buyers’ journey. Understanding these stages in depth may affect your B2B marketing strategies.
1. Awareness Stage
At this stage of the buyer’s journey, potential clients/customers get awareness about your business, brands, and services. It is a stage at which your prospect knows about a problem and becomes motivated to find a solution for it.
2. Consideration Stage
At the consideration stage, your buyers fully understand their business challenges. They define a name for their problem or opportunity and start evaluating the available solutions. You need to educate your buyers/leads at this stage by keeping your brand at the top of the list. Educate them about your services, plans, and marketing strategies, and tell them how your offerings can fix their day-to-day concerns. Target their pain points and try to convince them to invest in your services/products.
3. Decision Stage
Once the prospects know their business challenges and evaluate their solution, they compile a long list of all available products. At the decision-making stage, buyers/leads need to justify their solutions and make a final purchase decision.
9 B2B Digital Marketing Trends for 2023
The business-to-business (B2B) marketing landscape is continuously evolving. Technological advancements have completely changed the way buyers buy; that’s why businesses are obsessing over improving their customer experience. Whether you want to inform your audience, entertain or sell products, you can utilize B2B digital marketing trends to elevate your business and convert leads.
B2B digital marketing is an ever-changing arena as we have innovation peaks around every corner. You can be tempted to fall in the long run if you don’t update your digital marketing strategies. Businesses need to know which B2B digital marketing trends are worth considering. Below, we have compiled a list of 9 B2B digital marketing strategies to help you make effective marketing plans for 2023.
1. Focus on Video Marketing
Videos are the main part of your business-to-business (B2B) digital marketing efforts. One of the key reasons you should still prefer video marketing is that it can improve your customer experience. B2B marketing agencies and teams must focus on delivering captivating content to keep the prospects engaged. Video marketing can be a critical B2B digital marketing trend for 2023 as it helps businesses tackle the issue of reduced attention span.
A year ago, a survey revealed that more than 73% of users prefer to watch short and descriptive videos. It shows video marketing campaigns can help your business stay relevant in the long run. Above all, visual content is ideal and easier for social sharing, driving more leads to your business website. You can use the following tactics to improve your B2B digital marketing efforts;
Short-Form Videos
Short-form videos between 2.5 and 3 minutes are ideal if you target click-through rates.
Collateral Videos
Collateral or B2B sales videos are a great option to drive specific leads for your B2B businesses
Corporate Videos
Corporate videos are ideal for establishing a unique brand identity and showcasing your company’s culture.
Tips to Create an Effective Video Marketing Strategy
Video marketing can only show the desired results if implemented effectively. Our following tips can help you develop an effective video marketing strategy for your B2B business;
- Identify the metrics to measure and track the success
- Design a unique message for target personas
- For high-quality video content, identify your target audience and where they spend most of their time.
- Set budget and timeline for each video marketing campaign
- Find the best social media platforms to share your video content
The entire video marketing process depends on your B2B digital marketing purpose. You can create a short video of about 2.5 to 3 minutes for brand awareness. You need to create video case studies or testimonial videos to convert your prospects.
2. Develop Customer-Centric Content
Undoubtedly, B2B digital marketing trends have changed, but content is still the king. During the past few years, B2B marketers focused on content marketing by using relevant keywords and creating search engine-friendly content.
Customers-centric content can also be a great B2B digital marketing trend for 2023 as it directly addresses your targeted audience’s concerns, needs, and questions. You can create content according to your audience’s preferences and needs.
Tips to Create Customer-Centric Content
B2B marketers must need to understand the following guidelines to develop captivating and customer-oriented content;
- Prioritize your customer intent and expectations
- Use trending and industry-specific keywords to deliver the type of content your audience is looking for
- Identify your target audience to create content that perfectly resonates with their needs and concerns.
- Use social media marketing trends to identify the best platforms for sharing your content and engaging prospects.
By implementing customer-centric content in your B2B digital marketing strategies, you can take things to the next level.
3. Brand Personalization
Brand personalization is another one-to-one B2B digital marketing strategy that utilizes real-time data to deliver relevant offers and messages. It is a great approach to differentiate your products/services from the competitors and excel from them. The brand’s personalization in digital marketing reflects what your audience is looking for in a business-to-business (B2B) pattern. It allows B2B businesses to understand the preferences, needs, and interests of their existing and prospective customers to serve them precisely.
Brand personalization is a great B2B digital marketing trend that gives businesses a better chance to connect with their target clients and customers. It gives exclusive perks throughout your buyers’ journey, resulting in the following;
- Increased conversion rates and revenue
- Improved lead generation leads
- Increased brand reputation
- Better user experience
Businesses need to learn more about their users’ preferences to deliver a unique experience. You must invest in a reliable CRM solution to do more research about your target audience. You need sufficient data about your target audience to understand their preferences and concerns. This data will help you deliver each user a personalized and unique experience.
4. Use an Omnichannel Approach
The omnichannel approach is another greatest B2B digital marketing trend that promotes your products/services across various channels, devices, and marketing platforms. For example, most B2B businesses promote their services/products with consistent messaging through email, Facebook Messenger, and live chat.
The omnichannel approach is an efficacious digital marketing trend that enables businesses to reach their target audience whenever possible. B2B marketers can integrate tools such as email marketing solutions, messaging apps, and live chat options to develop a useful omnichannel strategy for their marketing efforts.
Statistics reveal that 80% of B2B buyers prefer moving towards other solutions if they don’t get a consistent and reliable experience across marketing channels. You can leverage an omnichannel CRM solution to unify communication with your prospects and customers in one view. Using an omnichannel approach in your B2B business marketing can help your business in the following ways;
- Optimized seller time by collating users’ data
- A seamless user experience throughout the sales process
- Improved sales cycles
- Wider reach
- Increased conversion opportunities
- Improved onboarding time for new sales reps
B2B can rely on omnichannel marketing strategies to focus on customers’ interests and send consistent messages to appeal to your targeted audience.
5. Sales and Marketing Alignment
Surveys reveal that misalignment between the sales and marketing departments can decrease your revenue by 10%. Moreover, more than 31% of B2B marketers say that their sales and marketing teams are not well-integrated.
Sales and marketing alignment is an effective digital marketing trend for communication, planning, and goal setting to help sales and marketing departments work together as one team. Delivering high-impact marketing activities, increasing sales, improving conversions, and achieving your revenue goals is the prime objective of sales and marketing alignment.
Successful organizations and B2B businesses leverage sales and marketing alignment to deliver award-winning and seamless customer experiences. Having misalignment between the sales and marketing teams can be quite disadvantageous. Clunky communication with customers and ineffective user experience can affect the credibility of your business and change the buyers’ perception of your services.
Statistics reveal that more than 65% of the marketing content of B2B brands goes unutilized by sales. Generally, marketing develops and delivers sales assets with minimum input from the sellers, which leads to the content failing to meet the salespeople’s needs.
Alignment between sales and marketing helps B2B marketers create and deliver content that meets the sellers’ expectations, effectively reducing wasted hours and higher adoption of sales content. Surveys show that 56% of companies with aligned sales and marketing teams meet their revenue goals more effectively.
Tips for Sales and Marketing Alignment
B2B marketers should keep the following things in mind for an effective sales and marketing alignment;
- Send consistent marketing messages
- Invest in sales enablement
- Align your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
- Use KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
- Share your goals with sales and marketing teams
- Centralize communication
Integrate your sales and marketing teams to identify your qualified leads and target them precisely.
6. Deliver a Mobile-Friendly Experience
A recent report on digital transformation reveals that 70% of the population will have mobile and internet connectivity by 2023. It means B2B marketers must focus on delivering a mobile-friendly digital experience.
Search engines utilize a mobile-first indexing strategy to decide the ranking of your website. It is essential to make your business website design mobile friendly to boost your search engine result page (SERP) position and SEO performance of Google.
Tips to Design a Mobile-Friendly Website
- Minimize HTTP requests to optimize the loading speed of your site
- Develop a site with responsive web-design
- Add mobile-visible call-to-action buttons (CTAs)
- Include important points within easy reach of a thumb
A mobile-responsive site with links can have improved SEO, attaining a higher position in search results.
7. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing has become a huge business-to-business (B2B) digital marketing trend. B2B businesses can rely on this marketing trend to partner with celebrities and influencers to advertise their products/services on different platforms. It can help you generate impressive engagement rates on different social media platforms.
Apart from getting your business name out to those who follow celebrities and influencers, you can benefit from this B2B marketing strategy in many ways. If you’re unsure how to start influencer marketing for your business, you can rely on B2B marketing teams and agencies that focus on influencer marketing.
8. Remarketing
Remarketing is also a great B2B digital marketing trend that can help businesses get more from their marketing efforts. It is an effective approach to retarget the audience who have already shown interest in your offering on YouTube, social media, or display ads. Statistics show that about 98% of visitors don’t convert the first time they visit your website. Remarketing can help you retarget those audiences and encourage them to convert.
Businesses using remarketing strategies have 70% more chances to convert visitors into paying customers. Remarketing is a straightforward and easiest digital marketing trend to increase conversions and achieve your revenue goals.
9. Leverage Digital Marketing Agencies
Business-to-business (B2B) brands spend increasing resources and time to build marketing collateral in the competitive digital marketing landscape. It often becomes overwhelming to run a business and stay on top of B2B digital marketing trends.
You can leverage digital marketing agencies to get the support you need to take your business to the next level. Expert B2B marketers administrate B2B digital marketing agencies with the expertise to help you build top-notch marketing strategies.
The Bottom Line
Business-to-business (B2B) digital marketing has always-evolving trends. If you’re not updating your business marketing strategies with the innovation peaks, you’re likelier to fail in the long run. Effective B2B digital marketing trends, such as sales and marketing alignment, video marketing, creation of customer-centric content, brand personalization, and omnichannel approach, can help you reach your business to the next level.
The business-to-business (B2B) marketing trends can help you reach more qualified leads, increase conversions, and increase traffic to your business site.