Five B2B marketing strategies to boost your sales

As the B2B industry digitalizes, which B2B marketing strategies will help your business reach online buyers most effectively? Read on to discover five key avenues – including LinkedIn marketing for B2B – that will empower your business to find, engage, and convert prospects.

What is B2B marketing?

B2B marketing stands for business-to-business marketing and involves the marketing of products or services from one business to another. There are many B2B marketing strategies businesses can employ to connect with target prospects, from email campaigns to influencer marketing.

Post Covid, many B2B processes have moved online. Gartner predicts that 80% of sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels by 2025¹, whilst 90% of B2B buyers say they now turn to online channels as their primary method for identifying new suppliers². Amidst this increasingly digitalized landscape, businesses should be investing time and money into their online B2B marketing strategies to better reach prospects and stay competitive. 

Five B2B marketing strategies to boost your sales

1. Create a strong brand identity

B2B marketing can be complex, often involving several channels. One industry report found that, on average, B2B buyers engage with 3-7 pieces of content before talking to a sales rep, whilst 11% consume more than that³. B2B businesses should prioritize creating clear and consistent brand messaging across all touchpoints – be it social media, blog posts, email newsletters or videos – so that prospects gain an in-depth understanding of the business’s value and benefits.

B2B marketers should first conduct market research to understand the target audience; their behaviors, motivations and challenges. It’s also important to learn how prospects currently view the business. Within the B2B industry, transactions are based on trust and credibility, so knowing how your business measures up – and where it is lacking – will help you prioritize which aspects of your brand identity to strengthen. 

2. Prioritize email marketing

When it comes to B2B marketing strategies, arguably email marketing is the King. The stats speak for themselves: 59% of B2B marketers cite email as their top channel for revenue generation⁴, whilst 77% of B2B buyers said they prefer to be contacted through email – more than double any other channel⁵.

The main benefit of email marketing is it enables the personalized experiences that B2B buyers desire. B2B marketers can segment their target audience and then create email campaigns based on each group’s specific needs or place within the buyer journey. By developing relevant messages for the right people, businesses can nurture prospects down the B2B marketing funnel and increase the chances of converting them.

Email marketing is also cost effective – allowing businesses to reach large numbers of prospects with minimal investment. Furthermore, the channel provides measurable results (such as A/B testing and click-through-rates), which can be used to optimize future campaigns.

3. Enlist AI

You can enhance your B2B marketing campaigns with AI-powered automation tools. Their wide range of applications include:

• Lead scoring. AI-powered software can do this more accurately than a human, combing through vast amounts of data from various channels to identify patterns in prospects’ behavior, preferences and habits. It will automatically score your leads – allowing your sales teams to allocate their time to the most promising – and even predict what products or services they’ll be most interested in based on their previous interactions with your business.
  
• Customer segmentation. AI can collect data from online sources like web traffic and social media platforms, and then segment audiences based on factors such as age, location, sales lifecycle stage and likelihood to buy. This will enable you to create campaign messaging perfectly tailored for the target group, resulting in greater engagement.
  
• Customer service. AI-powered chatbots can automate customer communication, responding to queries and questions quickly and accurately, 24/7. They can qualify leads and direct them to the best resource (e.g. a product page or a call with a Sales Rep), ensuring no sales opportunity is ever missed. 
  
• Performance optimization. AI can track your prospects through the sales funnel, identifying the points at which they encounter friction or drop off. This will allow you to take steps to improve your service and increase conversions.
  

4. Create value via LinkedIn marketing for B2B 

What type of content will motivate your prospects to take a sales call? That is the question that should influence your content marketing strategy.

So much of successful B2B sales depends on trust, so B2B marketers should be creating high-quality content that demonstrates credibility and expertise on a subject. Emails, whitepapers, opinion pieces and webinars can all be utilized to share industry trends and insights with prospects that provides solutions to their pain points. Video is an important format, too, well suited for “how-to” guides for complex products or services. 55% of B2B buyers cited video as the most useful type of content⁶, whilst 75% of B2B marketers believe incorporating video into their marketing strategies has improved their ROI⁷. 

LinkedIn is a natural home for B2B content, due to its vast audience of networking professionals. Over 90% of B2B marketers said they use LinkedIn for organic social marketing, and report up to 20% higher conversion rates than those who don’t⁸. If you’re currently creating content for the platform (or indeed, planning to), a good practice is to use LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index (SSI), a dedicated tool that measures how your social selling activities on the platform add up. Once you have your score, you have a benchmark to guide you to improve. LinkedIn claims social selling leaders create 45% more opportunities than peers with lower SSI scores⁹.

Don’t neglect your website either. 63% of survey respondents reported going directly to a company’s website when looking for information¹⁰, so be sure that your content is displayed there clearly, with easy navigation and a “Frequently Answered Questions” section to aid their search.

5. Think personalization         

Personalization is a strategy that involves targeting prospects with content that speaks directly to their unique needs. It makes the customer feel understood – and thus more likely to engage with the brand. In fact, businesses with personalized marketing grew 60% more than ones with little or no personalization¹¹.

Some tips to deliver personalized B2B marketing experiences:

• Understand where your target buyers most value personalized interactions. For example, research by Forrester12 found that “personalization targeted to specific needs is most impactful in the early stages of discovery, while personalization based on organization increases in impact closer to purchase and post-sale.” Knowing prospects’ intent at each stage of the sales cycle will help you construct the best messaging to keep them engaged and moving towards final conversion.
  
• Enlist AI. Predictive analytics can analyze historical and current customer data to make informed predictions about future behaviors. As an example, when someone visits your website, AI software can identify their likely intent based on their previous visits and interactions with your brand, and then serve them highly relevant product recommendations.
  
• Personalize emails. This goes beyond just addressing the email to the buyer’s name. The key is to segment your email lists based on audience’s demographics, goals, challenges, and where they are in the sales cycle; a new lead should not be sent the same email as a long-standing customer, for example. Send them informative, insightful emails that provide value to build trust in your brand.  
  

B2B marketing strategies summary

B2B interactions have historically been based on carefully nurtured relationships between sellers and buyers, but as the sector continues to digitalize, the question for B2B businesses is how to replicate these personal connections online.

By prioritizing personalization across all customer touchpoints, businesses can stay ahead in an ever-changing and fast-evolving industry. And to that end, keeping a close watch on the latest AI-powered tools to automate the process will be a beneficial strategy.  

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