1 - Gartner, 2020
2, 3, 7, 11 - Kurve, February 2024
4 – SendX, June 2020
5 – Marketing Tech News, January 2023
6, 10 – Isoline, 2022
As corporate purchasing shifts entirely online, implementing the right commercial strategies ensures your brand connects with digital buyers. Read on to explore five essential tactics—including B2B LinkedIn marketing—designed to help your enterprise identify, engage, and convert high-value corporate clients.
Business-to-business (B2B) marketing focuses on promotional campaigns targeting corporate decision-makers rather than individual consumers. Companies leverage diverse channels—ranging from automated email outreach to influencer campaigns—to secure high-value commercial partnerships.
Many B2B processes have now moved online. Gartner predicts that 80% of sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels by 2025 (1), whilst 90% of B2B buyers say they now turn to online channels as their primary method for identifying new suppliers (2). Amidst this increasingly digital landscape, businesses should invest time and money into their online B2B marketing strategies to better reach prospects and stay competitive.
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 that (3).
Before refining your message, conduct comprehensive market research to understand your corporate audience's unique operational friction points and structural motivations. In sectors like global logistics, commercial relationships are built largely on operational reliability. Pinpointing where your company excels—and where your market perception falls short—allows you to fortify your market position as a trustworthy partner.
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 generation (4), whilst 77% of B2B buyers say they prefer to be contacted through email – more than double any other channel (5)
The true strength of email marketing lies in data-driven personalization. Marketers can segment their audience based on specific operational needs, tailoring messages directly to where a prospect sits within the acquisition funnel. Email marketing providing highly relevant insights to targeted decision-makers systematically moves them closer to a final agreement. Furthermore, the channel provides measurable results (such as A/B testing and click-through-rates), which can be used to optimize future campaigns.
Integrating AI-driven automation into your commercial pipeline maximizes efficiency and scales your customer acquisition efforts. Key operational applications include:
Predictive Lead Scoring: AI software analyzes massive datasets across multiple platforms to detect real-time behavioral patterns. By automatically scoring leads based on buying intent, your sales force can focus primarily on high-conversion opportunities.
Dynamic Client Segmentation: AI tools aggregate data from web traffic and digital platforms to group organizations by industry vertical, geographic location, or lifecycle stage. This ensures your value proposition aligns perfectly with each segment.
Automated Customer Support: AI-powered chatbots manage primary client inquiries around the clock. By instantly qualifying leads and routing them to specialized product pages, you never miss a cross-border commercial opportunity.
Funnel Optimization Analytics: Machine learning tracks prospects through your digital touchpoints, uncovering exact moments of drop-off. This data allows you to streamline the user experience and boost conversion rates.
What type of content will motivate your prospects to take a sales call? That is the question that should influence your content marketing strategy. B2B relationships rely heavily on proven capability, meaning marketers must produce high-value resources like detailed trend reports, expert webinars, and technical guides that directly solve operational bottlenecks.
Short-form video has also become an invaluable asset for explaining complex workflows. In fact, over half of corporate buyers view educational videos as the most helpful content medium when researching potential vendors.
55% of B2B buyers cited video as the most useful type of content (6), whilst 75% of B2B marketers believe incorporating video into their marketing strategies has improved their ROI (7).
LinkedIn serves as the premier ecosystem for corporate content distribution due to its dense concentration of professional decision-makers. Over 90% of B2B marketers say they use LinkedIn for organic social marketing, and report up to 20% higher conversion rates than those who don’t (8). 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 improvement. LinkedIn claims social selling leaders create 45% more opportunities than peers with lower SSI scores (9).
Don’t neglect your website either. 63% of survey respondents reported going directly to a company’s website when looking for information (10), so be sure that your content is displayed there clearly, with easy navigation and a “Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)” section to aid their search.
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 those with little or no personalization (11).
Some recommendations to deliver personalized B2B marketing experiences:
Map Content to Buyer Intent: Personalization tailored to specific operational hurdles yields the highest impact during early discovery phases, whereas organizational-level customization becomes critical near the final purchasing decision.
Enlist AI: AI can evaluate past interactions to project future customer needs. When an enterprise user visits your site, the platform can dynamically recommend relevant international shipping solutions based on their past browsing history.
Personalize emails: Move beyond basic name variables. Group your contact lists by operational scale, logistics challenges, and industry sector to ensure that a growing startup receives entirely different insights than an enterprise-level operation.
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 focusing on personalization at every customer touchpoint, businesses can remain competitive in a dynamic and continuously evolving industry. To support this, staying informed about the latest AI-powered automation tools can be a valuable approach.
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1 - Gartner, 2020
2, 3, 7, 11 - Kurve, February 2024
4 – SendX, June 2020
5 – Marketing Tech News, January 2023
6, 10 – Isoline, 2022