What’s the right B2B marketing strategy for me?

It wasn’t that long ago marketers were saying “there should be no B2B or B2C, it should be H2H, human to human” – thankfully we appear to have moved on from this idea. Is the purchasing journey the same for someone looking to spend £100 on some running trainers as them also looking to invest £100,000 of their companies budget – probably not. 

When it comes to B2B marketing, there’s a number of different routes and strategies you could go down, but of course the right one, or ones for your company will depend on a whole range of factors. So, I thought it might be helpful to put my many years experience in B2B marketing to use and give you my thoughts on the different strategies and hopefully help you to decide what route is the best for you to achieve your growth objectives. 

Inbound Marketing

A personal favourite and one I’ve seen many successes with. Inbound Marketing at a top level is the idea of using content to draw your potential customers into your brand and guide them through the purchasing journey to eventually becoming a customer. We start with the “attract” phase where we use outputs such as blog posts, SEO, LinkedIn and YouTube videos to first introduce your brand to your persona, you’re attracting them to come to your website and learn more about you and your products or services. 

Then we “engage” them, they download a brochure, register for a webinar, request a call-back, or use a chatbot – something that gets them to commit and convert in some way. Email would also be an output that sits in this stage of the phase, maybe they were attracted by a blog and then signed up to a newsletter. 

Once we’ve engaged the prospect in some way, then it’s all about “delighting” them. We automate where we can and ensure content they see from your brand is “smart” content; it’s personalised to their interests or needs and they can easily access all the information they need – until eventually they love your brand so much, they want to tell all their friends and colleagues about it, they’re happy to have a case study on your website or provide an online review. 

If you’re interested in this approach for your brand, then you’re going to need a good piece of kit behind you to ensure all of the above can be managed efficiently and you can report accurately on success – HubSpotis a tool designed specifically for this and it’s one I can highly recommend. Need some help implementing HubSpot into your business? With many years experience, myself and the Next Chapter teamare well placed to provide implementation support and training so you can get the most out of the platform.

Outbound Marketing

In contrast to the above, we have the more traditional strategy of outbound marketing. This is all about pushing your brand, services, messaging intensely wherever you think your personas and prospects are going to be. It also includes cold calling and emailing, something which I often find marketers turn their nose up at, but sales teams are still very heavily reliant on. How often do you receive an unsolicited sales email from someone you’ve never heard of before, asking if you have a spare 15 minutes this week to hear about how their business can help yours? That’s outbound marketing and there’s still a lot of it going on. 

I’m not totally against outbound marketing, it can work and deliver results, but I think 95% of it is executed quite poorly, and as such and it becomes pretty expensive. 

However, one thing to note is that for inbound strategies to be successful, there has to be  some element of outbound. Trade shows and paid social media for example can play a really important role in an inbound marketing strategy – so don’t rule it out totally. Consider a hybrid approach. 

Account-Based Marketing

This is the interesting one, and it’s only right for certain types of B2B brands. If you’re products or services exist through large, high value contracts or projects, then account-based marketing, or ABM, is definitely one to consider. 

It’s highly targeted and specific, but in summary, is when you market directly to one, or a small specific group of companies you want to work with. Imagine you want to supply to Apple, an account-based marketing strategy would be to find out exactly who the person responsible for purchasing your products or services at Apple is, contacting them in some way and sending them some content that very specifically outlines how your business can help them. 

This commonly presents itself through landing pages, so a page specifically designed and created for that potential client. Direct emails, offline activity such as door drops to Apple, or in some cases I’ve seen businesses take out out-of-home ad space directly outside the head office of a business they want to work with. 

The risk with this approach is that it requires a lot of research, time from marketing and sales teams, the content can be costly to create, and it might be overlooked or not received the way you planned. Imagine working for 3 months on a campaign targeting Apple, and you never hear back from them, or you get a “nice, but no thank you” response. It’s risky, but the rewards can be vast. 

How to decide what’s right for you?

The first thing I recommend you think about is; where have your customers come from so far? Answering this question might help you in deciding where to focus your energy. Have your leads come via your website, or have they come from personal connections with individuals in your team? Ask around and check your attribution metrics on Google Analytics or other digital reporting tool.

The more you know about your customers and desired customers, the easier this is going to be.  If you don’t know that much about your current customers, work with your delivery or customer service teams to try and gather some data; quantitative and qualitative. Not all decisions can be made based on a graph or chart. 

To be successful in this process; sales teams and those in senior roles within your business are going to become your best friend. Quite often marketing teams in B2B businesses are riding solo, or a small team of 3 or 4. Marketing is there to support business growth and sales, so get those people engaged as early as possible, you’re there to help them do their job better. 

If you’re still as confused as you were when you started reading this piece, then get in touchand let’s chat through your challenges and see how we can help. As a leading B2B marketing agency, we’re ready to help you achieve the growth you’re looking for.