9 Best B2B Marketing Strategies That Work (Examples Added)

Are you struggling to market your products and services to other businesses?

Unlike B2C, B2B marketing can be challenging. This is understandable because today’s B2B buyers are different.

They are not only more informed, but are also conscious about every purchase they make.

In this blog post, you’re going to learn about the best B2B marketing strategies that actually work.

Granted, without the right B2B marketing tools B2B marketing can be a daunting task.

Why?

According to a 2021 McKinsey & Company report, B2B customers want an always-on, personalized, omnichannel experience.

In fact, B2B decision makers are now using ten or more channels during their decision journeys:

Image via McKinsey & Company

That’s why 41% and 37% of B2B companies have increased their spending on website development and digital marketing respectively according to a 2022 Sagefrog B2B Marketing Mix report:

Image via Sagefrog

We’ll teach you practical B2B marketing strategies and give you examples of companies that are using them effectively.

Let’s get started.

Best B2B Marketing Strategies & Examples

Follow these practical B2B marketing strategies to launch winning marketing campaigns.

1. Conduct In-Depth Market Research

Let’s face it. No matter how amazing your product or service is, if you don’t know exactly who needs it, you’re going to waste a lot of time, money, and resources marketing it to the wrong audience.

According to a 2021 Demand Gen B2B Buyers survey, 65% of respondents will choose a vendor that demonstrated a stronger knowledge of their company and its needs:

Image via Demand Gen

To launch successful B2B marketing campaigns, you need to conduct thorough and informed research.

Why?

That’s how you’ll be able to understand your customer’s needs, what drives their needs for your product or service as well as how to stand out from your competitors.

Generally, market research involves gathering information about your target audience to assess the success of your product or service and ensure your sales team is effectively communicating your company’s value efficiently.

In a nutshell, B2B market research helps companies to:

• Gather consumer data to better understand your target market.
• Assess the evolving customer needs.
• Differentiate yourself from the competition.
• Understand your customers' biggest pain points and challenges.
• Refine your product or service.
• Develop relevant, valuable, and targeted content to help customers with their research.

Understanding your customers' paint points is not an easy task though.

Why?

A typical B2B buying process is a long and winding one.

How to Conduct B2B Market Research

Here are some ways:

• Understand your B2B buyers through audience and keyword research.
• Explore industry and brand-relevant conversions on social media.
• Look at what buyers are saying about your competitors on social media.
• Explore plenty of ratings and reviews.

To conduct thorough market research, you can use:

• Surveys
• Interviews
• Focus groups
• Polls
• Questionnaires

2. Use B2B Mobile Marketing

For B2B companies, mobile marketing can help to drive demand generation when done right.

According to Statista, mobile devices account for over half of the world’s web traffic:

Image via Statista

Besides, there are over 6.5 million smartphone users globally and the number is expected to increase to 7.6 million by 2027:

Image via Statista

What does this mean for B2B companies?

Mobile marketing usage is rapidly growing hence you need to implement a B2B mobile marketing strategy that can help you target the decision-makersin your target companies.

If you don’t have a digital marketing plan that focuses on enhancing the mobile experience, then you’re missing out a lot on great opportunities for mobile traffic and data collection.

How to Build a Successful B2B Mobile Marketing Strategy

• Ensure your business blog, website, landing pages, and marketing emails are optimized for mobile users.
• Reach your prospects directly with text marketing.
• Create a mobile app for your business to enhance brand value and trust.
• Optimize your social media marketing content for mobile.
• Launch a successful mobile PPC strategy.
• Make your business emails mobile friendly.
• Create mobile-friendly content and copy.
• Track and measure success.

3. Use B2B Content Marketing

This is one of the best B2B marketing strategies for generating interest and educating your target audience.

B2B clients need a lot more information before they make a purchase decision, unlike B2C buyers who often rely on impulses to buy products. By sharing educational content about your products & services you can make their purchasing decisions easier & faster.

According to a 2022 Content Marketing Institute, B2B research 80% of B2B marketers have used a content strategy to create brand awareness in the last 12 months.

75% of them have used it to build trust and 70% to educate their target businesses:

Image via Content Marketing Institute

B2B brands can use this strategy to generate leads, nurture subscribers, and build loyalty with other businesses.

What type of content should you create? You may ask.

You need to create content that helps clients move along in their buying journey.

To achieve this, you need to develop a deeper understanding of your target businesses- their biggest pain points, content needs and preferences, challenges, and more.

This is where the need to conduct thorough B2B market research comes in. We’ve already mentioned this in our first point.

Develop detailed buyer personas to create content that’s relevant to your target businesses and the channels they prefer.

Remember that the internet is awash with the content of all types. More than 7.5 million blog posts are published every day.

So how do you differentiate your content from the competition?

According to the research mentioned above, 83% of B2B marketers say they produce better quality content, and 72% of them cover topics or stories that their competitors aren’t covering.

50% of marketers say they actively promote the content they publish and 38% use content formats their competitors aren’t using:

Image via Content Marketing Institute

HubSpot leverages different types of content to engage and educate other businesses, boost brand awareness and convert more leads into customers:

Image via HubSpot

How to Create a Powerful B2B Content Marketing Strategy

Here are practical tips on how to create content targeted to B2B companies:

• Define your audience.
• Use keyword research to lay the foundation of your content marketing strategy.
• Choose your main content formats and marketing channels.
• Develop amazing topics.
• Create relevant content that's interesting to your audience.
• Use content B2B decision makers consume in mind- videos, webinars, case studies, long articles, posts, etc.
• Target different content for each funnel stage.

Pro Tip: Create a content calendar to keep your content marketing efforts well-organized and on track. It will also help you produce valuable content consistently.

4. Build an Effective B2B Referral Program

One of the best B2B marketing strategies underrated today is referral marketing.

B2B referral marketing is how businesses mobilize loyal businesses or existing customers to refer your brand to others in their networks.

This can either happen through word of mouth, marketing influence, or using a referral marketing program.

Referrals have been a great source of new business for many companies for a while now.

You’re probably wondering why you should build a referral program.

Here are some of the reasons why B2B referral marketing is powerful:

• Customers trust referrals.
• Referred customers are more valuable and loyal.
• It improves customer retention, engagement, and market reach.
• Existing clients are much more willing to refer their friends and family members.
• It delivers a high ROI.

There are many referral programs to inspire you out there.

Mainstreet, an enterprise B2B SaaS platform that helps startups to find, claim and advance tax credits uses a robust referral program.

To participate in the program, Mainstreet clients who sign up get a referral link. The company rewards you with a $200 Visa gift card for every referral company that signs up and qualifies using your referral link:

Image via Mainstreet

Another amazing referral program is by Google Workspace, a company that provides a collection of productivity and collaboration tools to improve the way we work:

Image via Google Workspace

When you recommend Gmail, Google Meet, and other Google tools, you earn a reward for any new user who signs up.

How to Build a Successful Referral Program

Here are useful tips to launch an effective B2B referral program:

• Make your brand referral-worthy.
• Develop and nurture relationships with other businesses.
• Decide which businesses to target.
• Make your messaging compelling.
• Decide on a reward structure and when to ask for referrals.
• Reward businesses that successfully refer others to your brand.
• Make it easy for people to share your referral program.
• Promote your referral program.
• Automate your referral program.
• Track and measure the success of the program.

Pro Tip: Invest in referral marketing software to create a referral program with ease and start winning new custumers.

5. Use Account-Based Marketing(ABM)

Imagine a world where you can promote your product or service directly to your best-fit, highly qualified leads.

Where you could focus on engaging and delighting high-value accounts.

That’s how account-based marketing works.

This is also one of the best B2B marketing strategies that have gained traction in the past few years because it enables marketers to focus more on highly targeted markets.

Account-based marketing is one of the top marketing strategies used by over 30% of marketers currently:

Image via HubSpot

This B2B marketing strategy enables your sales and marketing team to concentrate resources on a set of high-value accounts and convert them into customers.

The strategy leverages personalized campaigns designed to engage best-fit accounts, tailoring marketing messages on the explicit aspects and needs of those accounts.

The best thing about ABM is that it can be implemented together with content marketing, traditional marketing, and others to find, communicate with, and obtain business accounts.

Here are reasons you should consider account-based-marketing:

• Allows personalized communications and marketing approaches.
• Enables efficient use of sales and marketing resources.
• Enables alignment of sales and marketing efforts.
• Shortens sales cycles.
• Helps to generate clear ROI.
• Fewer wasted marketing resources.

How to Develop a Successful Account-Based-Marketing Strategy

Here are handy tips to launch a comprehensive ABM strategy:

• Find and define your high-value target business accounts.
• Conduct research on those accounts to identify key internal players.
• Develop content and personalized campaigns.
• Determine what channels to use.
• Run targeted and coordinated campaigns.
• Measure your campaigns and optimize.

6. B2B Email Marketing

If you’re still looking for the best B2B marketing strategies, then try email marketing.

It’s one of the most popular B2B marketing strategies for enhancing customer relationship management.

Arguably, most email marketing campaigns target individuals. However, B2B email campaigns target multiple individuals within a company.

You can launch email marketing campaigns that focus on positioning your brand as a thought leader in the industry.

Generally, B2B companies can use email marketing for the following purposes:

• Lead generation
• Brand building
• Content distribution
• Relationship building
• Customer retention
• Customer advocacy
• Sales effectiveness
• Customer support

According to a 2021 Litmus State of Email survey, 41.5% of brands say that email marketing is critical to their success:

Image via Litmus

Besides, due to the growing popularity of email, nearly 37% of companies intend to increase their investment in email overall.

Some of the best B2B email campaigns you can send to other companies include:

• Announcements and updates emails
• Time-sensitive promotional emails
• Events and webinar email campaigns
• Case studies
• Re-engagement emails
• Follow-up emails
• Payment reminders
• Curated content
• And more

Asana, a web-based and mobile work management platform designed to support teams with project management and communications, uses email marketing to welcome new users to the platform:

Once you sign up for an account on the platform, you get a warm welcome email informing you about your 30-day free trial and the features you get.

Image via Asana

Asana also uses a clear call to action that stimulates you to get started using your free trial.

Top Tips for Creating a Successful B2B Email Strategy

Here are practical B2B email marketing strategies to use:

• Profile your target businesses and key decision makers within those.
• Tailor your email campaigns based on the stages of the buyer’s journey.
• Send relevant and business-focused content.
• Think like a B2B decision maker.
• Automate your email marketing.
• Measure your email marketing success.

Pro Tip: Email marketing tools can help you make your email marketing strategy even more effective. These tools can be very helpful in nurturing potential customers and turning them into buyers.

7. Use B2B Influencer Marketing

Contrary to popular opinion, Influencer marketing is yet another potent tool for B2B marketers and is just as effective for B2B marketing as for B2C.

A 2022 Top Rank Marketing B2B influencer report shows that 86% of B2B brands consider their strategy successful.

According to the same report, 70% of B2B marketers have improved brand awareness and 72% brand reputation:

Image via Top Rank Marketing

This strategy involves partnering with key industry leaders or different types of influencers to showcase your brand message to a larger audience and reach new businesses.

Partnering with B2B influencers can help your business to:

• Tap into new audiences.
• Gain loyal customers.
• Showcase thought leadership.
• Demonstrate your brand credibility.

In today’s post-pandemic times, where a majority of customers are now shopping on social media, it makes sense to get your products or services shown on social media channels with influencer partnerships.

When evaluating the profile of a B2B influencer to partner with, it’s important to consider essential qualities such as their relevance with their audience, trust, subject matter expertise, etc.

According to the report mentioned above, 98% of B2B brands consider the influencer’s relevance with their target audience whereas 87% consider the trust an influencer has with their audience:

Image via Top Rank Marketing

Practical Tips to Build a Successful B2B Influencer Strategy

• Define your long-term influencer marketing goals and KPIs.
• Determine your budget.
• Conduct research and identify existing influencers in your industry.
• Find influencers your audience already follows.
• Connect and engage with the influencers on the platform they spend most of their time on.
• Analyze your potential influencer candidate.
• Focus on building relationships rather than selling.
• Educate the influencers you partner with.
• Measure results beyond follower count.

Pro Tip: We also recommend partnering with micro-influencers as they cost less but have a higher engagement rate than influencers with large followings.

8. Leverage B2B Social Media Marketing

Due to the nature of interactions, social media may seem to be more suitable for B2C marketing.

However, B2B marketers use social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to promote their products or services through actionable, educational content and generate qualified leads.

So, this is also one of the best B2B marketing strategies to use.

Social media can be a powerful tool for B2B companies that want to:

• Enhance their reputation.
• Build trust with other companies.
• Build brand awareness.
• Increase their reach and customer loyalty.
• Engage with potential customers.
• Increase their sales.

Wondering why you should use this strategy?

Here are the reasons:

• Your target businesses are on social media.
• It can drive traffic to your website.
• Decision makers are using LinkedIn to find and connect with B2B brands.
• Social media offers a more personalized customer experience.
• B2B social media marketing can boost your PR efforts.

However, avoid rushing into the newest social media platform, instead, focus on the platforms that your prospective buyers are actively using.

See how Ahrefs uses social media marketing to connect, engage and educate its audiences:

Image via Ahrefs

9. Leverage B2B SEO

What if you could get the exposure your company desires, build brand awareness, and generate as many leads as you want without spending too much?

Yes. Implementing a successful B2B search engine optimization strategy can help you drive qualified leads from search engines and improve brand exposure for free.

By creating a powerful demand generation plan that includes SEO, your brand can:

• Explore your audiences better
• Find out how they search for information online
• Identify the search engines they use
• Create content that targets those searchers

We must mention that search engine optimization is a long-term marketing strategy so you shouldn’t expect quick results. However, it’s one of the best B2B marketing strategies for cost-effectiveness.

Canva, a graphic design platform for creating social media graphics and presentations uses super smart SEO strategies to improve its online visibility, increase brand awareness and reach a huge audience.

Image via Canva

Currently, Canva generates 106.1 million organic search traffic monthly. The graphics design platform also ranks position #1 on Google for terms like “brochure” and “YouTube banner”

Image via Semrush

Aside from ranking at first position, Canva also offers a helpful solution to their website visitors which explains why the platform ranks for high-volume keywords.

How to Launch a Winning B2B SEO strategy:

•  Understand the three types of SEO: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO
• Conduct proper research to understand your target B2B decision-makers.
• Create a unique content strategy plan.
• Develop B2B content and optimize it with appropriate keywords.
• Optimize your features or services pages.
• Build topic clusters for your B2B content.
• Build quality backlinks for your website.

How to Build a Winning B2B Marketing Strategy?

Learning about the best B2B marketing strategies is one thing and developing a killer B2B marketing strategy is another.

After going through all the 9 best B2B marketing strategies discussed above, you’re probably wondering:

How can I develop a powerful strategy that generates great results?

Follow these practical tips:

Determine Your Brand Positioning

The first step to developing a fruitful strategy is to determine where your business stands in the market.

• Conduct a SWOT analysis and uncover your brand’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Explore the strengths and weaknesses of your competition and evaluate their B2B marketing stratgies.
• Determine your USP- unique selling points.

Define Your Target Market

Even the best of the best B2B marketing strategies won’t help you if you don’t have a clear picture of who you’re marketing your product or service to in mind.

Conduct thorough research and define your target customers and their buying process.

Set Clear Goals

Set goals that are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

Try Different Marketing Channels

When conducting a competitive analysis, you will uncover different types of marking channels your competitors are actively using as well as those that they are yet to use.

At the very best, you will find that most B2B companies use LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

Determine Your Marketing Tactics

Next, identify the best B2B marketing strategies that will help you achieve your goals as well as a solid plan for how you will use each tactic.

The best marketing strategies are those that will enable you to reach your audience, effectively deliver your message, and get prospects to act the way you want.

Lastly, analyze and refine your strategy.

FAQs

1. What are the best B2B marketing strategies?

A. Follow these practical B2B marketing strategies to grow your business:

• Market research
• B2B mobile marketing
• B2B content marketing
• B2B referral programs
• Account-based marketing(ABM)
• Use B2B email marketing
• Use B2B influencer marketing
• Leverage B2B social media marketing
• Leverage B2B SEO

2. What are the typical B2B buying stages?

A. The typical B2B purchase process involves multiple stages before a purchase happens. First, a prospect recognizes there is a problem.

The prospect then evaluates available solutions by conducting thorough research then selects a supplier and proceeds to approve the supplier and then starts building long-term relationships.

3. What is the best platform for B2B?

A. With over 875 million users in more than 200 countries, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network and the best platform used by 86% of B2B marketers

4. Why is B2B marketing important?

A. With an effective B2B marketing strategy you can:

• Drive more targeted traffic to your website
• Increase brand awareness
• Generate more leads
• Boost customer engagement
• Boost brand loyalty
• Nurture leads

5. What is a B2B marketing model?

A. B2B, otherwise known as business-to-business is a model that involves the exchange of product services or information between two businesses.

Conclusion

The way businesses promote their products and services to other businesses has changed drastically thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Besides, business customers have evolved significantly.

What does this mean?

To launch an effective B2B marketing strategy, you need to keep your audience in mind. This will help you avoid wasting your marketing efforts.

If you’re stuck, we hope these 9 best B2B marketing strategies and examples will inspire your marketing campaigns.

Still not sure where to begin?

Use our professional search engine optimization, lead generation, and influencer marketing services.