The way we sell and market is evolving, making it increasingly challenging to stay ahead.
If B2B buyers were previously hesitant to rely too much on digital channels, the pandemic has shifted their behavior and increased their reliance on digital.
Another noted observation regarding B2B businesses is that the current economic uncertainties have led to an even greater reluctance to take risks. It also does not seem that budgets will keep pace with the inflated prices.
All these areas also influence the already challenging relationship with Sales teams and other internal stakeholders.
The B2B marketing landscape is expected to continue rapidly evolving in 2024. As a result, it is crucial to carefully choose and implement the best-performing strategies while also considering new and emerging technologies that may impact our strategy and operations in the coming years.
This blog, we will discuss the top strategies to help your B2B businesses and marketing team achieve business and marketing goals. These strategies include building reach and qualified leads, improving credibility, and building solid sales funnels. Based on my experience, implementing these strategies can lead to strong results. So, get ready, and let's seize the opportunity to make 2024 the year of B2B marketing teams' success.
The best marketing doesn't feel like marketing." - Tom Fishburne
1. Establish relations with industry analysts and other B2B industry influencers to gain trust and credibility
In the world of business-to-business technology, market research reports by leading industry analysts play a significant role in influencing decisions (along with satisfied clients and consultants). Companies often rely on such external advice when evaluating which technology vendors best suit their needs and validating their purchasing decisions.
Creating strong connections with analysts and implementing an influencer marketing or analyst relations program can serve as a crucial business strategy to greatly enhance a company's market credibility.
Working with analysts requires effort and continuous evaluation of a company's technology, innovation, and plans. However, the benefits are worth it. Analysts can help a company gain recognition even among the most established businesses and provide credibility, which is crucial in today's competitive market.
To leverage the power of influencer marketing, you must identify the relevant influencers in your category. You do not need to go for the major ones such as Gartner, Forrester, Celent; consider tier-2 or even some smaller regional consulting houses that have already built their credibility with clients.
2. Start a Customer Succes program and build strong relationships with existing clients
Building strong relationships is essential for success. To earn the trust of prospects and customers, it is crucial to establish deeper connections. This can be achieved through regular communication, participating in joint events, providing valuable resources and content, involving clients in industry discussions, and even incorporating their feedback in your product roadmap.
Also consider to start a Customer Success program that will engage your clients across the entire customer life cycle, from signing the deal and measuring the impact of your tech to jointly planning the future.
An engaged customer with clear, tangible benefits from your technology is more likely to act as a powerful advocate for your brand; let social proof work for you. It is crucial that you focus on building a proper customer experience across all engagement phases, not only during the buying journey.
Your clients are your most important influencers.
3. Invest into a comprehensive Content Strategy
Content can be a highly effective strategy. An effective B2B content marketing strategy involves creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to reach and engage with a targeted audience. Educational content, blog posts, e-books, white papers, and webinars are enduring formats that will continue to be relevant in 2024, but marketer can also try original research and engaging video content formats.
To create an effective content marketing strategy, it's important to have a deep understanding of the sales cycle and the buying journey. This will help you produce high-quality content that answers potential customers' questions, addresses their concerns, and provides relevant differentiation.
For maximum impact, it's crucial to distribute your content through both owned and paid channels. This includes search engine optimization and social media platforms like LinkedIn, as well as industry newsletters and media outlets. Content marketing is a powerful inbound marketing tool that can help establish your business as a trusted expert in your field. It can also fill your marketing funnel on autopilot.
4. Optimize Your Website for Search Engines and keep an eye on AI answer engines
Optimizing your website and content for search engines (SEO) is critical to ensure that your target audience can find you, especially when your brand aims to be top-of-mind for prospects. A high search ranking also provides additional credibility to your content and enhances the likelihood that prospects will consider your brand a viable option during their search.
By incorporating SEO best practices, such as keyword research, on-page optimization, producing high-quality and relevant content, and acquiring backlinks, you can increase your visibility and attract high-quality traffic based on search intent.
When it comes to paid and organic search, it's worth noting the emergence of generational AI conversational assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude. These assistants may become a preferred alternative to traditional search engines like Google. If this trend continues, search marketing strategies will require a significant shift in 2025.
5. Leverage Email Marketing for Lead nurturing
Lead nurturing is a proven practice for gradually building relationships with potential customers and is considered one of the most crucial B2B inbound lead generation strategies by many companies. Keeping your e-mail list's contacts engaged and informed about your business through delivering relevant and valuable content through email can help establish trust and position your business as a solution to their needs.
By offering valuable insights, you can build trust and position your business as a solution to their needs. While implementing a successful lead nurturing program requires well-crafted content, proper segmentation, and consistency, automation tools such as HubSpot can make this process more streamlined and efficient.
Before you can start nurturing your leads, it's important to convert anonymous interest into names, addresses, and other information that's necessary for proper CRM management. To improve your conversion rate, you should try out different third-party tools and services to see which ones work most efficiently and produce the best quality results.
6. Attend Trade Shows and Conferences; not all potential buyers are digital natives yet
Trade shows and conferences remain a valid B2B marketing strategy and an effective tool even in the digital age. Physical still trumps digital when it comes to meaningful interactions with target audiences.
Presence at key industry events also shows your continuous commitment toward the industry, which is especially important for emerging vendors.
Leverage events to network and build relationships with potential customers and partners (work closely with your sales team and organize as many meetings as possible pre-event. ), showcase your products and services, and gather market intelligence and insights to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and developments in your industry—additionally, leverage organizers' reach and credibility to build brand awareness and credibility.
7. Leverage Social Media for organic and paid reach
A sound Social media marketing strategy can help you reach and engage many of your target groups (partners, potential employees, influencers, and clients). By building a relevant followers base, posting relevant content, and engaging with your followers, you have a viable platform to manage your brand visibility.
Of all the platforms, LinkedIn (and regional platforms like Xing in the DACH region) stands out as a very effective tool for digital marketers that allows you to micro-target with your ads. This makes it a perfect companion for your ABM strategy and generation of quality leads. In addition, LinkedIn can become an essential part of your B2B lead generation process. Using social selling techniques, you can prospect leads, reach out directly to individuals, and make "cold calling" a much more pleasant experience for your prospects.
8. Research the unfamiliar part of the market
Analyzing won and lost deals will give you only a partial and biased insight into the market. I want to point out that uncovering and analyzing the opportunities you were unaware of is equally important to understand your market. You can do this by researching your competitor's announcements, reading industry reports and case studies, and keeping an eye on emerging solutions and innovative vendors. It is important to understand the world of deals you "were not invited to."
Identifying emerging approaches to the old problems is equally important, including the research of emerging vendors introducing new kinds of innovation. Do your own research, read SEC feelings (applicable to US stock-based companies), visit conferences, and follow market analysts and key investor moves (understand what drives competitors' valuations).
9. Create a Strong Brand Identity
Creating a strong brand used to be a B2B thing, but it is also crucial for B2B companies. By creating a strong brand identity, you can differentiate yourself from your competitors and build a valuable and strong association with your prospect and an ever-lasting value for your clients.
Remember, brand perception built before the purchase, is only one part of building the brand; take care that your clients have a positive and lasting brand experience (during and after the buying journey) that will make them become your brand ambassadors.
To start, it's essential to identify and define your target market correctly. Then, position your brand within this segment by defining your unique qualities and attributes, including your personality, values, levels of innovativeness, and pricing. When activating your brand, ensure consistency in your communication, be innovative and distinctive, and use memorable copy and design to build an emotional connection that extends beyond the formal purchasing process.
10. Invest in Pay-Per-Click Advertising
When starting to generate brand awareness, especially during the early stages when your brand and products are still new, and you may need to rank higher on search engines, PPC advertising provides a way to buy traffic and attention. But do not hesitate to use it afterward; good old advertising works for B2B as well. With well-executed Pay-per-click (PPC) search engine ad campaigns, you can intercept the B2B buyer searches intent by using targeted keywords.
In addition to search engines, leverage the PPC provided by social platforms, but with a more specific purpose in mind. Although the cost of LinkedIn advertising in developed European markets (such as DACH) can be extremely high, it offers highly focused and targeted advertising opportunities.
11. Focus on Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a strategy that focuses marketing efforts on specific accounts. ABM is where marketing and sales come closest and requires close collaboration between marketing and B2B sales organizations. By selecting the right accounts, personalizing content, messages, and even offering, and targeting the right decision-makers, you can increase your chance of closing a particular deal.
To personalize your ABM efforts, you need account insights, which can be obtained from sales or other field representatives. Another source of customer insights is intent data from both first and third-party sources. With these insights, you can create tailored multi-channel marketing campaigns to reach your prospects.
12. Use Storytelling in Case Studies and Success Stories
Storytelling is an effective way to communicate the value of your product or service in a manner that is both informative and memorable. By crafting relatable and captivating stories, you aim to create an emotional connection with your audience and establish deeper relationships beyond the formal B2B buying process.
You can use storytelling techniques such as the hero's journey to place the client at the center of the story. Ensure that the hero is always your client, not your company. Presenting case studies as stories that showcase your customers' success will be more relatable and memorable. By incorporating stories into your marketing, you can still demonstrate the value of your products but in a way that makes them more personal and helps to build trust and credibility, which are crucial in the B2B purchasing process.
13. Implement a data-driven marketing strategy
Data and analytics play a critical role in successful B2B marketing. By tracking and analyzing metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), you can make data-driven decisions about your marketing effort, leading to increased ROI of your activities. This can encompass monitoring basic metrics such as website traffic and conversion rates and more business-focused KPIs like the sales pipeline and marketing revenue contribution.
Additionally, you can step up your marketing efforts through attribution practices and customer segmentation and even boost your account-based strategies by utilizing customer behavior data, including first and third-party intent. This information can help improve the sales efforts and the funnel.
14. Asses and introduce emerging marketing technologies
Martech (Marketing Technology) became essential to modern B2B marketing strategies. It is not only about measurement and analytics but also helps automate marketing tasks, provides personalized experiences, facilitates collaboration between teams, and enables the analysis of large amounts of data to gain insights.
With the emergence of open language models and tools like GPT-3, the expectations for martech have only increased. As B2B marketers, we should assess and harness AI's potential to achieve new levels of automation, creativity, and scalability.
15. Offer Free Trials and Demos
Free trials and demos are a great way to demonstrate your products' capabilities and value. As a SaaS vendor, you may already include a freemium, limited features product or service into your B2B lead generation strategy.
By providing prospects to try your products or services, you can build trust and credibility and increase the likelihood of a sale. Additionally, the freemium model can provide valuable data and insights, as you can observe how users interact with the product and identify areas for improvement or new features to add. This can lead to more aligned product development and a more successful product over time.
Conclusion
The top 20 B2B marketing strategies discussed in this article are the most crucial marketing topics to consider and address. Whether you're a seasoned B2B marketer or just starting out, implementing these strategies will help you achieve your marketing goals and grow your business.
From developing analyst and client success programs to implementing lead engagement and nurturing strategies, you can use various tactics to reach and engage your audiences. With the right approach, you can make 2023 a success. And finally, it's important to continuously evaluate and optimize your marketing efforts. This means regularly reviewing your results, making changes based on what's working and not, and staying up to date with the latest B2B marketing trends. This is the only way to ensure you're reaching your target audience and driving the results you want.
Photo by Felix Mittermeier on Unsplash
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