If you bake cakes for office birthdays, make uniforms for schools, sell papers and equipment for office use, offer CCTV or internet installation service for office buildings or offer cleaning and ‘messenger’ service to companies, you will agree that a business-to-business (B2B) model is far different from a business that serves individuals (business-to-customers B2C).
In a B2B business, you don’t really need many clients. You just need to focus and retain the clients that are big enough to pay your bills and stay profitable. It requires a different approach than a B2C. This is why you need to firstly define your audience before defining your marketing strategies. The marketing strategy that works for B2B will not work for B2C.
B2B sales cycles are often longer and involve more stakeholders than B2C. Hence, you have to customize your marketing strategies to nurture leads over time and address the needs of different decision-makers.
You have to understand that the marketing strategy that works for a B2C will not work for a B2B. Whether you offer digital or physical products or services, you have to understand how to win your B2B customers, even before your launch.
1. Know Your Target Buyers
Before you launch a B2B, you need to know who your ideal buyers are, what their pain points and needs are, and how they search for information, and know their goals.
Buyer persona is the top priority of every B2B market player. It involves a detailed analysis of the granular details of your customer. along with monitoring the market trends and shifts in choice and preferences.
Being clear on who you are speaking to, what their challenges are, what their interests are, how they like to consume content, where they hang out (LinkedIn, Events, etc.).
Once you are clear on your audience you can craft messages and a strategy to project your brand through a mix of both broad reach like PR and Events.
Creating buyer personas can help you segment your audience and tailor your content to their specific preferences, challenges, and goals. Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers, based on data and research.
They include demographic, behavioral, and psychographic details, such as job role, industry, company size, goals, challenges, motivations, and information sources.
Find out where they hang out. Is it a community? Is it social media? Are they on LinkedIn? What are they talking about? How do they digest information?
What content formats work best for them? What challenges do they currently face? What are they passionate about? What trends are going on in their industry?
One of the mistakes that I see more frequently in this first step is building a buyer persona starting from our own assumptions. Guessing the wrong buyer persona could cause more damage than if you don’t have one at all.
You need to craft the ideal buyer profile starting from thorough market research: apart from demographic data, collect their doubts, common problems, used hashtags, vocabulary, and opinions above all. These data will lay the foundations for the next steps and strategy.
2. Create outstanding content
Once you have defined your prospective buyer, you need to create content that addresses their questions, concerns, and interests during the awareness stage. Your content should not be salesy or promotional, but rather informative and helpful.
You should aim to educate your buyers about their problems, the possible solutions, and the benefits of your offer, without mentioning your brand or product directly.
Some examples of content formats that work well during the awareness stage are blog posts, eBooks, white papers, infographics, videos, podcasts, and webinars.
Host engaging sessions with industry experts for insightful learning. Expert Insights and Webinars position your brand as an industry authority.
Teach them, don’t just tell them. It’s about making your solution as relatable as a morning coffee – necessary, impactful, and part of their daily routine. Think less lecture, more lightbulb moments.
That is how you turn potential audiences into anonymous buyers. These are the people that propose your solutions to their teams and cheer your products in the shadows.
There is nothing more authentic or valuable than being able to share thought leadership that presents a unique point of view or perspective about trends in your industry or category.
When you do it through first party data, you stand out as an expert in your category. Thought leadership is a great way to drive awareness of and build your brand.
Awareness stage content has to entertain – or at the very least, intrigue. These people are not actively searching for you or a solution to a problem.
They’re just going about their business. So, if you’re going to get their attention, you have to create entertaining content that hooks them.
Once you’ve got their attention, then you have to nail the follow-through and teach them something new. Doesn’t need to be salesy at this point, but it should make them want to learn more (about either you or the topic).
The saying goes that content is king, but long gone are the days of a person filling out a form to just get an e-book. So, instead of just going for the e-book, show your customer how your service or solution is the pain pill and not just a vitamin. Because when your content shows that you solve a problem, that generates interest.
Also, do not sleep on video as a piece of content because you believe it has to be a high-value production. Truly, a banner with animations can be a valuable piece of content because of how it allows you to use it across multiple channels, such as Facebook and Instagram, which people visit frequently on their phones.
Remember that around 90% of B2B customers are not actually in market for your product at any point in time. Therefore, trying to promote your product during this time is practically pointless.
It is best to develop content that builds trust and authority in your company and brand, so that when your customer is ready to buy, they think of your first.
There are gazillions of “valuable” & “educational” contents being served to your audience every day. Here is a tried and tested winning strategy – tickle the funny bone.
Intelligent humor sets you apart by miles. Everyone wants to be a thought leader in B2B, you’ll win by being a fun and interesting thought leader.
Sometimes, your prospects may even don’t realize that they have a problem (they are problem unaware). In that case, you should educate them on the current situation and the risks they may not see (use market insights, competitors’ examples to make them feel the pain).
Explain the new world coming and the rules they need to master to win the game. They will consider you as the expert subject matter and you will gain their trust.
Avoid sales pitches and calls to action that ask too much of your audience at this stage. Your only CTA right now should be “Learn More” or similar.
Explain why your product is the best, how it can be used, how its different than your competitors, and include real life client testimonials. If someone posts about a problem, reply with a solution.
3. Optimize your content for SEO
SEO optimization is vital in ensuring your content reaches the right audience. This involves thorough keyword research to understand what potential buyers are searching for and integrating these keywords naturally into high-quality content.
To reach your buyers during the awareness stage, you need to make sure your content is visible and accessible to them. This means optimizing your content for search engines, so that it can rank higher for the keywords and phrases that your buyers use to search for information.
SEO involves several factors, such as keyword research, title tags, meta descriptions, headings, images, links, and content quality. By following SEO best practices, you can increase your organic traffic, visibility, and authority.
Start with the problem rather than a keyword. Write for your audience first, then go back and check your SEO content grade.
Writing for SEO first tends to remove the human voice from your content and may have the opposite effect you are hoping for. Prioritize SEO optimization when you are sure of “what content is working”.
Effective SEO boosts your organic traffic and positions you as an authority, making your content a go-to resource for your target buyers. True SEO is about more than just keywords; it’s about making our content genuinely useful and relevant to our audience.
4. Distribute your content across multiple channels
Content distribution is as important as creation. Another way to reach your buyers during the pre-launch stage is to distribute your content across multiple channels, such as social media, email, paid ads, and influencers.
By using different channels, you can expand your reach, generate more leads, and build trust and credibility. However, you need to choose the channels that are most relevant and effective for your audience and your goals.
You also need to adapt your content to each channel, using the appropriate tone, format, and message. Leverage LinkedIn to showcase your expertise in articles.
Recognize that your B2B audience doesn’t uniformly inhabit all platforms. Rather than hopping from one platform to another, pinpoint the platforms where your target audience is most active.
Precision is key—avoid duplicating content across platforms. Instead, distribute content in alignment with a carefully crafted SEO strategy.
However, with 60 percent of the world’s population on social media we must acknowledge that not all will be on the same platform at once. Or even the same platform at all.
We all know individuals that refuse to use TikTok, but consume content on Instagram or Youtube. Or vice versa, those that only like long form content on Youtube, but have no short form even downloaded at all. So by not leveraging all audiences you are just leaving money on the table.
“For B2B Marketers, LinkedIn is likely the only social media channel you need the most.” This is not true.
Although professionally, many people are indeed on LinkedIn, they have lives outside of LinkedIn where they spend their time, such as Instagram, Facebook, and X. Thus, one of the smartest strategies we can deploy is to distribute the content across channels.
Omnipresence helps. It used to take 7 interactions for someone to trust you. Now, it feels more like 42. So, the more visible you are [where your clients see you], the better.
Remarketing can be a powerful tool for reaching B2B buyers who have already engaged with your content. By using targeted ads, you can remind them of your solutions and expertise, keeping your brand top of mind as they move through the awareness stage of their buying journey.
Always put reader experience first. If you are distributing content across different platforms you need consider what the user’s experience is as well.
For instance: When you make a post with a carousel on Linkedin, make the first sentence eye-catching because a reader will have to click “see more” in order to sell the rest of the post. That’s why the hook is important. On Twitter it’s different because you’re making threads.
If you have a thread post make sure you put 1/(# of posts in thread) so when the hook catches someone it gives them a good idea of how much they will have to read.
5. Measure and improve your results
Measurement is tomorrow’s strategy. Ensure you measure monthly and quarterly what is working and what is not working so you can optimize your marketing strategies with that knowledge and data going forward.
You need to measure and improve your results to ensure that your content is reaching and engaging your buyers during the awareness stage.
You can use various metrics and tools to track and analyze your content performance, such as traffic, views, shares, downloads, leads, conversions, and feedback.
By monitoring and evaluating your results, you can identify what works and what doesn’t, and make adjustments to improve your content strategy and reach more buyers.
Do not be afraid to fail and try something different even if the results are ok at the moment. Do not just copy and paste whatever brought the best results. Definitely improve what works, but do not stop there.
Measurability in marketing is crucial. By setting clear goals and employing valid measurement methods, businesses can discern whether their actions are effective. Without these metrics, there’s no foundation for informed decisions and optimizations.
Measurable objectives provide essential insights, allowing evaluation of ROI and serving as a navigation tool. They enable efficient resource allocation and continuous strategy enhancement. In short, measurability is the key to marketing efficacy.
6. Strategic Networking, and Leveraging of Stakeholder Communities
Most B2B thrive on networking and content marketing that positions you as an expert. Networking provide a faster route to reach decision makers. B2B sales often entail bureaucratic processes to close, and as such, reaching the key decision makers, and building relationships formally and informally can speed up processes.
Also, at the awareness stage, companies can leverage program-led approach to have the presence of potential stakeholders. Create events (industry or sectorial) that would be interesting to them, and bring them over… it would be easier for them to become leads after they’ve experienced.
B2B marketing often involves building long-term relationships. Invest in customer service, account management, and post-sale support to maintain customer satisfaction and loyalty.
7. Branding matters
Deconstructing the right brand building approach for your company starts with a user journey needs analysis, which should form part of any successful marketing strategy.
So, before you do anything else, make sure you understand what it is that makes a good digital campaign that aligns with your brand’s objectives. List down everything down from the activities involved to the reporting and analytics.
© Kingsley Ndimele
Your Reliable Consultant