8 Things about B2B marketing you may not be aware of

B2B marketing is one of the most prominent and sought-after marketing practices of all. With the CRM system placed at its heart, B2B marketing nurtures partnerships and brand loyalties better. Successful implementation of B2B marketing involves informative content creation, brand management through social media, camping construction, and organic as well as paid marketing activities. To analyze all these efforts, the implementation of a robust Customer Relationship Management or CRM software is important. 

Most of the companies nowadays are involved in B2B marketing, but the question is: are they doing it right? Populating HTML5 pages with information that is fetched from all the possible sources available or using a Content Management System (CMS) to do a few edits and posting those updates on all social media platforms is not exactly what it takes to execute a successful B2B marketing strategy. It goes way beyond that. While creating a B2B marketing strategy, the first and foremost thing that needs to be outlined in your business goal and target audience. Unless and until you fail to do so, everything will start falling apart. Do you know that content marketing is the most preferred form of marketing preferred by over 93% of B2B marketers? Well, yes, that’s true! Content marketing is considered to be the most fruitful form of marketing your products/ services to the right type of audience. 

Listed below are the ideal B2B marketing channels that you might be missing out on:

1. Content: Like mentioned before, content marketing tops the list of the most reliable and highest ROI generating B2B marketing practices of all. Various content formats like E-books, webinars, podcasts, websites, white papers, case studies, etc. are used to attract and nurture business leads. An informative and graphically attractive website that acts like a Wikipedia for your products/ services will help engage and eventually, convert more visitors. The content on the website should provide all the possible details that a visitor would consider before making a purchase. This will include your company history, goals and vision, product/ service description, client testimonials and other knowledge resources like case studies and white papers that will increase the sense of credibility. But, before you even start with the content strategy, the most important part is to define business goals and identify your target audience.
2. Business Goals: Whether it is branding or online reputation management (ORM), sales or partnership alliance, a business must know its goals and ways to achieve them. Without knowing this, it becomes difficult to create a strategy, choose marketing mediums and allocate budget and resources. For example, if your organization expects sales out of the marketing efforts, then your first step should be creating a buyer persona and identify the sales-driving marketing opportunities.
3. Buyer Personas: How would you feel if you step out of your house to buy apples and someone is trying to sell you flight tickets to Mauritius? These two things stand totally at loggerheads and it is simply annoying to constantly hear about flight tickets to Mauritius while all you can think of and want is apples. It is exactly the same in B2B marketing. Without knowing your target audience and their interests, all your marketing efforts will fall on deaf ears. But, on the other hand, imagine you are selling flight tickets to Mauritius for corporate events and a million-dollar company that is looking to plan its annual employee engagement program lands on your advertisement. There is a sure shot probability of that visitor getting converted. Hence, before you even chalk out your marketing strategy, it is important to define your target audience and create buyer personas. Now, buyer personas usually include information like age, demographics, professional details, customer pain points, interests and contact details. Depending on individual business requirements, organizations can include additional categories while creating buyer personas.
4. Social Media: How many of you create a generic social media post and then post it to all the social media platforms available by resizing images? Well, I believe almost 80%. This is a total wrong practice. Every social media platform is designed with specific goals and UI/UX. Treating all the platforms alike will fail to create that impact. For example, Twitter is used only for news and updates while Instagram showcases more of a casual/graphical representation of the same. Hence, the images, tone and content will be different for both platforms.
5. Email: Around 50% of B2B businesses use email marketing for generating revenues and 80% of them rely on automation to save time and efforts. Email marketing is surely not dead. It is all about how gracefully you do it. The world id evolving rapidly and so are humans, their interests and psychologies. Dumping promotional emails in the prospect’s mailbox without creating a connection will surely motivate him to blacklist you. While sending emails to a larger database, consider segregating customer database. A good CRM software can be of great help here, since it helps you identify when are your customers/ prospects most active and devise ideal times of sending emails to achieve better open and click-rate.
6. Guest Blogging: Guest blogging is one of the proven methods of increasing your website traffic. Guest blogging is all about publishing your write-upr or any other relevant content on third party websites. The goal is to get a link back to your website. This serves as an opportunity to promote the associated brand whilst help build domain credibility and ranking. It is important to understand that guest blogging is an art of expressing your own ideas and knowledge in the niche industry. Any kind of plagiarism, poor backlinks, grammatical errors and copying author’s work in any form is strictly prohibited.
7. Media Monitoring: A comprehensive audit of your brand can be achieved through scrutinizing the amount of mentions on all the channels of audience engagement like social media, press release and online mediums. Media monitoring helps a brand better resonate with its customers, cut-down the response time, identify and capitalize industry trends and optimize future social marketing campaigns for better performance. Social CRM is a great way to achieve this.
8. CRM Solution: Did you know that a robust CRM software could help a company improve its sales by 30%. Irrespective of location, employees can work from their smartphones to access instant data pertaining to customers, stay updated and enhance work performance even when on the go. CRM solution helps deliver exceptional customer experience by identifying and tracking customer interaction history, create more targeted campaigns and forecast sales figures.

B2B marketing is not a difficult feat to achieve, but when done diligently backed by a sound plan and strategy, it can certainly generate exceptional results for a business. All your marketing efforts when combined with an ideal CRM solution, will help achieve optimum results and drive higher profits.