8 Rules For Wildly Successful B2B Marketing
B2B marketing was something of an enigma for a long time. Experts thought they understood the B2C side of the equation (which they largely do). But selling between businesses remained a bit of a mystery. How are you supposed to get people to buy when you’re not relying as much on psychology and impulse selling?
Well, finally, a number of agencies and companies have cracked the code. And in this post, we distill all their ideas to their basic form so you can understand them and, perhaps, start using them in your business, whether you’re a widget factory making components for other firms or a services business cleaning offices.
Sell The Outcome, Not The Feature
The number one rule in B2B marketing is to sell the outcome, not the feature. This echoes B2C marketing advice that tells marketers to focus on the emotions they create in their audience and the benefits of their products to their lives.
For example, let’s say you sell cloud-based software. Clients aren’t usually particularly interested in how it is a “helpful interface that connects backend systems.” What they want to know is what it will mean for their things they care about, like their bottom line or employee satisfaction. How your product or service moves these metrics is critical. If you can show that spending $1,000 with you will result in $10,000 of additional revenue, you’re on a winning trajectory.
Target A Narrow Niche
While it might sound painful, targeting the narrowest niche you can also makes sense in the B2B sector. Specifically, going after a small group of customers with the pain point you can actually solve is the most effective strategy is marketing, and perhaps in business in general. If you can define exactly what you do and for whom, you will often leapfrog the competition, even as a relatively new company.
For example, let’s say you’re targeting manufacturing companies that want to use SAP. That’s far more specific and direct than just “producers looking to digitise their operations.” Everyone in the target audience knows what the former means. But only a fraction will understand how they fit into the latter.
Use Marketing Services That Understand You
Another pro tip is to only use agencies that understand you as a company and what you stand for. You don’t want to get generic marketing advice that doesn’t move the needle for you on any of the metrics you really care about.
For example, if you have a factory, use marketing services for industrial companies. These outfits often have specific insights that are almost impossible to get elsewhere and can really speed up the process of creating a successful business. The more you use them, the better off you’ll be.
Build a Category
You could also approach marketing from the perspective of “building a category.” The idea here is to do something completely new and really change how the rest of the industry sees your organization.
For example, you don’t need to necessarily invent something new. But if you can become the number 1 in your industry instead of number 2, then it can make a big difference in how you’re perceived.
Sometimes, just using new wording that appeals to multiple stakeholders can work wonders in B2B marketing. For example, you could present yourself as a “category of 1” by using a term that just makes sense to the community you serve like “conversational intelligence.” Yes, anything that you invent is likely to sound like a buzzword, but it can also be highly effective if you get it right.
Use Your Content To Make Buyers Feel Smart
If you can use your content to make buyers feel smart, that’s also a good policy. Ideally, you want to make them feel brilliant about their own actions so that they gain the confidence they need to run their businesses well. This is one of the reasons so much B2B marketing contains pep talks. Bigging up your audience is highly effective because they begin to associate positive emotions, like success, with your branding. Providing them with this can be ultra-effective and is also something your competitors, by all measures, probably aren’t doing.
It doesn’t take much, either. You don’t have to go full Tony Robbins on them. Just simple associations between your brand and what their own personal feelings are is all that matters.
Make Your Funnel Darker
This next piece of advice might sound a little strange, but making your funnel darker is also something that can work really well. Most B2B businesses think they need to be just as transparent as everyone else in their industry, marketing through all the usual channels, especially on Google. But if you can go deeper than this, that can really help.
Remember, a lot of the people who care about your business in the B2B space are in Slack communities and stalking Reddit. They’re not usually on TikTok or any of the other usual places you’d want to look as a B2C marketer.
Connect Sales And Marketing
What a lot of B2B firms do is also run their sales and marketing firms as a single “revenue team.” This might sound odd, but if you can create proper connections between these, then you can often boost the effectiveness of your marketing channels substantially, perhaps getting a new deal every few days instead of weeks.
For example, a lot of professionals recommend getting a Slack channel for the revenue team. You want some people thinking strategically about the optimal approach, then some actually going out there and deploying results and solutions.
Move To Specific Marketing Methods
Finally, you want to be more specific in your marketing approach. Many professionals in the B2B space recommend something called “from-to” messaging. The idea is to show customers where they are now, and where they could be if they used your services.
For example, “go from miserable results and no customers to thousands of new sign-ups via your email marketing portal every week.” It’s simple but effective.
