The Ultimate Guide to B2B Marketing in 2023 [+ New Data]

Discover a variety of B2B marketing strategies you can use to reach and resonate with your business audience

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Updated: 05/04/23

Published: 05/04/23

Effective B2B marketing is difficult to get right. Between creative demands, budget limits, and channel decisions, marketers have a lot to juggle when developing their marketing strategy.

The biggest determinant of effective marketing, however, is your audience .

If you’re not properly targeting your buyer persona , your promotions and advertisements will likely fall on deaf ears. You might as well not be marketing at all.

→ Download Now: Free Product Marketing Kit [Free Templates]

Where target audiences vary the most, though, is between individual consumers and businesses . Some companies serve individual shoppers, while others cater to companies and organizations.

Marketing to businesses is very different from marketing to individual consumers. That’s why an entirely different marketing method — B2B marketing — exists, and that’s why we built this guide.

By the end of this article, you’ll have a better understanding of B2B marketing, the most effective B2B marketing strategies, and how you can tap into and convert your business audience. Plus, the trends you can expect in the B2B space in 2023, according to new research plus expert tips.

What is B2B Marketing?

B2b vs b2c marketing, b2b marketing strategies.

B2B Marketing Trends to Watch

B2B Marketing Examples

What is b2b.

B2B stands for “business-to-business,” which refers to a business model where businesses sell products and services to other companies as opposed to consumers.

If you’re a new marketer in the B2B space, or a small B2B business owner learning the ropes, B2B marketing can seem new and strange, but not to worry — you’ll soon learn it’s not so different from typical consumer marketing, and we’ll go over everything you need to know so you can create an effective B2B marketing strategy.

B2B (business-to-business) marketing refers to any marketing strategy or content that is geared towards a business or organization. Companies that sell products or services to other businesses or organizations (vs. consumers) typically use B2B marketing strategies.

The purpose of B2B marketing is to make other businesses familiar with your brand name, the value of your product or service, and convert them into customers.

HubSpot is an example of a company that engages in B2B marketing. HubSpot’s customers are other businesses, not individual consumers. Therefore, all of our marketing efforts can be classified as B2B.

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B2B and B2C (business-to-consumer) marketing are very different. B2B and B2C marketing differ in their respective strategies and applications, as well as in their audiences and how they communicate with them .

B2B marketing targets the needs, interests, and challenges of individuals who are making purchases on behalf of, or for, their organization (rather than for themselves), thus making the organization the customer.

Here are a few examples of B2B companies:

A coworking space that leases office spaces to remote teams and freelancers (like Spaces )

An on-demand order fulfillment, warehousing, and screen printing service (like Printful )

A marketing software company that sells social media management tools, lead generation software, and other marketing tools to businesses and organizations (like HubSpot !)

B2C marketing targets the needs, interests, and challenges of individual consumers who are making purchases on behalf of, or for, themselves, thus making the individual the customer. Here are a few examples of B2C companies:

An e-commerce company that sells office supplies to remote or self-employed individuals (like Poppin )

A store that sells t-shirts and other clothing and accessories (like Target )

A music platform that sells streaming subscriptions (like Spotify )

Take a look at this chart comparing B2B and B2C customers.

As much as they differ, though, B2B and B2C also intersect in many ways. While Poppin sells office supplies to remote or self-employed individuals, they also design corporate office spaces and branded supplies.

On the flip side, Printful not only offers order fulfillment and warehousing to businesses; they also fill e-commerce printing orders for individuals.

As distinct as the B2B and B2C marketing audiences can be, B2B marketers can always learn from B2C campaigns , too.

As I said above, marketing depends on its audience. While B2B and B2C marketing vary, not every piece of B2B marketing material is alike, either.

In this section, we’ll talk about various B2B marketing strategies you can implement to reach your specific business audience. Some of these strategies are preparatory, such as identifying your audience, while others are ready to be executed, such as creating a B2B website. Let’s get started.

1. Understand the B2B buyer’s journey.

Before we dive into actual strategies you can implement, it’s important to understand the B2B buyer’s journey . This piece of information will help you create and implement marketing strategies that meet prospects at every stage of their purchase process.

Because of the higher price point of B2B products, B2B sales cycles tend to be a lot longer than B2C cycles. Nurturing these prospects via marketing takes a similarly long time, too, and you must use specific tactics at every stage to drive them toward a purchase decision or a demo request.

In other words: B2B marketing is not as easy as setting up ads on Instagram and hoping for clicks. (We wish! That can work, however, in conjunction with other strategies.)

b2b marketing strategy: buyer's journey

The B2B buyer’s journey is divided into three stages:

Awareness Stage: The prospect has become aware of a problem and begins educating themselves.

Consideration Stage: The prospect researches solutions for their new problem.

Decision Stage: The prospect is ready to make a purchase or formally begin a buying process.

After understanding the buyer’s journey, take this opportunity to create a customer journey map for your company — or, if you’re a new marketer at a B2B company, asking for one for reference.

A customer journey map is a customized version of the buyer’s journey that shows how your brand interacts with prospects during each phase. When you have that information, you can understand which marketing strategies, such as content marketing, will be most effective at each stage.

2. Identify your target market and target audience.

Now that you have a strong understanding of the buyer’s journey, it’s time to begin understanding who you’re marketing to specifically. Who is taking the buyer’s journey and purchasing your products? You get to decide — and it all begins by identifying who they are.

First up, define your target market . For B2B companies, we first recommend identifying your target companies with firmographic data such as:

  • Company size, i.e small, medium, or enterprise
  • Company region or location, i.e North America, South America, Africa, or specific countries and regions
  • Company industry, i.e healthcare, fintech, or SaaS
  • Number of employees

Then, define your target audience — that is, the specific human prospect who is looking for your brand’s products or services. Remember, you’re not marketing to other companies, you’re marketing to people who work at that company.

You can use demographic and psychographic data to identify individual prospects you’ll be marketing to. This may include their:

  • Education level

This information will help you create buyer personas and customer profiles , which in turn will help you understand how they make purchase decisions and which marketing channels they’re more likely to use.

For instance, if you’re targeting an entry-level employee, ages 22-26, at a small business in North America, you can likely use social media to reach them effectively.

3. Choose your marketing mix (or the 4 Ps of marketing).

Now that you’re armed with your buyer’s firmographic, demographic, and psychographic information, it’s time to start building a B2B marketing strategy that’s tailored specifically to them. Start by defining your marketing mix, or the 4 Ps of marketing :

  • Product: What product you sell
  • Price: How much the product costs
  • Place: Where the product is sold
  • Promotion: Where customers will find out about the product

Defining your 4 Ps is an excellent precursor to creating a more extensive marketing strategy. It marries all of the information you’ve recently found about your potential customers with the information you already know about your own product.

That will empower you to create a more effective strategy than if you jumped right into tactics and execution.

Featured Resource: Marketing Mix Templates

b2b marketing strategy: marketing mix templates

Click here to download the templates for free .

4. Create a B2B marketing plan and a marketing strategy.

Once you’ve defined your marketing mix, you can dive in even more deeply by creating a marketing plan and a marketing strategy . A marketing strategy marries market conditions with your company’s goals, and a marketing plan provides an actionable roadmap with specific channels and metrics.

What’s most important is outlining your own company’s summary and target markets, then deciding where you’ll promote your company. The thing is, it’s all too easy to choose specific strategies, like social media marketing and content marketing, without a strategic approach. That can easily lead to overspending in the wrong areas.

To create a marketing plan and strategy, we recommend starting with a template.

Featured Resource: Free Marketing Plan Template

b2b marketing strategy: marketing plan template

Click here to download HubSpot's free Marketing Plan Template.

Using this template, you’ll be able to compile all the information you need to choose the right B2B marketing channels for your company. You’ll be able to lay out your:

  • Business Summary and Initiatives
  • Target Market
  • Market Strategy
  • Marketing Channels
  • Marketing Technology

In this list, we could have easily shared specific marketing tasks you can do, such as creating online content or publishing short videos. And while these things will likely be a worthy use of your time, it’s more important to spend your time strategizing to minimize marketing costs and increase your ROI .

Strategizing is the core of your B2B marketing strategy — not implementing specific tactics such as blogging or SEO. Those will come later once you have defined the big picture.

5. Cover all of your B2B marketing bases, such as launching a website.

It’s time to dive into the more tactical aspects of your B2B marketing strategy by ensuring all of your marketing bases are covered. But we don’t want to dive too deeply yet; this is about nailing down the basics. The “basics” will vary per industry; for instance, in a more traditional vertical, you might rely less on your website and more on industry events.

That said, you want to ensure your B2B company has covered most of the following things (click on each one for a checklist to run through):

  • Launching a website
  • Creating and maintaining your social media profiles
  • Starting an email marketing newsletter
  • Signing up for industry events and conferences

No matter which B2B industry you’re in, and regardless of your audience type and age, these things will likely benefit you. Later, we’ll cover specific types of B2B marketing that you can integrate under each of these strategies. But here’s a good introduction:

  • Strategies for your website: Content marketing , blogging , SEO
  • Strategies for your social media profiles: Social media marketing , paid social media , short form video marketing
  • Strategies for your email marketing newsletter: Email marketing , lead nurturing
  • Strategies for industry events and conferences: Event marketing , trade show marketing

6. Run a competitive analysis.

To choose your specific marketing strategies even more strategically, carry out a competitive analysis .

Scope out the market and see which businesses are marketing to your target audience. Learn what they’re currently doing — do they have a website? A presence on a specific social media platform, such as LinkedIn? Things to be on the lookout for when inspecting competitors are:

  • Competitor product offerings
  • Competitor sales tactics and results
  • Competitor marketing content and social media presence

Featured Resource: 10 Competitive Analysis Templates

b2b marketing strategy: competitive analysis templates

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Getting a general overview of these items can help you recognize your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats — otherwise known as a SWOT analysis . Once you understand where they stand, you can better compete with them and choose the best channels.

If none of your competitors are on Instagram, for instance, then Instagram marketing may not be a good strategy to pursue (or, at least, you should test it out first before investing too many resources in it).

7. Determine your brand positioning.

Next, define your brand positioning in the market. This statement is the who, when, why, and how of your brand identity — or the way your brand is perceived through the eyes of the customer.

This will help you cultivate a consistent brand image, regardless of the marketing channels and tactics you use.

Devise a brand positioning statement that your team and prospective customers can believe in, and you’ll be ready for the next step.

Featured Resource: Positioning Statement Templates

b2b marketing strategy: create a positioning statement

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8. Explore marketing channels to use.

By now, you’ve likely run across the different types of marketing channels your competitors use successfully, and the channels they haven’t taken advantage of. You’ve also likely gotten an idea of what you want to do based on your big-picture strategizing so far.

With the previous steps completed, you’re ready to diversify your B2B marketing portfolio and reach the businesses you need to. Depending on your customer segments and competitor analysis, you can now explore channels, strategies, and tools to optimize your leads and customer funnels.

Next up, let’s look at the types of B2B marketing you can implement now that you’ve created your overall strategy.

Types of B2B Marketing

The following categories are B2B marketing channels bound to connect you to your target audience.

B2B Email Marketing

Email marketing is a tried and true method of reaching both individual consumers and business customers. Most B2B marketers use email — are you one of them? You should be. Emails lead to engagement, which turns subscribers into leads … and then customers.

Download our guide to optimizing email marketing for conversions and learn how to grow your email list, ensure deliverability, and increase engagement .

Unlike B2C customers who respond best to emotions and entertainment, B2B customers look for logic and positive ROI. Essentially, they’re asking themselves, How can your business help my business grow? Because of this, your email marketing must consistently resonate with your business customers and focus on things that matter to them — like time, money, and resources.

Email marketing is also a powerful vehicle for sharing your brand’s content. Many B2B companies use email newsletters as part of their content marketing program, and the B2B marketers we’ve spoken to say these newsletters are most critical to their content marketing success.

With the constant barrage of emails flooding our inboxes today, it’s more important than ever to create and send out effective marketing emails. To help you create emails that stand out, you can use HubSpot's AI Email Writer .

B2B Email Marketing Best Practices

Write enticing subject lines . Think about your email subject lines as a Netflix trailer — if you can’t hook your audience with a two-minute clip (or, in this case, a few dozen characters), don’t expect them to open and watch (or read) the whole thing. We recommend spending almost as much time on your email subject lines as you do on the emails themselves.

Stick to one call-to-action (CTA) per email . If you think the number of emails you receive is a lot, take a look at the CTAs in those emails … some are packed with two, three, and sometimes up to 10 different CTAs. Don’t make this mistake, which can leave your recipients’ heads spinning, asking “What should I click on first?” and ultimately clicking on nothing. With one CTA per email, you allow your audience to focus on your email content and ultimately one action … a welcome reprieve from today’s frequent decision-making and analysis paralysis.

Segment your email to reach the most relevant audience . Not every email you send will be appropriate for everyone on your list. Your subscribers may be at different stages of the buyer’s journey or be seeking different solutions. That’s where email list segmentation comes into play. Not only does this help you relate to your audience better, but it gives your emails that personal feel that says “Hey, I’m listening and I know what you’d like to see.” Consumers prefer email quality over quantity anytime.

Make sure your email designs are responsive . Most email users access their inbox on their phones, and emails that don’t show up correctly on mobile devices are often deleted. Ouch. Don’t let your email be one of those.

Don’t be afraid of the cold email . As uncomfortable as it is, the right email can convert new customers — like these cold sales email templates , which will help you get your leads’ attention.

👉🏼 HubSpot Tip : You can’t send marketing emails without any recipients — these people make up your lists. There are plenty of easy ways to grow your email list . Begin with opt-in forms on your website homepage, About page, and blog. Check out HubSpot’s Free Form Builder tool to get started.

B2B Digital Marketing

Every business, whether B2B or B2C, should have a digital presence — which is comprised of paid ads, search engine optimization, a website, and any other place your B2B company is active online. Let’s walk through a handful of tactics that can strengthen your B2B digital marketing strategy.

1. Define your target audience.

A strong B2B digital marketing strategy starts with defining your target audience, or buyer persona . This demographic and psychographic information will inform almost every other marketing activity thereafter, ensuring your content and digital material is absorbed by the right eyes and ears (and that no resources go to waste on your end).

2. Create your website.

Secondly, digital marketing can’t quite function without an informative, engaging website. Most buyers visit a website before making a purchase. Moreover, since the typical B2B sales cycle often involves many key players (such as gatekeepers, decision makers , and other folks who have to buy into a purchase), websites are easy, straightforward ways for influencers to share information about your product or service.

For inspiration on how the best B2B websites are built to impress, check out this video:

3. Optimize your digital presence.

Your website needs to be more than informative and engaging, though … it needs to be discoverable. You can do this with on-page SEO and technical SEO tactics. These include everything from image alt-text and meta descriptions (what your visitors can see) to structured data and site speed (what your visitors can’t see). Off-page SEO is also at play here, which refers to external linking strategies and social sharing — SEO tactics that take place off your website.

4. Run PPC campaigns.

Finally, round out your digital presence with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising , which allows you to get your content and brand in front of new audiences via search engines and other advertising platforms. I recommend maximizing your PPC investment by advertising more than your specific products or services — such as your brand personality, blog or social media content, or company tagline.

The best way to see an ROI from your paid ads is by 1) incorporating your buyer persona data and 2) boosting content that they can relate to. For example, it’s highly unlikely a brand new consumer who’s never heard of you is searching for your exact product.

They may be searching for a location-based solution or product feature. To reach the greatest number of potential customers, pay to target relevant categories within your brand vs. promoting your product or services.

B2B Content Marketing

We’ve talked about how B2B customers are focused on expertise, driven by logic, and desire to be educated. What better marketing tool to satisfy these priorities than B2B content marketing ?

Whereas a traditional PR marketing strategy interrupts a consumer’s day-to-day with promotional material, a content marketing strategy adds valuable information and informs the consumer — which is precisely what B2B customers are looking for. Not to mention that content marketing supports SEO efforts, which involves anticipating what your audience is searching for , helping them discover your website and content … and potentially converting them to customers.

It's important to note, content marketing is most effective when you align your content to various stages of the buyer's journey. As Jonathan Franchell, CEO and Founder of Ironpaper . points out: "Effective content in the awareness phase educates the buyer on their pain points."

"A frequent mistake B2B organizations make is educating the buyer on their own company, product, or service. The buyer isn't ready for that; they are just beginning to understand their problem."

Franchell adds, "Additionally, B2B companies should test content. Run a test on an incentive and vary the type of content - use a webinar, an ebook, or a video. Understand what format of content attracts the right types of buyers and measure it down to an individual human level."

Business decision makers prefer to get information from an article than an ad. Knowing this, I’d say you should be putting the same (if not more) resources into your content marketing than your traditional advertising strategy.

Because the B2B buyer’s journey is slightly different than the B2C buyer’s journey (which has shorter sales cycles and fewer decision makers involved), the content you create for your B2B content marketing strategy may vary more than the content you’ve seen as a consumer yourself, as illustrated in the below graphic.

b2b-marketing-content-for-the-buyers-journey-graphic

Before you start creating content, though, I recommend creating a business blog . (Don’t worry, growing your blog readership is easier than you think.) Your blog will house all the content you create and serve as a home base for readers to visit and subscribe to.

B2B Social Media Marketing

Believe it or not, B2B buyers and C-Suite executives can and do use social media when making a purchase. That’s right — social media marketing isn’t just for brands targeting individual consumers.

Many B2B companies struggle with social media marketing, though. It can be harder to use social media to connect with business customers, especially because (as we mentioned above) there’s typically a lengthier sales cycle and longer chain of command.

Honestly, B2B social media marketing might not be where you convert the greatest number of leads, and that’s OK. It likely comes into play near the beginning of your customers’ buyer’s journeys.

Social media is a powerful tool for building brand awareness, giving your company an online personality, and humanizing your business — all very powerful factors when it comes to marketing and connecting with potential customers. Like email marketing, social media is also a highly effective channel for sharing your content and enhancing your brand expertise, the latter of which we know B2B customers appreciate.

Overwhelmed by social media? Spend more time connecting with your followers with our time-saving suite of social tools.

While your social media accounts might not convert as frequently as your content or email marketing, they’re just as important. In this case, followers are just as valuable — you never know when they might convert to leads or customers.

👉🏼 HubSpot Tip : Content shared by employee advocates can generate more engagement than content shared by brands. So, involve your employees in your B2B social media marketing strategy. Encourage them to create their own social media channels and share about life at your company. Create a culture account ( like our @HubSpotLife Instagram ) to show what’s going on at work, not just what you’re selling. You never know — this might attract strong talent, too.

B2B Marketing Trends to Watch in 2023 [New Data]

HubSpot's Blog team conducted research to determine the challenges, opportunities, and initiatives that most B2B marketers are focusing on in 2023.

Let's dive in.

1. Generating leads and traffic is the top challenge for marketers.

Top of mind for everyone this coming year is generating more traffic. Marketers surveyed in our 2023 Industry Trends Report cited generating leads and traffic as the top challenge they face, followed by hiring talent and pivoting their marketing strategy to round out the top three answers.

With changes on the horizon and a potential recession looming, it's no surprise 17% of marketers are concerned with pivoting their marketing strategy. Throw in increased competition, and budget constraints and it's safe to say marketers have their work cut out for them in 2023.

2. Marketers anticipate struggling to keep up with trends in 2023.

Marketing trends move fast, so it’s not surprising that marketers we surveyed cited keeping up with trends as a top concern heading into 2023.

Facing increased competition, leveraging CRM systems, and having to pivot marketing strategy rounded out the top five concerns on the horizon for marketers.

3. Social media marketers report 'creating engaging content' will be their number one challenge in 2023.

22% of social media marketers marked "creating engaging content" as the number one challenge they believe they'll face in 2023.

With nearly all businesses utilizing social media vying for customer attention, competition is stiff. Businesses have had to evaluate what makes them stand out above the crowd and how they can better engage and target prospects. To make their best efforts shine, marketers have been utilizing a variety of formats, which we'll dive into next.

4. Marketers leverage video the most.

When it comes to marketing formats, video is the preferred choice with 50% of marketers making it their go-to option. Images came in a close second with 47% of marketers utilizing this format.

Video also provided the most ROI when compared to other formats like images, blog posts, podcasts, and case studies.

It’s popularity isn’t expected to wane anytime soon. Video is expected to grow among new users in 2023 with 1 in 3 planning to leverage this format next year.

5. Influencer marketing was the trend leveraged most this year.

As a result of the pandemic, we've seen an immense shift in how consumers' shop, with the majority now shopping online — and, in particular, purchasing products directly on social media .

It makes sense, then, that B2B marketers want to ensure their products or services are showing up on social channels with influencer partnerships.

Influencer marketing is projected to become a $13.8 billion dollar industry by the end of this year, and it's showing no signs of slowing down.

Most B2B marketers — 71% — planned on investing more in influencer marketing this year, and likely was a wise choice as this avenue will continue to grow in 2023.

However, you'll want to ensure you choose partnerships wisely. While it can be tempting to find influencers with massive audiences, many businesses have seen more success with micro-influencers, so be sure to do your research to determine which influencers have the most authentic connections with your desired audience.

6. Facebook leads in ROI, but other platforms are gaining popularity.

Our 2023 Trends Report found that not only was Facebook the most widely used marketing platform, but also provided marketers the most ROI . Out of the marketers surveyed, 18% stated they plan to invest in Facebook the most, followed by TikTok and YouTube tied with 16%.

While Facebook provides the most ROI, investment in other platforms is on the rise. YouTube is expected to see the most growth in 2023 with marketers with 91% of those using it planning to increase their investment.

Measuring ROI can be easier for some activities compared to others. For instance, it's easy enough to track a social media advertising campaign's ROI if you're tracking sales made from an ad placed on Facebook. Sales is a tangible outcome, and Facebook's Ad Manager enables you to easily track ROI from your efforts.

However, other activities can be more difficult to track. Analyzing which pieces of social or blog content resulted in sales, for instance, can be a more arduous and convoluted process.

To combat this challenge, take a look at How to Calculate ROI in Marketing [Free Excel Templates].

Additionally, consider A/B testing various marketing activities and tracking ROI to determine which platforms traditionally have the biggest ROI for your business. For instance, most marketers find the highest ROI from Facebook — but this could vary for your brand or business needs.

7. The number one goal for marketers in 2023 is increasing revenue.

Understanding your big-picture goals is imperative for creating an effective marketing strategy for 2023 — so it's likely helpful to know what other B2B marketers' plan to focus on next year. .

Looking ahead, B2B marketers’ top priority is to increase revenue and sales, knocking increasing brand awareness down to the third spot from last year.

Top marketing goals:

  • Increase revenue
  • Improve customer experience
  • Increase brand awareness
  • Increase engagement
  • Improve brand loyalty

Roughly half of B2B marketers reported that 'increasing brand awareness' was their number one goal in 2022.

Brand awareness is critical for fostering trust, long-term loyalty, and brand equity. It makes sense, then, that so many marketers feel it's critical for long-term success.

Additionally, Chief Evangelist at Terminus Sangram Vajre says he predicts that data collection will become a major priority for brands.

As he puts it, "The quality of our campaigns and initiatives will increasingly rely on our CRM, CDP, and 3rd-party sources to help create stylized, targeted, and convertible marketing initiatives. And since CMOs are increasingly held to ROI numbers, we have to up our game."

To consider how you might manage your data in a more efficient, sustainable way, take a look at Everything You Need to Know About Data Management .

Additionally, if you're unsure how you can continue tracking your audience without using third-party cookies, read 7 Marketing Alternatives to Tracking Cookies .

8. This year marketers stopped leveraging podcasts and audio content, while others stopped implementing VR and AR.

As important as it is to learn what marketers plan to do , it's equally vital to learn what they plan not to do. This can help you identify your own guardrails, and ensure you're sticking to the most efficient marketing strategies, rather than wasting time and resources on all of them.

HubSpot's Blog Research found 25% of marketers plan to stop leveraging podcasts and audio content ; followed closely by 23% who plan to stop leveraging VR and AR .

This doesn't mean these activities are inefficient, but it does suggest that some survey respondents found the time, effort, and resources required for each of these efforts wasn't worth it. Ultimately, it depends on your audiences' preferences.

If your audience doesn't enjoy consuming business content on podcast or audio formats, then re-consider investing in these initiatives.

However, audio content isn't going anywhere — so if you haven't already, you might consider testing various audio formats in 2023 to see how they perform with your audience. If you're unsure how to get started, take a look at Everything You Need to Know About Starting a Podcast or Clubhouse vs. Podcasts: Which Should Marketers Use? [Data + Expert Tips] .

9. Philanthropy is best when it's genuine.

Carla Andre-Brown, a Content Marketer at Mailbird told me, "Brand-building activities will look to work with social and environmental causes in a format that is ongoing and builds recognition for both parties. Marketers will need to be especially mindful of the way they present their company, to avoid being accused of having poor intentions."

"For instance," Andre-Brown continues, "a company using the Pride theme each summer without having policies that protect LGBTQ2IA+ employees is called 'Rainbow washing'. To ensure this work is well-received and has an impact, marketers should listen to their communities' suggestions and look for sustainable changes that everyone can benefit from."

A B2B marketing approach that works for one business may not work for another, but that’s not to say we can’t learn something from the pros. Here are eight B2B marketing examples of businesses who did it right.

1. Social Media Marketing: Adobe

TikTok can seem like a difficult platform to stand out as a B2B brand, but some companies have managed to attract thousands — if not millions — of viewers to their videos through high-quality content and an understanding of the app.

Take software company Adobe, which has 262.3K followers and 2 million likes on its TikTok account .

When Adobe first joined the app, the company's second video got over 2 million views. The video asked its audience, Who is a creative TikToker we should know about?, which encouraged high audience engagement.

Adobe succeeds on the app because it creates engaging content specifically catered for TikTok's audience. All Adobe's videos are short, entertaining, and easily digestible.

Take the following example, which has over 370K views and highlights how user @emilesam used Adobe's After Effects edit to create a fighting sequence against himself.

@adobe May the force be with @emilesam in his #AfterEffects edit. ✨ #Adobe #foryoupage #fyp #foryoup ♬ original sound - Adobe

The brand does a good job highlighting its products in a fun, non-promotional way. Both consumers and businesses can see a clear connection between using Adobe's products and finding success on TikTok — which makes this a great example of B2B marketing.

2. Content Marketing: Shopify

Ecommerce company Shopify produces many different types of content resources, such as a blog, business courses, and community events. But one content avenue that helps the brand stand out is its podcast , aptly titled Shopify Masters: The ecommerce business and marketing podcast for ambitious entrepreneurs.

The podcast focuses on inspiration stories from entrepreneurs, and offers practical tips for starting an online business on Shopify. Episode topics range from "Disrupting the Soda Industry with a Healthy Spin" to "How Masks For Dogs Landed a Deal on Shark Tank".

Offering so much valuable, interesting content for free is a fantastic example of effective B2B marketing, which should always provide value before it tries to extract it.

3. Digital Marketing: Mailchimp

Mailchimp's homepage is easy to navigate, clean, and focuses entirely on its customers' pain points.

Consider, for instance, the first large text you see when you click on the page: "Get down to business and grow sales". The smaller text below it reads, "Engage your customers and boost your business with Mailchimp's advanced, yet easy-to-use marketing platform."

The language focuses on the customer, and how Mailchimp can help the customer reach their goal: To grow their businesses.

Additionally, the website offers a banner at the top of the page that enables customers to choose in which language they'd prefer to view the website. Even the company's Products navigation menu includes how the product can "Get Your Business Online" and "Market Your Business".

mailchimps homepage as an example of good b2b marketing

Ultimately, the company demonstrates how much they value each of their customers by tailoring each piece of content towards its customers' unique challenges.

4. Client Testimonials: Venngage

Venngage took its positive client testimonials and sprinkled them throughout its website. This social proof lets prospects know that you have a track record of reliability, and have delighted previous customers beyond expectation. Not only that, but sharing testimonials can have a big impact on potential consumers in the Consideration and Decision stages .

After all, 98% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses, which is up from 81% in 2019, so using client feedback is a great tool to attract new ones.

venngage client testimonial b2b marketing

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5. B2B SEO: TravelPerk, Google

A B2B buyer spends 27% of the time in the purchase journey independently researching online, potentially using at least one search engine during the online research. It’s worth the time and money to invest in making sure other businesses can find you with ease.

TravelPerk displays a diverse range of paid search and SEO. An impressive SEO strategy is its use of topic clusters and sub-topics for reaching its target audience. TravelPerk ensures that search engine pages like “business travel expenses” have a paid ad leading to its website, or high-ranking blog content providing information travelers are looking for.

6. Inside Influence Marketing: IBM, Influencer and Employee Advocacy Program

IBM Systems business group has seen the growing importance of employee voice and the rise of employee influencers as a strategy in B2B marketing.

In the words of Ryan Bares , Global Social Programs Lead, he states, “In the B2B marketing world, we’ve all come to understand that buyers trust individual voices more than formal marketing and advertising messages, so finding ways to optimize influence internally is becoming a key area of focus.”

b2b-marketing_6

Leveraging employees in your company that have an affinity for the industry, vast knowledge of trending topics and your brand, could be key in building new relationships in the industry.

7. B2B Referral Program: Blackbaud, Blackbaud Champions

Blackbaud offers an incredible B2B referral program that incentivizes current customers to become product advocates — Blackbaud Champions. Champions are encouraged to share their insight into how the implementation process works, what it’s like to work with the team, and how Blackbaud solutions have helped you advance their mission.

“When you share your experiences and expertise and help us spread the word about our products and services, we’ll reward you with benefits only available to Champions. By providing your feedback, participating in activities like reference calls and case studies, and sharing educational content and events on social media, you’ll earn Reward Points in the Blackbaud Champions Hub which you can redeem from the Champions Rewards”

These points are what Champions strive to redeem, as they include incentives like discounts, complimentary passes, gift cards and VIP experiences, and more.

b2b marketing examples: blackbaud

Referral programs are a great way to kindle customer loyalty and have advocates spread the word about your business through the network.

Invest in B2B Marketing and Reach Your Business Customers

Marketing isn’t effective unless you keep your audience in mind, and no other audience is as fickle and critical as business customers. Your marketing should communicate how your business can help theirs, and if it doesn’t, you can redirect your B2B marketing strategies to reach them.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in March 2021 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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How to Create an Effective B2B Marketing Plan

B2B-Marketing Plan

  • Analyze, Adjust and Optimize Your Efforts
  • Foster Customer Advocacy
  • Conclusion 

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Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or a business owner looking to boost your company’s presence, a comprehensive B2B marketing plan can be a game-changer. A crucial element contributing to marketing effectiveness is understanding how your products bring value to your customers’ businesses. It’s not just a statement you are putting out there with well-crafted content but substantiating it. 

To ensure that you can explicitly demonstrate how your products can minimize costs, enhance competitive advantages, or boost productivity for your customers you need an effective plan. Failing to plan, execute and demonstrate the value of your product or service can turn your strategy and brand into nothing more than another marketing gimmick.

In this guide, we’ll discuss what is a B2B marketing plan, discover essential tips for creating one, showcase real-world examples, and provide you with a basic B2B digital marketing plan template to get you started. 

What is a B2B Marketing Plan? 

A B2B marketing plan is a strategic roadmap that outlines the steps a business will take to promote its products or services to other companies. Unlike business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, business-to-business (B2B) marketing targets a specific audience of decision-makers within organizations. The primary goal of a B2B marketing plan is to generate leads, nurture prospects, and ultimately convert them into loyal customers.

develop a b2b marketing plan

Key Components of a B2B Marketing Plan

Define your marketing goals.

Establish measurable and realistic marketing goals. Whether it’s increasing brand awareness, driving lead generation, or boosting sales. Your goals should align with your overall business objectives. Be specific and realistic about your goals using the (SMART) criteria – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound to track your progress.

Undertake a Market Analysis

Begin by conducting a thorough analysis of your target market. Identify your total addressable market (TAM) and assess the competitive landscape. Understand potential customers’ pain points and determine how your products or services can address those needs.

Segment Your Target Audience and Create Buyer Personas

Create detailed buyer personas representing your ideal customers. Understand their roles, responsibilities, challenges, and motivations. This will help tailor your marketing messages to resonate with your target audience. Segmentation recognizes that different groups will respond differently to content and messages. First, determine whether segmentation is necessary based on the identified audience(s) and their characteristics. Segmentation is recommended if the audience cannot be reached effectively with the same messages and channels and/or certain segments have significantly different worldviews, needs, and approaches.

Have a Laid-out Marketing Strategy

Develop overarching strategies that align with your goals. This may involve content marketing, email marketing, social media advertising, and influencer marketing. Each strategy should contribute to achieving specific marketing objectives.

Clearly Define Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

What sets your business apart from the competition? Your USP should communicate the unique value your products or services bring to the table. 

Write Content and Choose Your Channels

Dive into the specific tactics and channels you’ll leverage to execute your strategies. This could include creating engaging content, optimizing your website for search engines, running targeted Google Ads campaigns, and utilizing various social media platforms. 

Allocate your Marketing Budget

Allocate resources effectively by establishing a marketing budget. Consider the costs associated with advertising, content creation, marketing tools, and any other expenses related to your marketing initiatives.

Establish a Timeline

Create a timeline that outlines the timing of each marketing initiative. This will help you stay organized and coordinate your efforts for maximum impact. 

Define key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your marketing activities. Regularly track and analyze metrics like website traffic, conversion rates, and social media engagement to gauge the effectiveness of your efforts.  A successful B2B marketing plan is dynamic and adaptable. Regularly review your performance metrics, gather feedback, and be prepared to adjust your strategies and tactics based on the insights you gain.

10 Tips on How to Create a B2B Marketing Plan 

marketing tips

Creating an effective B2B marketing plan requires careful consideration and strategic thinking. Here are ten tips to guide you through the process: 

Understand Your Target Audience

Knowing your audience is paramount in B2B marketing. Conduct in-depth research to understand the challenges, pain points, and priorities of your target businesses. This knowledge will shape your marketing messages and strategies. 

segment your target audience

Align Marketing with Sales

A successful B2B marketing plan aligns closely with the sales process. Collaborate with your sales team to understand their needs, share insights, and ensure marketing efforts support the entire buyer’s journey. 

Understand the duration of your buying process and stay updated when it changes. This awareness allows you to report on these shifts and, more importantly, adapt your strategy to maintain a consistently robust sales funnel. 

Create Compelling Content

Content is king in B2B marketing. Develop high-quality, relevant content that educates, informs, and engages your audience. This could include blog posts, white papers, case studies, videos, etc. 

create a content

Utilize Multiple Marketing Channels

B2B buyers engage with content across various channels. Incorporate a mix of channels such as social media, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and offline events to reach your audience effectively.  

Implement Marketing Automation

Marketing automation tools can streamline repetitive tasks, nurture leads, and provide valuable insights. Invest in a marketing automation platform that aligns with your business needs and integrates seamlessly with your existing systems. 

Stay Informed About Industry Trends

B2B marketing is dynamic, with trends and technologies evolving rapidly. Stay informed about the latest industry trends, emerging technologies, and shifts in buyer behavior to ensure your marketing strategies remain relevant. 

Optimize for Search Engines

Enhance your online visibility by optimizing your website for search engines (SEO). Conduct keyword research, create relevant meta tags, and regularly update your content to improve your website’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). 

Measure and Analyze Performance

Regularly track and analyze key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Use analytics tools to gain insights into website traffic, conversion rates, and other relevant metrics. 

Happy customers can be your most powerful advocates. Encourage and showcase customer testimonials, case studies, and success stories to build trust and credibility within your target market. 

10 B2B Marketing Plan Examples

marketing plan from big business

Now that you know how to plan your marketing, let’s look at some B2B companies doing it right across various industries. 

HubSpot : HubSpot’s inbound marketing methodology focuses on attracting, engaging, and delighting customers. Their B2B marketing plan emphasizes content creation, email marketing, and marketing automation. 

Salesforce: Salesforce leverages a multi-channel marketing approach, combining content marketing, social media advertising, and community engagement. Their B2B marketing plan emphasizes building strong customer relationships through personalized experiences. 

IBM: IBM’s B2B marketing plan revolves around thought leadership and educational content. They invest heavily in creating white papers, webinars, and case studies to position themselves as industry leaders. 

Adobe : Adobe’s marketing plan highlights the power of visual storytelling. They use video content, interactive experiences, and creative campaigns to highlight the capabilities of their software products. 

Cisco: Cisco’s marketing plan focuses on a comprehensive digital strategy. They utilize social media, content marketing, and online communities to connect with their audience and provide valuable insights. 

Mailchimp : Mailchimp’s marketing plan is centered on user-friendly content and community building. They emphasize the importance of customer education through blog posts, tutorials, and engaging events. 

Oracle: Oracle’s B2B marketing plan integrates various channels, including social media, email marketing, and influencer partnerships. Their approach emphasizes the importance of personalized communication and targeted campaigns. 

SAP : SAP’s B2B marketing strategies center around customer success stories and case studies. They showcase the real-world impact of their solutions through in-depth narratives that resonate with their target audience. 

Microsoft: Microsoft’s marketing plan is characterized by a strong emphasis on thought leadership and innovation. They use a combination of events, webinars, and educational content to position themselves as industry pioneers. 

LinkedIn: As a B2B platform, LinkedIn’s marketing plan is built around professional networking and content sharing. They provide businesses with tools for targeted advertising, lead generation, and brand building within a B2B context. 

These examples illustrate the diverse approaches that successful B2B companies take in their marketing strategies. Analyze these cases to draw inspiration for your own B2B marketing plan. 

Best B2B Marketing Plan Template 

Crafting a marketing plan for B2B from scratch can be overwhelming, but having a template can simplify the process. Here’s a basic B2B marketing plan template to guide you: 

Executive Summary 

  • Business Overview: Provide a brief overview of your company’s mission and core values. 
  • Key Objectives: Clearly state your marketing plan’s primary objectives. 

Market Analysis

  • Total Addressable Market (TAM): Define the size and characteristics of your target market. 
  • Competitive Analysis: Assess the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. 
  • Buyer Personas: Create detailed personas representing your ideal customers. 
  • Unique Selling Proposition (USP) 
  • USP Definition: Clearly articulate what sets your business apart from competitors. 

Marketing Goals 

  • SMART Goals: Set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound marketing goals. 
  • Content Marketing : It is a best practice to outline your marketing tactics for creating and distributing valuable content. 
  • Social Media Marketing : Detail how you plan to leverage social media for brand promotion. 
  • Email Marketing : Specify your approach to email marketing and lead nurturing. 
  • Influencer Marketing : If relevant, explain how you’ll collaborate with influencers in your industry. 

Tactics and Channels 

  • Content Creation: Specify the types of content you’ll produce and the platforms you’ll use. 
  • SEO Strategy: Describe your approach to optimizing your website for search engines. 
  • Paid Advertising: Detail your plans for running paid advertising campaigns. 
  • Events and Sponsorships: If applicable, outline your strategy for participating in industry events. 

Marketing Budget 

  • Allocations: Break down your budget across different marketing initiatives. 

Timeline 

  • Marketing Calendar: Provide a visual representation of when each marketing initiative will occur. 

Metrics and Analytics 

  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Define the metrics you’ll track to measure success. 
  • Analytics Tools: Specify the tools you’ll use to gather and analyze performance data. 

Adjustment and Optimization 

  • Review Process: Outline how often you’ll review and adjust your marketing plan. 
  • Establish a system for gathering feedback from your team and stakeholders. 

Conclusion 

  • Summarize your B2B marketing plan’s key points and reiterate the importance of its implementation for achieving business success.

What Should a B2B Marketing Plan Put into Consideration? 

In addition to the above elements, here are a few factors that you should include in formulating your marketing plan:  

  • A SWOT Analysis: Conduct a thorough analysis of your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to inform your marketing strategy better. 
  • Customer Journey Mapping: Understand the various touchpoints your customers encounter throughout their journey with your brand, helping tailor marketing efforts at each stage. 
  • Competitive Advantage: Clearly define how your products or services offer a competitive edge over others in the market, emphasizing what makes your business stand out. 
  • Lead Generation Strategy : Develop a detailed plan for attracting and capturing qualified leads, outlining strategies such as content marketing, lead magnets, or targeted advertising. 
  • Sales and Marketing Alignment: Foster collaboration between the sales and marketing teams to ensure a seamless transition from lead generation to conversion, aligning strategies for overall business success. 

Key Takeaways

Creating a robust B2B marketing plan requires careful consideration of your target audience, clear goals, and well-defined strategies. By following the tips, studying real-world examples, and planning ahead, you’ll be well-equipped to develop a successful B2B marketing strategy that drives results for your business.

Transform your business growth with Blue Atlas B2B Marketing Services ! Let’s build your effective marketing plan strategy today – Contact us now!

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Blue Atlas Marketing Accessibility Statement

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How to Create a B2B Marketing Plan: Pro Tips & Examples

Danah Derani

September 14, 2023

Learn how to reach your business’s audience and drive growth through effective B2B marketing strategies and tactics.

Here, you’ll find:

  • Definition and benefits of B2B marketing
  • How to create a B2B marketing plan
  • B2B marketing tactics and best practices
  • Examples of B2B marketing strategies

The largest factor of successful marketing is your audience. If you’re not properly targeting your buyer persona, it’s unlikely your advertisements, promotions, and general marketing tactics will thrive.

Target audiences vary greatly between consumers and businesses, though. That is, some companies cater to individual shoppers, while others serve organizations.

Marketing to businesses is an entirely different beast. That’s why business-to-business marketing (B2B marketing) exists. 

Used by companies to sell products and services to other companies, B2B marketing aims to help build, maintain, and expand relationships with other businesses. 

As a seasoned marketing professional, there’s a lot to consider when taking your B2B marketing efforts to the next level. From channel decisions to budget limits to creative demands, effective B2B marketing can be a challenge to get right. 

To help steer you in the right direction, we’ll break down what B2B marketing is, the most effective B2B marketing strategies and tactics, and how you can help tap into and grow your business audience.

What is B2B marketing?

Just like in its name, B2B marketing refers to the marketing of services or products to other businesses and organizations. B2B marketing’s purpose is to attract other businesses, familiarize them with your brand, showcase the value of your product or service, and eventually convert them from leads into customers.

In today’s digital landscape, this means marketing teams need to be able to capture a prospect’s attention quickly — and retain it. There are various tactics to do this, which we dive deeper into below. 

B2B can include various industries and forms: car parts, security solutions, office supplies, restaurant equipment, software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscriptions , and much more. Essentially, B2B marketing campaigns are targeted at any individuals — from entry-level salespeople to C-suite executives — with the ability to take on purchasing decisions.

(Image: Adobe stock)

How does B2B marketing work?

B2B marketing involves nurturing prospects through the buyer’s journey. This journey begins when a business identifies a problem it needs to find a resolution for.

Say your office has been recently renovated, leaving you in need of fresh office supplies and furniture. At this point, you’d research the appropriate products, services, and other businesses to help. Then, you’d evaluate your options, settle on the best choice, and commit to a purchase. 

Ultimately, the goal of B2B marketing is to guide prospects along each step of the buying process. 

So, your B2B marketing efforts should:

  • Clearly identify the problems your business can solve
  • Showcase how you stand out from competitors
  • Provide trials/demos so your customers can better evaluate your products
  • Allow for a swift and easy purchasing process

Benefits of B2B marketing

You’re likely wondering how your business will benefit from a B2B marketing strategy. Even with its complexities, B2B marketing provides several benefits to your company, including:

More qualified leads: An extensive B2B marketing strategy — complete with a thoughtful plan and effective tactics — will help place you in front of more prospective buyers looking for your product or service.

Increased traffic: Strong marketing content will drive more traffic to your business and allow relevant leads to become familiar with what you have to offer.  

Nurtured relationships: Once you develop a B2B marketing plan that establishes your business as an expert in your field, you can reduce customer churn by building strong client relationships. This is also known as lead nurturing.

Stronger brand awareness:   Potential clients need to know what your business can offer and how they can work with you. Having a presence on various marketing channels will help with this, ultimately increasing your brand exposure and getting leads to choose your business over another.  

Improved rankings:   You want prospective buyers to easily find you when searching for the type of service or product your business offers. With a successful B2B marketing plan, you can improve both your search rankings and visibility. 

How to build a B2B marketing plan

In B2B marketing, your strategy will inform how you plan to increase brand awareness about your business offerings to potential buyers. This process involves everything from determining your target market and brand positioning to selecting the channels and tactics needed to take leads through their buyer’s journey. 

While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach that guarantees success for every B2B company, the basic steps of putting together a B2B marketing plan are applicable to all B2B companies. 

Follow these six best practices when building out your plan to ensure it meets your business goals.

1. Determine your brand positioning

First, you’ll want to define your brand positioning in your respective market. Brand positioning is what helps your offering stand out from competitors. This statement outlines the who, when, why, and how of your brand identity — or what makes it unique through the eyes of the customer. 

Think of your brand highlights, including excellent customer service, competitive pricing, ease of use, superior quality, and the like. This essential step is how you’ll maintain a consistent brand image and loyal customer base.

2. Define your target market and target audience

Now that you’ve defined your brand statement, you need to understand and define who you’re marketing to. Since your products or services may be better suited for some types of buyers versus others, you’ll want to make sure your marketing efforts are aimed at the right target audience and target market. Let’s begin with your target market, or the broader group of people who would be interested in your brand. In the B2B world, you’ll identify your target companies with data including:

  • Company size
  • Company region
  • Number of employees
  • Company industry

Next up, you’ll define your target audience. This is the specific segment of that broader target market who will also be the focus of your marketing campaigns. To determine these individual prospects, we recommend using demographic data including:

  • Education level

Once you’ve gathered this information, you can begin creating buyer personas to help you understand how your potential customers make purchase decisions, as well as which marketing channels they’re likely to use. 

For example, if you’re trying to target entry-level employees ages 18–22 in the entertainment industry, it’s safe to say you can use content on social media platforms to attract them. 

3. Identify the buyer’s journey

Before a potential buyer makes a purchase, they’ll navigate through a process known as the buyer’s journey . This process has three stages for audiences:

  • Awareness: The buyer identifies that they have paint points and want to understand more about them.
  • Consideration: The buyer begins to look for and compare potential solutions to their problem.
  • Decision: The buyer is ready to purchase the best solution that fits their needs.

To help guide your potential buyers through their journey, it’s important to build a trusting relationship with them. So, your B2B marketing plan should meet the following:

  • Generate demand using top-of-the-funnel marketing tactics that boost awareness of a problem and spark interest in your offering;
  • Generate and convert leads using middle- and bottom-of-the-funnel marketing tactics that convert interest into action;
  • Build customer loyalty using marketing tactics that transition one-off customers to returning customers.

After understanding and identifying your buyer’s journey, we recommend creating a customer journey map for your company. This visual tool will help you define your customers’ needs and how they engage with your brand.

4. Choose your tactics and channels

This operational stage is where you’ll begin using different marketing tactics and selecting the channels that make the most sense for both your brand and target audience. 

By implementing inbound or outbound marketing tactics (even a combo), you can generate more leads at the top of the funnel. Then, you can make strategic decisions about things like acquisition, conversion, and retention.

5. Create assets and execute campaigns

Now that you’ve decided on the best tactics and channels to reach both your marketing goals and potential buyers, it’s time to start creating assets. These can — and should — continue to evolve as you test and optimize your campaigns. 71% of B2B buyers state they consume multiple assets to help with their decision-making process before moving on to communicating with a sales team. For many prospective buyers, this is their first interaction with your brand. That’s why it’s essential to create meaningful ones that’ll guide them to the final stage of the buyer’s journey. 

Having a range of attention-grabbing, relevant content will help your brand stand out and prospective buyers see how your product or service is the best option out there. Keep in mind the lengthier B2B sales cycle when it comes to executing and launching your marketing campaigns.

6. Measure and improve

After your content has been published, monitor its performance metrics, collect data, and determine how to maximize its greatest reach. This information will help ensure you’re achieving the best ROI on your B2B marketing efforts and help assess which tactics are the most effective.

B2B marketing tactics (that actually work)

B2B marketing tactics make up the how that you’ll use to serve your overarching strategy. The difference between a B2B marketing plan and a tactics is as follows:

  • A B2B marketing plan is the strategy you’ll define to meet your business objectives.
  • A B2B marketing tactic is a tool you’ll utilize to achieve the objectives outlined in your plan.

There are two main goals to keep in mind when selecting which digital marketing tactics are best suited for your B2B marketing efforts: generate demand and generate and convert leads .

Generate demand

At the top of the marketing funnel, the main purpose of generating demand is to highlight a problem that potential buyers have and show them your solution.

1. Content marketing

Content marketing is a digital marketing tactic that involves creating and publishing content that’s relevant and valuable to your audience. This is essential for B2B businesses as it has a great ROI and positions you as an expert in your field.

The goal with B2B content marketing is to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, generate leads, and ultimately convert prospects into buyers.

The goal of SEO is to drive more traffic to your website from search engine result pages (SERPs), which should ultimately lead to more buyers. To take advantage of this digital marketing tactic that goes alongside content marketing, you’ll optimize your website and online content with specific, relevant keywords.

We recommend conducting a full content analysis, keyword research, and content audit, followed by implementing link building, page title and meta description updates, and high-value keywords. 

For example, if your company offers SaaS tools to other large companies, you could implement the keyword “enterprise SaaS tools” into your web content. This will help increase visibility and improve the ranking of your web page on search engines like Google and Bing so that more people find your website when they’re searching for information related to your products or services.

3. Paid search/pay-per-click (PPC)

Another effective B2B marketing channel is paid search, or PPC marketing. This tactic involves utilizing Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and other ad channels to display your ad beside specific keywords when someone searches for them online. B

2B companies can generate a great number of leads and reach potential customers with paid advertising, as it allows them to target specific groups of people who have already shown an interest in your offering. 

Pro tip: Combine your paid search efforts with other marketing activities like email marketing, SEO, and content marketing for the best results.

4. Social media marketing (SMM)

Even though B2B focuses on targeting potential customers within other businesses, those B2B customers still serve as individuals who you’ll be solving a problem for.

With social media marketing , you can interact directly with prospects by learning what they want and getting feedback on your products or services. This tactic is especially important considering 72% of B2B buyers indicate using social media to research solutions, and 84% of B2B executives state using social media as a source for making buying decisions.

Popular social media channels for B2B are Twitter, Meta (Facebook and Instagram), and LinkedIn, with each platform having its own unique features that make it ideal for various audiences. 

Generate and convert leads

Once you’ve used the above tactics to generate demand and reach your target audience, you’ve reached the middle and bottom of the marketing funnel. Your goal here is lead generation — to encourage potential buyers to move to the purchase or decision-making stage of their buyer’s journey.

1. Retargeting

Retargeting is a great opportunity to place your business in front of the prospects who are familiar with your brand and have already taken certain actions on your website. For example, they may have visited your site and added items to their cart, but ultimately left without making a purchase.

Retargeting displays targeted ads for your products or services on different websites, social sites, and SERPs to entice potential buyers to visit again — and hopefully make a purchase.

2. Referrals

B2B referral marketing involves leveraging your existing customers to generate your company’s new B2B business leads. You can do this through a referral program which incentivizes prospects with an offer.

Referrals allow you to increase reach, grow your business without spending money on ads, and help build trust and credibility for your brand.

3. Email marketing

One of the best ways to convert leads into customers is through email marketing. You can use this personalized tactic alongside other types of marketing activities, like social media marketing and content marketing. It allows you to send newsletters, updates about your products or services, invitations to events, and any other brand-specific information you feel is beneficial for potential buyers to learn.

Email marketing lets you engage in a more personalized way with your audience by targeting them with specific messages. The greater your engagement, the more prospects that are likely to come your way. And more prospects mean more conversions, which ultimately leads to increased sales.

4. Marketing automation

This strategic method is commonly used to guide leads throughout their buyer’s journey, particularly at the point when they need a greater level of information and trust in a company before making a purchase.

Once you’ve identified that a user has visited your website or downloaded one of your free resources, marketing automation allows you to automatically follow up with them in hopes of building that trust to choose your brand as the solution to their problem.

B2B marketing examples

Now that you know what to do to get your B2B marketing plan up and running, we’ve put together a list of three successful B2B marketing plans to give you a spark of inspiration ahead of your next campaign.

Roche Diagnostics: Marketing automation

Roche Diagnostics is a leading healthcare company that provides pharmaceutical and healthcare testing solutions to companies worldwide. To help avoid marketing to prospects who may not be a good fit for their specific products and services, the company places a premium on targeting their ideal customer base. This is an especially important consideration for an industry as large as healthcare.

(Image: Roche website)

Roche leverages marketing automation tools to qualify and nurture leads. This also helps them understand where prospects are in their buyer’s journey. Marketing automation also allows them to compare customer data between business units to further increase engagement with existing customers.

Shopify: Content marketing

Content marketing is essential for any B2B company that wants to attract a large customer base. Shopify has invested in almost every type of content marketing, including free business courses and how-to guides, podcasts, and blogs.

(Image: Shopify website)

One aspect of its content marketing roster that stands out amongst competitors is their offering of over 20 free tools. These tools help solve problems for entrepreneurs, including generating a business name, making a logo, or creating a catchy slogan. Queries for these specific types of tools have thousands of monthly searches on Google. In turn, this increases the number of visits to their  overall website. 

IBM: Social media marketing

IBM does an excellent job using social media marketing in a compelling way to reach current and potential customers. The company showcases its legacy in the tech industry by sharing photos and videos on Instagram. Which, of course, builds trust and credibility with their target audience. IBM also shares videos of employees talking about their work experience and what new technologies they’re researching.

(Image: IBM’s Instagram page)

This humanistic approach of storytelling reinforces the brand’s company values around innovation, trust, and personal responsibility, as well as making them a company that has seen repeated success for the last 100 years. 

What is the difference between B2B and B2C marketing?

Now that you understand how to put together your marketing plan, you may be wondering how B2B marketing differs from B2C marketing.

The main difference between B2B and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing is the targeted buyer. B2B marketing is focused on selling to businesses, while B2C is about selling to individual consumers. 

B2C companies look into the interests and needs of individual consumers who often make a purchase out of desire.  On the flip side, B2B organizations provide a specific solution to another business’ challenge or need. This makes the B2B marketing funnel and sales cycle much longer as there are more decision-makers.

B2B marketing poses some unique challenges that B2C doesn’t have to deal with — all of which are important to keep in mind as you develop your marketing plan. These include: 

Decision-makers

B2C generally has one individual making a purchase decision, while B2B often requires many people. This is because with B2B, purchase decisions are typically sent up the management chain for approval and involve greater effort and team input. 

Longer sales cycle

Since there’s only one decision-maker involved in B2C, the sales cycle is much shorter than B2B. On average, B2B sales funnels take between four and eight months .

Brand strategy

With B2C, branding is all about speaking to and reaching customer emotions. B2B branding, on the other hand, focuses more on customers’ intellect by gathering data and conducting case studies to determine how the service or product is the most reliable solution.

Different platforms

Since B2C aims to reach customers rather than other businesses, they typically use digital platforms  for engagement. (Think Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram). B2B marketing focuses primarily on strategizing efforts in search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, LinkedIn, and email. 

Although B2B is more involved than B2C, and the same strategies won’t work for each of their respective audiences, there’s a lot B2B marketers can learn from B2C campaigns . 

The takeaway

Yes, there’s a lot that goes into a B2B marketing plan. And it should continue to evolve over time. So it’s important to keep track of metrics, try out new methods, channels, and tactics, and continuously optimize your strategy. The marketing tactics outlined above should all be added to your marketing toolbox.

Remember, even though it’s business-to-business marketing, you’re still speaking to other humans. The most effective B2B marketing is thoughtful, conversational, targeted, and relevant. Take action to maintain an understanding of your customers’ motivations, pain points, and what they need most. 

Looking for more insight on how to improve your marketing efforts? We’d love to chat .

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What is B2B Marketing? Definition, Examples, Templates

What is B2B Marketing? Definition, Examples, Templates

Casey O'Connor

  • What Is B2B Marketing?

How Do B2B and B2C Marketing Differ?

The b2b marketing funnel, what are the best b2b marketing channels, account-based b2b marketing, how b2b marketing works with sales, 5 examples of b2b companies doing marketing right.

B2B (business-to-business) marketing is the act of advertising, promoting, and educating prospects and customers (other businesses) about your product or service. 

B2B marketing strategies vary greatly from company to company and are decidedly different from those used in the B2C (“business to customer”) sphere. 

In this article, we’ll go over everything you need to know about B2B marketing: what it is, how it works, and how to master the unique aspects that set it apart from B2C marketing.

Here’s what we’ll cover: 

What Is B2B Marketing?  

B2B marketing refers to all of the traditional and digital marketing techniques a business uses to make their potential customers — other businesses — more aware of their offering and more engaged with their brand. 

B2B campaigns should be optimized to achieve high-quality lead generation . Most campaigns are represented by a variety of marketing channels and content.

For a B2B marketing team, knowing the pain points and motivators of their target audience is crucial for a successful campaign. Every single B2B marketing strategy relies on the team’s ability to authentically and tactfully speak to the heart of what their prospects really need.

B2B Pain Points

This task comes with a unique set of challenges, though. Unlike B2C marketing, where salespeople can safely rely on emotional drivers to move individual prospects through the sales funnel , B2B marketers need to speak to businesses’ primary drivers: financial sense and ROI.

B2B marketing and sales teams typically work with teams of stakeholders for each of their target accounts. Because of this, they usually need to deploy a number of marketing strategies and sales campaigns simultaneously to ensure they’re meeting the needs of each of the many buyer personas involved in the decision-making process.

In short, the objective of B2B marketing is to enable other businesses to become more aware of your brand, highlight the value of your product, and convert high-quality prospects into loyal and long-term customers. 

Although they share an important keyword, B2B marketing and B2C marketing have very little in common. They require completely different approaches, skill sets, and execution.

There is, of course, the most obvious difference, one that we’ve already touched on: B2C companies sell products to individual buyers for personal use; B2B companies sell products or services (software as a service, or SaaS, is a particularly popular B2B category) to other businesses.

Let’s take a look now at some of the other major differences between these two forms of marketing.

Length of Sales Cycle

B2B sales cycles are almost always longer and more complex than those of B2C.

A B2C sales cycle can be completed in mere minutes; on the other hand, it’s completely normal for a B2B sales cycle to stretch on for months or even over a year.

Sales cycle length has a direct impact on marketing decisions and strategies. B2B marketers need to design their campaigns accordingly and prepare to engage and nurture leads for the long haul. 

Number of Decision-Makers

In a B2C sale, the only decision-maker involved is the consumer themself. The buyer does not need to consult with or gain approval from anyone else. 

B2B sales , though, typically involve a team of decision-makers for each purchase. This adds complexity and time to the process, and can represent a challenge for marketers who need to speak to the needs of a variety of personas. 

Education & Engagement Needs

The education and engagement needs of a B2C buyer differ greatly from those of a B2B decision-maker.

B2C buyers prefer to be educated through entertainment and are willing to allow emotion into the process. In fact, most B2C purchases are based entirely on emotions.

B2B buyers, on the other hand, prefer more traditional forms of content like blogs, white papers, and case studies. 

Keep in mind, though, that most B2B buyers are already well-versed in the product you’re selling; no matter its format, your content needs to be valuable and innovative in order to really engage a B2B buyer.

Buying Process

Overwhelmingly, B2C buyers prefer to make purchases without any direct input from sales or marketing. They are happy to conduct research and evaluate products entirely on their own and with their own expertise. 

That being said, although most B2B sales are notoriously “high touch,” even today’s B2B buyers are eager to leave marketing and sales out of the equation for as long as possible. In fact, most B2B buyers are already 57% of the way through the buying process by the time they reach out to sales. Marketing now takes the lion’s share of responsibility in nurturing prospects through the funnel.

The New B2B Marketing & Sales Funnel

But don’t use that as an excuse to check out or sit back — when B2B buyers do eventually reach out, they expect custom and personalized support and a bespoke buying experience.

Deciding Factors

Perhaps the most important difference between B2C and B2B marketing is the fact that they design campaigns for two entirely different buyer purposes.

B2C buyers are driven primarily by emotion. They make purchases for entertainment, personal gain, and sometimes even in direct response to an emotion they feel. They don’t care as much about the longevity of what they’re buying; instead, they purchase to satiate an immediate emotional need.

B2B buyers fall on the other side of the spectrum. Above all, their purchasing decisions are driven by logic. They value efficiency, long-term solution, and strong ROI value. There is little to no emotion involved in the purchasing process.

The B2B marketing funnel, when designed correctly, should align with the buyer’s journey.

B2B Buyers Journey

This funnel is designed with strategic content at specific intervals for maximum engagement.

B2B Marketing Funnel Content Strategy

In order to design a high-converting campaign, marketers need to develop a specific set of criteria. If marketers can complete these tasks successfully, and in collaboration with the sales team, their marketing funnel will have a strong foundation on which to build a variety of campaigns.

Well-Defined Buyer Persona

If nothing else, marketers absolutely must develop buyer personas for the various decision-makers in the purchasing process.

B2B Buyer Persona Example

These personas will help marketers design effective B2B content marketing campaigns. It’s important to remember that each team of decision-makers will include multiple roles, including influencers, champions, skeptics, and C-level executives. Marketers should take care to develop unique and tailored buyer personas for each of them.

Thorough Competitor Analysis

A comprehensive SWOT analysis will help your marketing and sales teams position themselves as the best choice to potential B2B customers.

SWOT analysis

The results of this kind of analysis will help the marketing team improve brand awareness strategies and enhance the customer experience through the marketing and sales processes.

Establish Conversion and Business Goals

Clear and appropriate goals will help drive your business-to-business marketing strategy. Try writing your goals using the SMART goal framework for optimal results.

B2B S.M.A.R.T. Goals

Data-Driven Analysis

There’s little to gain in creating a marketing strategy or campaign if you don’t follow through by tracking the metrics and KPIs it generates. 

Teams can track and analyze marketing success through various relevant metrics: the number of web visitors, leads, MQLs, SQLs, sales opportunities, and converted customers. This data can shed light on valuable insights that can help improve performance. 

There are a wide variety of marketing channels — tools, services, or platforms that businesses use to reach their target audience — that B2B marketers can leverage in order to reach their buyers.

Although it’s prudent to use a mix-and-match approach — dispatch campaigns through a number of different channels simultaneously to speak to different buyer personas and stages of the buyer’s journey — there are two universal “must-dos” that marketers should keep in mind when designing campaigns for today’s sales world.

First, think digital. These days, over half of all B2B buyers are millennials . This demographic is fluent in all things technology, and they expect a high level of intuitive automation in the marketing and sales process.

Second, take the time to develop a solid lead-nurturing strategy. Many businesses lose out on a tremendous number of leads because they failed to do so. Although 27% of leads arrive at the funnel sales ready, only 35% of companies have a lead-nurturing strategy that’s designed to guide them to close.

Shocking B2B Marketing Statistics

The results of implementing a lead-nurture strategy are dramatic: 67% of B2B sellers report a 10% increase in sales after embracing one. And for 15% of those companies, sales jumped 30%. Nurturing your leads properly increases your chances of converting by 47% .

With those points in mind, let’s take a look at some of the best and most popular B2B marketing channels.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is one way that B2B marketers “reach” their target audience. That word is quoted because inbound marketing is actually all about not reaching out, and instead attracting prospects in.

Marketers can design things like quizzes, calculators, and tools to hook website visitors and draw them in. They can strategically contribute to relevant, popular publications, blogs, and forums. They can also leverage the power of SEO (search engine optimization) and social media to position themselves right at a prospect’s fingertips at exactly the right time. All of those things are examples of inbound marketing.

Content Marketing

The content marketing strategy should be one of the core components of a B2B business plan; 87% of buyers report that content has a major or moderate impact on buying decisions.

Buyers want to be educated about the characteristics and financial benefits of your B2B product or service. There are a number of types of content that marketers can use to deliver those messages.

B2B content marketing

Your buyer personas and sharing platforms will help dictate what kind of content to use and when. You wouldn’t, for example, share a long-form blog post on Twitter. 

Find your winning content: Yesware’s Attachment Tracker helps you identify your most engaging content

Account-Based Marketing

Account-based marketing, which we’ll go over in more detail later in this article, refers to a scenario in which marketers research, identify, and engage specific best-fit companies. And deliver a completely customized marketing campaign unique to their company profile and needs to each one.

B2B account based marketing ABM

Account-based marketing is a particularly effective strategy for B2B companies that sell to enterprise clients. 

Drip Campaigns

In terms of lead-nurturing marketing strategies, drip campaigns are hard to beat.

B2B drip campaigns

Drip campaigns are one way to approach email marketing. A drip campaign is named as such because it “drips” information to buyers in a way that subtly and productively moves them down the funnel until they are engaged enough to purchase. They’re highly effective, too; drip campaigns have been shown to generate a 50% increase in sales-ready leads .

Social Media

It’s no secret by now that social selling is here to stay. More than ever, buyers are using social media to help them make purchase decisions: 75% of B2B buyers and 84% of C-level executives report using social media to inform their purchase decisions.

Marketers and salespeople can leverage social media marketing on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to connect with buyers and provide valuable content.

It’s important to ensure your messaging lines up with the typical use of the platform you choose. Facebook, for example, is usually more casual and “social,” while LinkedIn works better for more formalized content like high-ranking blog posts and whitepapers. 

Landing Page

Some marketers publish expertly-designed standalone landing pages with high-converting copy and a clear call-to-action. There is little to no navigation on this page, and no links other than the single primary CTA. This makes it easy for prospects to avoid distraction and focus on the desired end result: following through to purchase.

In addition to the many digital tools available to marketers, there are also a number of “traditional” or in-person strategies for attracting and converting B2B leads .

  • Trade shows or conferences
  • Direct mail
  • Word-of-mouth referrals

Using a combination of some of the strategies outlined above will ensure that your marketing efforts capture leads from all corners of the target market. 

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a marketing approach that prioritizes personalized marketing and sales resources for a hand-picked subset of highly qualified leads.

ABM works really well for businesses that sell to enterprise companies. The idea is that these “big fish” will appreciate and respond to a custom marketing plan created specifically for their needs.

In the simplest terms, designing an ABM strategy looks like this: 

1. Identify and Research High-Level Accounts  

Start this process by studying your most successful current accounts. Note any similarities between them, and identify other companies with similar profiles.

An ideal customer profile (ICP) will help you create a system for how to identify your most promising prospects.

The Components of an ICP

After you’ve identified a best-fit account, research as much as you can about their business and needs.   

2. Identify Decision-Makers

The next key component of your research will include identifying the individual employees at your target accounts that will ultimately be responsible for collaborating on the purchase decision. Once you’ve identified this team, you can create buyer personas for each of them to help you tailor your marketing. 

3. Design Your Campaign

Use what you know about the decision-makers at each company to craft a custom marketing campaign designed to meet the exact educational and business needs the company requires to move forward with purchase.

An account-based marketing strategy can include any of the techniques outlined above. Other effective tactics include custom offers, invitation-only events, and individual trainings and webinars. 

The single, most important aspect of a successful B2B marketing strategy is whether or not marketing and sales have aligned .

When marketing and sales work together, they gain a deep understanding of the customer. The two teams can provide a feedback loop for one another. This collaboration can generate new and exciting ideas for content marketing, and can help salespeople maximize where they spend their time and effort.

It’s very important for these two to be aligned because 68% of companies report having trouble getting enough quality data leads.

B2B marketing can sometimes fall into a rut of becoming boring or bland, especially when the product or industry is on the technical side. Take a look at some of our favorite examples of B2B marketing that do an incredible job of resonating with their audiences.

Google AdWords

In this ad for their AdWords service, Google uses very effective storytelling to promote its product.

Google uses this vignette to show other businesses how easy it is for B2C customers to find and purchase their products.

General Electric

General Electric uses video marketing very effectively by humanizing their otherwise complicated and technical product. 

Although this ad doesn’t mention their product or service at all, it does highlight how GE views their business: built by real people, for real people.

Deloitte is a big-name brand, but many people likely couldn’t tell you much more about the company than that. That’s partially because Deloitte actually provides a handful of different products and services — consulting, tech, auditing, and more.

To mitigate the fact that they have so many offerings — and, therefore, so many different buyer personas to speak to — they created Deloitte Insights .

Deloitte Insights is their educational content page, where they house everything from blog posts to videos to podcasts. This content hub allows Deloitte to position itself as an industry expert to a variety of markets, and showcase itself as a company that’s willing to help solve their customers’ problems.

Caterpillar

Caterpillar’s marketing team served up another one of our favorites with their construction-equipment-driven game of Jenga.

This campaign does a fantastic job of injecting some fun into the otherwise technical and serious world of heavy-duty machinery.

Slack, recently in the news for their huge Salesforce buyout, relies on a solid combination of word-of-mouth referrals, free trials, and social selling. These strategies have afforded them tremendous organic brand traction — 8,000 people signed up on the first day , and that number doubled two weeks later. They now have 4+ million daily active users.

What B2B marketing strategies does your team use? Are there any new ones you can implement after reading this article? Remember to encourage collaboration between marketing and sales as often as possible for the highest-converting B2B marketing campaigns. 

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10 B2B Marketing Plan Examples To Help You Stay Organized

Jesse Seilhan

Jesse Seilhan

10 B2B Marketing Plan Examples To Help You Stay Organized

As complicated as B2B marketing can be—it’s easy to get caught up in different B2B marketing strategies, channels, campaigns, and tactics. Having a plan is the best way to keep things secure and structured.

Whether your plan is meticulous, loose, or a combination of both, having that plan will keep you focused. Depending upon what market you are targeting, you will need a different mix of strategies and channels addressed in your marketing plan.

b2b marketing plans example

For B2B marketers, creating marketing plans is part of your job description. Your marketing plan dictates how your business runs as it helps develop content, timelines, etc. Developing content requires an understanding of your market’s demand.

Market demand informs what content customers want to read—and this is informed by what questions (or keywords) they are typing into the search engines.

When you provide the content your customers are looking for, your business is more likely to grow.

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10 B2B Marketing Plan Examples to Inspire You

Of course, knowing where to start with your marketing plan can be a challenge. To help you find direction, we’ve rounded up ten marketing plan examples to help you stay organized.

#1: Brilliant B2B Digital Marketing E-book by Smart Insights

Image of strong B2B digital marketing e-book.

When looking for B2B marketing plans, a great place to start is with actually building the outline of the plan before deciding what tactics, strategies, and KPIs to fill it with.

Enter Rene Power and his Brilliant B2B digital marketing e-book . You’ll find the critical questions you need to ask yourself and your company to understand your current position in the field.

Are you targeting the right keywords? Is your website built for the future?

Sometimes you need to start there before you can employ that killer email marketing strategy or clever viral campaign.

#2: Building an Email Marketing Strategy by Bronto

Developed by e-mail marketing consultant, Tamara Gielen , this plan is all about using email for marketing advantages. It focuses on creating a comprehensive plan that uses emails as primary market outreach .

image2 2

Email marketing utilizes customer outreach as a way to create focused content as well as grow your customer base. Perfect for marketers and market executives, this plan is strategic yet straightforward.

It’s important to remember that different types of outreach follow different best practices. For instance, you wouldn’t send the same copy in an email as you would a LinkedIn message. For email outreach, however, we’ve done an extensive amount of testing on how to increase response rates and closed/won opportunities.

For actionable tips on how to increase your response rate in your email outreach, you can read this post we wrote on how we improved our email response rates in our link building outreach campaigns.

Screenshot of article that helps enhance B2B marketing strategies.

#3: The Four Step Marketing Plan for Ideal Campaigns

SJWeaver keeps it simple with their Four Step Marketing Plan for Ideal Campaigns. However, there is actually complexity under the hood, so we’ll break it down into easy-to-swallow steps:

  • Step 1 : The Unique Selling Propositions/Points
  • Step 2 : The Platforms and Offers
  • Step 3 : The Marketing Arsenal
  • Step 4 : Marketing Automation

And if you’re more of a visual learner, they’ve compiled some solid videos that break down each step into more detail:

Screenshot of video content that can enhance your B2B marketing strategies.

While not purely focused on B2B, this marketing plan is great for anyone struggling to define their unique selling propositions or creating the automation needed to support their marketing.

#4: Brainrider’s B2B Content Marketing Strategy Template

Detailed and easy to understand, this plan runs through B2B marketing basics. This tool provides a framework or “skeleton”  for marketers to use as a template for their plans.

image3 2

The plan runs through prioritizing objectives and articulating your business goals to customers. It also focuses on targeting your audience and finally creating content for them.

In short, this is another highly-customizable B2B marketing plan. As long as you’ve got the framework, there’s no limit to what strategies you can test out, and start making a difference for your clients!

image4 2

#5: The Complete Guide to B2B Marketing

When Salesforce decides to throw their hat into the ring, people listen. Their Complete Guide to B2B Marketing is a great piece for beginning marketers and expert executors alike, and it includes beneficial checklists and actionable worksheets to incorporate with your team.

Below, you will find an example of a “Call-to-Action Checklist,” which is helpful for marketers to ensure that landing pages and blog content leave an impact and encourage their viewers to take action… every time.

Screenshot of Salesforce CTA checklist to enhance B2B marketing strategies.

B2B marketing strategies sometimes focus too narrowly on one aspect of the funnel without taking a holistic approach to your entire philosophy behind your marketing. This marketing plan helps you understand models that marketers need to make a great plan, tests theories in a real way and then enables you to learn and grow from those same exercises.

It’s a must-read for all B2B marketers and should become a roadmap for those losing their way in the digital world!

#6: Business-to-Business Marketing Summary by SAGE

The digital marketing template focuses mainly on the top internet marketing strategies .

The plan teaches readers to build a framework, communicate better, and also teaches many other skills that lead to successful B2B marketing. The most significant advantage of this sample plan is that it is widely comprehensive.

Different marketing strategy situations are explored. The most successful strategies are identified.

In short, this B2B marketing plan example hits all the right spots and won’t leave you confused.

#7: B2B Marketing Segmentation by Circle Research

Compiled and created by Circle Research , this plan is more of a “how to” that focuses on B2B market segmentation. It looks at case studies and different marketing plan approaches to inform and build new plans.

image6 2

The plan also breaks down segmentation.  You’ll find the following included:

  • Outlines the different approaches to segmentation in B2B environments.
  • Provides a step-by-step guide to adopting each approach.
  • Looks at how to effectively implement and action a segmentation model.
  • Offers links to B2B segmentation case studies.

The overall template offers an interesting look at B2B marketing plans through a different lens. Marketers can benefit from this slightly elevated approach after taking the time to dive in.

#8: Single Statement Templates from CMI

Single statement marketing plans are an actual thing. They may sound minimalist, but they are a solid way to stay focused.

Developed by Content Marketing Institute , single statement plans refer to creating an objective by establishing a single, active, mission statement for your campaign. The statement will be one that hits all the points and goals of your company. It should include  what you do, who you help, and why you help them .

Content Marketing Institute offers useful examples and templates for this plan. In a sort of “ad-lib” set up, marketers can fill in the blanks and create a statement that acts as a starting point for a marketing plan.

See an example of this below:

image7 2

#9: The Why.Who.How Workbook from CMI

This is another big find from Content Marketing Institute. Audience-focused B2B marketing plans  use your audience demographic to fuel content. The idea is to build a target audience with in-depth customer profiles. They should be focused to the point that each ICP (ideal customer profile) has a name, a job title, key concern, personality, interests, and age.

Example of B2B marketing plan to reach targeted demographic easier.

You can also give them a funnel position, the type of B2B needs they have, and what they care about in terms of metrics. The more your customer develops a well-rounded persona, the more you can take action to serve them better. This template is part of a larger whole, but it is a great starting point.

#10: The Essential Data-Driven Content Strategy from CMI

The last entry from Content Marketing Institute to discuss are  data-driven B2B marketing plans . Looking at your data is essential to craft your marketing plan and conquer your goals. Craft the plan backward by looking at the results of previous plans:

  • Take the data you have compiled and study it.
  • See what worked and what did not.
  • See what B2B customers responded to, and what fell flat.
  • See who your content reached, and where you could reach a bit more.

Data-driven B2B marketing plans are a way of fixing past mistakes to make stronger decisions moving forward. Reverse engineering your campaigns  from where your previous strategies have converted users is a great way to start your strategy off on the right foot.

These 10 B2B marketing plan examples should help you come up with plans of your own. The success of your business hinges on how well you market it and its services. By studying these plans, you can stay organized, find focus, and begin creating plans that work. If you want to know how we develop marketing plans backed by financial modeling, we’d love to get on a call.  Schedule a call  today to find out how our proven Customer Generation approach will bring your tech company results.

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B2B Marketing Plan

Your B2B Marketing Plan for 2024 (incl. Template)

16 february 2024 by jessie taylor.

There's plenty of resources out there for creating B2C and D2C marketing plans, but B2B companies seem to get left high and dry.

B2B companies, especially those in SaaS and tech like Leadfeeder , face different challenges and have different goals. You have to consider how your target audience and industry impact what marketing strategies are effective for your business.

So, we're going to share the process we're using to design our 2024 marketing plan. I hope this step-by-step guide (and marketing plan template!) will help you start the new year off right.

Note: Leadfeeder is the lead generation tool you've been dreaming of. Sign up for a free trial and start finding hidden, high-quality leads today.

Why do you need to create an updated B2B marketing plan?

Marketing is always evolving.

The strategies and tools you used this year might not help you get ahead next year. Even if the core tenets of marketing are the same (think lead generation , SEO, paid ads, and content marketing), the strategies and martech tools you use to implement a successful strategy may have.

When you think back, COVID-19 completely changed how many companies worked, who they hired, what goals they focused on, and even their revenue.

Covid economic activity chart

As a B2B company, it's crucial to be ready to adapt to whatever is going on in the world.

For example, with Leadfeeder by Dealfront, we use IP addresses to identify the companies visiting your site . During the pandemic, we had to change the way we track companies to make sure we were still accurate.

Other companies have changed the platforms they use, the ads they create, even the type of content they publish.

It's not a whole new world, but things have definitely changed.

To be successful, your 2024 marketing plan needs to match the new reality. Here's a five-step guide to get it right.

5 steps to create an updated B2B marketing plan 

B2B companies struggle to generate more leads, find effective marketing strategies and improve conversion rates . A well-planned marketing strategy can help you overcome those challenges.

Not sure where to start with your 2024 B2B marketing plan? This five-step guide will get you started. 

1. Examine your past marketing success and failures

Before you set goals for next year, consider what worked last year. Did your email marketing strategy kill it? Was your new lead generation tool a flop? Are paid ads spending more than they're bringing in?

You can also use tools like Leadfeeder (and obviously Google Analytics) to see what content your website visitors spent time-consuming vs. quickly bounced from. Hotjar could be another neat element to bring in to literally see where people hung out on the site.

I'm going to be honest — this step can be lengthy, but it's crucial to avoid wasting time and resources on strategies that don't work.

Review each segment of your marketing strategies and answer these questions:

What was the goal of this strategy?

Did we meet those goals? Why or why not?

What tools did we use? Did they meet our needs?

What can we improve? (Or, should we scrap this strategy entirely?)

2. Pay attention to new and changing marketing trends in 2024

No one can predict the future, but paying attention to the current marketing landscape is crucial to designing an effective 2024 marketing plan.

Here are a few trends our team is paying attention to this coming year:

Automation : Automation is taking over the marketing world. While we don't suggest turning your entire marketing strategy over to the robots, there are areas it can help, such as marketing automation tools , automated bidding for paid ads, and automated integrations that push data from one tool to another.

Machine learning and AI : This is an exciting field that just keeps growing. Machine learning and AI allow algorithms to analyze a set of data or rules and use it to understand unrelated data. AI helps B2B companies understand our customers better, personalize our marketing, predict changes in the industry, and inform content creation.

Personalization : There's been a permanent shift towards personalized marketing efforts. More than half of all consumers say they will keep buying from a company that offers a personalized experience. Consider adding it to your marketing plan.

Segment stat graphic

More (and better) content : B2B buyers read an average of 13 pieces of content before they decide to buy, so creating engaging content should still be a key part of your 2024 marketing plan.

SEO is still the reigning champ : Nope, SEO is not dead. In fact, Google is getting smarter and smarter. Pay attention to new SEO trends like natural language processing and passage ranking .

3. Review your buyer personas 

A good marketing plan is designed to move a specific customer through the buyer's journey. Do you know who your customers are?

At Leadfeeder, we actually have two main buyer personas — sales and marketing teams. We've found that most of our top customers derived from the marketing side, so we've adjusted our content and marketing strategies to focus on them.

And it's made a huge difference. We wouldn't have realized the shift if we hadn't taken the time to review our buyer personas and make sure we were targeting the right market.

4. Consider new marketing tools

There's a ton of marketing tools out there. (That might be an understatement.)

It's overwhelming, I know. Rather than trying all the new tools out there, take a look at your biggest challenges of the last year.

Where did you fall short? What took up most of your time? Where do you want to improve?

Then look for marketing and sales tools that specifically target those tasks.

For example, if finding leads is a problem, Leadfeeder can help. Using a small bit of code, we track who visits your site and show you how to reach out to them. It only takes a few minutes to set up and we have an awesome free trial .

Here's a peek at our dashboard, where you can see new leads, filter them by location, industry, etc., and view contact information:

Leadfeeder home page

Other tools we love include Pipedrive , a sales CRM and pipeline management tool, and Mailchimp, a killer email automation platform — we have an integration with both of these tools .

The point is to find marketing tools that solve problems for you, not just ones that pay for the most ads on LinkedIn.

5. Outline short and long-term goals

Now it's time to lay out some goals. What do you want to accomplish in the next year? Does that goal align with the overall business goals of your c-suite? It's important to outline both short and long-term goals to keep yourself on track.

For example, your long-term goal might be to increase lead generation by 24 percent in the coming year, while your first-quarter goal might be to implement a new lead gen tool and increase leads by 15 percent.

Having both goals creates a framework to reach that larger goal.

We like to use the SMART framework for goal setting to ensure goals are clear and trackable.

SMART goals guide from Leadfeeder

B2B marketing plan template

After following the steps above, you should have most of the information needed to create your 2024 B2B marketing plan.

This checklist will help you create a usable document:

Leadfeeder B2B marketing plan template

Success starts with a strong marketing plan

Creating a winning B2B marketing plan for 2024 is the key to growing your business in the new year. Yes, it can be time-consuming. But, investing the time now will ensure your team is ready to hit the ground running in January.

Note: Is lead generation part of your 2024 marketing plan? See how Leadfeeder can help you uncover hidden leads and turn them into customers. Sign up for your free 14-day trial today .

Jessie Taylor

Jessie works in Content Marketing and Social Media for 6+ years and creates authentic, brand-led content that helps turn target audience into customers.

Now that you're here

Leadfeeder is a tool that shows you companies that visit your website. Leadfeeder generates new leads, offers insight on your customers and can help you increase your marketing ROI.

If you liked this blog post, you'll probably love Leadfeeder, too.

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How To Write an Effective B2B Marketing Plan

on November 9, 2022 - blog , B2B Strategy and Messaging , Campaign and Content Development/Execution , Strategy and Messaging

b2b marketing business plan

Marketers have a love-hate relationship with the end of the year. While it is exciting to wrap up a year and review performance, it is also a bit chaotic when planning for a new year. Have you thought about your B2B marketing plan for next year? Well, it might be a good idea to start. While it can be tempting to procrastinate planning, especially when the end of the year can be a busy time for organizations, it is valuable to stay on top of planning. Being fully prepared for the first quarter of the year can help an organization maximize leads and revenue and refrain from missing any opportunities. Whether the year is coming to an end, or you are reviewing and editing your plan during the second quarter of the year, it is important to keep certain things in mind when developing a B2B marketing plan. These four components will explain how to write a B2B marketing plan that will increase leads, opportunities and revenue.

Understand What Has and Has Not Been Effective

While it is ideal for all marketing efforts to be effective, the reality is, some marketing activities are more effective than others. Understanding which efforts performed well, did not perform well or only somewhat had an impact, is necessary to determine what should be included in a new B2B marketing plan. Be sure to evaluate all your marketing tactics. This includes everything from content marketing to social media to search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing and more. Everything that qualifies as a marketing activity in your organization should be analyzed and helps round out the B2B marketing plan moving forward. Consider these three questions when determining what has and has not been effective:

  • Which activities moved the marketing engine forward most effectively and influenced company growth and revenue?
  • Which activities were star performers in terms of response and conversion rates, cost-per-lead, total revenue generated and overall influence?
  • Which activities did not see any success and had minimal impact on overall marketing and revenue performance?

Have Knowledge of Emerging B2B Marketing Trends

In any industry, but especially marketing, it is important to be in tune with current and emerging trends as well as changes to technology, software and more. Trends influence many aspects of marketing that impact B2B marketing plans and overall business decisions. For example, with the addition of new social media platforms comes the opportunity for advertising on those platforms. Understanding how popular that social media platform is, who the audience is, what the costs look like and the potential for success will largely determine if advertising on that platform is worthwhile. As new trends take hold, such as new social media platforms, the usage of videos , the inclusion of voice search in SEO and more, there will need to be more consideration as to if and how to include them in your B2B marketing plan. Whether they are included or not, being up to date on new trends ensures you are keeping up with the industry changes and even gaining a competitive advantage.

Be Clear on Sales and Marketing Objectives

Too many marketing teams create goals and tactics that are not necessarily aligned with sales. This crucial error negatively impacts the relationship between sales and marketing and creates issues when developing a B2B marketing plan. It is important to be in the know of how the sales team is working and what they need from marketing to move prospects forward. For example, understanding the type and volume of leads that the sales team needs and when the time is to pass a qualified lead to them. Taking the time to strategize with your sales team also gives you the ability to revisit the segments and audiences you are trying to reach, tactics to get to them and the information they need before purchasing your product or services. While this is most likely a known thing, it is always valuable to have a conversation with sales since they are at the forefront of what’s going on in the market by being face-to-face with prospects every day. As a result, you will wind up with aligned goals and ensure that sales get what they need, not just what marketing thinks they should have. An empowered sales team is a more effective sales team, which directly impacts the bottom line and marketing’s value within the organization.

Consider All Possibilities When Creating Your B2B Marketing Plan

With trends, data and other teams in mind, it is time to put those together and create a marketing plan that will help your organization achieve success. Start by outlining all of the possible activities, while keeping in past performance, and prioritize them based on your expectation of what each one should produce. For example, if you found this year that SEO was a key factor in driving people to your website, this is something to devote more time and resources to in the future. In contrast, if you found social media efforts did not have a huge impact, but you want to keep a presence alive, then it might go lower on the list. Consider all possibilities. Maybe videos were not a large part of marketing activities in previous years, but it might be something to include this year based on trends. Whatever the case may be, do not rule out anything. Some activities have to be included, like content creation and branding. Content and branding heavily drive many other activities in the B2B marketing plan, so including these is non-negotiable.

Another thing to keep in mind is the budget. Including budget allotment for each activity will ensure it is approved and remains under the targeted budget. Having specific numbers tied to expenditures gives you the ability to properly evaluate cost-per-lead and other metrics that will help assess the efficacy of a marketing activity. And, it almost goes without saying, but you need to put resources into each of the marketing activities too. After budget tasks, it is a matter of creating a marketing calendar, and then individual action plans for each part of it. When it is all put together, it will surely be a detailed B2B marketing plan aimed to deliver success and increased revenue for organizations.

Want to get started on your yearly B2B marketing plan or make adjustments to your current one? Contact us today or request a free marketing consultation! We’ve helped many of our clients put together B2B marketing plans around their goals.

Contact Launch Marketing to see how our turn-key marketing services can generate leads and drive revenue for your business.

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B2B Marketing Strategies: Free Templates, Examples & Definitions

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B2B marketing strategies are a plan that is developed by a business selling to another business looking to drive results by influencing their potential customers. It’s the strategic direction that leads to the tactics that will be implemented in the coming months to achieve objectives that align with the overarching business goals.

Whether you’re the size of Salesforce, or you’re still in the early days trying to win your first 100 customers—the primary goal is still the same: Influence your potential customers.

And in order to win those customers and become profitable (or stay that way), your B2B brand is going to need a marketing strategy.

But where do you even begin to create a B2B marketing strategy?

You’ve come to the right place. In this post we’re going to share a 5-step process, tried and tested templates and some examples that will inspire the approach you take for creating B2B marketing strategy that drives results.

Let’s jump in and discuss:

In a rush? We’ll send you a PDF version of this post.

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By downloading this resource, you’ll also start receiving a few emails per week on B2B growth and content marketing.

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B2b marketing strategy process:.

  • Start with customer research
  • Conduct qualitative and quantitative analysis
  • Establish key objectives and metrics
  • Develop your B2B customer journey map
  • Identify executional marketing tactics

B2B Brand Strategies:

  • Transparency
  • Cause & Purpose Association
  • Being The Underdog
  • Employee Empowerment
  • Launch Free Tools
  • Own Your Position Of Strength
  • Being Customer-Focused

B2B Lead Generation Tactics:

  • Downloadable Assets
  • Host Webinars
  • B2B Review Sites
  • Paid Search Advertising
  • Paid Social Advertising

Why you need a B2B marketing strategy

The first question you’re probably asking is this:

Why is a documented and well-researched marketing strategy so important?

Is it really worth taking resources away from executing on marketing tactics and marketing automation to put together this plan—especially when your marketing team is small (or non-existent)?

The answer is:

Absolutely.

And in this post, we’re going to talk about why exactly that is, how you can navigate the process, and share some real-world examples from brands you know (and maybe love).

First, let’s use a simple example to compare B2B to B2C from a marketing standpoint:

For B2B companies, the potential buyer pool is typically smaller and less urgently looking to buy. Everyone needs toilet paper and (almost) everyone wants new shoes, but far fewer people will rush out to buy surface drills, ultrasound machines or a brand new customer support software on a whim.

In other words, if your approach to marketing is “sit back and hope our customers break down the door to throw money at us” — you’re probably going to be waiting for a while.

There’s still power in word of mouth, but many organizations aren’t in a position to let customers find them organically—and typically very slowly.

inbound marketing model

A B2B marketing strategy dictates how an organization will be proactive in attracting customers, closing sales and remaining on the road to continued financial success.

Having a marketing strategy also allows organizations to iterate on their marketing efforts over time. Experimenting to learn what works and what doesn’t for your customer segment can be valuable, but only if you’re able to capture data you can learn from in the future.

Very few companies have gone completely under from a single bad marketing decision. It’s happened, but it typically happens after the cumulation of several bad decisions, and you want to give yourself every advantage to avoid those pitfalls.

So if you’re sold the why of a B2B marketing strategy , keep reading—it’s time for the how .

How to create a B2B marketing strategy:

Alright, so now that we’ve touched on the *why* behind a documented & research-backed strategy—it’s time to talk about *how* you can do it.

(Hint: It starts with a good amount of research)

1. Start with customer research

There’s something that many marketers agree is incredibly important, and yet many companies don’t do it anywhere near as much as they should:

Customer research.

If you don’t know what your customers’ pain points *actually* are beyond just a wild guess, your marketing decisions aren’t going to be based on research and your chances of flopping are much higher.

Don’t be fooled, either—customer research goes beyond anecdotal evidence that your audience is on a specific channel or is purchasing a certain way.

The best marketers don’t just know more about the latest channel, tool or tactic. They know more about… people. You can find plenty of crafty ways to get your message in front of prospects, but if you want those people to actually pay attention—rather than just ignoring you—you better do your research. — Katelyn Bourgoin , Growth Strategist & Trainer

We have a full post that tells you everything you need to know about how to find your target audience . It touches on identifying what your core offering to your customers is & building customer personas .

Here’s the high level view of the 4-step persona process, but the full post is worth a read if you’re still at the persona-building stage.

Marketing Persona

The big takeaway that we’ll repeat here is this:

Actually talk to your customers. And if you don’t have any, talk to the customers of your competition.

“Instead of trying to guess what your customers were thinking, you can actually ask them what they were thinking.” — Josh Gallant, Digital & SEO Strategist with Foundation

Before you start planning your marketing strategy , you need to figure out if you’re on the right track—will your efforts create value, or are you trying to fish with dynamite?

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” — Sun Tzu in The Art of War

But talking to your customers is only the first step in the research process.

It’s not enough to just send a survey, book a few calls, take some notes and call it a day. Your research needs to go deeper than that. And that’s where the qualitative and quantitative analysis comes into play.

2. Conduct qualitative & quantitative analysis

Talked to your customers? Fantastic.

Collecting answers to interview or survey questions from your customers is only the first step.

What you have at this point is data —not insights.

The same goes for having Google Analytics installed on your website (if you don’t, you should). Just because it’s collecting data doesn’t mean you have insights in a bottle.

Next—you need to analyze that data.

  • Look at the customer research you’ve collected.
  • Look at common behaviours and actions that are happening on your website
  • If you have a sales team, ask them what questions come up the most
  • If you have active social media pages , look at what people are messaging you
  • If you have a support team, ask them what problems are the most common

And when you’re analyzing this data, remember that you can find insights using two different approaches—qualitative and quantitative.

Qualitative analysis…

Is intentionally open-ended and not necessarily based on numbers. (i.e. asking a customer “What’s one thing that frustrates you the most about ABC product?” to understand what their most common problems are.)

Quantitative analysis…

Relies on questions that can be answered with data, numbers and/or statistics. (i.e. researching which questions are getting the most search volume in Google, and using the findings to prioritize your customers’ most common problems.)

To gain the best possible understanding of the market and your customers, you’ll need both.

Here are two of our favourite methods to put into practice here:

1. Ask your customers what their biggest pain point is.

And leave it as open-ended as you can. If you ask leading questions here (i.e. “Is ABC a major pain point for you?”) you’ll miss out on what their pain points *actually* are.

Ask them the question, let them share whatever they’d like, then compare the responses to look for trends after you’ve conducted a handful of interviews.

2. Use the Sherlock Homeboy Technique to see what’s working best for your competition.

Define what result or metric you want to focus on, then study your competition.

What are they doing marketing-wise that’s achieving that result the best? Don’t be afraid to get specific as well—if they’re creating blog content that’s working, which specific topics are performing the best? Is there a certain *type* of content that’s working best?

The Sherlock Homeboy technique will become your best friend here.

For example: Which HubSpot blog posts are attracting the most backlinks?

sherlock homeboy technique

#SherlockHomeboy 🔍

3. Establish key objectives and metrics

Every organization is chasing success. But what “success” actually looks like varies wildly from one company to the next, and how “success” is measured varies just as much.

The same is true for B2B marketing strategies—a successful strategy could be one that increases sales, or generates awareness, or attracts more leads, or increases customer referrals , and the list can go on & on.

Our walkthrough on how B2B marketers can identify key content marketing metrics and objectives outlines how to approach this from a content marketing lens, but the same thinking can be extrapolated to other marketing strategies.

  • Identify your business goals first—what does success look like?
  • Work backwards from that goal to figure out what actions and results will lead to hitting your business goals & achieving success
  • Connect these actions to metrics you can track that show progress

And you’ll have a (rough) map of which metrics matter most and how exactly they tie into your overall business goals.

Here’s the thing that we see a lot of B2B marketers get hung up on:

All data can be important, but if you try to measure and analyze everything, you’re going to end up with nothing.

Just because you can track and measure 100 different metrics doesn’t mean you should be tracking and measuring all 100. The key is to prioritize the metrics that best align with your business objectives.

Are click-through rates from Twitter posts impacting your business goal of generating more inbound leads? It’s unlikely, but if they are then it’s something you want to track.

How about click-through rates from your blog posts to your demo request landing page? The impact on your business goal here is likely going to be a lot higher, so it’s a metric you’ll want to pay closer attention to.

Not only does this keep you focused on what matters, it prevents you from being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data points you have at your disposal.

After you identify which metrics have the most impact on your business goals and which you’re planning to actively track—the next step is setting targets and marketing goals.

Here’s the key:

Make sure your goals are SMART.

smart goal framework

Specific : Explain exactly what it’s you’re trying to accomplish.

Measurable : Make sure there’s a way for progress and success to be tracked.

Achievable : It needs to be realistically possible (i.e. “generate 50,000 inbound leads this year” when you only had 200 last year is likely a major stretch)

Relevant : If the goal doesn’t connect to your business goals and won’t directly impact your overall success, it’s not worth setting.

Time-Bound : A goal without a deadline is just a dream.

Let’s say you’ve identified blog post visitors from Google as your highest converting source of traffic and you want to increase the volume here.

Instead of your goal being:

“Get more visitors to our blog”

It would look more like this:

“Since organic blog traffic is our best converting traffic source, I want to increase organic blog traffic from 2,000 sessions to 3,000 sessions per month within 3 months.”

4. Develop your B2B customer journey map

At Foundation, we start every content marketing strategy with a B2B customer journey map .

The customer journey map is an opportunity for you to become familiar with the various touchpoints that are involved in your B2B marketing strategy as customers move through the sales funnel , as well as what influences their decisions and what questions they may have.

This is also a great place to include ideas for content that may answer those questions, how many searches that content might receive based on your research, and what format is best for that content.

This is the template we use at Foundation:

b2b customer journey map

(You can download a copy of your own here)

A nd here’s how you can get started with a journey map:

  • Identify who the key stakeholders are (and who needs to buy in) at each stage of the buying cycle
  • Outline what’s most likely to influence them at each stage
  • Note down the most common questions they’re likely asking (your customer research is going to come in handy here)
  • Use a tool like Ahrefs / Moz / UberSuggest to get a rough estimate of the monthly search volume in Google for the commonly asked questions
  • Brainstorm a few quick ideas for content that could answer these questions (don’t worry about getting too into the weeds with these ideas)
  • Jot down the types of content you’re planning to use at each stage

At its core, the customer journey map helps you understand your different buyer personas and identify opportunities to get their attention.

It’ll also keep your sales team from becoming the annoying sales reps that keep showing up in your inbox with the wrong message at the wrong time.

When you know the specific pains your best customers are experiencing at each stage of their journey, you can reach out with the right message at the right time to help them solve those pains.

5. Identify executional marketing tactics

At this point, you’ll have your customer research, a customer journey map, qualitative & quantitative analysis, and a breakdown of your key metrics and SMART goals.

It’s time to map out what you want to do to reach those goals.

Let’s run with an example… Here’s the details:

  • In Q3/Q4 last year, the case studies on your website had 40 downloads
  • Of those 40 leads, you were able to close 10—a 25% close rate
  • The rest of your downloadable resources only had a 10% close rate, so case studies generated the best results for your business

And here’s the goal you’ve landed on:

“Since our case study leads have the highest close rates, we want to generate 100 total case study downloads by the end of Q2 this year.”

What you need to figure out now is how you’re going to increase the amount of case study downloads this year.

  • What tactics are you going to test?
  • Which distribution channels are you going to experiment with?
  • Are you going to share the case studies directly on these channels?
  • Are you going to use content like blog posts & videos to attract people first?

Before you make any decisions, let’s take a look at the common content marketing funnel:

b2b marketing funnel

You’re trying to bring in strangers and convert them into leads . In order to do that, you first need to turn those strangers into visitors.

Looking at the funnel, we can see that at the top of the funnel, blog posts, SEO, videos, podcasts, and social media are the most effective methods for doing exactly that.

So it would make sense for a few of your marketing tactics to look like this:

  • Publish at least 2 blog posts per month
  • Create 1 short-form video for social media each week
  • Be a guest on at least 1 podcast per month
  • Conduct at least 1 link building outreach campaign per week promoting our new blog posts to improve our rankings in Google

That will help you turn strangers into website visitors.

From there, you want to figure out what you’re going to do to turn website visitors into leads—how are you going to carry them from a blog post or video to your case studies?

Your tactics here may look like this:

  • Include multiple call-to-actions in blog posts to relevant case studies
  • Launch a retargeting campaign on Facebook/LinkedIn to promote our case studies to blog post visitors and video viewers
  • Ask current customers for testimonials & include them on your case study landing pages

Depending on your business and marketing goals, the tactics you outline are going to look slightly different. You may have the most success with TV ads, so your tactics will reflect how you’re going to get more value out of that channel.

Or perhaps your focus is further down the funnel and your goals are to increase your close rates on inbound leads—if that’s the case, your tactics should include ways to improve your email marketing and automations that trigger after a visitor becomes a lead.

Whatever your goals are, make sure your tactics can be directly tied to achieving those goals and alleviating the pain points your customers are feeling throughout their journey.

Developing your B2B brand strategy: Methods & examples from some of the top brands

At this point, you’ll have conducted plenty of research—customer research, industry research, analytics research—to pull out as many valuable insights as you can.

You’ll have set your high-level business goals and connected them to marketing activities and metrics that carry you toward them.

Then used that research and those marketing goals to plan your customer journey map and executional tactics.

You have a plan that’s ready to be implemented.

But before you dive right in, we want to share a handful of examples from the real world. Both from a brand-building and lead generation (further below) standpoint.

Let’s jump in:

1. Transparency

A brand development strategy that more and more companies have been adopting in recent years is transparency.

For Buffer , this has meant making all of their behind-the-scenes data—revenue, workplace diversity metrics, even salaries—freely available to anyone who wants to access them.

Here’s a great example from their CEO, Joel Gascoigne:

buffer announcement

He talked about how they tried to scale too quickly and had to let 10 of their recent hires go. This type of honest communication simply isn’t common in the business world.

What’s more, he outlined the steps the company was taking to right the ship, starting with a salary cut of 40% for himself and then-COO Leo Widrich.

“It’s more work to be transparent, because you’re sharing the data, the numbers, and you’ve got to explain the context. One of the things I love about transparency is it forces us to do that.” —Joel Gascoigne, CEO of Buffer

Here’s what they share directly on their about page :

buffer transparency

Companies are always eager to talk about their successes, but never their failures, even though that’s where the valuable stuff is.

Businesses don’t always talk about the negatives. They’d rather focus in the moment on trying to be successful, assuming there will be time for reflection afterwards.

That strategy may work for some, but the fact is that having transparency as a core value has earned Buffer a ton of attention from the likes of Forbes , The Atlantic , and Fortune .

As a brand development strategy, transparency may be trendy, but open and honest communication with employees and a commitment to providing more opportunities to underrepresented groups will never go out of style.

2. Cause & Purpose Association

Earlier in Slack’s lifetime (before the brand refresh & before the IPO) the company had a storefront on its website called the Slack Shop , which sold items like wooden coasters, shirts, and socks with Slack branding.

slack shop

Corporate swag is cool, but the real value of the storefront was in charitable giving .

Every six months, Slack selected a new charity to support through store proceeds, with a minimum $10,000 donation.

While the Slack Shop is no longer a permanent fixture (it only appears from time to time), it’s an example of cause and purpose association, also known as cause marketing or cause-related marketing .

Put simply, cause and purpose association is tying your business to an issue or a topic that is more important to the world than your bottom line.

One of the most prominent companies to embrace cause and purpose association is the outdoor clothing and gear company Patagonia .

In 2016, they donated the entirety of their Black Friday sales to environmental groups fighting climate change ($10 million, a 300% increase in sales over the previous year).

“It cost us a bunch of money because it was total revenue. But 60 percent of the customers were new buyers. Sixty percent. It was one of the best business things we’ve ever done.” — Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia

While the initiative got the company a bunch of attention, helping to save the environment is in Patagonia’s DNA.

In 1986, Chouinard committed either 1% of sales or 10% of profits (whichever was larger) to environmental activism, and 10 years later the company started to exclusively use organic cotton.

The culture of cause and purpose association has thrived even without Chouinard at the helm.

Fall of 2018, CEO Rose Marcario donated $10 million (Patagonia’s tax cuts) to environmental charities to protest a tax bill.

Patagonia isn’t in the B2B space, but the same principle applies: One of the most surefire brand development strategies is to stand for something.

Advertising great Bill Bernbach once said:

“If you stand for something, you will always find some people for you and some against you. If you stand for nothing, you will find nobody against you, and nobody for you.”

3. Being the Underdog

Everyone loves to root for an underdog, and many brands have positioned themselves as an alternative to something other companies are or aren’t doing.

In their classic book The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing , Al Reis and Jack Trout write about The Law of the Opposite :

“If you want to establish a firm foothold on the second rung of the ladder, study the firm above you. Where is it strong? And how do you turn that strength into a weakness?”

That’s exactly what Salesforce leadership did in the early days:

They picked an enemy to oppose—their biggest rival, Siebel Systems.

Ahead of a major campaign launch, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff hired actors to pose as protesters at a conference for Siebel. The protesters descended on San Francisco’s Moscone Center with the rallying cry “The internet is really neat! Software is obsolete!”

Another group of actors pretended to be a news crew covering the “protesters” (who were advocating for Salesforce’s cloud-based system).

marc benioff tweet

Because the protest was so realistic, Siebel Systems called the police, and it wasn’t long before actual reporters showed up (ultimately earning Salesforce hundreds of new customers).

“This marketing stunt worked across many fronts: we built Salesforce.com morale, got great press coverage, and brought our competitor’s customers to our event to hear our message. Within two weeks, more than 100,000 organizations signed up for our service; most were introduced to it through articles about the launch. Later, our End of Software campaign was recognized by PR Week as the ‘Hi-Tech Campaign of the Year.’” — Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce

Over the years, Benioff has grown fond of these guerrilla marketing tactics—using the actions of competitor companies to put a spotlight on his own brand.

It’s a tactic that Slack also utilized recently, when it put an open letter to Microsoft as a full-page ad in the New York Times the day the software giant’s competitor, Microsoft Teams, was unveiled.

slack newspaper ad

In that letter, Slack spoke about the lessons it had learned in building its platform, noting that communication software has to be more than a list of features.

With one advertisement, Slack positioned itself as both the underdog and the master.

The company couldn’t fight Microsoft in a battle of resources ( see $1.27 trillion with a “T” market cap ), but Slack’s role as the king of communication meant they weren’t afraid to offer some tips for success to the competitor infringing on its turf.

Naturally, some people loved the ad. Some people hated it.

But that’s the goal, right?

Getting people talking.

4. Employee Empowerment

First of all—what does this *actually* mean?

According to study.com (great domain name), employee empowerment means giving employees a certain level of autonomy and responsibility for decision-making regarding their specific organizational tasks.

As Mike Tanner explored in his book Really Little Wins , when given autonomy and the ability to tackle his tasks in whichever order he desired, he experienced a dramatic increase in job satisfaction and productivity.

One of the best examples of employee empowerment as a B2B marketing strategy was the video campaign the live chat company Drift ran on LinkedIn in 2018 —a campaign that was planned only five days before it was launched, yet generated 3 million views and resulted in the highest single-day traffic in the company’s history.

drift linkedin takeover

Dave Gerhardt (Former VP of marketing at Drift) had been running some engagement experiments using LinkedIn video, which was a fairly recent addition to the platform, and found his videos getting thousands of views and a ton of engagement. People he did not know would recognize him as “that guy from the LinkedIn videos.”

Seeing how far his message had spread, he wondered what would happen if a hundred people at Drift posted videos to LinkedIn to promote a new product.

It started with half a dozen people posting videos during their daily commutes, and then things started to get really crazy when one of the product managers posted a video while on vacation:

“She’s literally skiing and … she’s talking about how, you know, ‘Modern email is broken. We built an email marketing platform that actually matches how people want to buy…’ and she’s literally skiing down the mountain. That was when just all hell broke loose, because at that point, then once people saw it, it turned into a competition here internally where everyone started to one up each other.” —Dave Gerhardt, VP of Marketing at Drift

With its super-engaged workforce, Drift is also one of the leaders in employee advocacy.

It’s a strategy where employees share company content to their personal social networks and in turn are able to grow their personal brands.

The company will routinely have employees from different departments create content based on their expertise, such as a customer success manager hosting an informational video about using video in customer success .

5. Launch Free Tools

People tend to love things that help them solve problems.

And they love it even more when that help is free.

Creating helpful tools and releasing them for free is a fantastic way to help your customers solve their problems and build up brand affinity. And one of the best in the industry at doing exactly that is HubSpot.

They’ve created and launched dozens of free tools over the years. The current tally is at 45 different tools available for download—with everything from buyer personas to invoice templates making the cut:

hubspot free tools

But one of their most well-known tools launched in 2007 (the early days)—the Website Grader .

website grader

Visitors type in their email address and the URL of their website, and the Website Grader will measure the site’s marketing effectiveness, generating a score between 0 and 100 based on factors including traffic, SEO and social media. Based on its findings, the grader will also suggest ways to improve inbound marketing efforts.

The user gets actionable insights and suggestions.

HubSpot fills their pipeline with well-populated leads.

HubSpot may be one of the best-known free tool providers, but it’s not the only one.

Over the past few years, Shopify’s also gotten in on the action—creating privacy , refund , and terms of service policy templates for its users (which are bundled with a free trial of the product, of course).

shopify privacy policy

Refrens.com also provides free  online invoice generator  for agencies, small businesses, and freelancers.

Having new stuff to play with online is always cool, but the reason that offering free tools is a great brand development strategy is that it’s all about empowering the customer to do things they wouldn’t be able to on their own.

Consultants to analyze our website are expensive.

So are lawyers that write custom privacy, refund and TOS policies.

If you can give customers the tools to tackle their own problems to a certain standard, they’ll value the experience, gain confidence, and remember that it was YOU that helped them.

And as an added bonus, it’s no surprise that the best free tools are also often the most linked to free tools.

B2B Brands can create a lot of different types of content: How To's, Guides, News, Research, Product Updates, Collections, Round Ups, Stats, Reports, Definitions, etc… But the most *LINKABLE* asset you can create is often times a TOOL. ⚒️What do I mean? (THREAD) — Ross Simmonds (@TheCoolestCool) January 20, 2020

If you can create something that’s helpful for your target users or customers, they’re highly likely to be willing to give you their email address to get access. And the more helpful your tool becomes, the more people will be talking about it.

6. Own Your Position of Strength

Here’s the reality:

There’s little room for humility in marketing.

“Marketing, like war, is a zero-sum game. If you want something you have to take it from someone else. In order for someone to win, someone has to lose. Adam Morgan described it as ‘like a knife-fight in a phone box.’ there isn’t anywhere to hide. There isn’t any place for bystanders. Everyone has to choose.” — Dave Trott, advertising legend

In other words, businesses aren’t often going to succeed by caring deeply about how their competitors might feel.

You need to be willing to own your position of strength. When something great happens to your business, you should use it to your advantage.

This doesn’t mean you need to ship a press release for every single thing that ever happens with your company, but promoting and announcing that your company is top rated SaaS product in your category can affirm your position at the top.

salesforce #1 crm

You won’t be at the top of a product or service category forever, but when you say your business is #1 in your vertical or within a certain customer base, that becomes your reputation with customers and competitors alike.

Find out what your organization is knocking out of the park and promote yourself with it.

If the goal of marketing is to persuade the right sort of customers to buy, then promoting yourself as a leader in a specific area is one of the most surefire ways to do so.

7. Being Customer-Focused

It’s easy for a business to say they’re customer-focused.

But this typically means the great service they provide ends with sales and support.

Companies that are truly customer-focused are investing in long-term relationships with their customers. They treat the amount of money they can make as secondary to the personal growth and development of the customer.

Naturally, this focus on helping their customers win is going to lead to the company winning long-term as well.

Plenty of B2B companies host conferences with the goal of helping to educate and inform. HubSpot hosts Inbound , a conference dedicated to marketing, sales, and business. Slack is behind Frontiers , about the intersection of technology and organizational performance.

One of the best conferences is Twilio’s Signal .

signal event

It’s a two-day customer and developer conference focused on Twilio’s products, one-on-one engagement with experts, networking and building stronger relationships with customers.

Demonstrating their commitment to their developers and customers, Twilio also hires developer evangelists who can teach others about coding and the world of software development to serve as the public face of the company to local groups around the world.

Another business demonstrating their focus on customers in their marketing is customer success company Gainsight .

They’ve created a Slack community for leaders to share their ideas, discuss industry trends, network and learn from guest speakers.

customer success chat

One of the main advantages of being customer-focused is being able to grow a community of people with similar interests. Those relationships may end up being more valuable than the product or service that is being provided.

What’s next?

For those keeping track at home, that’s seven brand building strategies that the top brands in B2B have used over the past decade to position themselves as industry leaders.

Even if you’re not Slack or Salesforce-sized (most of us aren’t), you can still take inspiration from their initiatives and campaigns and test smaller-scale versions.

Now let’s shift gears a bit.

Let’s talk lead generation tactics for B2B brands.

Creating a lead generation strategy: What works & what do you need?

No matter how you tackle the brand building side of B2B marketing, one thing will almost always be true—you need more (or just better) leads.

Chances are your B2B marketing strategy that’s in the works as you read this post is connected to increasing revenue in some fashion. More customers, better retention, higher quality pipeline—all of these goals have one thing in common: Revenue.

And as you’re working backward from that primary business goal, the almost unavoidable step you’ll hit is lead generation. You need to find reliable methods and tactics that you can use to generate leads on a consistent basis.

In this section, we’re going to share 5 proven methods you can start using right away.

1. Downloadable Assets

Pop quiz: What do the people love?

We’ve already talked about this one—the people love getting things for free.

There’s a ton of value in offering downloadable assets on your website, especially when they speak to problems beyond your product or service.

For example, Stripe offers guides and resources on everything from talent recruitment to using machine learning for fraud detection.

Similarly, Intercom offers downloadable ebooks on product management , customer engagement and even the jobs-to-be-done productivity framework.

intercom book

Free stuff is great.

And it’s even better when giving away these free assets that help your audience also result in leads for your business.

In exchange for the free template, guide, worksheet or ebook, your future customers will give you their email address (and whatever else you ask for) with a form.

And just like that, you now have the contact information of someone who’s expressed interest in something you offer. And once you have that information, you can start to reach out (manually or with automated email sequence outreach ).

Offering downloadable assets is one of the most common lead generation strategies —and for good reason. It’s because it works. Plain and simple.

2. Hosting Webinars

The humble webinar has long been a staple of B2B marketing.

It’s a training session, product demo and Q&A all rolled into one live and interactive meeting.

However, companies are starting to recognize that webinars are more than just great tools for interacting with and helping to educate current customers—they can also be used to increase customer lifetime value , reduce churn, convert trial users and, yes, even generate leads.

Intercom in particular frequently hosts webinars that feature a well-known guest or business leader sharing their expertise.

Not only does this attract people outside of the company ecosystem, it also increases product and brand awareness and helps build relationships with these guests.

intercom webinars

You can also include incentives to convince leads to attend. Things like free strategy calls, templates, extended trials, etc.

While Intercom may talk a lot about the features of their platforms, their public-facing webinars are intended to be as valuable as possible, and that’s what will lead people to poke around their websites and sign up for trial accounts.

Notion takes the same approach.

They run weekly webinars on CrowdCast that just explore the hundreds of ways people use Notion. They’re not *selling* Notion on the webinar—the goal is to show how awesome the product can be, introduce plenty of great ways to get value from it and let the rest take care of itself.

notion webinars

Intercom also allows their trial users to attend product-specific webinars. As a result, trial users learn more about what the platform is capable of and how they might use it better, and have added incentive to become paid users.

And that’s the art of the pitch: Demonstrate the value of a product to a user, showcase how it can make their life easier, and they’ll typically be willing to at least give it a try.

3. B2B Review Sites

One of the most significant trends in the B2B world over the past several years has been the Yelpification of B2B .

Our personal behaviours of looking for social proof, reading reviews, and making judgement calls about products or services have slowly but surely spilled over into the business world.

Some of the biggest adopters of this trend are the business software review sites G2, Capterra and TrustRadius, and as a result they’re getting huge amounts of traffic.

Yelpification Of B2B. The same way Yelp / TripAdvisor is make or break for restaurants — Capterra / G2 are becoming that for B2B software. They already rank: #2 for 70+ branded terms. #3 for 60+ branded terms. #4 for 80+ branded terms. AND… #1 for hundreds of BOFU pages. — Ross Simmonds (@TheCoolestCool) June 9, 2019

All of this traffic, combined with the social proof these sites provide, can act as significant lead drivers for B2B software.

When you visit Capterra and see that Notion has an overall rating of 4.5 stars, tons of glowing reviews, and starts at $4 a month, odds are you’re going to click through to Notion’s product page to at least see what all the hype is about.

4. Paid Search Advertising

We touched on this during the customer journey mapping stage.

Your audience has pain points and questions that they’re asking. Where are they going to ask those questions? That would be Google.

Take a look at the current search market share:

google market share

Google = 90.8%

That means 9 out of 10 searches are happening on Google-owned properties.

So if you’re customer has questions, and you have answers—where is it that you need to be? Where they’re asking the questions, of course.

A successful content marketing strategy where SEO is a major part is going to lead to long-term success when executed well, but the other search-related tactic you can start executing right away is Google Ads .

The process is fairly straightforward:

  • Figure out what your audience is searching for the most
  • Setup a landing page that offers a downloadable resource related to their question
  • Build your campaign at ads.google.com and monitor the results as you go

The value of Google Ads is that they will put your company on page 1 for a relevant Google Search. Yet over the last five years, the cost-per-acquisition (CPA) for a Google Ad campaign within most industries has steadily increased. So, many companies use social media ads to build trust and familiarity which can result in a more successful Google Ads campaign . But, Google Ads are definitely something worth testing at the very least.

5. Paid Social Advertising

While paid social ads are similar to Google ads in the sense that you’re paying to reach your audience right away—the stage itself is a bit different.

With Google Ads, your customers are actively looking for something that you offer. You’re just paying to show up at the top of the list.

With social ads, your customers are not actively looking for you. In fact, all they’re looking to do most of the time is figure out what their friends, family, colleagues and favourite celebs are up to.

If you want to just open up Facebook and launch a campaign to target certain interests or demographics, the audience you’re targeting is going to be quite cold. They probably don’t know you, and they’re probably going to be hesitant to give you their information or swipe their credit card right away—if they even stop scrolling and give you the time of day.

So how should you approach social ads?

Retargeting ads.

First, setup a Facebook Pixel and LinkedIn Insights Tag on your website. This will keep track of who’s visiting your site and what actions they’re taking.

Then, as the pixels collect more and more information, you can launch social ad campaigns that target people who’ve already taken specific actions that indicate they might be interested in what you’re offering.

Cold → Warm

You can narrow it down to target only people that visited your pricing page but didn’t convert, added a product to their cart but didn’t checkout , or just visited more than one blog post.

In 2019 we analyzed 100 Facebook ads from SaaS brands to see what tactics, campaigns, and ad types were working the best—be sure to give that post a read as well if you’re planning to launch an ad campaign in the near future.

b2b saas facebook ads

Wrapping Things Up

One of the most exciting things about B2B marketing is that there’s always something new to try or experiment with. And while most tactics don’t last, the rules of brand strategy have proven to be far more consistent.

If you’ve made it this far—congratulations and happy to see you at the finish line!

Hopefully you’ve been able to pull some great value from this post. Don’t forget to hit “bookmark” so you can come back to the examples we shared down the road.

Let’s recap what we just covered.

If you’ve made it this far, you’re not like most marketers…

Most marketers aren’t interested in doing hard things like reading a blog post this long.

But here you are.

You’re demonstrating your willingness to do hard things, so how about one more:

We challenge you to take one of the ideas you’ve read about and act on them. Right now. Not tomorrow. Right now. Copy the section and send it to your boss or team and say “we need to think about how we can apply this.”

That’s all it takes.

And with that, we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments down below. Strategy steps that you’re getting hung up on? Favourite brand building examples? Favourite lead generation tactics? Let’s hear ‘em. 🚀

(Post written with contributions from Matthew Rawle )

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What Is B2B Marketing? Guide to 2024’s Best Strategies!

Mastering B2B marketing can be a challenge.

We’re used to being marketed to as consumers, but try to turn the tables and market to an entire board of key stakeholders... 😨 Let’s not even mention the red tape and all those pain points that need solutions!

But where there’s a B2B business, there’s a way to market to them.

In this guide, we’re covering everything you need to know for business-to-business marketing success, including:

  • The definition of B2B marketing.
  • The differences between B2B and B2C marketing. 
  • The best tried and tested B2B branding strategies.
  • Examples of B2B businesses doing excellent marketing.
  • The latest trends to keep on top of if you want to build the best B2B campaigns.

Let’s start by defining the meaning of B2B marketing 👇

What's on this page

What is b2b marketing .

B2B marketing means business-to-business marketing. It’s any marketing strategy or content used by one business to target and sell to another business. For instance, companies that sell services, products, or SaaS to other companies or organisations typically use B2B marketing.

Two good examples of B2B marketing are Monday.com’s B2B brand strategy on LinkedIn. Another out-of-the-box example is the way Gong plans and executes its Super Bowl adverts . It’s companies like these that sell solutions to help businesses automate or enhance their processes.

The goal of B2B marketing is to attract and convert leads into customers. In the digital age, this means that you need to be able to capture a prospect’s attention quickly and keep it. This can be done through educational content like white papers or value-driven blog posts.

The 6 differences between B2B and B2C marketing

Now that you know the answer to the question, “What’s B2B marketing?” it’s time to look at how B2B and B2C marketing differ.

There are many key differences between B2B vs. B2C marketing, but the most important are the audiences they target:

👉 B2C marketing targets an audience of individual consumers like you and me who are interested in buying products or services for themselves rather than a corporation. B2C companies look at everyday individuals’ needs, interests, and challenges who often buy on a desire or whim rather than waiting for facts to be checked or an expected ROI to be delivered.

Examples of B2C products are anything available in a mall, from toothpaste to t-shirts.

👉 B2B marketing sells to individuals or groups looking to solve a pain point at their company. Examples of B2B products are anything that provides a solution to a challenge, such as sales automation software , which makes B2B prospecting easier. B2B marketing funnels are a lot longer as there are more decision-makers who all have a say in the final purchasing decision.

Here’s a rundown of the six major differences between business-to-consumer and business-to-business marketing:

B2B vs B2C marketing differences in a table.

Knowing the differences between potential buyers in B2B and B2C showcases how the tone, targeting, and style are quite different. What’s more, demand generation strategies that work for B2B don’t always work for B2C customers, and vice-versa.

The B2B marketing process explained

Before you start strategising your B2B marketing plan, take a minute to understand the buyer journey first. This will help you, as a B2B marketer, improve your customer’s overall experience when interacting with your brand and speed up the buying process.

How can you use the B2B customer journey to improve marketing efforts?

A B2B buyer’s journey is the process potential buyers go through before buying a new product or service. Their journey usually consists of three main touchpoints - awareness, consideration, and decision.

At Cognism, we’ve developed our own process for marketing to B2B that’s based on our customers’ journeys. We’ve also created a list of must-have B2B marketing tools which help us scale and improve processes.

It’s a process that’s been highly effective in our marketing development representatives (MDRs) generating quality leads and improving their overall experience.

A huge bonus - it creates brand loyalty at the same time! And that’s an incredibly valuable attribute you want going forward.

There are four steps to our marketing process:

1. Awareness stage

  • Your buyer realises they have a problem and starts researching solutions.
  • Intent data for digital marketing plays a big role in the awareness stage. With it, you can get in front of prospects ready to buy and offer them the perfect solution before your competitors do.

💡 Discover how a tool like Cognism can help you get in front of in-market buyers before your competitors do!

2. Consideration stage

  • Your buyer puts all their research together and considers the best solution to solve their pain points.
  • If you didn’t get in front of your potential customers before they started considering solutions, your sales team would need to explain why your service or product is better than your competitors.

3. Decision stage

The buyer makes a purchase decision for a solution that meets their needs, adds the most value, and fits their budget.

4. Retention stage

  • Marketing’s role doesn’t end when customers sign. B2B companies need to build on their current buyer relationships as well as new ones. A marketing email signature is one example of a B2B marketing effort you can use to achieve this. You can refresh relationships with relevant content sent via personalised email.

Improve your win rates by right-clicking and saving this informative B2B marketing process template 👇

An example of B2B marketing process at Cognism.

Once you’ve got your process down, it will be easy to implement an inbound and outbound marketing strategy.

5 strategies you need to add to your B2B marketing plan 

The B2B buyer’s journey is unique in that you’re not selling to an individual but to an entire team or group of people, all of whom might have a say in the purchasing decision.

And the journey is no longer simply about prospecting , demoing, and closing. It’s about educating, offering value, and solving pain points.

According to a study by Forrester on the Three Myths of the “67 Percent” Statistic, 67% of a buyer’s journey is now being done digitally. Your prospects can easily collect information and find what they’re looking for, making it ten times harder for your outbound sales team to influence their decisions.

Your customers are struggling to make these purchases.

This is because there are many solutions, new technologies, suppliers, and services to consider.

To win sales opportunities, you’ll need to create the ultimate strategy. To help you do that, we’ve got five tips to help you create the perfect B2B marketing plan for the business-to-business market:

Five B2B marketing strategies.

Here’s a breakdown of each step:

1. Establish your TAM

Start by outlining your ideal customer profile and TAM. This is an essential part of B2B product marketing and ensures you only target the right leads for your business.

💡 Tip: If you need help calculating your Total Addressable Market, try our TAM calculator .

2. Decide on your goals

Secondly, set actionable goals for each member of your marketing team. You can stay on top of and optimise your team’s performance by tracking B2B marketing metrics and KPIs .

3. Establish your value proposition

Consider what you can offer prospects that your competitors can’t. Then, decide on your messaging and value drivers for each target audience and key account. (You might be interested in using account based marketing for this.)

4. Plan outreach

Take everything you've learned from the above steps and plan your outreach content to drive revenue.

5. Create content

Start creating educational content that drives demand , adds value, and builds brand awareness.

5 examples of strategies for effective B2B marketing

There are several B2B marketing activities, channels, and strategies you can use when marketing to B2B.

Here are five examples of the most important B2B marketing strategies that have been proven to assist in the revenue growth of B2B companies:

1. B2B Campaign marketing

Campaign marketing plays a significant role when marketing to B2B organisations.

It takes a lot of planning before executing a campaign to sell your product or service. It’s typically conducted through email marketing . Analytics are drawn from the results to measure each campaign’s effectiveness.

👉 Here are four of Cognism’s best B2B marketing campaigns .

Once you’ve had a look at those examples, you’ll want to start planning your campaigns with a template.

2. B2B Content marketing 

B2B content is arguably the most important step of a digital marketing strategy.

Online and offline content aids in attracting, converting, and retaining buyers. It typically consists of written, audio, and video content published on an organisation’s blog and then shared across social media channels for more organic traffic.

Organic traffic is a crucial part of a B2B content marketing strategy. You’ll want to invest in hiring a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) expert to get the top result for your product or service when buyers search online. If you don’t already have an SEO expert, then have a look online for a beginners guides to SEO .

AI can augment the content creation process, enhancing efficiency and creativity, but it’s not a standalone solution! The human touch remains crucial for strategy, tone, and authenticity. 

Whatever you do, just be sure every piece of marketing content stays valuable, informative, and keeps your audience in mind.

👉 Here’s an example of how Cognism creates content worth $88,270 in annual revenue.

3. B2B Digital marketing

Also known as B2B online marketing, digital marketing helps promote your brand so you can better connect with prospects.

Email, social media, paid channels like Google ads, text messages, and influencer marketing all play a part in the digital side of your strategy.

B2B marketers understand that posting generic content on social media is no longer an option. Instead, brands are expected to create a social presence, building themselves as experts in their field. If a customer can’t find you on social media, it will result in a lack of trust. That’s why B2B branding is so important.

Many brands seek influencer marketing for a brand boost, while others are experimenting with Instagram and TikTok.

👉 For Cognism, LinkedIn has created the best B2B campaign opportunities. Here’s a guide to our LinkedIn marketing strategy .

4. B2B Performance marketing

Relating to digital marketing, performance marketing combines digital channels with paid advertising, such as Google ads and brand marketing across channels.

Performance marketing allows you to manage your company’s digital advertising spend, generate targeted leads through ads, and build brand engagement.

The preferred channels are Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

👉 Here’s a guide that explains how to create powerful Google Ad campaigns for your B2B products .

5. B2B Product marketing 

Product marketing builds brand awareness of a B2B service or product and promotes it at scale. Product marketers are responsible for a product or service’s positioning, messaging, and value proposition.

Customer case studies, webinars, and sales collateral are all approaches to B2B marketing that play a vital part in encouraging business audiences to buy.

To achieve the best results in product marketing, you need to first research your customer’s needs. Then, discover their pain points and ensure each piece of content includes messaging that resonates and offers a solution.

For an effective marketing business strategy, you need to reach the right customers. Compliant, quality B2B data can help you achieve this. Click the banner below to discover how Cognism can power your marketing 👇

Reach your ideal customer with Cognism's data

Current B2B marketing trends

B2B advertising is constantly evolving - from direct mail and trade catalogue ''industrial marketing”, as it was called in 1929, to the launch of smart data, search, and social media marketing. New products and innovative technologies are revolutionising the way we do business.

AI is currently at the heart of the advertising revolution. It is set to further enhance content creation, enabling marketers to produce relevant and engaging content at scale.

AI is increasingly being used for ad targeting in digital marketing. It can process large audience data sets to refine ad targeting and messaging, aiming for more precise and effective ads.

Video content has also emerged as a critical player in the business marketing arsenal. Platforms like LinkedIn now host many short, engaging videos that command attention and encourage dark funnel shares.

These evolutions will require B2B marketers to stay agile and react quickly to a changing world and industry.

B2B marketing best practices - 6 tips!

B2B marketers need two things to be able to run successful revenue-generating campaigns, and they are:

  • An excellent marketing strategy
  • Aligning the entire team with best practices

By following best practices, you can ensure your B2B strategy fits your sales goals for a united, more streamlined B2B company.

Here are our six best practices for B2B marketing:

All good marketing starts with a plan. First, decide on your goal for each campaign. Then, research your target audience before strategising your way forward.

Once you know what you want to achieve, set B2B marketing KPIs to ensure you stay on the right track. Periodically review your marketing plan against your KPIs. If it’s not working, don’t be afraid to change it.

2. Harness the power of data

Good quality GDPR-compliant data will do wonders for your account based marketing campaigns .

Firstly, you’ll have access to the right contact information for your prospects, and your B2B marketing campaigns will be more personalised and effective.

Secondly, by using intent data , you’ll be speaking to people who are actually in the market to buy while following your local privacy laws.

Even better, a data-driven marketing campaign helps you make faster and better decisions, reducing spend and lost customers.

Data providers like ZoomInfo and Cognism can provide global data to help power marketing campaigns. 

For example, Sales Confidence found the emails and numbers of their ideal customer using Cognism. This led to immediate and impressive results. Here’s what they said:

“Overall, we saw a 104% increase in engagement rates compared to when they hadn’t used Cognism. Our website traffic over the campaign period increased by 255%. In total, Sales Confidence received 104 opportunities from Cognism. The platform is now an integral part of our growth mission.”

Want to see what Cognism can do for you? Book a demo 👇

Get better results with compliant email addresses

3. Create visual content

No one wants to read a blog that’s just long paragraphs of words. Business-to-business content marketing doesn’t need to be boring!

Spice up your blogs, website, and marketing campaigns with visual assets like videos, GIFs, infographics, and high-quality images.

Visual content encourages engagement with your buyers and strengthens your brand image.

4. Create a brand identity

Speaking of your brand’s image, the best thing you can do for your company is agree and stick to a brand persona.

Brainstorm how you want to be perceived, your values, tone of voice, and visual identity.

Customers remain loyal to consistent and transparent brands, so building a brand and creating awareness around it will only increase your position in the B2B market.

An example of B2B marketing in practice is sharing your brand campaigns via your email signature .

5. Focus on pain points

When you know who your customers are, you’re better able to add value to their day-to-day lives.

Buyers no longer want to be sold to; they want to be offered something that can help them solve ongoing frustrations. Swoop in with the perfect answer to their problems and the best B2B marketing solution, and you’ll be their go-to provider of choice for years to come.

6. Experimentation is everything

At Cognism, we’ve learned that the perfect B2B marketing strategy doesn’t exist.

Hard work, perseverance, A/B testing, and experimentation are the tools that will help you thrive in the B2B space.

Another thing to bear in mind is that the SaaS marketing industry is constantly evolving; you need to stay updated on the latest innovations and trends.

Foster an experimental, scientific mindset in your team. Run weekly sprints to launch campaigns quickly and acquire initial learning for your best chance at record-breaking marketing revenue .

What are the 4 types of B2B you can market to?

The four types of business buyers you can market to are producers, resellers, governments, and institutions.

Why is B2B marketing important?

There are numerous benefits of B2B marketing - it helps build your brand name across channels. By ensuring business to business customers are aware of your product or service and understand its value, you increase the likelihood of converting them into loyal customers.

Which social media platform is best for B2B marketing?

LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok are all good lead sources in the B2B market.

Better marketing with tech

B2B marketing solutions have only gotten smarter and more efficient over the years - making it easier than ever to save time on tasks that used to take hours and hours to do. 

One such tool is Cognism, a sales intelligence solution that brings you more quality marketing data - meaning better relationships and more revenue! And that’s what’s most important, right? Want to learn more? Book a screen-share today 👇

Book a demo

How to Create an Effective B2B Marketing Plan in 7 Steps

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As a business owner, you know that having a solid marketing plan is essential to the success of your company. But what goes into creating an effective  B2B marketing plan? This blog post will give you some tips and tricks to get started.

When I first started my business, I had no idea how important it was to have a well-thought-out marketing strategy. I quickly learned that without one, my chances of success were slim to none. Creating an effective B2B marketing plan can seem daunting, but with these tips in mind, you’ll be on your way to putting together a winning strategy for your business!

B2B Marketing Plan

A business-to-business marketing plan is a strategy for targeting and marketing to other businesses. This can include B2B SEO, content marketing , lead generation , and email marketing.

The goal of a B2B marketing plan is to generate leads and sales from other businesses.

7 Steps for Creating an Effective B2B Marketing Plan

To succeed in the crowded, fragmented world of modern digital marketing, you have to be able to control your customers’ experience.

Customers are overwhelmed with choices, but clear about what they want: relevant information that is delivered through a coordinated, personalized process. If your customers don’t get it, they will go somewhere else.

With all of the hype surrounding marketing tactics like social media marketing, influencer marketing, and content creation, it’s tempting for marketers to jump right into implementing these tactics and forget about the bigger picture.

It’s important to have a marketing strategy that takes into account both the needs of your business and the value journey that customers take. This will help you understand the reasons behind your marketing efforts.

Understanding your customer’s journey can help you develop an effective marketing strategy. By understanding how customers progress through the buyer’s cycle, you can better identify which marketing channels to use and when.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the seven steps to building an effective, strategic plan for your marketing efforts.

1. Analyze Your Company’s Market Situation.

Before you can get started with your marketing plan , it’s important to do some self -analysis by evaluating or reevaluating your current position.

This focuses on three key areas: the company, competitors, and the business climate.

Looking at the market from all three of these angles will help you determine where you currently stand and what you can do to improve.

A SWOT analysis is the foundation of any marketing plan.

It is important to review your strengths and weaknesses, as well as opportunities and threats to your business.

If you have already completed a SWOT analysis, reviewing this will give you a good base to start from when creating your yearly plan.

Skipping this essential step can sabotage your prospecting efforts. Just like with sports, you must practice the fundamentals before performing.

When you take the time to create a marketing plan, you set yourself up for success by gaining new insights and opportunities. By aligning your marketing efforts with what your customers want, you’ll be able to make a positive impact that will benefit your business.

2. Create a Buyer Persona.

If you’ve created your buyer personas, you should review them regularly to make sure they’re still accurate. If you haven’t, you should develop them. Marketing should work closely with sales in this process.

We strongly believe that sales and marketing should work together during the planning stages of any campaign.

Your sales department can be a valuable resource when defining your buyer audience. They can help identify the important metrics. By working closely together, you can develop more accurate and more complete customer profiles that will guide your sales and marketing strategies.

To understand who your customers are, try creating customer avatars that are similar to buyer personas but go even deeper. They help you understand the stresses, opportunities, and vision for your future customers.

The customer avatar is a snapshot of your ideal customer.

Your ideal customer is struggling with a problem that your product or service can help them solve. They have goals and aspirations that your product or service can help them achieve. They are influenced by people in their life who they trust and respect. They are currently at a point in their journey where they are ready to take the next step.

Their jobs are important to them, but they may not be fulfilled by their work. They are excited about the potential for change and transformation in their lives. Your product or service can improve their lives in a significant way.

Once you’ve gathered all of this information about your customers, you can create a customer avatar that represents different target audiences.

b2b marketing business plan

3. Define the Customer Value Journey.

One of the most important step s to creating a successful marketing campaign is documenting your buyers’ journey.

The Customer Value Journey is a blueprint that companies can use to create a consistent stream of new customers.

It outlines how customers engage with products, services, and brands, and provides a framework to convert casual interest into high value and brand loyalty.

The buyer’s journey is modeled after the stages of a relationship and involves more stages than a traditional sales funnel .

These steps create a natural flow of interactions and will help to align company and customer interests, resulting in happy customers advocating for your brand.

This marketing analysis, when done correctly, will outline your current state and reveal several opportunities.

It helps meet your prospects on their terms and through the channels that are most convenient for them.

4. Set SMART Goals.

Once you have a sales journey planned out, you can determine the best steps to take to reach your goals.

A smart goal is both realistic and achievable. A goal should be both precise and concise.

Your goals need to be measurable and time-bound. Yours could be to increase revenue-qualified lead levels by 15% in 6 months, or you could simply aim to improve engagement with a particular product by 30% in the next 3 quarters.

If you want your marketing team to be successful, it’s crucial to set SMART goals — specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.  This will help you hold your marketing team accountable and help you achieve the results you want.

5. Identify Strategies to Meet Goals.

A marketing strategy is a plan you develop to attract, engage, and convert more leads to customers. The right marketing tactics and tools need to be integrated into your strategy to achieve your goals.

There are four tactics within the world of sales:

  • Attract more prospects
  • Create engagement
  • Convert leads
  • Create advocates

Finding the right balance of tactics and strategy can be tricky. Some strategies, like following up with your prospects, are fundamental. Others, such as using video, are newer and require more thought.

There are likely some newer strategies out there that you can test, but the challenge lies in finding the ones that will work best for your target audience and incorporating them into your lead nurturing strategy.

Here are some of our digital marketing strategies:

  • Search engine optimization (SEO)
  • Paid search (PPC/Google Ads)
  • Endemic display
  • Programmatic display
  • Content marketing (blogging and article writing, ebooks, white papers, webinars)
  • Social media advertising
  • Video production
  • Website design
  • Conversion rate optimization
  • A/B testing
  • Landing page strategy
  • Call-to-action strategy
  • Link building/earning
  • Infographic design
  • Email marketing
  • Marketing automation
  • Digital publishing/newsletters
  • Lead nurture strategy
  • Public relations (PR)

6. Establish KPIs

It is important to establish key performance indicators that measure your performance against goals.

Many companies don’t take the time to measure the impact of their activities.

We recommend focusing on a few measurable KPIs that will help you understand the success of your campaigns, initiatives, or outside specialists.

A growth scorecard is a framework that businesses can use to review and assess their initiatives and reveal opportunities for optimization.

It provides a means for marketers to demonstrate how they’re performing to senior management.

7. Set a Budget

Before you can complete your marketing strategy, you need to first determine your budget. This will help you decide which marketing activities to prioritize.

It can be helpful to note a budget or price range for each marketing method.

Some methods can be executed internally, but others will require outside help. Estimate how much each method will cost, and plan accordingly.

Some of your marketing budgets will have to be allocated to any out-of-pocket costs for your marketing.

For your marketing strategy to be successful, it’s important to have clear communication between everyone involved. Your plan should outline your strategy and include your SWOT, your goals, and your proposed methods. You should also have a way to measure your success.

The customer journey is an important aspect of our marketing process. It allows us to understand our customers’ interactions with us and what we can do to improve their experience with our company.

What is an Example of B2B Marketing?

B2B marketing is the process of marketing products or services to other businesses. This can be done through a variety of channels, such as online advertising, trade shows, and direct mail. An example of B2B marketing would be a company that manufactures widgets selling them to another company that sells them to consumers.

What is a B2B plan?

A B2B plan is a business plan that specifically outlines a strategy for marketing and selling products or services to other businesses. This type of plan can be helpful for companies that want to focus on growing their business-to-business sales, as it provides a clear roadmap for achieving this goal. The key components of a B2B plan include an analysis of the target market, the development of marketing and sales strategies, and financial projections.

How Do I Make a B2B Plan?

The best way to make a B2B plan is to base it on your specific industry and business context.

  • Define your target market: who are your ideal customers? What needs do they have that your product or service can address?
  • Research your competition: what are they doing well? What could you do better?
  • Create a unique selling proposition : what makes your product or service stand out from the competition?
  • Develop a marketing strategy: how will you reach your target market and promote your product or service? What channels will you use?
  • Create sales goals and objectives: what do you hope to achieve with your B2B plan? How will you measure success?

How Do I Create a B2B Digital Marketing Plan?

  • Define your goals and objectives – What do you want to achieve with your digital marketing efforts? Be specific and realistic in your goals, and make sure they align with your overall business strategy.
  • Research your target market – Who are you trying to reach with your digital marketing? What are their needs and pain points? What type of content will they engage with?
  • Create a content strategy – Once you know who you’re targeting and what type of content they’re interested in, you can start creating engaging and informative blog posts, articles, infographics, videos, etc. that will help you achieve your goals.

The most important thing to remember when creating a B2B marketing plan is to be clear and concise about your goals. What are you trying to achieve with your marketing efforts? Once you know this, you can begin to put together a strategy that will help you reach your target audience and convert them into customers. Keep these tips in mind as you create your own B2B marketing plan , and don’t forget to have fun along the way!

Need Help Automating Your Sales Prospecting Process?

LeadFuze gives you all the data you need to find ideal leads, including full contact information.

b2b marketing business plan

Go through a variety of filters to zero in on the leads you want to reach. This is crazy specific, but you could find all the people that match the following: 

  • A company in the Financial Services or Banking industry
  • Who have more than 10 employees
  • That spend money on Adwords
  • Who use Hubspot
  • Who currently have job openings for marketing help
  • With the role of HR Manager
  • That has only been in this role for less than 1 year

Want to help contribute to future articles? Have data-backed and tactical advice to share? I’d love to hear from you!

We have over 60,000 monthly readers that would love to see it! Contact us and let's discuss your ideas!

Justin McGill

About Author: Justin McGill

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7 Steps to Creating an Effective Annual B2B Marketing Plan

To effectively market in today’s noisy, fractured marketing landscape, you’ve got to be firmly in charge of your customer’s experience. That starts with a strategic B2B marketing plan that revolves around your potential buyers. 

B2B buyers are bombarded with choices, but they are unequivocal in what they demand: relevant information delivered through a coordinated and personalized decision-making experience. If they don’t get it, they’ll take their purchasing power elsewhere and look for alternatives to meet their needs.

With the hype of marketing efforts from social media to influencers to content marketing, it is tempting to leap into tactical initiatives when beginning to formulate an annual marketing plan. But without an overall marketing strategy driven by your customers’ value journeys and your business needs, you’re missing the critical “why” behind the tactics.

I t is important to step back and follow some fundamental principles that help guide your strategy and identify which tactics will be implemented and how they influence buyers at different stages of the customer value journey.

The 7 steps to build an effective, strategic B2B marketing plan:

  • Analyze your company’s situation in the market.
  • Outline your buyer.
  • Define the Customer Value Journey.
  • Set SMART goals.
  • Identify tactics to meet strategic goals.
  • Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
  • Set your budget.

These steps, done properly, will set you up for success. 

1. Analyze Your Company’s Situation in the Market

Before you can get started with your marketing plan, it is a good idea to do some self-examination by revisiting or defining your current state or situation.

This entails three key areas of focus: 

  • Company: Are there new products and offerings? Have there been organizational changes? What are the company’s business goals? What has worked effectively so far? What needs to be addressed with an annual plan? 
  • Competitors: How do you compare to your competitors? Are their products better than yours? Do you have competitive advantages or disadvantages over them? Consider the gaps in each competitor’s approach. What are they missing? What are they doing and saying? How are they marketing? Has their product mix changed? What sets them apart? What sets you apart?
  • Climate: What is the marketplace like? Are there trends that are impacting your business positively or negatively? What is the current state of your reputation and place in the market? What needs work? Where are the opportunities to improve your position?

Conducting a basic SWOT analysis is an important foundational and fundamental step to creating an annual marketing plan. It is essential to review and define your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in the context of your marketplace, competition and your recent efforts. If you have done this in prior years, it is good to review previous SWOTs, measure progress, and compare changes in the marketplace.

The temptation is to skip this important work and just begin “planning.” Don’t do that. Like practicing the fundamentals of any sport, this is essential to performance. Doing this will reward you with new insights and fresh opportunities, and will have a positive impact as you begin to better align with your customer wants.

2. Define Your Target Audience

If your company already has buyer personas, we encourage you to revisit these and refine them. If you don’t have a buyer persona, you should create them.

We are big proponents of bringing marketing and sales together during some of these initial planning steps. Your sales team is an important resource when creating buyer personas, and a few of the steps to follow; helping define the customer value journey and defining parts of your measurement plan. 

A recent survey by Hubspot found that when sales and marketing teams work together, companies see 36% higher customer retention and 38% higher sales win rates. 

For defining the customer audience, we use Customer Avatars which are similar to personas but go deeper to help you understand your customer’s world – the stressors, the opportunities, and the vision for the future. 

The Customer Avatar is a snapshot of a person in time that defines:

  • What is your ideal customer struggling with?
  • What are their goals and aspirations?
  • Who are they?
  • What influences their decision?
  • Who influences their decisions?
  • Where are they now and what is the next step for them?
  • What are their jobs like?
  • What are they excited about?
  • What can your product/service do that transforms their lives (to a more desirable future state)?

Once you have this information detailed, it’ll help you define a Customer Value Journey for your buyer. 

According to Gartner, the typical buying group for a complexB2B solution involves six to ten decision-makers, each armed with four or five pieces of information they’ve gathered independently and must de-conflict with the group.

We recommend you have an avatar for each key audience member that defines the different details that impact their information gathering and decision-making within their role. In some cases, you may have multiple audiences for a single product or service. 

3. Define the Customer Value Journey

We believe documenting the Customer Value Journey is arguably the most important step in formulating a sound marketing strategy for businesses.

The Customer Value Journey is a blueprint for creating a predictable flow of customers. It defines the step-by-step process of how buyers interact with products and services, providing a framework for converting casually interested prospects into high-value customers and brand promoters. 

Modeled after human relationships, it includes additional steps not found in a traditional marketing funnel. These steps lead to a more natural sequence of interactions, and helps align organizational and customer interests around shared success, leading to satisfied customers, advocates, and promoters. 

This framework, completed properly, will identify a current state and will reveal a host of gaps and opportunities to market to prospects. It helps you meet them on their terms through the channels they use to gather information and provide the right information to address their needs.

4. Set SMART Goals

Once you have a Customer Value Journey defined, you can determine what goals you want to achieve and how they impact specific stages of the journey.

SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. This means that your goals should be specific and include a time frame for which you want to complete them.

For example, your goal could be to increase sales qualified leads by 15% in six months, or a simpler goal would be to increase levels of engagement on a specific product page by the next quarter.

If you don’t have clearly defined SMART goals before you move into tactical planning, you will have little direction around what you are trying to achieve and you will not be able to hold your marketing organization accountable for ROI.

5. Identify Your Marketing Tactics

The ultimate purpose of a B2B marketing plan is to map out ​​ a strategy to attract more prospects, convert more leads, close more sales and build loyal advocates. That requires selecting, implementing, and integrating the right tactics to achieve the goals you’ve set to reach your goal. 

Primary Marketing Goals: 

  • Attract more prospects – An example might be gaining more website traffic through content (blogging), email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), paid search (PPC), programmatic display advertising, PR, and social media advertising.
  • Create engagement – An example might be driving prospects to specific landing pages designed and developed for specific campaign initiatives. Converting traffic from anonymous website visitors to an identifiable lead would be a key engagement initiative, and would require developing relevant, gated and downloadable content.
  • Convert leads – An example of this would be sales enablement tools and information to help sales in their discussions with prospects, and then lead nurturing via email to maintain the connection and deliver information based on prospect behavior.
  • Create advocates – An example would be tactics that encourage current clients to tout the benefits of your product, service, or brand to compel others to consider it. This may include social media, Google reviews, newsletters, email marketing, and marketing automation.

With these four areas in mind, determining tactics is part art and part science. The challenge is identifying the right ones and integrating them to lead your audience deeper into engagement with you.

Digital Marketing Tactics We Use At Risdall:

  • Search engine optimization (SEO)
  • Paid search (PPC/Google Ads)
  • Endemic display
  • Programmatic display
  • Content marketing (blogging and article writing, ebooks, white papers, webinars)
  • Social media advertising
  • Video production
  • Website design 
  • Conversion rate optimization
  • A/B testing
  • Landing page strategy
  • Call-to-action strategy
  • Link building/earning
  • Infographic design
  • Email marketing
  • Marketing automation
  • Digital publishing/newsletters
  • Lead nurture strategy
  • Public relations (PR)

6. Establish Your Key Performance Indicators

You must determine key performance indicators (KPIs) that provide measures of performance against your goals.

Many times, companies do a lot of activities without a clearly outlined framework of how to measure whether those activities are having an impact. 

We recommend you begin the KPI process by focusing on a handful of the most important, actionable metrics to gain insight into the effectiveness of a particular tactic, campaign initiative, level of engagement, or even the performance of an outside specialist. 

A Growth Scorecard provides the framework needed for periodic review and assessment of initiatives and can reveal opportunities to optimize an initiative. It also provides a crucial point of accountability with senior stakeholders who need to have a line of sight to how marketing is performing.

Learn more about Growth Scorecards . 

7. Set Your Budget

Before you can finalize your marketing plan, you have to know your budget and prioritize activities to fit.

Once you have defined the tactical elements of your marketing strategy and the KPIs you are measuring, you should categorize them by importance and impact. Then, you can prioritize the tactics you will invest in first, according to the available budget. 

Create Realistic Estimates

It’s helpful to note an estimated budget or budget range for each tactic. Consider carefully who should be involved in this process, the person doing the work would be best suited to estimating the time needed. Some tactics may be managed by internal resources as part of your marketing operations budget, while other tactics or initiatives may require external specialty resources such as a contractor or agency partner. Some of your marketing budgets will need to be allocated for out-of-pocket costs associated with media. 

In summary, your final B2B marketing plan should be written to communicate your plan of action to stakeholders; a clear strategy, opportunities based on your SWOT, goals to address those opportunities, tactics you plan to use to achieve those goals, and a clear framework for how you will measure those tactics. 

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Looking for a trusted marketing partner to help you create an effective marketing plan? Contact our team today .

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Free B2B marketing plan template (+ tips and best practices)

Free B2B marketing plan template (+ tips and best practices)

Before we get started, here is the free B2B marketing plan template you're looking for, which you do not need to fill out a form to get. Really, it's yours:

You need to make a copy of the document to use it .

Now, let's dig into a few details you need to know before you get started building out your rockstar marketing plan for your B2B company.

A marketing plan is more than content

I think when people get started with content marketing , they think their content strategy is the entirety of their strategy. While a content strategy is, indeed, a large piece of the proverbial marketing pie, it is not actually the entire pie.

Mmm, pie. Now I'm hungry. Is it Thanksgiving, yet?  🦃

Your company's marketing plan should encompass so much more beyond your content — although your content is very important:

  • Email marketing campaigns and newsletters
  • Social media marketing
  • Paid media and social advertising
  • Events (virtual and in-person)

That's why you need to have a marketing plan, scoped out on an annual basis, with regular updates (as necessary). But your marketing plan isn't just a means to delineate what your campaigns are. It's so much more than that.

What is the purpose of a marketing plan?

The best marketing plans, no matter what industry you're in, all accomplish the same three things (based on a defined period of time):

  • They provide a clear overview of what goals your marketing efforts will achieve over a specific period of time, across the entire company.
  • Each objective has measurable, specific goals that correspond to your company's overall mission and purpose, with defined milestone points at each stage (activation, acquisition, and expansion).
  • For every objective, at every stage, you see how each element of your marketing (social, content, email, etc.) all come together holistically to help you achieve your goals. 

Why is this B2B marketing plan template based on account-based marketing?

The free B2B marketing plan template above is based on the principles of account-based marketing . Account-based marketing takes the traditional B2B sales and marketing funnel and turns it on its head by going after “qualified” leads rather than letting them filter themselves. 

Whereas inbound marketing starts with organic lead generation, account-based marketing starts by identifying and targeting key decision-makers within accounts which have the potential to bring the biggest revenue to your business. 

That being said, we do not view the principles of ABM and inbound or content marketing to be mutually exclusive. In fact, create content that answers the most pressing questions of your ideal buyers (as you would in a content marketing strategy), is still critical to the success of your B2B marketing plan.

With an ABM approach, however, your content will simply be more targeted to what is called your ideal buyer profile . As a note, you need to create your ideal buyer profile first before you get started. And no, it is not the same as a buyer persona.

(It's an efficient exercise though, so don't panic.)

How do you create a B2B marketing plan with an ABM approach?

The best ABM-based B2B marketing plans have their efforts broken out into three specific stages :

  • Acquisition This stage is for bringing net-new accounts into your pipeline. Most companies focus a lot of their efforts in this stage.
  • Acceleration Once you have engaged accounts in your pipeline. You are either keeping them engaged or potentially reviving what was previously a dead deal. Techniques, such as personalization, is really helpful here. 
  • Expansion Expansion is all about retaining, upselling, and expanding relationships and service agreements with your existing customer base. Like the old saying goes, it's easier to win business from existing clients than to attract new ones.

That's why each section of the B2B marketing plan template is broken out into those three phases, based on the specific service/product objectives you outline in the beginning of your plan. That way you see how, at each interaction phase, you are targeting your marketing efforts to meet your goals. 

What are the benefits of an ABM approach to B2B marketing?

In addition to going after qualified leads right at the start, instead of having them self-select and identify their fit for your products and services, there are four key benefits to an ABM approach to B2B marketing:

  • It personalizes the experience for your buyers , because your marketing campaigns are less broad. Instead, they're more targeted and focused on the specific needs and pain points of your ideal buyers.
  • You build trust and long-term relationships by networking with people within accounts and transforming them into advocates — a big deal since a 5% increase can lead to an increase in profits of up to 95% .
  • It shortens and streamlines the sales process because you're already dealing with more qualified leads that require less nurturing. Your sales team will also waste less time with bad-fit prospects, because they won't be targeted in the first place.
  • You'll align your sales and marketing teams because ABM is, simply put, a business growth strategy that holistically aligns your sales and marketing teams around the same goals and objectives. 

How to make your B2B marketing plan a winner

As the marketing leader at your company, creating a winning marketing plan is a unique challenge. When done right, your people will love you for helping to grow the business with a clear strategy.

When done incorrectly, however, you can find yourself in a very lonely place, with a big document and nothing much else to show for it.

So, how do you avoid the latter? 

  • Do not write your marketing plan on your own. Talk to leadership, sales, and different segments of your business. Leadership will help you align on what your goals and objectives should be. Sales will help you with the finer details of your plan — realistic goal-setting, ideal buyer profiles, etc. Anyone you list as a stakeholder should be someone who gives feedback.
  • Take your time to create your marketing plan. A great marketing plan isn't written overnight by candlelight. It takes time, requires lots of collaboration, and is too important to be rushed. Instead, make it a four- to six-week initiative, with a clear delivery date. Then, have specific milestones, such as a first draft for leadership review, a draft for cross-department collaboration, and so on.
  • Be as thorough as possible the first time you write it. From experience, I know how writing massive, 20+ page documents can feel tedious and draining — even if you're totally bought in on the outcome. Don't cut corners. For example, you may be tempted to say, "Oh, I'll note exactly what happens in this nurturing sequence when it comes time to do it." Don't do that. Do it now.

Again, yes, it is a ton of work. But trust me when I say you'll thank yourself for all of the effort you put into it. Instead of scrambling at each stage — "What should this workflow include? What social media campaigns do we need to run? Crap, did we even think about paid media?" — you'll simply be ready to execute

On top of that, you'll know already that your logic is sound and vetted by other teams, including your leadership. Which means, more buy-in for the work you're doing.

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Millennium Agency Menu --> Services Market Research BRAND180 Brand Strategy Creative Design Messaging Strategy Website Design Digital Marketing Sectors Technology Advanced Manufacturing Pharma and Biotech Client results eBooks About Leadership Community Careers Schedule Time Blog Podcast 180 Schedule a call How to Write a Powerful B2B Marketing Plan: Free Template

Posted on July 8, 2022 by Linda Fanaras

Writing a powerful B2B marketing plan is no easy task. When you are establishing your B2B marketing plan, it is important that you take the time to really get to know your brand, as well as your current and potential audience. You need to know what you are selling, and who you are selling to. However, it is not that simple, and there are many additional factors and steps that need to be taken to have a truly powerful marketing plan. At Millennium Agency, we are experts in marketing planning, as well as an assortment of other B2B branding and marketing strategy services which is why we have created this B2B marketing plan template that walks you through the stages of building a powerful marketing plan.   

Phase One: Research and Foundation   

Before you can begin writing a marketing plan that is powerful enough to drive success , you must know exactly what makes your business unique. During phase one of our B2B marketing strategy template, we encourage you to conduct in-depth research about your brand, both from an internal and external perspective. Knowing what your employees, customers, investors, and even potential customers think about your business can give you productive insight into what your business does well, and what you can improve on. It is in your best interest to invest in taking careful time to dive deep into your brand and what people think, because this research will be used to build your overall marketing planning strategy.   

During the research phase, you also want to consider your competition and do a bit of research on them. Knowing who your competitors are, and how they position and market themselves not only helps you avoid being repetitive, but also shows you how you need to do better. Research is the key to marketing plan templates for every industry, and it allows you to build a stable, cohesive foundation for a powerful marketing plan.  

Phase Two: Analysis and Goal Setting  

Once you reach phase two of the B2B marketing plan template , you begin to use the research conducted in phase one. During this stage, you should analyze the information that you yielded and note any popular trends or consistencies present, both positive and negative. A common marketing planning strategy used by industry professionals is called the SWOT analysis , which combines internal and external analyses to guide you towards a marketing plan that is successful. A SWOT analysis examines your strengths and weaknesses, as well as your opportunities and threats, and requires you to look openly and honestly at how your business performs as is. Once you properly break down these key points of your business, you can establish your goals with ease.   

Establishing goals not only includes pinpointing the successes you want achieve in the future, but also lays out the objectives you must meet to succeed. Goal setting is the core of marketing plan templates, and the more specific and direct you can be when setting your goals, the more cohesive and successful your results will be. Your goals serve as your guiding beacon for your marketing plan, and your objectives are what help get you there. Establishing your marketing plan objectives can be challenging if you do not have a background in marketing, because they are the logistical, technical details of your entire strategy. If you are unable to determine successful marketing objectives on your own, employing the help of a professional firm is the best way to get assistance and see a marketing plan example for yourself. Either way, you cannot move on to the next step in the template until you have clearly identified your goals and objectives.  

Phase Three: Audience Identification and Targeting      

By phase three of the Millennium Agency marketing plan template, you should have a wealth of knowledge on who you are and what people are saying about your brand, as well as a clear understanding of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. From there, you should have built out a clear set of goals and objectives that support your business reaching those goals. Once you have the basics down, it is time to fine tune your marketing planning to your specific audience.   

You should have gained a thorough understanding of your target audience and your customers’ identities during the research phase of the marketing plan template, and now is the time to use what you learned to better serve your products or services to the right people. How you position yourself within your market and industry is important, and most customers take only a mere minute during first impressions with your brand to decide whether or not they wish to continue on with your business’ website, advertisement, blog, email, or however you are reaching them. Because of this, you need to make sure that you are making the right decisions when it comes to communicating with and engaging your audience; if you miss the mark, you may not get a second chance. During this phase of the marketing strategy template, you should be establishing a clear tone and message that you will be using to reach and engage your target audience and generate leads.   

Phase Four: Coordinating Logistics   

Before you can begin executing your marketing plan, you must also coordinate all of the different logistics that must be taken into consideration such as your business’ budget, timeline, and capabilities. If you have not already enlisted the help of a professional marketing strategy firm, now is the time to do so! Although you can tackle coordinating all of the technical logistics of your marketing plan on your own, having an experienced firm is a great way to guarantee that you are getting the most out of your marketing planning experience. The right marketing firm will help you ensure that you are getting the most optimal results from your planning efforts.  

During this phase, you should lay out exactly when you hope to reach each goal, customizing each objective deadline to your specific business and industry needs. From there you need to determine what your budget is, how much you want to spend daily, and on what marketing efforts. You cannot move on to solidifying your tactics until you know how much time and money you are working with. Once you have your goals and objectives lined out, and have your budget and timeline sorted, you can begin to schedule and execute your strategy as outlined through this digital marketing plan example.  

Phase Five: Execution   

By the time you reach phase five, the execution phase, you should have already laid the foundation and pinpointed the exact goals and objectives you want to reach, as well as determined how you are going to achieve success using the budget and timeline you are working within. Now it is time to execute your marketing plan, which involves a lot of different components depending on your specific goals as a business. Making sure that your B2B marketing plan goes off with success can be tricky to manage, and marketing firms are well versed in juggling many different marketing components, ensuring the correct materials and efforts are launched correctly and without issue. During the execution phase, you should be preparing and launching all of the different objectives you pinpointed during earlier phases. From there you should be gathering data on your B2B marketing plan’s success and determining how successful your efforts are at generating leads. The execution process can take place over the span of weeks, months, quarters, or even years, and requires close management to ensure your plan stays on track.  

Phase Six: Monitoring and Refinement  

The final stage of any marketing planning template example is the monitoring and refinement process that takes place from initial launch up until a new campaign is launched or the current plan dies out, whichever comes first. However, we suggest reevaluating your B2B marketing plan strategies frequently to avoid falling behind in your industry. Throughout the monitoring and refinement process, you should be gathering data on how successful each component of your campaign is at meeting your goals, and using that data paired with qualitative data such as customer and employee comments allows you to modify and optimize your B2B marketing plan and strategies.  

Don’t Navigate this Alone    

Marketing planning can be difficult, especially if you do not have previous marketing plan examples f or your brand or if you do not have a marketing planning template to follow. We have reviewed the most basic form of a market planning template, and through the six phases we highlighted, you should be able to build a B2B marketing strategy that works for your business. Although no one knows your brand better than you, an experienced marketing firm knows the ins and outs of marketing the best – after all its what their brand is all about. Hiring a B2B marketing firm will optimize your marketing planning experience and will yield more successful results every time.  You do not need to navigate the marketing planning process alone, you have already done half of the hardest part by going through this marketing strategy template, the next step is to schedule time with a member of our staff to begin planning your next strategy.  

About Millennium Agency  

Millennium Agency is a nationally recognized, top woman led B2B branding, positioning, and digital marketing firm who knows how to create value that emotionally influences your customer’s buying decision, giving you the competitive advantage. As your trusted partner in B2B software technology and manufacturing, we provide the branding and positioning framework that make an impact – so you can focus on what you do best – run your business successfully. For more information, visit our website or call 877-873-7445.  

b2b marketing business plan

About Linda Fanaras

Linda Fanaras is the CEO and Founder of Millennium Agency located in Manchester, NH and Boston. She can be reached at 877-873-7445 or [email protected] .

b2b marketing business plan

B2B Company Marketing Plan Template

  • Great for beginners
  • Ready-to-use, fully customizable Subcategory
  • Get started in seconds

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Ready to take your B2B marketing strategy to the next level? Look no further than ClickUp's B2B Company Marketing Plan Template! This complete template is designed specifically for B2B companies, helping you identify target markets, develop effective strategies, and achieve your business objectives with ease.

With ClickUp's B2B Company Marketing Plan Template, you'll be able to:

  • Define your target audience and understand their pain points
  • Craft tailored marketing strategies to reach and engage your ideal customers
  • Set clear goals and track your progress towards increasing brand awareness, generating leads, and driving sales
  • Collaborate with your team, assign tasks, and ensure everyone is aligned for success

Don't waste any more time trying to piece together your B2B marketing plan. Get started with ClickUp's template and watch your business soar to new heights!

Benefits of B2B Company Marketing Plan Template

The B2B Company Marketing Plan Template is a powerful tool that can help your marketing department achieve its goals and drive business growth. Here are just a few benefits of using this template:

  • Provides a clear roadmap for your marketing team, ensuring everyone is aligned and working towards the same objectives
  • Helps identify and target specific B2B markets, enabling you to focus your efforts and resources effectively
  • Guides the development of marketing strategies and tactics that resonate with your target audience, increasing brand awareness and generating quality leads
  • Enables you to track and measure the success of your marketing initiatives, allowing for continuous improvement and optimization

Main Elements of B2B Company Marketing Plan Template

ClickUp's B2B Company Marketing Plan template is the perfect tool to streamline your marketing efforts and achieve your goals. Here are the key elements that make this template effective:

  • Custom Statuses: Track the progress of your marketing tasks with 6 predefined statuses, including Cancelled, Complete, In Progress, Needs Input, Planned, and To Do.
  • Custom Fields: Utilize 6 custom fields such as Quarter, Task Type, Impact, Progress, Percent Completion, and Effort to capture important details and metrics for each task.
  • Custom Views: Access 5 different views tailored to your needs, including Key Results, Timeline, Getting Started Guide, Objectives, and Progress Board, allowing you to visualize your marketing plan from different perspectives.
  • Collaboration Features: Leverage ClickUp's collaboration features such as assigning tasks, commenting, and file attachments to ensure seamless communication and teamwork within your marketing team.
  • Goal Tracking: Set and monitor your marketing objectives using ClickUp's Goals feature, which allows you to align your marketing efforts with your overall business strategy.

How to Use Marketing Plan for B2B Company

Creating a comprehensive marketing plan for your B2B company is crucial for driving growth and success. By utilizing the B2B Company Marketing Plan Template in ClickUp and following the steps outlined below, you can develop a strategic and effective marketing plan that will help you achieve your business goals.

1. Define your target audience

To start, it's important to clearly define your target audience. Understand who your ideal B2B customers are, their pain points, challenges, and motivations. This will help you tailor your marketing efforts and messaging to resonate with your target audience.

Use the custom fields feature in ClickUp to create categories for your target audience, including industry, company size, job title, and pain points.

2. Set clear marketing objectives

Determine the specific objectives you want to achieve with your marketing plan. Are you looking to increase brand awareness, generate leads, or drive conversions? Setting clear and measurable marketing objectives will help you stay focused and track your progress.

Utilize the Goals feature in ClickUp to set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals for each objective.

3. Develop your marketing strategies and tactics

Based on your target audience and objectives, develop a range of marketing strategies and tactics that will help you reach your goals. Consider using a mix of digital marketing, content marketing, social media, email marketing, and events to maximize your reach and engagement.

Use the Board view in ClickUp to create cards for each marketing strategy or tactic, and assign team members responsible for executing each task.

4. Create a marketing budget

Allocate a budget for your marketing activities to ensure you have the necessary resources to implement your strategies. Consider factors such as advertising costs, content creation, marketing tools, and team training. Having a well-defined budget will help you make informed decisions and optimize your marketing efforts.

Utilize the Table view in ClickUp to create a budget spreadsheet, track expenses, and monitor your spending.

5. Monitor, analyze, and optimize

Once your marketing plan is in action, it's important to continuously monitor and analyze your performance. Keep track of key metrics such as website traffic, lead generation, conversion rates, and ROI. Identify what's working well and what needs improvement, and make data-driven optimizations to maximize your marketing effectiveness.

Use the Dashboards feature in ClickUp to create visual reports and track your marketing metrics in real-time.

By following these steps and utilizing the B2B Company Marketing Plan Template in ClickUp, you can develop a well-structured and effective marketing plan that will drive growth and success for your B2B company.

add new template customization

Get Started with ClickUp’s B2B Company Marketing Plan Template

B2B marketing teams can use this Marketing Plan Template to streamline their marketing efforts and effectively reach their target audience.

First, hit “Add Template” to sign up for ClickUp and add the template to your Workspace. Make sure you designate which Space or location in your Workspace you’d like this template applied.

Next, invite relevant members or guests to your Workspace to start collaborating.

Now you can take advantage of the full potential of this template to create a comprehensive marketing plan:

  • Use the Key Results view to track and measure the success of your marketing campaigns
  • The Timeline view will help you visualize your marketing activities and deadlines
  • Refer to the Getting Started Guide view to understand how to effectively use this template
  • Utilize the Objectives view to set clear goals and objectives for your marketing plan
  • Use the Progress Board view to track the progress of each marketing task
  • Organize tasks into six different statuses: Cancelled, Complete, In Progress, Needs Input, Planned, To Do, to keep track of progress
  • Update statuses as you work through tasks to keep team members informed of progress
  • Monitor and analyze tasks to ensure maximum productivity and successful marketing campaigns.

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The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Go-To Marketing Plan for Your B2B Business

by Debra Andrews | June 22, 2023

“Marketing just feels like a waste of time and money.”

As marketing consultants, we’ve heard this many times, and we’ll probably hear it many more. Often, when they don’t see an immediate value or return on their marketing investment, business owners decide that it wasn’t even worth it in the first place. If you’ve said something similar yourself, know you’re not alone — in a  survey by Rakuten Marketing , respondents estimated that they wasted an average of 26% of their budget on ineffective channels and strategies thanks to their B2B marketing plan (or lack thereof). Even John Wanamaker, marketing pioneer, said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

Which, if you’re the glass half full kind of person, means that half of it  isn’t  wasted. But how do you ensure that your go to marketing strategy is batting higher than 50%? How do you create a strategic marketing plan that not only successfully launches your new product or service, but can be tracked, analyzed and evolved to meet your industry’s ever-changing landscape? How do you hold it—and your marketing partner—accountable? And what is bad marketing, and how do you make it…well, good?

At a very basic level, “bad” marketing is marketing that isn’t strategic. It lacks a solid foundation and doesn’t base its conception upon research. And it can’t adjust to changes and be flexible along the way. 

Oftentimes, it leaves you wondering why you even bothered. 

Bad marketing will always exist. But by using a cohesive and adaptable plan based on analytics, we can discover which half of our marketing dollars are wasted and optimize those funds towards initiatives that are working. We can refuse to have a short-sighted view of marketing, track marketing KPIs and revel in a long-term increase in revenue. 

When it comes to creating your go to marketing plan, you may think you can’t afford to create one, but in reality…you can’t afford not to. 

Understanding Go to Market Strategies

What is a go to market strategy? A go to market strategy is a plan that outlines how a company will bring a product or service to market and reach its target customers. It involves understanding the intricacies of your target market, identifying the unique value proposition of the product or service and determining the best way to reach and engage with potential customers. And it’s essential for any business looking to enter a new market, grow its customer base and/or gain a competitive advantage. 

The objectives of a go to market strategy include:

  • Create awareness of your product or service
  • Define and segment the target market
  • Coordinate company goals and objectives
  • Generate leads and convert them into customers 
  • Increase customer engagement
  • Outperform and protect the current market share against competitors
  • Strengthen your brand 
  • Reduce costs and optimize profits

Importance of Go to Market Strategies in B2B Marketing

A  survey  we conducted back in 2017 revealed that 32% of respondents’ companies did not have a formal marketing plan.

Given some business owners’ perception of marketing, this isn’t exactly a shock. 

But what  is  shocking is how big of a disservice this is to their businesses and their ROIs. Market strategies are particularly important for B2B marketing, as they help businesses define their target market and tailor their efforts to reach it. 

Since B2B marketing is all about building relationships with potential customers, a go to market strategy serves as the foundation for developing those relationships. The purpose of B2B marketing is to make other businesses familiar with your brand name, the value of your product or service and convert them into customers. By understanding the needs and pain points of your target market, you can create messaging that speaks directly to them and positions your product or service as the differentiated solution they need.

A go to market strategy framework also helps you focus in on your business goals and gives you a blueprint to measure and quantify results. It allows you to develop more effective promotions by tracking analytics and making adjustments along the way.

Key Components of a Go to Market Strategy Framework

A go to market strategy typically includes several key components, including market research, target market identification, product positioning, messaging and content creation, sales and distribution channels, pricing strategy and marketing KPIs.

Each of these components is critical to the success of the strategy and should be carefully considered and planned:

  • Target Audience : Identifying the specific group of customers and buyer personas who will benefit most from your product or service, and understanding their pain points, preferences and willingness to pay.
  • Product-Market Fit : Determining the unique value proposition that sets the product or service apart from competitors for that target audience, and addresses a specific problem or need for them.
  • Market Demand and Competition : Researching the market landscape, including existing competitors and the level of demand for your product or service.
  • Distribution Channels and Pricing : Identifying the most effective means of delivering the product or service to potential customers, and setting a pricing strategy that supports the product’s unique value proposition (UVP) and market position.
  • Marketing Strategies:  Creating a strategic  marketing plan  that outlines the tactics and channels to be used to reach prospective customers in your target market and generate awareness, leads and sales.
  • Sales and Customer Support : Ensure that sales and customer support teams are aligned with the go to market strategy and provide them with the necessary training and resources to sell the product or service effectively.
  • Performance and Optimization : Track marketing KPIs to measure the success of the go to market strategy and optimize towards driving more impact to the business based on data and insights.

Identifying Marketing KPIs

One of the most important parts of a go to market plan is measuring success with marketing KPIs, or key performance indicators. KPIs are key to optimizing future marketing efforts.

Some common marketing KPIs include:

  • Customer acquisition cost for a SaaS business
  • Return on investment
  • Website traffic
  • Lead generation
  • Conversion rates (leads to customers)
  • Length of sales cycle
  • Customer lifetime value 
  • Revenue growth
  • Market share 

KPIs help you track the success of your marketing efforts so you can identify areas where your strategy is working well and areas where you need to make adjustments. 

Slack: A Go to Market Strategy Success

There are many examples of successful go to market strategies, but one that stands out is Slack’s. When Butterfield and his team decided to share their internal communications platform with the world, they knew they had something big. However, they had to figure out how to convince the people who were tired of email to give them a try.

So, they positioned themselves as the go-to team communication tool that does away with confusing email threads. This is how “the email killer” was born.

The  company  identified that internal communication was a huge problem for many companies, even if they didn’t know it. They focused on selling Slack as a fun, easy-to-use and highly convenient solution that keeps communication straightforward. 

The popular workplace communication tool Slack successfully entered the market with a strategy that targeted early adopters, offering them a freemium model and providing outstanding customer support through a Customer Development Team that listens to users and implements solutions accordingly. Their strategic marketing plan included content marketing, social media marketing and influencer partnerships to raise awareness and generate buzz.

The results have been fantastic so far, including a rise in value from $0 to $4 billion in just four years, 3.5x growth in daily active users over a single year without a marketing team, and an eventual sale to Salesforce for $27 billion.

How Marketri Develops Your Strategic Marketing Plan 

The biggest issue with “wasted marketing” is that it lacks strategizing, monitoring, analyzing, adjusting and then adjusting again. Often, marketing not led with a well-thought-out strategy is spent putting the cart before the horse and then trying to figure out why you’re not moving forward.

But not here at Marketri. Marketri empowers companies to achieve predictable, profitable growth through data-driven  B2B marketing strategies  and executions. We create rigorous marketing plans that successfully drive revenue growth and make a measurable impact.

We call this process our Marketri Momentum Model (M 3 ) ® .

Our innovative approach unlocks each business’s potential through a research-backed strategic marketing plan that drives them to meet and exceed their goals. Every step of the way, our experienced marketing professionals are tracking and optimizing your plan—so you can go from “How can we use marketing to drive our growth?” to “I can’t believe the results we’re seeing.” 

This framework is designed to develop a customized strategic marketing plan that generates outstanding bottom-line results. The M 3  follows six proven steps that generate measurable results across various industries.

  • Discovery & Assessment  process, where our strategists immerse themselves into your company and industry to gain insights and data that we need to build an effective plan. The M 3  discovery process is tailored to your business, drawing from effective techniques like interviews with your clients and internal stakeholders, a competitor analysis, a SWOT analysis, a review of the industry landscape, and an assessment of your digital footprint.
  • Strategic Marketing & Growth Plan , where your Marketri team leverages our discovery findings and analysis to create a custom, actionable roadmap that’s informed by research, grounded in strategy, and aligned with your goals. It outlines your ideal buyers, strategic approach, targeted marketing tactics, execution timeline, technologies, budget, and KPIs we’ll measure against. We also begin to map out positioning and high-level messaging that ensures your marketing resonates with buyers and moves them to act.
  • Quick Wins  to achieve immediate results while planning for the future. The Marketri discovery and planning process is extensive and comprehensive—which is why we look for quick-win opportunities that can make an immediate impact, such as a contact re-engagement campaign to drive some sales qualified opportunities, website optimizations to enhance conversions, or clearer messaging to generate a stronger connection with your ideal customers and prospects.
  • Brand & Website.  You can’t engage in effective growth marketing without a sound brand strategy and a website that is easy to navigate while delivering your unique value proposition to visitors. If needed, we’ll guide you through productive branding exercises, develop or update your brand identity, or revamp your website with more compelling messaging, a robust repository of content that attracts leads, and more effective navigation that moves buyers along the right path.
  • Marketing Technology.  Scaling your marketing, assessing whether it’s working, and doing more of what’s performing best is made possible through having the right marketing technology. We’ll guide you in choosing, implementing, and getting acclimated with the tools that enable you to scale, measure, and optimize your marketing for the strongest ROI. No more lost opportunities. No more guessing about what’s working well. And no more wondering what kind of results your budget is generating.
  • Execution & Analytics . Marketing plans and technologies form the foundation. Now, it’s time to execute flawlessly. Your Marketri team will execute your  marketing plan  with precision and urgency, taking a proactive and agile approach to driving your marketing campaigns, directing your social engagement, ensuring your website is working hard 24/7, and more. They’ll leverage analytics and insights to focus on the metrics that matter to your business goals—assessing your marketing results against your KPIs, identifying improvement opportunities, and fine-tuning your marketing for the greatest impact.

Discover Your Business’ Potential with Marketri

In today’s competitive business environment, a go-to-market strategy is essential for any business looking to launch a new product or service, enter a new market, or grow its customer base. By understanding your target market, identifying your unique value proposition, and developing a comprehensive marketing plan, you can position your business for success.

And we are here to help every step of the way. While Marketri understands that marketing plans and technologies are essential, how they are executed is just as important. Through our proprietary Marketri Momentum Model (M 3 ), we develop strategies that have always been and always will be grounded in research and data. Our team takes a proactive and agile  approach  to ensure that your marketing goals are met every time, using our leading-edge technologies and tools to ensure your success is repeatable, sustainable, and predictable. And you’ll be able to see your big wins through our advanced analytics that track, measure and optimize your go to marketing plan. 

Here, we’re fully committed to providing strategic, cost-effective marketing that accelerates your growth, delivers a high ROI and works hard every minute of every day — marketing that even John Wanamaker would certainly say is 100% not a waste. 

Are you ready to take your business to the next level with a go-to-market strategy?  Schedule a call  with our CEO Deb Andrews to start building your business’ momentum.

Do B2B Companies Over-Invest in Sales and Under-Invest in Marketing? →

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B2B Marketing Business Plan

B2B marketing business plan

B2B or business-to-business marketing is one of the strategic approaches that businesses incorporate in their operational activities. As technological innovation grows rampantly in this digital age, your company has to learn several more ways on how to tap new markets and get the loyalty of your current market hold. The processes involved in B2B marketing allow establishments and organizations to get a wider market reach and bigger lead generation. A B2B marketing plan can help you a lot if you want to ensure that all your action plans, strategies, and tactics are aligned with your vision.

  • Financial Advisor Marketing Plan Examples – PDF
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B2B Marketing Plan Template

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Size: US, A4

Not knowing anything about the development of a B2B marketing business plan should not be treated as a disadvantage. You can learn how to create one with the help of resources, references, and guides. For one, we have listed a number of B2B marketing business plan examples in PDF that you can use whenever you need help in developing both the content and format of your own document.

B2B Content Marketing for a Business Plan Example

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B2B Content Marketing Business Plan Example

b2b content marketing business plan example 01

Complete B2B Marketing Business Plan and Guide Example

complete b2b marketing business plan and guide example 01

Why Is It Necessary to Have a B2B Marketing Business Plan?

Just by looking at the executive summary of a marketing plan , you should already have an idea on how the entire marketing business plan can potentially affect your operations—especially if it can cover all the key points of concern of the business about its marketing actions and activities. However, you still need to thoroughly review the entire marketing business plan to ensure that call-to-actions are realistic and attainable.

If you are tasked to develop a B2B marketing business plan, an executive summary is one of the last things that you need to create as you first need to be knowledgeable of all the areas of the document before you can summarize it accordingly. More so, you should also know the purpose of the B2B marketing business plan so you can be well-guided within its drafting phases. A few of the reasons why it is necessary for you to create and use a B2B marketing business plan are as follows:

  • A B2B marketing business plan can help you properly focus on the milestones that you want to achieve. The definition of your success measures can help you prioritize call-to-actions that are essential for your growth and development. Moreover, this can make you more strategic and tactical when it comes to dealing with other businesses for your marketing needs, requests, and requirements.
  • A B2B marketing plan can present an analysis of your current marketing condition. This can then be compared to the state where you would like to be within the marketplace in relation to relevance, presence, and visibility. Through this, you can ensure that any business-to-business marketing decisions that you will come up with are truly beneficial to your business.
  • A B2B marketing plan allows you to answer relevant questions and look into existing concerns and issues. Giving commitment to your B2B marketing strategies and tactics with the help of a B2B marketing business plan can make it more efficient for you to communicate and connect with other businesses and your audience.

B2B Marketing: Revised Model of Marketing and Communications Effects Example

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B2B Marketing Business Plan Example

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Project of a Marketing Plan for a B2B Company Example

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Size: 166 KB

Thinking of Making a B2B Marketing Business Plan?

Business-to-business marketing allows one business to sell its offers to another business. In this manner, buyers or the businesses that will transact with one another can properly distinguish the profit potential of working with one another to achieve marketing goals. If you want to create a B2B marketing business plan that will set the direction of the entire transaction, here are some of the things that you should always remember:

  • You have to keep in mind the B2B marketing gives importance to the creation and maintenance of professional relationships that are built from trust, credibility, and business interests. Hence, you have to value not only the integrity of your business but the goals and desires of your business partners as well. Whether you are a small establishment or a big corporation, you have to ensure that you will prioritize the business relationships that you have so you can set a strong foundation when implementing the B2B marketing business plan that you have developed.
  • Know how to select your audience. There are different types of customers that you can acquire in B2B marketing processes. Knowing the market that you would like to target can help you develop strategies and action plans that will surely get their attention. Compared to a business-to-consumer transaction, you are actually not dealing with individuals but groups. As an example, a few of your target customers can be companies who need your products to develop theirs, government agencies, medical facilities, academic institutions, and wholesalers.
  • Ensure that you will align your B2B marketing business plan with your annual marketing plan . It is essential for all your marketing documents to work together for a common goal. Lapses in objectives and plan application can weaken the activities and efforts that you will execute, so you have to ensure that your B2B marketing business plan is well-developed and incorporated in your other marketing planning documents.

B2B Digital Marketing Plan for a Micro Design Company Example

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B2B Marketing and Branding Business Plan Example

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Factors That Can Affect B2B Marketing Business Plan Development

In comparison to a  nonprofit marketing plan , a B2B marketing business plan actually goes on the different route as it needs to provide sales leads and profitability to the business once the approved document is already up for implementation. Hence, the delivery of work actions and its application to business operations must be directly developed based on the needs and expectations of specific customers.

Once you have already decided to create a B2B marketing business plan, you have to remember that the process of developing this document is not the same when your focus in consumer marketing. Aside from having a smaller audience to focus on as the target market is very particular, there are also some factors that can affect the planning and development phases of the B2B marketing business plan. Here are some of the factors that you need to consider when drafting this document:

  • The products, services, and offers that you can provide to other businesses for the B2B marketing transaction be realized
  • The target businesses that you would like to work with especially those that are within the same industry where your business belongs
  • The strategies and tactics that you will use to deliver your marketing and business message in a direct and straightforward manner
  • The time frame in which B2B marketing activities will be implemented
  • The promotional and advertising activities that you will use so you can get the attention of your target audience
  • The pricing strategies and other financial concerns that you need to look into to for case revenue potential and value of returns
  • The benefits that the transaction can provide to the businesses whom you will be working with within the entirety of the B2B marketing processes specified in the business plan

Digital Marketing Plan for a B2B Company Example

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B2B Marketing Business Plan Guide Example

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Tips in Making a Successful B2B Marketing Business Plan

Creating a B2B marketing business plan from scratch is not easy. However, there are some guidelines that will allow you to efficiently maximize your efforts and time when developing the specified document. Here are some tips that can help make an outstanding and effective marketing business plan:

  • Understand the context of B2B marketing and identify the ways on how it can benefit your business.
  • Ensure that your goals and objectives are measurable and time-bound so you can have an idea on how to develop steps that can help you achieve the things that you would like to get at the end of the transaction.
  • Develop quality standards and metrics for evaluation that can help you evaluate the impacts and effects of the B2B marketing business plan to your business especially in terms of profitability.
  • Review the document before signing it or sending it to the concerned entities who will evaluate the content of the B2B marketing business plan .

Use references like templates and examples so that it will be faster for you to come up with an effective and well-laid-out document. Download any of the examples that we have listed in this post and start making your own B2B marketing business plan.

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