For decades, B2B digital marketing strategies were based on the same fundamentals as B2C marketing. But over the past few years, B2B marketing has evolved into a stand-alone discipline with its techniques, methods and critical indicators of success. Against the backdrop of other companies’ marketing efforts, yours can get lost, but you can avoid this by following the five simple rules we’ve compiled in this article.
There are two main categories of markets: business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B). The B2C approach is the most familiar for most of us, as we daily engage in this process when we buy products and services as part of our personal lives.
Conversely, B2B is less intuitive because it involves transactions between professionals. The basis of B2B digital marketing lies in three areas:
- Acquiring valuable leads that the sales department can easily convert
- Building an expert image (mainly through content marketing) to grow your brand’s value that often enables you to raise your rates
- Client retention and loyalty that will help you achieve stability of your business
To help you achieve the intended results in each of the above areas, in this article, we explain what you should do to stand out in B2B digital marketing.
Define your brand’s tone of voice (based on your brand positioning and identity)
The tone of a brand’s voice refers to how a company communicates its brand values and vision to its target audience. It also testifies to how the brand expresses itself and communicates with its target audience. These elements directly influence how the recipient perceives the message. A clear tone of voice helps build a company’s personality through written, vocal or visual content. The voice style is vital to create a bond with the audience and, most importantly, to stand out from the competition.
In B2B communications, tone of voice is just as crucial as in B2C digital marketing. That is well known to MailChimp, which plays with language every time it communicates with its clients, using an informal tone with a touch of humour. However, the tone is never inappropriate or snobbish.
Mailchimp’s content style guide also advises that it is better to remain serious if your wit were to be forced. With specific tone-of-voice guidelines, the company effectively communicates with small businesses, responding to their challenges in a warm and approachable manner.
Decide what your KPIs are
A key performance indicator, also known as a KPI, is a measure of performance that helps you better see if your company is meeting key objectives. These metrics also provide insight into how some aspects of your strategy are performing and help you make critical business decisions. You can control your campaigns’ effectiveness using the right metrics, including how their costs translate into profits. In addition, setting KPIs will allow you to prioritise the time and energy you will devote to specific activities to develop form and ultimately achieve goals.
One of the most relevant KPIs in marketing is the conversion rate, which presents whether an action taken by the company influences the actions taken by its audience. Thus, this KPI allows you to monitor the effectiveness of your efforts. For example, suppose 1,000 users are taken to a promotional data collection page (or a landing page in simpler terms) after clicking a promotional link, and only 100 complete the corresponding form. In that case, the conversion rate is 10%. This is a relatively low coefficient value, so you should treat it as a reason to take optimisation measures.
Even a seemingly insignificant change can lead to spectacular results. Walmart is a good example. This company saw a sharp decline in conversion rate as their average site load time increased from 1 to 4 seconds. They decided to deal with this problem and saw that for every 1 second of improvement in load time, Walmart experienced a 2% increase in conversions. For every 100 ms of improvement, they grew incremental revenue by up to 1%. The reduced bounce rate was an additional, but also beneficial, result.
Know your competitors
Knowing your competitors’ strategies is vital to implementing and adapting your sales and marketing activities. You certainly already have an idea of who your main competitors are. However, business leaders need to focus on something other than their direct competitors. It is equally important to know your indirect competitors, as their efforts can significantly affect your results.
As the name suggests, direct competitors are companies similar to yours. They are those who offer the same products and the same services. For example, in the case of an email marketing tool, another email marketing tool is a direct competitor. Indirect competitors, on the other hand, are companies that offer different products or services that are still somewhat similar. For example, an indirect competitor of an email marketing tool is a web push platform because it provides a similar service – quick communication with customers.
Careful monitoring of such companies is also essential because the products or services of indirect competitors can, at some point, replace your offerings.
We talked a lot about that in our article: How to know your audience better.
Have a recognisable and fresh visual identity
Corporate identity has a real marketing significance. It’s a crucial part of your company’s strategy and can boost achieved results. To be recognised by everyone, a company must create its own identity based on well-defined graphic elements. Brand recognition creates a sense of trust with the client. There is a reason why clients or potential clients trust companies that have a strong brand image. Moreover, a well-thought-out visual identity in line with a brand’s vision and values helps it stand out from the competition, making it appear bigger and stronger than the competition, which is especially important when acquiring business clients.
The importance of visual identity is well known to Visa, a company that underwent a significant rebranding in 2021 to strengthen its image. Their goal was not to be associated only with issuing credit cards. It took a year to work on the new idea. As a result, Visa now has a fresh visual identity to effectively communicate with recipients of both individual (B2C) and business (B2B) audiences.
Read more about the brand identity and rebranding examples.
Create unique content to enhance your digital marketing
Creating great content comes down to one fundamental thing: The audience. Business audiences are particularly demanding in this regard. They want to see or read content that’s practical and unique from other sources. Such an approach will allow your brand to build an image of an expert, and this is of great importance in B2B digital marketing.
B2B content marketing should be specific and reliable. Remember, however, that your audience is not the company itself. More and more B2B marketing is discussing the H2H (human to human) concept. There is always a person on the other side of the table. That is because it’s the people, not the company, who decide to establish cooperation. Remember that content marketing in B2B is not just blog posts. It’s also e-books, audiobooks, podcasts, case studies and webinars. The latter form is particularly suited to B2B marketing, even more so when the topic is a real challenge that the brand’s audience faces daily.
An excellent webinar idea you can use is to partner with another brand, as, for example, Litmus and Trello have done in the past. That is a brilliant move, as creating content together and hosting a meeting such as a webinar allows you to reach a broader client base and get easier access to the target market of the brand you’re partnering with. It’s a clear win-win situation for both participants.
Make your B2B digital marketing stand out from the noise
If you work in B2B marketing, your goal is to maintain a close relationship with the clients and demonstrate industry knowledge (including industry-specific language). It is also essential to diversify the means and formats of communication to optimise interaction with the audience. That is a challenging task, so it can be helpful to rely on the professional support of a branding agency.
Our agency makes its B2B marketing services available by contributing to the growth of brands and bringing positive results to our clients. Our team of experienced professionals is available to help you create or optimise your B2B marketing strategy. Contact us today to find out more!
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