Have you tried and tested every B2B marketing strategy on Google search with little to no results?
Chuck out your outdated guides and forget everything you know about marketing.
This article is going to cover new strategies from those that are doing it successfully!
👇 Start scrolling for the truly ultimate, 'ultimate guide' to the top B2B marketing strategies for 2023.
What are B2B marketing strategies?
B2B marketing strategies are tactics used by businesses to generate more demand for their product or services from other businesses. B2B marketing strategies have a lot in common with B2C in that they'll use many different types of marketing to get their message in front of buyers.
Online content marketing is a favorite strategy as it allows B2B marketers to connect with prospective buyers where they spend most of their time. On LinkedIn or Facebook, for example.
Organic, paid, and referral marketing are some of the top B2B marketing strategies used to attract business audiences today.
12 B2B marketing strategies for 2023
Beat the recession with well-thought-out B2B marketing strategies! We asked marketing leaders what tactics have worked for them in this informative video:
Continue 👇 to learn twelve strategies you need to implement now.
1. Understand and relate to your audience
Before creating any marketing collateral, you must first understand who you want to target and why. Many B2B companies first conduct market research and create an ideal customer profile to guarantee they market to the right audience.
This streamlined way of targeting leads ensures no budget is lost to uninterested buyers. Plus, when MQLs are sent over for conversion, no time is taken away from your B2B sales reps.
Once you understand your target audience, you'll need to determine your brand positioning. In B2B marketing, creating a trusted online presence should be your top marketing strategy. Your brand and how other buyers perceive it will help drive demand for your products and services.
At Cognism, we believe in creating a value-driven approach to marketing made stronger via our social media presence. Our brand is known for sharing relevant content with our target audience. Here's an example:
We know this strategy works because we've done our marketing research. We understand our customers and know they respond better to a demand marketing approach than a typical lead generation approach.
Your brand is everything, and coming up with B2B branding strategies that speak to your ideal customers and their needs is crucial for marketing success in 2023.
💡 Our top B2B marketing strategy tip: Do research before creating any campaigns!
Hinge Marketing found businesses that conduct research on their prospects grow three to ten times faster and are up to two times more profitable than peers that don’t pursue research.
2. Discover competitor weaknesses
B2B marketers should always have one eye on their competitors.
Start with a competitive analysis. It will help you establish who they are, their strengths, and their weaknesses. Then consider how you can market to your shared audience better.
Simply offering a more affordable solution won't cut it.
Look at their website, social media ads, paid and organic keyword targeting, and overall messaging.
For example, suppose your competitor has a large advertising budget but isn't putting any effort into delivering niche content. That's where you can fill the gap.
What's more, if you notice that their messaging doesn't speak to your customers in a way they understand, you can modify yours to be better.
Do this before implementing or creating content for your B2B digital marketing strategies. It’ll help your company stand out from your competition, no matter the size of your budget.
SaaS software like SpyFu can also help when it comes to your SEO and PPC marketing strategies. It shows you what keywords your competitors are targeting so you can compete. With these tools, you can fill gaps and learn what has worked and what hasn't.
3. SEO isn't an option
Search engine optimization is one of the best B2B marketing strategies.
It's an affordable way to grab prospects' attention via organic search and rank for keywords you'd have to pay for with PPC.
Since implementing a more focused and strategic SEO plan at the beginning of 2022, Cognism has seen our organic traffic rise from 6k to 35k. Here's a graph showcasing this growth:
Strategies like these are the best for increasing marketing ROI. They are easily measurable with SEO tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Google Search Console.
This makes SEO the perfect business-to-business marketing strategy. Use it to showcase growth when presenting to your CEO and key stakeholders.
To do well with SEO:
- Stay on top of algorithm updates.
- Ensure your messaging is consistent across your website.
- Navigation is optimized for mobile and makes sense for your user journey.
💡 Our top SEO strategy tip: Follow SEOs on LinkedIn!
The best way to stay on top of the ever-changing SEO landscape is to follow trendsetters on LinkedIn. They share little-known tactics and tips and expand on how upcoming Google updates might affect your site. Here are a few profiles to follow:
4. B2B data for better targeting
Google plans to phase out third-party cookies this year.
Not only will this make precise targeting even more challenging, but marketers will need to find new ways to collect data. Especially if you want a successful B2B marketing strategy in 2023.
Marketing teams plan to do this by building prospecting lists from first-party data.
Solutions like Cognism provide safe, GDPR-compliant data to power your B2B marketing strategies.
The lists you generate with Cognism come with quality account and contact-level data. It includes accurate business emails, mobile numbers, and social handles, so you can immediately action them across different channels.
Other popular tactics for better targeting are:
- Refreshing current third-party data to create retargeting campaigns.
- Gated content lead generation campaigns boosted via paid ads.
- Mixing broad match keywords and audience targeting in Google ads.
- Using Google alternatives like Microsoft.
- Creating your own marketing experiments to gather psychographic data.
- Exploring LinkedIn website demographics.
🎥 Here's a video showcasing how Cognism has used Google ads as part of our digital marketing strategy:
5. Don't cut corners with your customer journey
With budgets tighter than ever, purchasing decisions will take longer.
Equating to an extended buying cycle.
In general, B2B buying cycles are already lengthy processes. Marketers must ensure potential customers have the resources they need to make decisions at every stage of their journey.
Content should support but not disrupt the B2B buying decision. Here are some examples of marketing content to share:
- Case studies
- Pricing
- Product updates
- Testimonials
Consider outbound vs inbound marketing strategies when creating content. The more thought and attention that goes into your distribution, the more targeted leads you'll be able to qualify.
Inbound vs outbound? Which is better for your B2B marketing strategy? 🎥 Watch this quick video to find out:
6. Email for smart devices
Email marketing revenue is estimated to reach almost 11 billion by the end of 2023.
So it shouldn't surprise you that 81% of marketers use email marketing as part of their B2B content marketing strategies.
Aside from cadences, cold emails, and newsletters, how else can you use email marketing to your advantage?
Many marketers swear by nurture campaigns. To do nurtures right, you'll need to invest in an automation tool to time when and who will receive your campaigns.
For increased success, B2B data can inform you of important marketing triggers for your industry. So you can send out hyper-personalized emails at the times when your prospective clients will find them the most valuable.
Use automation software to schedule drip email campaigns. Unlike nurtures that help build long-term relationships, drip emails drive conversions. It's important to think about your messaging for each type of campaign and what action you want your buyer to take at the end.
At Cognism, we like to incorporate a bit of humor into our campaigns. Here's an example of one of our most successful retargeting nurtures:
And if you're worried that being witty won't be enough to get noticed, then it might be time to consider plain text alternatives for all your email campaigns.
While this strategy sounds crazy, here's why it works:
They're compatible with every device, including smartwatches.
Think about this:
Your prospect just took a break to hit the gym. When a notification comes through on their watch, they're more likely to check what it is than stop and look at their phone. And, because your email is plain text, it's more likely to be seen and read than one that can't be displayed.
Another one of the most effective B2B marketing strategies is to incorporate a Vidyard video into your emails. Not only will this increase click-through rates, but your prospects will appreciate the personalization.
💡 Our top email marketing strategy tip: Read our guide!
It’s not enough to create and send a single email. You want to incorporate exceptional content with best practices proven to get results. Discover all the tips you need in our 'Anything But Basic' Guide to Email Marketing.
7. Choose the right tech stack
The right tech can get you everywhere.
Whether it's marketing automation tools, CRMs, AI, or analytics software, investing in tech is one of the most effective B2B marketing strategies you can implement.
Consider combining automation and artificial intelligence to assist your marketing team in creating optimized campaigns.
Here's a quick rundown of how tech can fuel your B2B marketing strategies and tactics:
- Automation helps speed up manual processes like creating, managing, and measuring campaigns across marketing channels.
- Customer relationship management (CRMs) help store your contact database and track and organize opportunities. This information can be accessed across organizations, which helps to align sales and marketing and strengthen ABM campaigns.
- There's no need to enter nefarious paths to buy leads if you invest in a good sales intelligence tool. What's more, this software can help refresh existing data, set up trigger alerts, and target leads interested in buying with intent data.
- Many teams supplement their marketing efforts with artificial intelligence. AI can suggest changes, write copy, chat with leads, and more. This speeds up the marketing process and helps ensure all campaigns perform at their best.
💡 While most tech will cost you, a few free options are available. Here's our list of free marketing tools.
8. Make value-driven content your marketing goal
One surefire way to achieve B2B success in the coming year is to create different types of content across your lead source channels.
There's no more copy and paste when it comes to content creation. What buyers want is dynamic content that offers actionable guidelines. A few examples are blog posts on the latest trends or ungated playbooks detailing their industry's best strategies.
One way to achieve this level of personalization is to adopt an account based marketing strategy where marketing and sales teams align for better targeting. This strategy reaches prospects on every marketing channel they access, encouraging client engagement and brand loyalty.
Other tactics to boost your campaigns are:
- Share snippets of published blogs on LinkedIn.
- Encourage employees to build their personal brands where they discuss and share company posts.
Social channels aren't the only means of getting targeted content in front of potential buyers. You can also use your B2B website to create personalized experiences.
Platforms like Drift allow you to create specific user experiences based on web pages they visit. Think of it like a choose-your-own-adventure but automated for B2B prospects!
Each prospect will have a different experience depending on their location, how they found your site, and how they interact with it.
Learn how to optimize content for your audience from Cognism experts Alice de Courcy, Fran Langham, and Liam Bartholomew. 🎥 In this video, they discuss how Cognism shifted its marketing strategy to create content that's optimized to provide the most value for its audience.
9. Get prospects sharing
One unique marketing strategy is to build a community on social media. This increases sharing across dark social media, encourages referrals, and gives you a deeper understanding of the content your buyers want.
Cognism has several strategies at play when building communities across channels.
Our first was to hire a subject matter expert or influencer to be our brand ambassador. With his help, we created podcasts, videos, blogs, and more.
Here's an episode from our Revenue Champions podcast featuring our expert, Ryan Reisert:
Influencer marketing isn’t the only great marketing strategy for B2B. Creating clever campaigns that get shared and encourage conversations is also a fantastic way to get your brand seen by your community.
We made a bunch of "lead gen leavers' shirts for our LinkedIn followers to claim for free. All they had to do was share a pic wearing the shirt. This tactic helped spread brand awareness, was memorable and humorous, and encouraged referrals.
Plus, offering free gifts certainly gets people talking 😉
10. What would Gen Z do?
It's hard to believe, but it's time to target millennials and Gen Z.
After all, this is the demographic most workforces are currently composed of, with 73% of millennials making purchasing decisions at their companies.
With that in mind, shouldn’t you start attracting younger buyers?
Consider B2B marketing strategies that encourage them to move down the B2B marketing funnel, such as:
- Mobile compatibility.
- Expanding across new social media channels like TikTok.
- Easy and fast communication that doesn't involve phone calls.
- Supporting a cause, such as donating a percentage of profits to stop global warming.
11. Remove 'boring' from your playbook
B2B doesn't stand for boring to boring.
Many marketers are taking inspiration from B2C advertising to drive demand and create unforgettable marketing campaigns.
One example of B2C vs B2B advertising is Gong's super bowl ads. Udi Ledergor took inspiration from B2C to create a memorable campaign. The campaign broke the record for the most inbound leads ever collected at Gong and the most inbound business opportunities ever accepted.
And the backbone of these innovative B2B marketing strategies is a pivot from lead generation to demand generation.
This means:
- Ungating ebooks and guides.
- Creating hyper-personalized content.
- Using emotion in your campaigns.
- Focusing on creating educational content for dark social and dark funnel sharing.
- A greater focus on podcasts, webinars, and videos.
Here's an example of a worked demand generation campaign to inspire your SaaS B2B marketing strategies.
If you're keen to learn more about what demand generation can do for your strategies, watch this video:
12. Track the performance of your B2B marketing strategies
You can implement the best marketing strategies for the business-to-business market, but it won't do you any good if you don't monitor performance.
That's why our twelfth and final B2B marketing strategy is to measure your metrics.
Google Analytics and marketing CRMs like HubSpot can help you keep track of how your campaigns are doing. What's more, once you've collected data for your campaigns, you'll be able to better plan for new ones.
The top five B2B marketing metrics we track at Cognism are:
- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs).
- Sales Qualified Opportunities (SQOs).
- Website traffic.
- Leads in.
- Closed-won deals.
💡 You can see the full list in this article on B2B marketing metrics & KPIs.
FAQ
Q: How do B2B and B2C marketing strategies differ?
The difference between B2B and B2C marketing strategies is that B2B businesses market a product or service to decision-makers, while B2C companies market their products and services to individual buyers.
In B2B, the marketing strategy needs to showcase how the product or service can solve a company’s pain point while creating trust backed up with social proof. With clever copy and punchy media campaigns, B2C marketing needs to make their product or service desirable for the individual.
Q: What are the four types of marketing strategies?
The four most popular types of B2B marketing strategies are inbound, outbound, account-based marketing, and a go-to-market strategy.
Cognisms' secret B2B marketing strategy
See how marketing pro and CMO Alice de Courcy has taken Cognism to the next level in our 3 Secrets to CMO Success playbook.
Click 👇 to discover how she used different types of B2B marketing strategies to break revenue records month on month!
