If there’s one thing we know about B2B marketing, it’s that marketing business-to-business is all about storytelling. Not just crafting an entertaining narrative like a movie script, but backing up your narrative with ROI and data-backed insights.
In the movie Training Day, Denzel Washington said it best: “It’s not what you know, it’s what you can prove.”
The most persuasive people in B2B marketing are the ones who can tell the best and most convincing stories, but your data and metrics are what set your narrative in stone for your B2B audience.
Whether you’re creating the next masterpiece or just a cold email script, the perfect B2B marketing recipe for a brand is that your B2B marketing strategy should be a healthy mix of both emotional triggers and logical reasoning through data-backed evidence.
Before you put your creative thinking cap on, it’s important to understand the basics of B2B marketing.
We’ve condensed everything you need to know about B2B marketing in this article, covering:
- The definition of B2B marketing
- B2B marketing vs B2C marketing
- Step-by-step guide to getting started with B2B marketing
- Strategies in business-to-business marketing you should know
- Top-tier B2B marketing examples that you can replicate
- B2B marketing trends to look out for
What is B2B marketing?
The acronym “B2B” stands for business-to-business. Simple and easy to remember.
B2B marketing is marketing in the business-to-business industry. It’s marketing from one company to another aimed to get more companies to buy their products or services.
B2B marketing is the all-encompassing term that describes every effort a company makes to attract, engage, and capture new customers who are businesses that fit their ideal customer profiles.
Marketing for B2B is not your typical marketing that you see targeted towards consumers.
While you may think of marketing as a heavily creative role (which it is), in the B2B space marketing relies heavily on appealing to customers through logic, ROI, and data-driven insights.
At an individual level, everyone is technically a consumer, but B2B marketing bridges the gap between appealing to both individuals at an organization and the entire company itself.
📘 Related: What is B2B sales?
The difference between B2B marketing and B2C marketing
Let’s say you're a B2C marketer transitioning to a new B2B marketing position at a new SaaS company. What do you need to do differently in this new B2B marketing role compared to your previous B2C marketing experience?
At a glance, the difference between B2B marketing and B2C marketing is quite simple: B2B is focused on marketing between businesses while B2C marketing involves a company doing marketing towards individual consumers, hence B2C (business to consumer).
However, if you take a step back and really look at the core of both types of marketing, it’s all the same. Whether it’s B2B or B2C, it’s all P2P, or people to people.
Marketing at its core for any type of business should focus on understanding how to appeal to customers and their values. It’s all about crafting a relatable narrative that resonates with your target customers.
If you’re still itching to know the detailed differences between B2B and B2C marketing, here’s what you should know.
B2B marketing focuses on:
- Businesses and organizations
- More technical, niche concepts and language
- Longer marketing cycles
- Navigating more complex organizational structures of the target customers
- Making professional connections
- Logic and ROI-based messaging
B2C marketing focuses on:
- Individual consumers
- Everyday concepts and language
- Shorter marketing cycles
- Direct communication with individual consumers
- Everyday consumer trends
- Ethos and pathos-based messaging (emotional triggers)
One of the more prominent differences to note from this list is that B2C marketing focuses heavily on ethos and pathos-based messaging, or in other words, emotional triggers.
Ethos appeals to the authority and reputation of the company while pathos appeals to the consumers’ emotions.
In B2C marketing, consumers nowadays are more likely to purchase from brands that align with their personal values, emotions, and beliefs–whatever that looks like to them.
While appealing to emotions and showcasing the authority of a company is also important in B2B marketing, B2B marketing sometimes can take more of a logos, or logic-based approach to their marketing messaging.
Customers in the B2B space want to know whether your product or service will:
- Save them time or money
- Help them make more money
- Streamline bothersome bottlenecks in their workflows
- Work in tandem with their existing tech stacks
It’s nice to know the difference between both types of marketing, but remember this: Whether you’re doing B2B or B2C marketing, focus on the bigger picture of connecting with customers on a human level, from person to person.
The role of marketing in B2B SaaS
Here’s what most B2B organizations don’t know about B2B marketing: B2B marketing isn’t about just having a recognizable logo with the fanciest tech or tools.
Always remember the golden rule of marketing for B2B–sell an experience, not a product. In reality, B2B marketing (especially for SaaS companies) should be about marketing products/services as an extension or reflection of their people, their beliefs, a delightful experience, and the promise of better business results.
Consider this: With the influx and booming growth of the SaaS industry, customers are tired. Their LinkedIn feeds are flooded with endless posts about the newest product or service in the market, all claiming that they’re the “best-in-class” or “the most innovative thing you’ve seen today.”
The point of B2B marketing isn’t to boast about how great your product is. The point of B2B marketing is to provide authenticity and human connection that cuts through the noise of every other brand treating customers as dollar signs instead of real humans with real challenges.
Some companies may think they can buy their way into B2B marketing, but money can’t buy authenticity.
Authenticity should be the big picture north star of your B2B marketing at every touchpoint and stage of the customer’s buyer journey.
Don’t know what that looks like? Here’s what the B2B marketing funnel looks like:
The B2B marketing funnel can be summarized into three main buckets:
- Top of funnel (TOFU): The stage where prospects are gaining awareness about your brand through various marketing touchpoints
- Middle of funnel (MOFU): The stage when prospects are considering your product or service as a solution for them
- Bottom of funnel (BOFU): The stage when prospects become customers and want to know how to continue getting the most out of your offerings
The type of B2B marketing strategies and tactics that you decide to use in each stage can look different, but we’ll get more into that later.
How to do B2B marketing with the 4 W’s (from scratch!)
Like any other concept in B2B SaaS, building a B2B marketing strategy from scratch can be overwhelming. It can feel like there are a million different buzzwords and ideas to learn in this field.
But simply taking online courses and learning B2B marketing buzzwords doesn’t make you a marketer.
Teodora Maksimova on Medium said it best:
“Marketing is a living organism that constantly evolves. You don’t learn how to raise a child by reading a book, you learn it when it’s 2 am on a Tuesday and there’s a stinky diaper with your name on it…Education can give you the foundation, but you still have to lay bricks and pick bathroom tiles.”
You’ll learn how to do B2B marketing best as you’re going through it–studying other campaigns, people’s reactions, and what other B2B brands are doing.
But when you’re feeling stuck and need a good place to start, don’t overcomplicate it and start with the basics using the 4 W’s:
- Who
- What
- Where
- Why
The good ole’ 4 W’s framework is an easy way to get a big-picture idea of what your marketing plan will look like. This should also help you answer the looming question of how you will capture new leads and brand awareness through your marketing efforts.
1. Who is your target audience?
How well do you know your target audience? Sure, you may know the basics like what industry they work in, what positions they hold, or their customers. But do you know what internally motivates them at work? Do you know what their personality is like?
Getting to know your target audience on a personal level like this for B2B marketing can be difficult at scale, but uncovering these details sets the foundation for your B2B marketing strategies.
Get to know the personalities, inclinations, and personal motivations of your target audience,
Let’s put our creative thinking caps on with this example. Let’s say you’re selling a new software tool to software engineers.
You can usually infer that software engineers are usually found in online communities like Reddit, GitHub, or Discord (there are many more but let’s go with these three). They are usually great problem-solvers, they’re good with detecting small details, and connecting complex ideas to everyday problems.
One idea to appeal to this challenge-driven, inquisitive audience of software developers is to do some type of marketing campaign through online communities like Reddit or GitHub in the form of a gamified “unsolvable” code or coding challenge with various levels.
It’s the same idea from Google’s notoriously secret hiring challenge in which they send spontaneous invites to developers on a specific website to participate in a coding challenge for a chance to get hired at Google.
Here’s why this example works: By understanding what excites, attracts, and engages your customers on a personal level, you can personalize your marketing tactics to speak in their language.
In B2B marketing, you can also divide your target customers into different groups according to certain characteristics or attributes, or do targeted segmentation. Categorizing your different customers into different groups based on similarities will help you do more targeted marketing later on.
📘 Related: How to Attract Your Dream Customers (Your ICP)
2. What are you marketing?
You need to have a strong value proposition, full stop. You can have the most interesting and entertaining marketing idea, but what’s the real value you’re delivering?
A strong value proposition is what sets you apart from the competition in your market. You can hop on the newest TikTok trend and get millions of likes overnight, but your actual product or service has to be of high-value to actually reap the rewards of your amazing B2B marketing ideas.
Here are the two things you need for your value proposition:
- Unique Selling Points (USPs): Clearly define what sets your product or service apart from the competition.
- Benefits: Highlight the key benefits and how they address the specific needs of your target audience.
In B2B marketing, your unique selling points zoom in on a specific, unique feature or aspect of your offering that sets you apart from competing brands.
In Seamless.AI’s case, we offer a real-time, live search engine for prospecting. Some of our unique selling points are our AI-driven contact data enrichment, our Chrome extension, and our Autopilot that automates list-building efforts. These are our unique selling points.
Benefits, on the other hand, describe how our unique selling points or features address specific needs or challenges of our target market. For example, the benefits of using Seamless.AI’s products include saving hours and days on prospecting, reaching your total addressable market (TAM), and prospecting with fresh and precise B2B contact data in real-time.
Knowing your product or service isn’t just memorizing a list of USPs and benefits.
Great B2B marketers know how to tailor their value proposition, USPs, and benefits to specifically address their prospects’ unique challenges.
In other words, understand what value your offering delivers to each segmented customer.
4. Where? Essential B2B marketing channels you should know
Your B2B marketing campaigns won’t always land in front of the right audience if you don’t choose the right place to launch.
Back in our example of marketing to software developers in online communities like Reddit, Github, or Discord, the same marketing strategy might not give you the same results if you decided to launch it on Instagram or LinkedIn.
Where you interact with your customers matters for B2B marketing.
There’s a plethora of B2B marketing platforms and mediums you can choose from. Sure, you can try it all eventually, but rather than taking a “spray and pray” approach, zoom in on the ones that will bring you the most impact and results at first.
Once you’ve mastered a few platforms or channels, you can start exploring other platforms. This is especially important if you’re operating on a shoe-string marketing budget or limited resources.
Here are some of the most essential B2B marketing channels you should have in your toolbox:
- Blog articles
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Local SEO
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
- Whitepapers, ebooks, and infographics
- Video
- Podcasts
- Case studies and customer testimonials
You can choose your B2B marketing channels based on your ICP, product or service, and niche.
It’s like choosing which fantasy world you want to play in using a specific character in a game. Some characters have different strengths that you can lean into accordingly with different virtual worlds or environments in video games.
Choose the platforms that help you lean into your strengths and personalize your B2B marketing campaigns to your dream customers.
5. What is your “why”?
Figuring out your “why” in B2B marketing is a task that’s two-fold:
- What is the purpose of your marketing campaign?
- Why should your target audience care?
Set your intentions and goals for each marketing campaign. If you don’t know why you’re doing something, how do you expect your customers to also know why they’re seeing your marketing efforts?
Your marketing campaigns should clearly communicate the “why” in a self-explanatory way.
It’s all about the golden rule of storytelling: Show, don’t tell.
If you’re raving about a new restaurant to your friends, they can only be so interested in what you’re saying. Add some pictures and videos of the food and dining experience though, and you’re sure to make a stronger case for your friends to go to that new restaurant with you.
It’s the same with B2B marketing, except you also need to know why you’re choosing to do a specific campaign on one platform over the other.
Maybe you choose to do a paid media campaign on Google because you’re targeting local small businesses. Or maybe you choose to do a coding challenge through reddit because you’re targeting software developers.
Always have intention behind your B2B marketing strategies, and clearly communicate your purpose through your messaging.
B2B Marketing strategies you should know in 2024
“Whether you’re in the B2B or B2C sales side and whether or not your product is a cheap impulse buy or a multi-million dollar long term sales cycle, your business is now – without a doubt – a media company as well.”
- Mitch Joel, Entrepreneur and writer
Most B2B companies get the idea that marketing is all about supporting sales, and it is. But the bigger picture about marketing for businesses is that your strategies should center on one thing and one thing only: speaking to humans.
Your B2B marketing strategies are only as good as how you position your brand externally to not just your customers but also a random stranger online who comes across your brand.
What messaging does your brand communicate and embody through your B2B marketing campaigns?
Consider the emotions, thoughts, and reactions someone might feel when they see your brand through different marketing touchpoints or channels.
Still feeling lost on which B2B marketing strategies to do? Here are a few important ones you need to know.
B2B Content Marketing
When done poorly, content marketing in the B2B world sometimes feels like yelling into a mic in an empty stadium.
When done right, B2B content marketing can feel like a dopamine rush from seeing your numbers climb in traffic, number of quality leads, and sales.
The key to doing it right is to have a structured, targeted B2B content marketing strategy.
First, identify which types of B2B content marketing will serve your customers best. Know your audience and where they come from, especially when it comes to your specific industry.
Let’s say you’re doing marketing for a construction business targeting other businesses. You probably won’t have much luck only doing blog articles.
The construction industry is big on word-of-mouth marketing, paid media, and other forms of content marketing. You’d probably generate more marketing leads through focusing on optimizing your business’s online listing on search engines and business directories, or running paid ads targeting leads in locations relevant to your business.
That’s just one example. Once you’ve locked down a few different channels for your content, you can start exploring more niche ways to deliver content, like creating a podcast or starting a webinar series.
The one thing to remember for content marketing is to focus on delivering value–not just regurgitating information.
It’s not everyday that you can come up with original concepts or ideas in your content, but you can always deliver your brand’s unique perspective on certain topics through content marketing.
Whether you’re writing a blog article, email newsletter, or even a white paper, always consider what value your target audience is getting out of your content.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
Account-based marketing (ABM) is where an organization markets their products or services to an individual prospect or customer accounts as markets of one.
In other words, ABM marketing in the B2B world is about marketing to an entire account with multiple decision-makers across an organization rather than focusing on an individual.
This type of B2B marketing is huge because it allows you to pursue more high-value accounts, like selling to an entire organization than just one person.
Inbound vs. outbound marketing
Inbound B2B marketing involves campaigns focused on capturing leads who reached out or interacted with your company first.
Outbound B2B marketing involves campaigns focused on capturing new leads who haven’t engaged with your brand yet.
You’ll often hear this question tossed around in conversations about B2B outbound marketing for pipeline generation: Is outbound dead?
According to UserGem’s “Move the Needle Report” with 100+ revenue leaders, while most respondents say they generated less than half of their pipeline through outbound in 2023, a whopping 98% are still using some sort of outbound motion for pipeline generation.
The same report states that most B2B leaders agree that signal-based selling or prospecting can help cut through the noise for outbound.
Whether you’re on the fence about doing one over the other, our suggestion is to weave a good balance between both outbound and inbound marketing.
📗 Related: Which is better- inbound sales vs outbound calls?
Product marketing
Product marketing involves promoting and selling a product to a customer. It focuses on the product itself, identifying its target market, understanding customer needs, and creating compelling messaging and positioning to drive sales.
This type of B2B marketing allows you to flex your product’s features and solutions.
Here are some ways you can do product marketing:
- Hype up product launches or feature release announcements through social media and email marketing
- Publish detailed product launch or feature release notes regularly on your website or blog
- Invite people to an exclusive “preview release” of your new product or feature. Instead of calling it a “beta” test phase, market it as something exclusive to create FOMO.
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is collaborating with individuals who have large followings on social media or other platforms to promote your products or services.
But nowadays, you don’t need to find influencers with millions of followers to do B2B influencer marketing. Instead, we’re in an era of “micro influencers.”
Identify micro influencers who might only have a few hundred or thousand followers, but high engagement rates.
The key here is to work with niche influencers who have dedicated audiences who really feel connected to them regardless of their follower count.
You can borrow some of this dedicated audience and connection by collaborating with these influencers on things like:
- Hosting podcast episodes with them
- Collaborating on webinars
- Guest blogging
Social media marketing
Yes, social media is a must in the B2B marketing world whether or not you’re a fan of it yourself.
The good news is that you don’t need to blast 10+ posts a day on every platform under the sun. People on social media are tired of seeing the same things over and over again–they crave real authenticity and value as they scroll.
The thing that most B2B companies get wrong about social media marketing is that it doesn’t have to be about showing off how great your company is doing. Instead of treating it like a place to boast about your accomplishments (namely, LinkedIn), treat social media as a channel for building connection and relatability.
Here are some social media platforms you can use in B2B marketing:
- LinkedIn: Utilize LinkedIn for networking, sharing industry news, and engaging with potential clients.
- Twitter: Use Twitter for real-time engagement, sharing updates, and participating in industry discussions.
- Reddit: Engage in real conversations with anonymous users about any topic. Just be careful about trying to sell something to people on this platform.
- Medium: Use this platform as an extension to your blog. Share more anecdotes, personal learnings, and trending topics here to connect with a wider audience.
📗 Related: How to engage your audience on social media
B2B marketing examples that set the bar high
Simply knowing all the buzzwords and technical parts about B2B marketing doesn’t make you a great marketer.
Here’s what does: Learning how to replicate the success of other highly successful B2B marketing campaigns and apply their strategies to your own marketing approach.
You don’t always have to reinvent the wheel in B2B marketing. Marketing is all about understanding how to tap into people’s desires and motivations.
Here, we’ve gathered an example or two of B2B marketing campaigns that we think set the bar high and serve as great learning tools for marketers out there.
Zoom’s capitalization on the COVID pandemic
Remember when “hopping on a Zoom call” wasn’t even a thing before the pandemic?
The way that Zoom was able to market themselves as a necessary solution during such a bizarre and unconventional time like the pandemic is a great example of B2B marketing.
Zoom’s “Stay Connected” campaign really drilled into everyone’s minds the importance of staying connected with coworkers, friends, and family while working from home. This campaign’s product positioning was timely, relevant, and quick.
In only 4 months of 2020, they experienced 30x growth in daily meeting participants. If those numbers don’t wow you, I’m not sure what will.
Businesses at the time all over the world were scrambling to find solutions to help them adjust to the new idea of working remotely, and Zoom gave them exactly what they needed.
Not only did their product positioning fit perfectly for the situation, but Zoom also leveraged emotional messaging in their campaign that resonated with people on a personal level and reinforced the importance of their core product.
The takeaway: Emotional B2B marketing doesn’t have to be sob stories. Just be timely and relevant with the way you market your product to represent how your customer will feel as a result of your product.
The launch of Slack, “an email killer”
With so many messaging and communication platforms out there (especially email), Slack made waves with its launch when it first released back in 2013.
And the most surprising part about their success throughout the years is that Slack reached a $1.1B valuation without a CMO onboard.
The founder of Slack decided to rely on word-of-mouth marketing and beta testing, but they didn’t call it beta testing. They called it a “preview release” to create hype around the new platform.
It’s the same concept as exclusively inviting people to a movie pre-screening before the public release. People want to feel like they’re part of something exclusive and get their hands on something that no one else has before.
This B2B marketing campaign for Slack’s launch was genius because it:
- Created hype, awareness, and FOMO among other companies
- Gathered pre-launch product feedback from participants to identify any potential issues
- Helped measure product-market fit
Through this launch, Slack was able to position themselves as “an email killer”.
The takeaway: Even in a crowded industry saturated with competitors and similar solutions, you can do successful B2B marketing with the right messaging and connection with your target audience.
Major trends in B2B marketing to keep an eye on
B2B marketing is always on the move. Plus, what got you to a point of success in B2B marketing won’t always get you there in the future.
That’s why it’s important to keep a pulse on what’s happening in this ever-changing landscape of new trends.
We’ve compiled a list of some stats and trends that paint an interesting picture about what to expect in the world of marketing for B2B.
Trend #1. AI in B2B marketing
AI is the new language of B2B marketing in 2024 (and beyond).
Here are a few data insights from the Influencer Marketing Hub 2023 that we found interesting about marketers’ use of AI:
- 61.4% of marketers have used AI in their marketing activities.
- 44.4% have used AI for content production.
- 19.2% of marketers spent more than 40% of their marketing budget on AI-driven campaigns
Basically, AI isn’t going away for marketing in the tech world.
Here’s what you can do to capitalize on this trend–without completely relying on AI:
- Test out a few different AI tools to help you streamline your content production. Tools like NeuronWriter or ChatGPT are making waves in the content world.
- Get familiar with the limitations of AI. AI won’t replace your work but simply supplement it.
- Explore the art of prompt engineering. Your output with AI is only as good as your input. Look into case studies of how other people engineer their prompts and learn how to tweak your inputs to minimize faulty outputs.
Our suggestion is to always use AI tools with a set of guardrails to make sure you’re not erasing your unique, human voice or personality with bland, AI-generated content. People want to interact with real people, not a machine learning tool that regurgitates information.
Trend #2. Videos in B2B marketing
TikToks are not just for Gen Z dancing videos, they’re also taking a seat at the big table with big B2B organizations.
TikTok still isn’t really considered a B2B marketing platform, but there are ways to work with creators or get brand awareness out there through short-form videos.
Take for example, ClickUp, a B2B project management tool. With almost 55 thousand followers on TikTok, Clickup is a great example of how B2B companies can adapt to new and less conventional marketing platforms like TikTok.
ClickUp’s short-form videos usually hit on TikTok trends to showcase their workplace culture, niche project management jokes, and relatable work situations.
What you can learn from ClickUp’s presence on TikTok for B2B marketing is that not everything has to be serious and boring in the business world.
Showcase your brand’s personality and use videos to build relatable connections with untapped communities on platforms like TikTok.
Here’s what you need to know about videos in B2B marketing:
- Videos are all about engagement. Your video hooks and introductions are key to getting people to keep watching and coming back.
- Consider using videos on your website’s blog to add more engagement and keep visitors on your website.
- You don’t need videos that are the same caliber as long, well-produced movies. Short, digestible clips with highlights of golden nuggets of information are what will help you get your foot in the door.
📗 Related: Strategies for generating more leads through TikTok
Trend #3. Podcasting
These days, everyone has a podcast. But in our humble opinion, not every B2B podcast out there is hitting homerun in such a crowded space.
Podcasting for B2B marketing is not just about delivering information from a script, but broadcasting real conversations with industry leaders to share their insights, experience, and lessons learned.
Before incorporating podcast marketing into your B2B content marketing strategy, consider these things:
- Touch on topics that are currently trending in your industry, and provide your own unique perspective, hot-take, or unpopular opinion on it.
- Treat your podcast as a platform to share new information and insights–not a platform that acts as a megaphone for your own accomplishments and accolades.
- Invite other thought leaders in your industry to join your podcast to establish more authority for your brand and collaborate with them to position yourself as a thought leader as well.
📗 Related: How to start podcasting for your brand
Trend #4. “Dark social media”
This B2B marketing trend is less ominous than it sounds.
It’s pretty simple. “Dark social” is when someone reads your blog article, email, LinkedIn post, or any other piece of content and they share it with their friends through private messaging platforms.
As a B2B marketer, you’re essentially in the “dark” about who, when, or where your content link is shared.
Some prominent messaging platforms include Facebook Messenger or even Whatsapp. Whatsapp has about 2 billion monthly active users, and so does FB Messenger.
So how can you leverage the “dark social” trend for your B2B marketing strategy?
It’s difficult to tap into private platforms that have data privacy guardrails. Instead of trying to hack into WhatsApp or Facebook’s data, just focus on creating content that people would want to share on different platforms.
Here are a few things to consider for creating shareable content:
- Get to the point. People like to share content with a shock factor, thought-provoking statements, or the latest news.
- Make it digestible. If you created a long B2B data report, glean out the most important insights from your report to make it easy for people to share those from your report.
- Don’t just make it entertaining, make it useful. B2B marketing can be fun and trendy, but make sure you’re delivering real value and useful information in your content.
Business marketing in a nutshell
Every company has a different idea of what marketing should look like in business. The one thing that differentiates businesses that absolutely crush it in B2B marketing from the ones that can never seem to get it right is being able to build a strong, authentic connection.
Marketing strategist and author David Meerman Scott said it best:
“It’s fascinating how the fundamentals of business-to-business marketing are the same today as they were 50 years ago. It’s still about relationships although today we have new tools and techniques at our disposal.”
Build your B2B marketing strategy on the premise that every campaign, every marketing touchpoint, and every customer interaction builds more authenticity and rapport to your connection with the customer.
Maintaining relationships that are not just surface-level but rather based on a deep level of service for others is what will help you see the growth in traffic, engagement rates, and loyal customers.
Still looking for more resources on marketing in business? Check out these resources:
.png)
