8 Essential Tactics To Know About Inbound Marketing for B2B

Starting an online business can be an easy task, but marketing that same online business is tiring and overwhelming because the competition is pretty high out there. If you haven’t started selling your business, you might fail with a significant loss as you are missing a viable opportunity to reach new clients and grow your company.

Effective online business marketing is pretty difficult to get right. Between budget limits, creative demands of the customers, and channel decisions, marketers have a lot on their bucket lists to juggle when creating their marketing strategy. But if done with proper technique, it can convert into an easy task. 

The most significant determinant of effective marketing is your audience. If you are not targeting your buyer persona properly, then there are high chances that your promotions and advertisements will fail to deliver expected results and are more likely to fall on deaf ears. You might as well not be marketing at all.

Marketing to businesses is little different from marketing to individual consumers. That is why B2B marketing exists to help you. The primary purpose of inbound marketing for B2B is to attract, engage, and delight website visitors and provide them with engaging content at every phase of the buyer’s journey. 

It ultimately transforms your prospects into customers and promoters of your brand. Inbound marketing tactics can be built upon one another to achieve this marketing goal. At the end of this guide, you will know what is Inbound marketing and its essential strategies that will help you to generate revenue for your business.

What is B2B Marketing Strategy?

Business to business marketing or B2B marketing is defined as marketing services and products to other businesses/businesses to generate leads, optimize conversions, and generate revenue. Let’s explain this in more simple words. 

When service providers or businesses sell their services and products to any other business customers, they use a B2B marketing strategy to optimize the company’s presence in front of its target audiences, build business relations, boost lead generation, and increase their online sales.

For example, software-as-a-service provides the subscription and license of the software to many businesses. Other best examples can be security solutions, office supplies, tools, and financial services. The B2B marketing helps you with the decision-making power at the centre and focuses on regulating their buying decisions across the sales funnel.

From understanding the buyer’s journey to building the buyer’s persona and designing business-to-business marketing content, decision-makers have to incorporate different B2B strategies for increasing brand awareness in the target market.

Importance of Inbound Marketing for B2B

Business-to-business marketing is essential for the growth of the online business. Here are some of the critical reasons why B2B marketing strategies are vital for the marketing team as well as for the sales team:

1. Reduced Products & Services Cost

B2B strategy needs businesses to get to know the interests and needs of the customers they will target. This maximizes the investment volume to a large extent. Moreover, businesses must know their local suppliers and their customers. 

2. Widened Distribution Span

B2 B’s marketing strategy allows businesses to widen their reach and bring more customers under its jurisdiction. Businesses don’t need to restrict themselves from venturing out to the corners of the world. With the help of the internet, they can reach all kinds of customers without facing any issues.

3. Creates a Room for Innovation

eCommerce businesses can make their services and products in various ways. Business-to-business marketing enables them to maintain a sound and stable market image. Online shopping, virtual banking, online business transactions, etc., can all get easy because of eCommerce.

4. Generates Higher-Quality Leads

Inbound B2B marketing helps you generate higher-quality leads. When a B2B buyer finds you via an inbound digital marketing channel, they are much more likely to close than if they had connected through an outbound strategy. As per the search engine journal report, inbound leads have a close rate of 14.6%, which is compared to just 1.7% for outbound leads.

Additionally, B2B marketers now prioritize lead quality over lead quantity. Outbound B2B marketing is quantity-driven-it is often just about working your way through a list of email addresses or phone numbers. At the same time, inbound marketing is focused on quality through attracting and nurturing an engaged audience. 

5. Cost-Effective

As per b2b marketing stats the typical inbound B2B marketing lead is 68% more expensive than an outbound equivalent organization with 51 to 200 employees, per Marketing 2Connect. You are paying a slice or portion of someone’s attention with outbound marketing, for instance, by buying a search ad. 

With B2B inbound marketing tactics, you create assets that need organically engaged customers. It is because you put the customer first and meet them where they are. This approach is more economical than paying attention.

Strategies of Inbound marketing for B2B 

1. Research & Analysis

In business-to-business marketing, your business needs to start with research, and it goes into everything from industry to brand. It is the cornerstone of a rational and sound decision-making process. With in-depth research, you can find out the industry insights and know your clients well, their needs and preferences to provide them with a tailor-made solution. Doing market research helps you get ample scope to enhance your performance.

2. Niche-Driven Strategy

One of the essential inbound B2B strategies is specialization and niche targeting. The fastest-growing firms tend to be specialists in a carefully targeted niche with a deep research analyst strategy. This must be an industry area that you need to understand thoroughly and a space in which you can become an indisputable expert and leader.

A niche-driven strategy helps you make all your marketing efforts much easier as it tends to define precisely what you do and immediately determine you from the competition. 

3. Enhance Website Performance

Your website is nothing less than short of an asset for compelling business-to-business marketing when it comes to online business. The website determines the business’s visibility and enables you to convey your message to visitors. 

Your website should be professional so that your clients can find it without going deep. It should be treated as a vital tool as the popularity of the business pins entirely on it. In more simple words, the performance of your website determines the performance of a business.

4. Search Engine Optimization

SEO (search engine optimization) is a vital piece of the online marketing puzzle, and high-growth firms list it as the most effective online marketing technique that they can use to enhance their business presence. SEO is a complex and evolving discipline and it ultimately consists of two main components: on-site SEO and off-site SEO.

On-site SEO works with the targeted keyword phrases to communicate your website’s concepts that matter to your audience. And these keywords mainly focus on your business services and expertise. But the primary purpose of an on-site SEO is to communicate to search engines what your online website is about. This enables search engines to generate more relevant results for searchers. This comes with the result: when your targeted audience searches for insight into your speciality area, they will find you.

Talking about off-site SEO, it takes the form of links to your website, whether through guest articles or outside engagement in other publications. These efforts help you increase the website’s authority as a widely recognized leader on your topic. The more relevant websites link to your site, search engines will see your site as more credible, resulting in a higher ranking.

5. Social Media

It has a significant impact on everyone’s life, even on buyers, as they check out new services and products on social media. Social media is a more commonly used source of information than formal referrals and recommendations. Even referral’s nature has changed in the wake of social media. 

Some recent studies show that 17% of expertise-based referrals are made based on social media interactions. Social media is an accelerator for the reach of your expertise, reputation, and content. It enables you to network and connect with valuable contacts and influencers and monitor your brand by social listings.

6. Referral Marketing

The nature of professional services referrals has changed, which has enormous implications for your B2B marketing strategy. Some studies have revealed an important new fact of referral marketing practice– 81% of consumers are more likely to engage with brand reward programs. 

But the question is, where do these referrals come from? 

Using content marketing in conjunction with the rest of the tactics in this list, you can create a brand with a good reputation for security in your area and your exceptional understanding among audiences who have not worked with you directly. This recognition of your brand leads to referrals and new online business.  

7. Advertising

Another inbound B2B marketing strategy is advertising. You’ll find several platforms on which you can advertise effectively; here is the list of some mainly used platforms:

• Social Media 
• Industry Publications & Websites
• SME (Search Engine Marketing)
• Retargeting (A cookie-based technology that uses a simple JavaScript code to anonymously “follow” your audience across the Web)

Advertising promotes your product and services and plays a crucial role in driving content downloads, increasing both your expertise and visibility on search engines. It is important to use forms of advertising best suited to professional services. A platform like LinkedIn, retargeting and other industry-focused advertising tends to work best as they enable you to target appropriate industry audiences most directly. 

On the other hand, SMEs (Search engine marketing) can be more expensive and tough to target for professional services. Likewise, Facebook ads tend to be less effective because the platform is used at a lower rate by professional services than other social media networks. 

8. Customer Relationship Management & Lead Nurturing

A customer relationship management system is software that organizations tend to use. They depend on it for reordering, organizing, and maintaining their client data and information. 

Lead nurturing hinges on your website and email marketing strategy for forming strong and long-lasting with your clients. Your email marketing strategy should be driven by analytics as it will help you nurture your clients well.

Final Words

If you have an online business, you should adopt some strategies that help you grow your business. The important thing is not to stand still and grow comfortably because competition is pretty high, and you need to focus on effective marketing strategies. To remain competitive, you must constantly assess your B2B marketing strategies and search for ways to improve. 

As a business owner, you must know which B2B marketing strategy will drive relevant sales for your business. Our guide on inbound marketing for B2B businesses will help you find the best relevant tactics, and you can implement them in your business.