B2B Marketing: 10 Tips That Actually Work in 2023

Despite an uncertain economic climate, 44% of B2B companies still tend to increase their marketing budgets in 2023. It means that with higher budgets, marketers have more space for actions. In this article, you’ll find ten tips that will help you spend your marketing budget cost-effectively.

What is B2B Marketing, and How Does it Differ from B2C?

B2B marketing is mainly used by technology vendors, manufacturing firms, wholesalers, business consultants, or any other organization that sells their products or services to other businesses. Unlike B2C, which focuses on driving experienced-based purchases through emotionally charged campaigns featuring incentives such as discounts, giveaways, and cashback offers, B2B promotions are typically driven by rational purchasing decisions based on price, quality of product/service, and level of expertise.

B2B businesses have a wide array of options when it comes to effective marketing techniques. Event marketing, PPC campaigns, and email marketing are all viable options that can be tailored to fit the specific needs of any company.

However, businesses must remember that no one strategy fits all situations – a personalized plan should always be implemented to ensure the best possible results. By carefully evaluating data and understanding marketing trends, B2B companies can develop strategies to help them reach their goals.

B2B Marketing Challenges

It’s hard to imagine B2B marketing without challenges, and B2B marketers will prove that. The Finite report, in partnership with Clarity, revealed the main challenges for B2B marketers in 2023.

Most respondents’ biggest challenge is “Maintaining growth within an uncertain economy,” and unfortunately, marketers cannot do much here. However, when it comes to resource management, aligning marketing with sales, working with limited resources, and attribution and measurement, some tips will help you overcome these challenges.

10 Tips for B2B Marketing

Building a comprehensive marketing strategy is more than just a walk in the park. It requires a powerful vision and strong planning skills. Nevertheless, these ten tips will help you to simplify the process and make your life easier.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is crucial for B2B marketing strategy. According to the Content Marketing Institute research, 71% of B2B marketers consider that content marketing has become more critical for business. Creating valuable and engaging articles and developing your content strategy has significant value for business due to customer education and loyalty building.

If you still need to decide how to manage your marketing budget, inbound marketing is worth including in your marketing strategy.

What type of content can be utilized? Here are the most common yet effective formats:

Inbound marketing not only helps you to build close relationships with your target audience but also has a positive impact on SEO. So, by utilizing helpful content, you’re killing two birds with one stone.

Offline events

Offline events have become increasingly important to a successful B2B marketing strategy. The FINITE report reveals that most marketers (55%) consider event marketing the most critical channel for B2B companies. 

Events provide a platform for exhibitors to showcase their products, services, and capabilities to potential buyers and existing customers, enabling them to make more informed purchasing decisions. Additionally, offline events allow businesses to network with other companies in the industry, making expanding their customer base and generating leads easy.

Apart from providing a great way to connect with buyers, offline events can also be used as an effective lead-generation tool. Businesses can use exhibitions and trade shows to collect contact information from interested parties to follow up on later.

Offline events also allow businesses to build relationships with key partners by participating in joint promotions, such as speaking engagements or product demonstrations. Through this kind of relationship building, companies can create long-term business partnerships, resulting in better deals and exclusive offers for their customers.

PPC

Utilizing PPC marketing can lead to warm traffic to your project. Search advertising allows businesses to target high-purchase intent users and generate leads in a cost-effective way. Due to the data-driven nature of PPC ads, you can track any essential metrics, including CPL, CAC, Sales, ROI, and even more.

Moreover, you can use display ads to reach a broader audience or take advantage of remarketing and follow users who have taken a particular action on your website.

Some of the most known brands in the PPC world are listed below:

Email marketing

Email marketing is an integral component of a successful B2B marketing strategy. It allows organizations to craft personalized messages to their target audience based on demographics and other key criteria. When used strategically, email campaigns can result in increased customer engagement and, ultimately, more sales.

For email marketing, it’s vital to set up email automation based on various client segments. To improve the performance, it’s essential to devise a systematic strategy and set up an automated system based on collected data for both welcome and follow-up letters and emails announcing special offers.

PR

When it comes to PR, it’s always important to remember the value you provide for the audience. Don’t just spread company updates or late st news; try to create something valuable and engaging for your potential clients.

Branded videos, market research, or survey may arouse the audience’s interest and make it spread your PR organically. Viral reach steps into the game here, and it can bring incredible results.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is underrated for B2B. Collaboration with niche influencers can increase brand awareness and improve reputation. Moreover, this will help you to stand out from your competitors, as influencer marketing is not widely spread in B2B.

Developing an influencer marketing strategy is a complicated process. Here is the flow, which will help you to keep an eye on the key aspects of influencer marketing strategy:

When it comes to influencer research, take into account micro-influencers. Micro-influencers have 47% more engagement in comparison with macro-influencers. Building your influencer marketing strategy for B2B projects around a vast pool of niche micro-influencers is worth considering.

End-to-end analytics

The customer journey in B2B is usually longer compared to B2C. It may take a year or even more to deal with a potential client who will make several hits with your company during this period.

In order to track the potential clients during their customer journey and increase the conversion from lead to a sale, it’s necessary to implement end-to-end analytics. With advanced analytics, you’ll see the whole order of customers’ actions and evaluate which channels provide you with the highest ROI.

As you’ll see the whole picture of your business, it will let you reduce your costs on ineffective channels, boost leads flow and improve your KPIs. Moreover, end-to-end analytics will help you to align marketing with sales. It will show you all the problematic aspects of the marketing and sales process and will let you improve the conversion rate on each step of the marketing funnel.

Social Media

Being active on social media helps you to build trust and credibility around your business. You must show your working environment and share helpful content with potential clients. Your customers want to ensure they can trust you, and social media is one of the best tools to prove it. 

What kind of content is worth sharing on social media? Keep in mind the following content types:

Simplify customer experience

The more straightforward for users to go through your sale process, the more probably it will convert. Starting from your website and ending with your sales script, it’s necessary to simplify the user experience. 

There is no doubt this process requires comprehensive research and serious adjustments. However, these tips will let you save a little bit of time:

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the primary sources of leads for B2B business. The competition in B2B is usually lower than in B2C, which means improving the website’s positioning is more effortless.

When it comes to SEO, it’s really important to focus on E-A-T factors. Content “written by people and for people” is crucial for website optimization. Moreover, after the December Google Algorithms update, marketers must pay special attention to link building. Building low-quality links is deadly dangerous for websites, and it may lead you to the penalty from Google. Google wants to see links generated organically; that’s why it’s all about the content again.

Create engaging content that people will want to share and build links in a native way from highly ranked websites. Moreover, always remember about E-A-T, show your expertise, authority, and trust with complete transparency and links to reliable sources. Following these recommendations, your website has all the chances to improve its positioning.

B2B Marketing Trends in 2023

In 2023, B2B marketing will continue to be an ever-evolving and quickly changing field, with trends coming and receding in response to the demands of the industry. To stay ahead of the competition and remain competitive, business-to-business marketers must analyze, adjust and respond to these changes continually. Here is the list of 5 B2B marketing trends imperative in 2023.

Data-Driven B2B Marketing

According to Insider Intelligence, investing in marketing technologies will increase to 12.4% in 2023. This is not surprising, as one of the main challenges for B2B marketers is still aligning with sales, tracking, and attribution. 

Comprehensive analytics system and automation technologies is a priority for B2B marketers in 2023 as data integration opens up new perspectives. Complete integration within the departments and detailed analytics on customer journeys allow for an increase in customer retention and total revenue.

Self-Service Will Prevail

In 2023 customers tend to research and explore all product information without sales calls. People no longer want to talk; they prefer to search for information online.

Focusing on user experience is crucial in 2023. B2B marketers have to make it smoother and answer possible online questions before the client meets with a sales representative.

Content King

63% of B2B marketers pick content marketing as the most crucial channel for marketing strategy in 2023, and this is not a surprise. To improve customer experience, companies must create valuable and engaging content that will focus on clients’ needs.

By doing this, B2B marketers can reduce buying cycles and meet customers’ requirements. It’s important to create personalized content based on relevant data. Alignment with the sales department and the complete picture of the customer journey plays a crucial role here, as it allows us to reveal the exact clients’ problems and offer the best solution.

The Bottom Line

B2B marketing is changing, and to stay competitive in 2023, marketers must follow the latest trends. It’s necessary to focus on clients’ needs and work on enhancing customer experience. Although marketers will face challenges building a B2B marketing strategy, the tips and trends mentioned above should help to overcome the obstacles and improve performance.