In B2B (business to business) digital marketing , we are faced with a target with very specific purchasing habits, with much longer sales cycles and very specific needs. This means that our digital marketing strategies will have to adapt to different rules.
B2B Marketing: Its Main Features
As we said at the beginning, B2B stands for business to business . This means that it pursues the sale of products and services between companies instead of doing it directly to the consumer, as occurs in B2C (business to consumer) marketing .
But what does it really consist of? There are many definitions that explain it, but we'll stick with this one from Salesforce: B2B marketing is a business practice by which a business markets its facebook database products or services to potential buyers . B2B marketing differs from the B2C variant in that, instead of focusing on individual consumers, it focuses solely on other companies.
When targeting companies, B2B digital marketing strategies have a series of distinctive features:
Purchasing motivation: Companies are motivated by objective factors such as profitability or productivity.
The target: a B2B audience is more niche and highly segmented, making it more difficult to reach.
The approach: To convince a B2B audience to buy, you need to use a deep and detailed approach that focuses on the functioning and advantages of the product or service.
The purchasing cycle: the sales process is longer and on a larger scale, since the purchasing decision within the company is more premeditated.
Challenges for B2B Marketing Teams
Marketing for companies presents a series of peculiarities that become challenges for the team in charge of carrying it out.
1. Generate quality leads
Quality over quantity is the main rule when it comes to B2B lead generation. Knowing your audience well and creating personalized campaigns that connect directly with them is key to achieving this. This will allow you to build strong relationships and establish an effective communication channel with your target audience.
2. Calculate the ROI of marketing actions
All marketing teams spend a lot of time trying to prove that the actions they carry out are delivering the desired results and that they also have a positive impact on the company (return on investment). This is not an easy task, as it requires collecting data, interpreting it and making decisions that lead us in the right direction.
Using appropriate tools and integrating all the information is crucial to obtain quality data, interpret it and thus answer these key questions for the business.
Tableau, for example, is an analytics platform that allows marketing data to be unified in a single platform and analyzed for valuable, actionable insights. Tableau dashboards help marketing teams make evidence-based decisions and calculate the ROI of their investments.