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For any business, marketing is an integral part of your business growth. Marketing the business in the right way is very important for your brand growth and sales.
However, for B2B businesses, the marketing process is lengthy and involves different decision-makers unlike their B2C counterparts.
As a B2B business you need to use the best B2B marketing channels to reach your target businesses and engage them.
This article will guide you and give the best marketing channels that you can use for your B2B marketing in 2021 and beyond.
What are B2B marketing channels?
To start with, b2b marketing channels are the ways through which businesses use to market their products to other businesses. It’s the strategies businesses use to reach out to other businesses or organizations that need and use their services.
Through these channels you put your business in front of your B2B target audience to let them know more about your brand and how you can help them solve challenges for their business.
Importance of B2B marketing channels to B2B companies
Increase brand awareness
Through the B2B marketing channels, businesses can reach other businesses and let them know about their products or services. They also provide their target businesses with the value they will give them in solving their pain points.
Increasing brand awareness lets other target businesses who can use your services know more about you and engage with your business. You draw more leads to your business whom you can nurture and convert into customers.
Increase traffic to your website
Marketing channels help businesses increase traffic to their websites. More target businesses visit your business website and learn more about your business and what you can offer them to solve their pains.
With great traffic, many potential customers engage with your business and how you can help them solve their pains. It can be a great way to build trust as other businesses read content and testimonials from past clients.
Generate leads
Using the best B2B marketing channels is great for businesses to generate leads to their website.
Through the marketing channels, their target leads get to know and interact with them. They learn more about the business and how it will solve their challenges.
READ THIS: B2B Lead Generation: Proven Best Practices to Multiply Your Lead Generation Efforts
Best B2B Marketing Channels
Video Marketing
Videos are a new and increasing trend among target businesses. More people are consuming video content than ever.
You can keep creating video content to engage your target businesses and build relationships with them.
You can create videos explaining to target customers how your products or services work. Some types of videos you can create include:
You can create business channels on Youtube and keep posting new content often to attract and engage new businesses.
Your videos should focus on their pain points and explaining and showing them possible solutions you will offer them.
Testimonials and case study videos can help build trust and draw more target B2B businesses to your brand where they can learn more about your business and get the value you offer them.
Social media marketing (LinkedIn)
Social media is another great channel B2B businesses can use to market themselves. Most of the target customers are on these social sites.
The best site for brands to market to their target B2B businesses is LinkedIn. Keep posting content and engage target businesses on this site.
Be the answer to the questions your target customers ask and place your business as a thought leader in your industry. As you engage them, they get to know more about your business.
Content marketing
Target businesses will keep searching for the content as they look for solutions to their pain points.
As a B2B business, you need to understand their pains and create content that helps them through the buyer stages.
Use the right keywords according to your target search intent and optimize them. There are different kinds of content you can create.
Having the right content marketing strategy can drive massive traffic to your business, generate leads, nurture them the right way and convert them into customers.
You can use the right tools to help with your content marketing. Research shows that 86% of top B2B Marketers use analytic tools.
If you don’t have time to create content or want to focus on other things for your business you can outsource them.
RELATED: 10 Best B2B Marketing Analytics Tools You Need to Know
Most B2B businesses outsource their content needs to experts who create their marketing content. The above report shows 71% of large B2B businesses outsource their content needs.
It is essential to keep promoting your content and engage target brands.Creating content alone will not be of great help if your target businesses don’t learn about you or engage with your business. Use different content promotion strategies as you keep creating content and marketing it.
Email marketing
Email marketing is one of the best B2B marketing trends and B2B businesses still use it to market their business to target B2B businesses. Research by statista shows email usage will reach 376 billion that by 2025.
This shows that email marketing is here to say. As you use email marketing for your marketing, ensure you create and send emails that resonate with the target audience.
Your focus should be to create educational and informative content for your target audience. Remember the buyer process for B2B is long and involves different decision makers.
Ensure your email newsletters are focused on engaging your target B2B business to your brand. You need to educate and show them how your business will solve their pains.
As you nurture your leads, keep giving them content that educates and guides them on how you will solve their pains.
Most of the emails for B2C are sales focus aiming to drive the target customer to make a purchase decision. They offer discounts and offers that entice the target audience to buy.
Don’t send your target businesses more emails that are sales focused but aim at nurturing them to learn more about your business and the value you can offer them.
Webinars & podcasts
These are still popular this year and beyond. Most B2B businesses use webinars and podcasts to engage their target audience.
With the Covid-19 pandemic more B2B brands have been using webinars to market to their b2b target businesses. Statista research shows how B2B brands have been using webinars for their business marketing.
As you plan to host a webinar, ensure you use the topics that your target audience engages most with.
It is also important to have an expert talk about those topics to bring your thought leadership to your B2B target businesses. Your experts should be able to answer all the attendees’ questions to their satisfaction.
To reach a larger audience you can partner with other businesses and together promote the webinar to the target audience.
You can also create podcasts and host thought leaders in your industry. Talk about topics that affect your target audience and concern their pain points.
It’s a great way to reach your target audiences and increase your B2B brand awareness.
Partner Marketing/ influencer marketing
You can use influencers in your B2B industry to get them to give you a shout-out to your target B2B brands. You can also partner with other businesses in the industry to work together to reach the B2B target audience.
Since these big brands have a large audience, you can leverage it and reach more target leads for your business. You also learn more about how they market their brand and implement some of the strategies to your own marketing.
RELATED: How to Use Influencer Marketing to Promote Your B2B Business
Conferences and networking events
The B2B marketing process is long and complicated. Networking and attending conferences can be a great way to get to know your target persons in the business you want to reach.
Networking events also present new opportunities for B2B brands as you get to meet other businesses that you can target. If you are a thought leader and expert you can speak at some of the events.
B2B target audience will engage with your business more as they see the value you can bring to their business in solving their pains.
Search engine optimization
When done well, b2b SEO can be a great channel to market your B2B business to your target audience. It’s essential to ensure every single piece of content you put out is optimized for your target audience.
Understand your target businesses, research them, and know the keywords they use in their content search on search engines. Use keywords that have high search volume, low search difficulty. Some factors to consider include:
Link building and getting backlinks is essential for your search rankings. However, don’t buy links or stuff keywords in your content.
Referral marketing
Satisfied B2B companies will always be grateful for your services and like other target users to know about it. That’s why it is important to give your target customers the best products and services to solve their pains.
A happy customer will refer other users to your business. Since people trust other people more, you will earn their trust and probably convert them into leads and convert them into customers.
As part of giving your users the best ensure your website has a faster loading speed and is easy to navigate. Don’t let your target customers struggle to find what they want when they visit your website.
Customize everything on your website to speak to your target customer so they can know right away about your business the moment they arrive on your website.
Paid search/ pay-per-click
You can create ads and place them on search engines, social sites, or third-party websites and only pay when the target audience clicks on the ads.
Some of the benefits of this b2b marketing channels include:
- It’s easy to track
- The target audience is most likely to see them as they are targeted to them
- It’s a great way to get exposure to your business
A disadvantage to it is it’s costly in the long run as a b2b long-term marketing channel. When choosing the keyword for your PPC ads use the ones that target your user intent and optimize the bidding options for:
- maximum conversions
- target cost per action (CPA)
- Target return-on-ad-spend (ROAS)
- Maximum clicks and impression share
RELATED: B2B PPC: How to Use Paid Search to Drive Business Leads and Revenue
Trade shows
This is another B2B marketing channel that is here to stay. Brands will keep showing their best services or products to target B2B businesses.
Trade shows are the best channel for your b2b lead generation. It’s a great way to reach those targeted businesses and showcase what you can offer them for their pains.
Target customers get to interact with your business one-on-one and see what you offer them. You build trust with your target market and engage them with your brand.
Account-based marketing
This is one of the best B2B marketing channels businesses are using to attract and engage other businesses.
Explained in simple terms account-based marketing is the approach where businesses target the best fit businesses that use your products or services and work to convert them into customers.
RELATED: The Ultimate Guide to Account-Based Marketing for B2B Businesses
You reach out to these targeted accounts, engage them through different channels and draw them to your business.
Since they are the best fit and can use your products or services to solve their pain points, it’s easy to convert them to customers.
Need help with your B2B business marketing?
The above are the best B2B marketing channels you can use to engage with your target customers and build trust with them and eventually convert them into customers.
If you have challenges with your B2B business marketing you can reach us for help. We use powerful strategies to help B2B businesses generate leads and acquire new customers for their business products or services. Also avoid making these costly mistakes that can affect your marketing and sales. Here is our business approach
Contact us today and let us help you grow your business.
