Marketing is the spine of your business. It’s marketing that creates buzz in business and demand for their offering. Business to business targets individual companies and their decision makers as customers. B2B marketers refer to customers as leads, contacts or accounts. The sales cycle is longer in B2B and marketers uses many different tactics to a acquire, covert, and retain customers.
Your marketing strategy should be based on your clients and their needs. Having a framework is important where basic guidelines can help narrow down your strategy. Here are a few golden guidelines of B2B marketing that shall help you grow your business better;
Customers First: Customers are an integral part of any business operation. Focus more on your customers need and requirement. Notice how the interact with the brand they business with. Provide them solutions, and help simplify their business. Make sure you build a strong foundation with your clients when getting into business with them. Predict customers purchase behavior to help strategize future steps of the business.
Automate: Make use of technology, with several high-end business technology available, target your specific customer. Gather right data and use it in a way that supports your marketing strategy, processes, and ultimately your customer relationships. Make sure to add human touch where required, the pandemic have blurred the lines of events, hence engage and continue to evolve as per the new normal.
Stick to your ethics: You started your business in order to fill an existing void, or to fulfill a customer need. Stick to your business ethics, and make sure that the values that the values embedded in your business are genuine. Brand awareness is a critical aspect in today’s marketing strategy. Genuinely understand the requirement of your customer and the industry. Do not only pay attention to technical knowledge or individual initiatives.
Provide Insight And Advice: Help your clients in their decision making by offering insight and educational tools. Make use of surveys, primary and secondary data collection, and research to gather the marketplace insight. Research will help you gain an insider’s view of your client’s market, and shall provide you the opportunity to offer back up points, and educational materials to ease in the process of decision making. Primary research will help you understand your clients’ challenges, and will give you direct access to their voices and opinions. Impeccable research will help you create meaningful content and resources for your clients’ needs which won’t only resonate but will demonstrate your understanding and knowledge, help you build thought leadership.
Connect with your community: Climate change ad sustainable business in the need of the hour. Support your marketplace and wider community. If you can help others through your offering and actions, this also builds trust and credibility for you and your business. Don’t just boast about your achievements and actions. Look at the wider impact and implications and consider how this aligns with your vision, values and customer base.
Consider these four important P’s and C’s of B2B marketing,
- Product = Clients wants and needs
- Place = Convenience to buy
- Price = Cost to satisfy
- Promotion = Communicating with
