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B2B (business-to-business) is sometimes the forgotten stepchild in the marketing family but it is an important element to master. Moreover, it is not a certainty that, if you know B2C (business-to-consumer) marketing, you can plan a successful B2B campaign. For some unknown reason, B2B campaigns have often an “unsexy” stigma, but, quite the contrary, a thorough B2B campaign is a good opportunity to prove otherwise. In this blog, I will put B2B campaigns under the microscope and share with you how a successful B2B campaign might look like.

First, let me just get some B2B qualifications out of the way. I have quite a bit of experience in B2B. I used to work on the Dell B2B account in Germany and I have worked with B2B IT (MSPs, i.e. Managed Service Providers) clients in the U.S. Great! A first major difference between B2C and B2B is the longer sales cycle for B2B. Keep in mind, there are also some B2C verticals that have a long sales cycle, e.g. automotive and real estate. An average B2B sales cycle can take several months. Further, an important difference to consider is that B2B customers consume, on average, more assets before a purchase decision is reached. The average B2B buyer consumes 13 assets. Assets in the B2B buyer’s journey can be e-books, whitepapers, analysts reports, webinars, brochures, and blogs for ex. So, it is clear that we want to reach the decision makers in a B2B campaign. 

First and foremost, it’s vital for your business to have a solid Customer Service Management (CRM) system at hand. You must have a centralized place to store and manage all your customers’ contact information. To have a clean and organized database is also paramount for a successful email marketing strategy. I can write a blog about email marketing later. You need to collect explicit and implicit data.

• Explicit data: Information that is intentionally shared between a contact and a company
• Implicit data: Information gathered from user behavior 

Modern CRM platforms have a robust application programming interface (API). This is good because the API lets your systems “talk” to each other. For example, you can link your Salesforce CRM with Google Ads. This will help you how to measure your Google Ads’ return on advertising spend (ROAS). Read more here. If you don’t have direct access to the client’s Salesforce CRM it’s important to work closely together with the sales team to understand how your marketing efforts are working to progress the target accounts to the next stages.  

In the CRM, you can run reports on progression to illustrate the marketing activities’ contributions. The reports should include:

• Content downloads
• Demo request forms completed
• Inbound demos scheduled
• Inbound demos completed
• Inbound opportunities created
• Inbound closed/won opportunities

This will help you to optimize your digital marketing efforts according to, e.g.:

• Increasing revenue or increasing contract length
• Generating demand within your target prospect accounts
• Increasing closed/won deal size
• Increasing the number of qualified opportunities in your qualified accounts
• Decreasing churn (the number of customers who jumped ship)
• Creating new customer advocates

The above concepts relate to account-based marketing and it’s a good B2B strategy to turn your best-fit accounts into customers. This tactic focuses on accounts that can have the biggest revenue potential for your business. Because a B2B buying decision can involve several decision makers this strategy can prove to be fruitful for your B2B campaign strategy. Click here to learn more about this strategy.  

I mentioned earlier that B2B customers consume more assets on average thus content marketing can be a powerful method to enhance your strategy. I have experienced success with relevant Google Display ads pushing traffic to blog pages that contribute value to your customers’ research. Make sure that your blog landing pages are optimized for conversions and track these conversions correctly. Display ads are cost-effective and if executed correctly, you can catch some highly relevant B2B traffic. CPCs (cost-per-clicks) on B2B keywords can be quite high. It’s not unusual to see search CPCs on keywords hovering around $20-$40 in the U.S. so it’s absolutely vital to select highly relevant keywords if you implement search intent campaigns. 

It’s not always the case that you should only target the main decision makers in a B2B campaign strategy. I am speaking from my own experience. Some years ago, I was working on a B2B Dell Germany campaign. Naturally, we had only targeted a C-Level/DM (decision-makers) audience in the past but our campaigns’ goals had stagnated. After much research, my team and I discovered that the IT Administrators were actually a viable audience to target since they bring their recommendations to the DMs. The DMs “listened” to their IT Administrators in terms of recommendations. We had data backing up our research. In addition, the IT Admins are in the trenches and deal with issues and needs on a daily basis, i.e. they know “what’s up”. Our campaign caught incredible traction and took off. In fact, we won several international B2B media awards like “B2B Campaign Of The Year” at the M&M Global Awards in London. You can see the case study (in English) here. 

B2B campaigns are a different “game” vs. B2C but if executed correctly, they can yield good return for your business/clients. B2B buyers are consuming more content online nowadays (remember print?) and relevant content like webinars can be a good avenue to provide value for B2B buyers. Your communication style can pave the road to success. Ensure correct communication in regards to the marketing funnel. My blog “Digital Marketing And The Importance Of The Marketing Funnel” looks at this some more. For example, at the B2B remarketing stage, you really want to emphasize trust and credibility. At higher stages in the funnel, you want to speak to pain points.

Thank you for reading my blog. If you have any comments or questions, you can contact me here. 2021 is going to be a better year after all the turmoil we have been through. Never stop learning and as a digital marketer, never take B2B for granted. Cheers!

Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash