A Guide to B2B Growth Marketing in 2023
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Effective marketing is difficult to get right. Between creative demands, budget limits, and channel decisions, growth marketers have a lot to juggle when developing their growth marketing strategy. This is especially true for those marketing for B2B organizations
The biggest determinant of effective marketing, however, is your audience.
If you’re not properly targeting your buyer persona, your promotions and advertisements will likely fall on deaf ears. You might as well not be marketing at all.
The target audiences vary the most, though, between individual consumers and businesses. Some companies serve individual shoppers, while others cater to companies and organizations.
Marketing to businesses is very different from marketing to individual consumers. That’s why an entirely different marketing method — B2B marketing — exists.
Business-to-business (B2B) marketing is a process that involves selling a certain product manufactured by one company or a set of services provided by one organization, to another. Also, it’s necessary for any company that wants to offer its services to other organizations. B2B marketing is a collection of techniques for marketing to business buyers. Its goal is to improve lead quality, sales acceptance of leads, and conversion rates.
B2B marketing means business-to-business marketing. It's any marketing strategy or content used by one business to target and sell to another business. For instance, companies that sell services, products, or SaaS to other companies or organizations typically use B2B marketing.
Two good examples of B2B marketing are Monday.com's B2B brand strategy on LinkedIn. Another out-of-the-box example is the way Gong plans and executes its Super Bowl advertisements. It's companies like these that sell solutions to help businesses automate or enhance their processes.
The goal of B2B marketing is to attract and convert leads into customers. In the digital age, this means that you need to be able to capture a prospect's attention quickly and keep it. This can be done through educational content like white papers or value-driven blog posts.
What is Growth Marketing?
Given the specific nature of B2B marketing, there is no doubt that establishing a growth marketing strategy, as well as an organization-specific growth marketing mentality is much different when marketing to organizations as compared to marketing to end-consumers.
But before we delve into what these differences are, let’s establish more about growth marketing per se.
Creating a Growth Marketing Strategy
A growth marketing strategy focuses on long-term sustainable revenue growth by using an array of innovative and more importantly data-driven tactics that are employed not just at the traffic-driving stage, but at every stage of the sales and marketing funnel. So not only is this data-driven approach essential for acquisition, but also for engagement, retention, and brand advocacy.
In a nutshell, growth marketing is a long-term, strategic methodology or approach that works to help brands achieve sustainable, measurable growth. It is a holistic and data-driven approach that leverages end-to-end funnel optimization to find, attract, convert, retain, and grow buyers into loyal brand advocates and evangelists.
Growth marketing as a tactic was born out of need -- most businesses do not have the time or money to operationalize “industry best practices” to grow. Nor do they always have the resources with which to hire specialists internally that can help cement such practices.
Instead, growth marketing is decidedly experimental, focusing on untested or unconventional marketing solutions that can result in massive growth.
Now that we have established just what growth marketing entails, let us look at growth marketing and how it pertains to B2B Marketing, as well as how it differs from B2C Marketing.
What is B2B Growth Marketing & What Does it Entail?
B2B growth marketing is a newer approach to marketing that focuses on generating leads from qualified prospects through content, email marketing, social media, and other online marketing tactics. It is great for businesses trying to increase leads, sales, and revenue in a short amount of time.
Another term that is often used to refer to B2B growth marketing is B2B growth hacking. Growth hacking is a marketing technique used to increase a business’s growth and sales using unconventional means. It is a great way to learn about your target audience, improve your sales and lead generation strategies, and provide you with a way to improve your business continuously. However, it should be considered a short-term approach to help you get off the ground and to provide data with which you can assess the efficacy of tactics fairly quickly.
Once you’ve started seeing your initial results, you want to transition from these short-term, unconventional efforts to a more strategic, long-term strategy that utilizes more conventional marketing tactics, such as email, social media, etc.
When it comes to B2B growth marketing, you can use countless tactics and strategies to help your business grow. However, it’s crucial that you use tactics that are relevant to your target audience.
That being said before we delve into what tactics are best as part of a growth marketing strategy, let’s dive into some key differences between how growth marketing tactics are applied to B2C businesses vis a vis how they are applied to B2B organizations.
So What Makes Growth Marketing Different for B2B rather than B2C organizations
There are a number of points that makes applying a growth marketing strategy different when trying to do so for a B2B vs a B2C Business. Let us focus on 4 of them.
Target Audiences: B2B marketers go after key decision-makers within an organization. They don’t have to bother about everyone in the company or even the end user. For instance, it doesn’t matter if a medical software or device will be used by hundreds of clinicians and care teams; only the CIO, information technology officer and relevant members of the hospital administration will make the final purchase decision. So, B2B marketers should make sure that all of their marketing efforts are geared toward this small group of decision-makers. As we mentioned above, B2C marketers sell directly to consumers, not retailers or any other business down the supply chain. B2C marketers can direct their campaigns to just about anyone who can use their products or services, not necessarily the buyer. A kid who sees an ad for a PlayStation, for example, might convince their mom or dad to buy it for them. Even still, it is crucial for B2C marketing to reach the household’s decision-maker primarily rather than anyone else.
2) Logic vs Emotion-Based Decisions: B2B marketing is all about logic. Marketers have to tell decision-makers stories about the product/service, its features, and how it’ll help the organization. There are little to zero emotions involved in the process.
Of course, B2B marketers want to deliver their marketing message in a way that decision-makers can understand. After all, the use of complex, esoteric jargon is one of the biggest B2B marketing mistakes most companies make.
In B2C marketing, the consumer is most likely interested in the emotional grand scheme of things. When B2C marketers are crafting their stories, they should tell the benefits and value of the service or product in plain language. And not a long, boring story.
3) Perception of Value/ROI: B2B customers want to know the return on their investment (ROI) right away. They want to know your expertise, and if your product or service will contribute to the efficiency and bottom line of the company. As such, most B2B purchases are driven by financial incentives and the logic behind the product/service. Consumers, on the other hand, are more interested in entertainment, deals, and other exciting parts of the purchase process. They’ll probably care more if they can score a discount rather than if the product is durable.
4) Decision-Making cycle: B2B marketing is usually a lengthy process that involves a long chain of command. After all, the decision maker is often not a single person, which means B2B marketers have to spend more money.
B2C customers typically make snappy, one-person decisions. This can save marketers a lot of time and money. B2C customers may only have to seek recommendations from family and friends. The purchase decision is usually made by one person and generally takes a matter of minutes.
The B2B buying process is a different story. Accounting, procurement, and heads of several departments have to give the green light before a purchase is made. Because B2B marketers are not dealing with an individual, the purchase decision process can take much longer and become more complex with each passing day.
B2B-Specific Growth Marketing Tactics to consider in 2023
Now that we understand some of the main factors one needs to consider when creating a B2B growth strategy, let’s look at some growth marketing tactics that are specific to B2B that we ought to look at. For our purposes, here are 6 main ones.
Channel/Partner-Based Marketing: Since B2B growth marketing involves, as mentioned targeting decision makers, one quick way around this is to get others to sell your product/service for you. With channel marketing, you essentially partner with another company (or individual, though it’s usually a business) to sell your product to end customers. Let’s look at an example.
Imagine your company is a CRM platform. Your product has many different use cases, including real estate agencies.
Another company, which specializes in creating custom systems and software stacks for real estate agents, approaches you to become a partner. They want to resell your product as part of the customized software packages they’re building for their clients.
It’s a win-win situation. You sell additional user licenses without needing to invest a single dollar in marketing or sales, and they take a cut while continuing to grow their business and services their customers’ needs
2) Thought Leadership as Part of a Long-Term SEO Strategy: SEO (search engine optimization) is the backbone of many B2B marketing strategies.
It’s all about attracting customers organically through search engines like Google.
Imagine you’re that CRM platform.
There are many potential terms a real estate agent might search for during their research journey. “Real estate CRM” is an obvious one, but that’s only likely to be the case when that agent is far down the sales funnel and ready to purchase.
In this case, we have several high-intent keywords to target. We can create conversion-focused landing pages targeting terms like “CRM for real estate” and educational blog posts for terms like “What is a CRM in real estate?” and “best real estate CRM.”
The important factor to remember here is that your content-based SEO strategy should be focused on the long term.
Look at the search phrase “CRM for real estate,” for instance. It has a decent search volume (1000 searches each month) but a high keyword difficulty (72%). It will be hard to rank for this term on a site with low Domain Authority and minimal content.
You’ll have a better chance once you have:
A stronger Domain Authority
Backlinks from high DA websites
A robust internal linking strategy
Other ranking terms that link back to your piece target thing keyword
To give yourself the best shot at building some page-one rankings and developing your domain authority, it would be smarter to first work on the content that targets lower-difficulty keywords.
3) Account-Based Marketing (ABM): Account-based marketing (ABM) is growing in popularity, particularly among B2B organizations targeting enterprise-level customers.
Here’s how it works.
The traditional B2B marketing approach is to identify what your ideal customer looks like (theoretically) using ICPs and buyer personas. Then, you push out your marketing campaigns and hope to reach some businesses that fit that profile.
ABM goes even deeper before jumping into marketing activities. Here, you identify the actual companies you want to target. These are called your target accounts.
Then, you develop personalized marketing tactics (ex; email outreach, specific case studies) to reach these specific accounts and make an impression.
4) Build a Community Around Your Area of Expertise: Some digital marketing channels like social media ads can get you in front of potential customers quickly, but don’t underestimate the value of a long-term play. The best B2B marketing strategies understand the value of investing in the future.
Long-term B2B growth is all about building a presence in your industry, providing value, and developing meaningful relationships.
One of the most powerful ways to do this is by creating a community where one did not exist previously.
An example of this is Pipedrive, which created a Sales Forum, where people from anywhere can post about sales and marketing, which provided a tremendous association for sales and marketing to Pripederive, which now has over 100,000 customers.
5) Free Trials/Freemiums: Everyone loves free stuff, right? So why not make use of it as one of the growth strategies for your company?
Offering some sort of freemium service or free trial is an excellent way to attract new customers, spread the word about your startup, and drive growth.
By offering potential customers a free trial or access to part of the software for free, you’re showing them the value you bring to the table and allowing them to experience your brand first-hand. This helps to build trust between you and your customers, as they can see for themselves that you deliver on your promises and that your tool is a reliable solution.
What’s also great is that, if your product is actually good and does what it promises, they’ll become hooked once people start using it. And, if your product is OUTSTANDING, they wouldn’t be able to imagine their life without it!
Another very important benefit of offering a free trial or freemium services is that you’ll get a lot of feedback from your users, which will help you understand their needs better and make improvements that could skyrocket your product’s growth
6) Pay Per Click: Compared to all of the others, this is the one which can if handled correctly, achieve the most rapid, short-term growth. That does not make any of the others any less valuable, just that this is the one that can allow you to scale your business growth scale the fastest.
Plus, you can target prospective customers more precisely and reach people who are actively looking for solutions.
That said, it’s important to remember that you need to clearly understand your target audience and what they’re looking for to succeed with paid ads.
There are lots of different platforms and options to choose from:
… and many more.
Study the different options and find the ones that work best for your business.
Obviously, PPC landing page conversion rates aren’t quite as high as organic conversion rates as people are shopping around and the traffic volumes are automatically significantly higher, but the sheer number of new leads coming in is impossible to ignore.
A Growth Marketing Strategy is A Must for Your B2B Business
As you can see, there are many different growth strategies for B2B that can help your company achieve growth.
However, these strategies will only work if you know your audience and what they want, so before you start doing any of this, make sure you have a very good understanding of your target market.
Hopefully with this guide, you not only have a decent understanding of your target market but also the differences between what growth marketing entails for B2B vs B2C businesses. With this, perhaps 2023 might be the year where a growth marketing strategy starts to permeate, and takes the 1st step toward becoming entrenched within your organization.
If you need any help in terms of getting a growth marketing strategy to stick within your organization, why not arrange a meeting with our growth marketing consultants? We will work to understand your business, to leverage the right tactics to help generate the type of growth your business is looking for.