In a previous post we looked at the importance of establishing the proper growth marketing processes within a business.  There is no doubt that this is part and parcel to any type of business at any stage of its development, of course what specifically entails as part of these processes will be different with different type of businesses.

As part of a recurring series, we will continue to examine the growth marketing processes at different types of businesses, and business at various stages of their business evolution.

In this article, we will be examining the various factors entailed in terms of setting up the growth marketing processes for B2B businesses.

What Exactly Is B2B Marketing?

B2B marketing essentially involves any marketing strategy including content, that is 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 all examples of businesses that use B2B marketing.  However, B2B is not just synonymous with SaaS businesses alone.  Wholesaler-retailer interactions are another example, as are companies that sell safety signage to construction companies, hazardous waste companies or municipalities. 

The overall goal of B2B growth marketing is to attract leads looking for what you offer, and ultimately direct them towards becoming customers.  Let’s examine the overall process in order to get a better sense of how this works, as well as how to go about achieving the overarching objective of acquiring and retaining customers in the long run for B2B enterprises.

How to Use the B2B Customer Journey to Improve Marketing Efforts?

A B2B buyer’s journey is the process potential buyers go through before buying a new product or service. Their journey usually consists of three main touchpoints, awareness, consideration, and decision.  

There’s a fourth that is arguably just just as important, if not more so with B2B businesses, and that is retaining one’s customers.  The reason being that since B2B businesses tend to operate on either a recurring revenue or licensing model and their revenues are based on work that they continuously do with customers, losing a customer or steady percentage of customers represents a tremendous loss of revenues for these businesses.  

Let’s briefly look at each below.

The 4 Overarching Steps Involved in the B2B Growth Marketing Process:

1. Awareness 

• Your buyer realizes they have a problem and starts researching solutions.

• Intent data for digital marketing plays a big role in the awareness stage. With it, you can get in front of prospects ready to buy and offer them the perfect solution before your competitors do. Failing that, you can demonstrate your expertise relative to what your prospective customers are struggling with via content marketing. 

2. Consideration stage

• Your prospective customers compile their research and consider the best solution to solve their pain points.  If you didn’t get in front of your potential customers before they started considering potential solutions, it is especially important to realize that your sales team needs to explain why your service or product is better than your competitors.

3. Decision stage

• The buyer makes a purchase decision for a solution that meets their needs, adds the most value, and fits their budget.

4. Retention stage

It costs less to retain existing clients compared to acquiring new ones. In the B2B world, with long sales cycles and large average contract value, losing a single client has massive repercussions. What this ultimately means is that while you need to adopt marketing strategies that aggressively seek out new leads, you also need to emphasize tactics that keep your existing clients satisfied.

As an example, in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies, customer retention means customers continually renew software subscriptions, purchase add-ons, upgrade systems, and remain loyal to the business because the customer is satisfied with their experience. On a more elevated level, Hubspot hosts Inbound.  This is Hubspot’s customer conference that goes into workshops and speaker presentations about the various pain points there customers have as well as any new upcoming features that (hopefully) address some of these pain points.

What are the Growth Marketing Fundamentals for B2B Businesses

Now that we have established the phases that every B2B oriented enterprise has to go through as part of its customer attraction and retention framework, we now need to establish the various fundamental aspects that make B2B businesses distinct.  Understanding what makes B2B businesses unique allows us to know how to approach the growth marketing framework when considering the most appropriate tactics for helping these B2B establish consistent revenue growth.

1. B2B Markets are More Complex

In B2B, the buyer makes a more complex purchasing decision. This brings with it the need and responsibility to consult multiple departments before making a purchase. In B2B, there is also the need to not only consider product information, but also technical requirements and the needs of other departments come into play.   This stage is characterized by multiple decision and approval mechanisms, which only further adds to the complexity requiremnts. 

2. B2B Involves a Rationally Oriented Purchase, Which Means Buyers Are More Informed.

Those who buy on behalf of their company have the responsibility to make the right decision.  This is all the more imperative since such purchasing decisions affect the operation of the business they represent. As a result, they tend to be more rational and less impulsive with the goal of maximizing the benefits of the products or services offered.

What this means that B2B buyers are more informed.  The businesses that these buyers are considering need to be able to provide answers to the questions that they have in order to successfully be able to influence the purchase outcome. 

3. B2B Marketing Involves Needs Rather Than Emotionally-Based Purchases

One example of this involves the wholesale t-shirt industry. The purchase of raw materials to be used in the production of t-shirts require certain specifications.  Choosing the most suitable option for this need is a need-based consumption motivation rather than a behavioral purchase. Therefore, there is a segmentation difference in B2B compared to B2C.

4. Customer Communication is More Important in B2B Markets

B2B buyers bring high monetary value purchases. Therefore, the impact of mistakes at any step in the sales process can snowball. For example, a human error in the invoicing or returns process can create a crisis for high value B2B buyers. 

5. B2B Purchases Are Made With Long-Term Intentions

In B2B, there is an inherent long-term commitment.  More time needs to be spent researching recommendations and sourcing.  However, as a result of going through process, B2B customers tend to have more entrenched loyalty to their suppliers.  

4 Growth Marketing Pillars for B2B Businesses 

Effective B2B marketing begins with a solid growth marketing framework.  Before we delve into the specific steps that are part of the growth marketing process, we need to take a closer look at 4 factors that serve as pillars of a solid, sustainable marketing strategy for B2B businesses. 

1) Customer Personas

Identifying and targeting the right audience is one of the most important aspects of B2B growth marketing. These customers then become evangelists for your product, making your marketing efforts even more effective.

To accurately target such prospects, you need to create detailed customer personas. These personas, generally created by analyzing and interviewing your current customers, identify the demographic information and professional concerns of your most valuable prospects. This includes their:

• Expected Customer Lifetime Value

• Specific Industry that You Are In

• Job Title & Responsibilities

• Goals and objectives

• Pain Points they have as it relates to what your product or services addresses

Examining personas in this way allows your company to speak to its target audience in language they understand and appreciate.  This in turn, increases credibility for your business and ultimately increases the appeal of your product/service from their perspective.

2) Multi-Channel Customer Acquisition

Growth marketing requires your team to test many channels to find the most successful ones, rather than relying on one or two. But because budgets are limited, growth marketers will still need to prioritize which channels to focus their attention on.  Doing so requires a strong understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of each. Some channels are suited to serving as centerpieces of a growth marketing strategy, while others are better in a supplemental capacity.  

3) Content Creation That Shows Thought Leadership

Thought leadership content establishes your business as an industry authority.

Audience targeting is also a big part of thought leadership, and customer personas are once again valuable. Writing thought leadership with personas in mind allows your team to use language that signals to prospects that you’re a part of their in-group, and focus on the product features that are actually relevant to their pain points. 

Effective content marketing for B2B businesses also allows you to target different stages of the marketing funnel.  This in turn increases conversion rates across the funnel by ensuring that your marketing efforts are far more targeted. 

A Marketing Strategy that is Data-Driven

A strong B2B-focused growth marketing strategy is data driven.  Key to this is understanding which metrics to track.  Here are some worth considering.

• Customer Acquisition Cost: The average cost of bringing in a single new customer, as calculated by dividing your total number of new customers by your marketing and sales spend.

• Customer Lifetime Value: The overall profit generated from a customer over the course of their lifetime.

• Customer Retention Rate: The percentage of your customers who continue to purchase your products or services.

• ROI: The overall return on your marketing spend for a given period of time.

• Cost Per Lead: The cost of acquiring a single new lead, as calculated by dividing your total number of new leads by your marketing expenditure.

• Visitor to Lead Conversion Rate: How many web visitors will become leads, calculated by dividing your total web traffic by your total number of conversions.

• Clickthrough Rate: The percentage of visitors who click on a specific promotional or search link, calculated by dividing the total number of people who see that link by the total number of clicks.

After establishing a baseline for these metrics, you can then observe the effect of your growth marketing efforts on each. A simple but powerful technique examining the effect of our marketing efforts is via conversion rate optimization by way of A/B testing.  This involves paying attention to whether changing a single element of a web page, piece of content, or advertisement produces a significant change in any of these bottom line metrics we just mentioned.

Examining the Growth Marketing Framework As it Pertains to B2B Businesses

Now that we have established the particularities of B2B businesses and the uniqueness of the B2B sales and marketing process, it’s now time to evaluate it as it pertains to the popular AAARRR growth marketing framework.

AAARRR stands for Awareness, Activation, Adoption, Retention, Revenue, and Referral.  This growth marketing model attempts to follow the various stages that a prospect is likely to follow before, while and after they show interest in and purchase a product or service that your business offers. 
Let’s look at the various steps below, with specific emphasis on how it relates to B2B businesses.

Awareness (A)

The journey begins with creating awareness about your products or services. In the B2B realm, this involves understanding the pain points of your target audience and presenting your solutions as indispensable. 

Growth Marketing Processes Involved at the Awareness Stage

Content marketing, social media strategies, and thought leadership are pivotal in casting a wide net and attracting potential clients to your brand.

Prospective clients aren’t ready to make a purchase during the awareness stage, but they want information. At this point in the buyer’s journey, the targeted audience is likely to have only just become aware of your brand and its products. The content creation for this awareness stage would need to be primarily focused on establishing yourself as an industry expert and building trust with this audience.  Blog posts, Youtube videos, and podcasts are effective examples of how to go about doing this at this stage. 

Acquisition (A)

Once awareness is established, the next step is to acquire these potential leads.

Growth Marketing Processes Involved at the Acquisition Stage

 In the B2B space, this often involves gathering contact information through gated content such as case studies, white papers webinars, or other valuable resources on your website. Crafting compelling and relevant offers is key at this stage, ensuring your audience sees the value in providing their details. 

Activation (A)

Activation marks the transition from leads to engaged prospects. This stage is about nurturing the relationship, providing targeted content, and demonstrating the unique value proposition of your products or services. 

Growth Marketing Processes Involved at the Activation Stage

Personalized communication and tailored solutions become key as businesses seek to convert interested leads into active full-on customers as part of the sales process.  This is often done by trying to provide a positive initial experience, often via onboarding processes, trial periods, or introductory offers.

Retention (R)

Once a prospect has converted into a customer, the focus shifts to retaining and deepening that relationship between vendor and customer.  The focus here is not only on maintaining their existing contracts, but potentially extending the business relationship beyond the initial scope.

Growth Marketing Processes at the Retention Stage

 In B2B marketing, this often involves ongoing communication, customer support, and additional value-added services. Building a long-term partnership is crucial for securing repeat business  upselling related products or services and fostering customer loyalty.

Revenue (R)

At the heart of any business, revenue generation is the ultimate goal. The revenue stage in the B2B marketing funnel is about maximizing the value of each customer as fully as possible.

Growth Marketing Processes at the Revenue Stage:

Upselling, cross-selling, and identifying opportunities for expansion within existing accounts become vital strategies for increasing the revenue potential of your entire customer base.

Referral (R)

Word-of-mouth marketing is a powerful force in B2B sales and marketing efforts. The referral stage encourages satisfied customers to become advocates for your brand. 

Growth Marketing Processes at the Referral Stage:

Providing exceptional service, building strong relationships, and incentivizing referrals can turn existing clients into enthusiastic promoters.  This helps bring in new business through the most effective channel, which is via trusted recommendations. Specific loyalty and referral programs can help to incentivize customers that remain with you, but also refer other customers with similar needs as theirs that you can solve.

6 Growth Marketing Tactics that B2B Business Ought to Focus on As Part of their Long-Term Growth-Focused Strategy

Now that we have established the basis for creating a growth marketing-focused strategy oriented toward B2B brands, we can now examine tactics that B2B businesses should consider for crafting an efficient growth marketing strategy.  Here are 6 of them.

1. Channel/Partner-Based Marketing:  Since B2B marketing involves 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.  

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 software  stacks for real estate agents, approaches you to become a partner. They want to resell your product as part of the custom software packages they are offering 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 most consistent B2B growth marketing efforts.

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 needed for an effective real estate CRM?” 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 and be oriented towards matching the customer broader journey. Your content should be focused on what prospects are focused on depending on where they are within the growth marketing funnel.

3) Account-Based Marketing (ABM):  Account-based marketing (ABM) is growing in popularity, particularly among B2B organizations targeting enterprise-level customers.

B2B seeks to identify what your ideal customer looks like (theoretically) using ICPs and buyer personas. After this is done, you devise a strategy and  push out your marketing campaigns targeted towards 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) Investing in a Custom Content Marketing Strategy:

Business owners and search engines both want the same thing: more in-depth content with valuable information. Creating actionable, high-quality content in your niche is the best way to get in front of decision-makers and help them realize the benefits of your product.

Blog articles are the most popular format for content marketing but that doesn’t mean you have to limit yourself to that medium. Try publishing research reports, whitepapers, free video courses, or case studies.

You can also repurpose your webinars by breaking them up into bite-sized video content and using the recorded content as modules in a course. Investing in educational content as part of an overall knowledge base that prospects and customers can have access to also makes it easier for customers to see the impact that your products and services have on other business owners. It’s important that every piece of content has a clear purpose and aligns with your overall marketing goals.

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 that is associated with your own business. 

An example of this is Pipedrive, which created a Sales Forum, where people from anywhere can post about sales and marketing.   Pipedrive, which now has over 100,000 customers, gets a tremendous long-term brand building association from its association with Sales Forum.

5)Email Marketing:

 A well-executed email marketing campaign can be a powerful tool for building relationships and growing your business.  However, without a clear strategy on how to map out the critical steps in your customer's journey, it can quickly become time consuming with little to show for your efforts.

So what are the most effective and efficient email marketing strategies you can employ for B2B businesses?  A lot of that depends on what you are trying to accomplish.  Here are a few email marketing strategies that B2B businesses might want to consider depending on both their objectives and what stage of the growth marketing funnel your business is trying to cover.

i) Prospecting: Prospecting emails introduce people to the solution your business provides.

Best practices for prospecting emails:

• Strategically position your company as a go-to resource for a pain point your prospect is looking to solve.

• Highlight the value that prospects stand to receive.

• Provide a strong reason for reaching out.

• Build rapport to establish trust.

• Make it highly engaging.

ii) Lead nurturing:  A lead nurturing email sequence helps prospects to move along the growth marketing funnel, encouraging them at every step to get one step closer to becoming a paying customer..

Best practices for nurturing emails:

• Provide helpful B2B content marketing with expert insights.

• Stick to one topic per email.

• Keep it concise.

• Ensure the emails progress naturally with each subsequent picking off from where the previous one ended off.

• Track key metrics.

iii) Drip campaigns: These are a set of pre-written emails that are sent out to customers and prospects in a continuous, consistent stream.

These perfectly-timed messages are a great way to remain top of mind and follow up with your customers.

Best practices for drip campaigns:

• Send out story emails to build B2B brand awareness and trust.

• Send fewer transaction-based emails to boost your trust signals.

• Share your expertise.

• Provide engaging, relevant, and high-quality content.

iv) Promotional Emails: These serve the sole purpose of promoting a product or service.

Best practices for promotional emails:

• Quality over quantity.

• Clear and concise subject lines.

• Use attractive visuals.

• Include a call-to-action, typically to get prospects to request a demonstration or a consultation

6) Remarketing

B2B retargeting is the tactic of targeting those who have already been exposed to a business, either by seeing a previous ad or visiting the brand’s website, with the idea of guiding them down the sales and marketing funnel.

It generally takes multiple exposures before a viewer chooses to purchase. Plus, B2B purchases are often even more involved as purchasing can require company sign-off or budget approvals. 

Retargeting ensures that the advertiser’s product or service isn’t forgotten about during the decision-making process and can provide valuable information to prospects to help them convert. 

How B2B Business Can Make the Most Out of a Remarketing Strategy 

1. Start with a clear segmentation strategy

First, it’s important to understand that not every customer who you retarget will respond to the same advertising message. For example, one B2B buyer may be interested in how budget-friendly your software is, while another may be more interested in its technical capabilities.

That’s why it’s important to begin your B2B retargeting campaign with a clear segmentation strategy.

Segmentation is the practice of splitting your audience into groups based on shared characteristics, such as:

• Demographics

• Previous interactions with your company

• Pain points and goals

• Company size and budget

The best ways to segment your audience will depend on what you know about your buyers and your company.

2. Build custom content around each segment

Now that you’ve split your audience into unique segments based on shared characteristics, you can begin appealing to each of those segments with targeted content.

When we say content, we’re talking about more than just banner ads and boosted social media posts. It’s absolutely worth customizing the ads themselves. But the content that someone sees after clicking on the ad should also reflect the segment that they belong to.

For example, you may use an ad to highlight your product’s ability to automate key business functions, especially to prospective enterprise buyers who care most about saving time.   Such an ad should potentially lead to a landing page where prospects can sign up for a webinar about how your business helped an organization eliminate bottlenecks, saving not only time and money in the process.

You can take that idea and apply it to each type of content you create, including social media posts, emails, and even YouTube videos, keeping in mind that in each medium, the call to action will be catered not just to the content, but the ad types particular to each channel.

Establishing the Processes that Generate Growth Within Your B2B  Business: A Strategic Marketing Approach

Establishing the processes that form the foundation of a  growth marketing strategy is an extremely iterative process.  However, understanding the growth marketing framework and how it applies to B2B businesses , one can work to drive  consistently proven, data-driven processes that cumulatively foster growth. 

Of course, depending on your situation, devoting the time and attention to this  can be challenging.  Especially with so many considerations and processes that make up entrenching revenue growth, it can seem overwhelming to know even where to start.

This is where the support of our expert growth marketing consultants can come in handy.    

With that in mind, why not reach out to one of our expert growth marketers for a free, no-obligation consultation.  We will happy to sit down with you, examine your business, understand what struggles  you may be having and work closely with you to determine what processes we can work on to start to establish consistent growth from your marketing efforts.