What Are the 5 Best Ways of Marketing in a B2B World?

A big challenge your company may have is to decide how to market your products and services to other organizations. Following what your competitors are doing can lead you down the wrong path. What matters most is not what is popular, but what will yield the best sales results.

There are five core tried-and-true ways to market in a B2B world. When you integrate these five tactics in your marketing plan, you can increase the number of customers and sustain revenue growth.

Direct Marketing

Email Marketing
Email marketing is a cost effective marketing tactic. After websites email is the biggest marketing priority among most companies, according to the Direct Marketing Association 2013 Statistical Fact Book. Take a look at some of the email marketing trends:

• Reduced cost of renting email lists for lead generation. The price to rent permission-based email addresses at mid-to-large-sized businesses decreased by 12.1% and at small companies went down 17.8% in 2013 compared to last year, according to Worldata Research.
• They also reported a 1.5% increase in rental prices for global lists.
• Email volume is increasing at a rapid pace. A report by Experian Marketing Services shows the volume of emails in the second quarter of 2013 increased by 17.9% compared to the second quarter a year ago. The report also shows email open rates increased by 7.2% year-over-year from 2012 to 2013.
• Email has a 127% ROI in B2B marketing, according to Marketing Sherpa.

Image Courtesy of Sherpa Marketing

Trade Journal Feature Stories

Trade journals are an ideal place to reach your target market. Executives and managers read trade journals to keep up with trends in their industry. Although a display ad would build awareness for your product or service, a better tactic is to create a feature story that the trade journal would publish.

A story is more intriguing to your audience than an ad. You get to talk about the problems your audience may be facing and the solutions your products and services provide. Plus your story can include interviews with industry experts. They can endorse your products and services.

Your story could be a feature article in a trade journal.

Readers make or influence purchasing decisions on products and services featured in the publication. This can bring your company hundreds or thousands of leads and tens of thousands of dollars or more in sales. The best way to go about this is to write the story and approach the trade publication to publish it.

The best part about this tactic is that your primary cost is low. You only have to pay a good writer to create a compelling story. Bear in mind you’ll have to be persistent in contacting trade publication editors to publish your story. Once you get them to publish your story, the financial rewards can be awesome.

Trade publications with an online presence are ideal to publish your story. That’s because prospects and customers can find and read your story long after the publisher publishes it. They can find your article through keyword searches and links from other publishers who cite it. So you get a residual return on your investment weeks, months and years after your story is published.

Event Marketing

Event marketing – also called face to face marketing – has and is still an effective way to market your products and services. In fact B2B marketers rate in-person events as the most effective marketing tactic, according to a report by the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs.

The Center for Exhibition Industry Research reported in August, 2013 that trade shows have strong growth with twelve consecutive quarters of year-over-year performance. Events for professional business services, raw materials, science and food are the strongest growing sectors. But events can be good for most other sectors too.

There are two ways you can market your products and services at these events. The first way is to exhibit. You’ll need a creative booth to attract visitors and instill a memorable experience. Plus you’ll need an aggressive pre-show promotion and even stronger follow-up to maximize sales from the contacts that come to your booth.

A second way to market at events is to speak at an educational session. This builds your company credibility as a leader in the field. You can attract new customers. Plus it also leads to developing strategic relationships with other companies who can refer customers to you.

Online Content Marketing

Online content marketing has become a very popular method for marketing B2B. The primary goal of content marketing is to generate qualified leads that you may otherwise not reach. It is an effective way to increase search engine optimization for your website.

Nonetheless, content marketing does NOT always produce a “direct ROI.” Most content marketing, such as blogs, can help you to increase your sales indirectly. But there are two types of content marketing that can yield sales quicker. These include case studies and video.

Case Studies
B2B marketers rank case studies as the second-most effective marketing tactic, according to a report by the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs.6 Case studies are stories about how your company helped a customer or client improve their company performance. A case study is a feature story about your products or services in action.

A case study can quickly show the reader how your company can help solve a problem his or her organization faces. You get to communicate your company’s expertise.

You can create case studies and publish it in a variety of media that includes text, text with graphic or video. You can publish the case study in print or electronic pdf format and deliver it by mail, email, on your website, in webinars or in presentations at meetings.

Video
B2B marketers are using video more often compared to other tactics. Video gives you a bigger emotional impact than other forms of media. The most effective way to use video to generate sales is with customer testimonials.

Customers get to express their feelings and appreciation of how your products and services helped their company. These testimonials are far more believable than actors saying a few lines in an advertisement. Plus they may say things that you have not thought about that could influence the viewer to buy from you.

Perhaps the biggest benefit for using video as a B2B marketing tactic is that it could generate an immediate sale or at least a purchase decision faster than the other tactics. People buy with emotion and video is an emotional media. That’s especially the case when the content in the video is a customer testimonial.

Newsletters

The first four ways to market your products and services focus mostly on generating qualified leads and new customers. These tactics could certainly generate additional sales from established customers. But there is one tactic that you can execute to focus on building repeat sales. This tactic is newsletters.

By publishing a weekly newsletter, you get to communicate with your customers and sustain your brand in their mind. You can include all sorts of content in your newsletters. The key is find out what type of content is most relevant to your customers. Including a case study in each newsletter can lead to more sales.

You can deliver your newsletter by email. Plus you can even create a video newsletter. In fact, a video newsletter can set your company apart from competitors.

The best part about newsletters is they are not costly. And you get to remind your customers about who you are and what you can do for them with each issue you create and send to them.

Next Step

The next step for you is to get together with your management team. Develop a marketing plan that focuses on the five marketing tactics, namely email marketing, trade journal feature stories, event marketing, content marketing through case studies and video testimonials and newsletters. You may soon find how you can generate new sales and build your B2B business.