5 Ways for Effective B2B Marketing

This topic speaks truly to me: I have been working in sales & marketing operations in B2B companies for the past 4 years and I see B2B marketing failures and mistakes every day. In this post, I will dissect - based on what I have seen - the five most effective ways for B2B marketing from this D&B infographic.

In-Person Events

Nothing beats a face-to-face conversation and this is one tactic where B2B companies can greatly leverage and influence. Do you host marketing events and invite your clients and prospects? (example: Salesforce.com hosts Dreamforce every year in San Francisco and it is a blast every time, I'm going this year in September and I cannot wait to see what new features and products they are introducing)

Webinars

One step down from in-person events - lower cost, larger reach with lower lead conversion - is company-hosted webinars. Webinar is only a format, you can play with what you want to communicate to your target audience depending on the ask. Some of the examples that I have seen includes: inviting your customer to speak about how they use your product to prospects, topics around current events (e.g. online security software hosting a webinar on cyber security after the Sony hack). Hubspot has a nice checklist of tasks that make your webinar great.

Videos

Instead of live events, videos that demonstrate how your product work in real life are even more affordable to produce, and very informative when the lead is just entering the top of the funnel. One thing to avoid though is rambling on and on about the technical specs with little or no mention of real life application. You want to make product videos thinking from the buyer's perspective, not simply to showcase how complex your product is - unless that is relevant to the decision maker. Even then, make it short and sweet.

Blogs

This should go without saying. Compared to whitepapers, blogs feel a tad more personal and gives you the option to read further into the company and its products after you get a feeling from videos and webinars. A well-maintained and curated company blog makes it stands out among competitors and educate potential buyers. 

Case Studies

Companies want to see how other similar companies use this product and what they say about it. Case studies are usually requested further down the sales conversation and the request in itself demonstrates great interest and intent from the buyer. Why do you want to waste your time reading another company's story if you are not considering buying? Therefore, getting great testimonials from your clients is very important. 

In fact, last month our company was able to seal a deal with a financial services company after we provided them with a list of clients within their vertical with similar revenue level. Sometimes, just the fact that others similar to your business is using the product is convincing enough.