B2b Marketing For Small Businesses – How To Create An Effective Strategy
For any business to operate successfully, it needs to have people to sell its product or service to. To sell people your product or service, you need to conduct some sort of marketing.
The fact that 76% of B2B organisations have a formal marketing plan is perhaps surprising; while it may seem a high percentage, every B2B business should have a well-thought marketing strategy.
Let’s take a look at what that strategy might look like, and how small businesses can create one. Thanks to the Headley Media team for their guidance with the B2B aspects of this article.
Building a Strategy
There are several distinct steps you can go through in order to create your strategy:
1. Identify your target audience
Perhaps the most important part of any marketing strategy is identifying who you’re aiming to talk to with your content.
Even within the B2B niche, there will be multiple different potential audiences that you could aim to talk to; identify one or several groups that are likely to buy your product or service, and learn as much about them as possible.
Learn about their purchasing decisions and the problems they commonly face in their professional life, and then show how your business can provide a solution. Use incentive marketing to sweeten the deal.
2. Look at the competition
By looking at your direct competitors, especially the most successful among them, you can learn from their successes and mistakes in equal measures.
Look at what they’re doing with their marketing efforts, and try to gauge what’s working and what isn’t. See what kinds of posts and content are getting the most interaction, while avoiding posting content that’s similar to pieces that have fallen relatively flat.
Don’t directly copy the competition, but definitely learn as much from them as you can.
3. Consider appropriate content forms & channels
Every business niche has channels that are more and less effective at reaching its target audience. For example, some businesses may have a strong community presence on Facebook, but have low interaction levels on Linkedin. In this case, it’s clearly more effective to focus efforts on posting content on Facebook.
The same can be said about forms of content. Some industries may prefer video, while others may find long-form blogs to be the most effective at conveying information.
You don’t have to follow market trends 100% – a little experimentation can be a good thing. These trends will, however, tell you a lot about what works and what doesn’t.
Outsource To A Marketing Agency
While business owners can learn to do a lot themselves, most small businesses will find it most beneficial to outsource their B2B marketing to marketing agencies or external resources.
Even large companies with in-house marketing teams tend to outsource a lot of their marketing tasks to specialists.
B2B marketing is a highly specialized field that often revolves around leveraging media partnerships, and for small businesses especially, it’s simply not an efficient use of resources to try to do it all without help.
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