B2B companies often have long sales cycles, complex decision-making processes, and multiple stakeholders. Therefore, it’s important for B2B companies to follow certain best practices to maximize their chances of success. Here are 10 best marketing practices that B2B companies should follow.

1. Define Your Ideal Customer Profile: B2B companies should have a clear understanding of their target audience. This includes identifying the industries, company size, job titles, and other relevant factors that define their ideal customer. This helps in creating more effective marketing strategies and sales outreach.

2. Develop a Strong Brand Identity: A strong brand identity helps B2B companies stand out in a crowded market. It’s important to develop a consistent brand message across all channels, including website, social media, and sales collateral.

3. Create Valuable Content: B2B buyers are looking for information and insights that can help them make informed decisions. Therefore, B2B companies should create high-quality, informative content that addresses the pain points and challenges of their target audience. Create content that has value to your audience, minimizing “selling” content.

4. Measure and Analyze Results: Finally, B2B companies should measure and analyze the results of their marketing and sales efforts. This allows them to identify what’s working and what’s not, and make adjustments to improve their strategies over time. Key metrics to track include website traffic, conversion rates, customer acquisition cost, and customer lifetime value.

5. Leverage Social Media: Social media is an effective tool for B2B companies to reach and engage with their target audience. LinkedIn is particularly effective for B2B marketing, but other platforms such as Twitter and Facebook can also be used to build brand awareness and drive traffic to the company’s website. Maximize your social posting with employee engagement. Encouraging employees and leadership to post independently and share company posts maximizes exposure and is shown to increase sales.

6. Embrace Account-Based Marketing (ABM): ABM is a targeted approach that focuses on a specific set of accounts that are most likely to become customers. ABM allows B2B companies to personalize their messaging and outreach to each account, which can lead to higher conversion rates and stronger customer relationships.

7. Use Marketing Automation: Marketing automation tools such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Management (formerly Pardot) can help B2B companies streamline their marketing efforts and automate repetitive tasks. This allows marketing teams to focus on higher-level tasks such as content creation, strategy, and analysis.

8. Focus on Customer Experience: B2B companies should focus on providing a seamless and positive customer experience. This includes everything from website design to customer service to post-sale support. A positive customer experience can lead to repeat business and referrals.

9. Emphasize the Value Proposition: B2B buyers are looking for solutions that will help them solve their problems and achieve their goals. Therefore, B2B companies should focus on emphasizing the value of their product or service and how it can benefit the customer.

10. Prioritize Sales Enablement: Sales enablement refers to providing sales teams with the tools, training, and resources they need to be successful. B2B companies should invest in sales enablement programs to ensure that their sales teams are equipped to sell effectively.

Summary

Initiating these 10 best practices can go a long way toward helping B2B companies improve their marketing and sales efforts, build stronger customer relationships, and drive business growth. By focusing on their target audience, creating valuable content, leveraging social media, embracing Account Based Marketing (ABM), using marketing automation, prioritizing customer experience, emphasizing the value proposition, investing in sales enablement, and measuring and analyzing results, B2B companies can achieve success in a competitive marketplace.

Need to jump-start your B2B initiatives? Have a look at how quickly you can get in the game with AdVic’s B2B Commerce Accelerator.

How Can AdVic Help?

Ad Vic’s dedicated B2B Commerce team is ready to apply their knowledge and passion to your challenges. Whether you are migrating from a legacy eCommerce solution or just starting to dip your toe into the B2B eCommerce world, our U.S.-based team, who works on your hours,  has the skills and expertise needed to get your branded storefront up and running quickly so you can drive new revenue. Reach out and talk to us today!

Related Resources:

B2B Customer Success Story
B2B Commerce Accelerator
B2B Marketing Tips You Have Not Thought Of

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The B2B marketing landscape is continuously evolving. The last two years saw a few unprecedented changes and trends in the B2B marketing ecosystem. What trends can we expect in 2023? On a recent Ad Victoriam “Salesforce Simplified” podcast, Paul Slack, founder and CEO of Vende Digital discussed sales and marketing, SEO, and social media trends B2B marketers should watch – and possibly embrace – this year. What follows are some of the highlights of that conversation.

Video is Still King 

“Video,” Paul remarked, “as a way of delivering information, is becoming more and more important. We’re seeing video consumption just on the rise and short video consumption being the biggest form of that. I think we can thank our short attention spans, and maybe TikTok for that, but we all want these short videos. And so, video worked well in 2022. I think it’s going to work extremely well in 2023.” 

From a sales perspective, Paul added, “Video is also a really important tool. So I think the sales reps that were able to send little video messages to their customers, that’s something that if you didn’t try in 2022, I’d recommend that you try in 2023. Think about all the emails that you’re getting, unsolicited emails and things like that. And then every now and then I’d get an email and it’s a little video from a person where they’ve analyzed my website or they’ve got a specific message related to me, and that catches my attention.”

Creating Personalized Content Hubs

Championing the creation of personalized content hubs, Paul shared, “I think the more that you can deliver a message, whether it’s on the sales side or on the marketing side, that makes that recipient of that information think to themselves, ‘Wow, that was for me. That person spent some time sending me this email, delivering me this message on social media,’ whatever the case may be.” 

He added, “And there’s so many tools out there today that can help us really hyper-personalize. And so one thing that I like to bring up is, these personalized content hubs. And I know a lot of businesses are taking advantage of those now, but even into 2023, if you can have a landing page on your website for each of your sales reps and have that be personalized, which you can do with marketing automation and tools like that to where when that visitor… The sales rep drops a link, ‘Hey, check out this content hub I’ve made that’s got all this great information to help you, Mr. Prospect.’ But when they land on it, through marketing automation and personalization, it can look like it’s a customized landing page, not just for the rep, but actually for the prospect.”

Your SEO Initiatives

With an eye toward shoring up SEO initiatives, Paul suggested, “If you did a good job in 2022 of making your website technically sound and loading fast, etc., in 2023 you really need to focus on establishing really awesome content that’s tied to your content pillars where you’re calling out your niche.”

Additionally, Paul said that B2B marketers need to think about when they’re building content for 2023, “We cannot write a blog or an article, or a webpage and hope that we’re going to rank well, because that’s a key phrase that’s important for us. We’ve got to write content that answers the query of the user. So Google’s really looking at, did that user click over to your website? Did they hit the back button and go to another page because they didn’t get their answer on your page? That’s going to have a big impact. So when you write content in 2023, make sure you’re answering the user intent. And then the last thing for SEO is, just make sure you’ve got multimedia on there. So for example, audio or video or stats, things like that, that are going to really help the user along the way.”

Leadership Leading the Social Media Messaging

A huge proponent of turning employees into ambassadors for your company on social media – speaking to their audiences directly – Paul suggested it start at the top. “I call it founder branding… Positioning the head of your company as the face of your company on social media, I think is going to be really helpful in 2023.” 

Lastly for social media in 2023, Paul added, ”If you haven’t thought about advertising, you absolutely need to, but think about it as a way of getting your best content in front of your ideal customers.”

Is your business in need of a B2B solution that might include migrating from a legacy eCommerce platform? No worries, because the AdVic B2B Commerce team has the skills and expertise needed to get your branded storefront up and running quickly so you can drive new revenue. Contact us today, we’re ready to chat!

Related Resources:

B2B Marketing Tips You Have Not Thought Of (Podcast)

B2B Marketing Tips You Have Not Thought Of – Part 1 (Blog)

B2B Marketing Tips You Have Not Thought Of – Part 2 (Blog)

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The job of Sales and Marketing is to work together towards common goals, helping their company grow and securing business. While their job functions differ, working together as one maximizes business profits and growth. 

Companies that unify Sales and Marketing hold the advantage of collaboration. Rather than functioning as separate entities, exchanging information and ideas between Sales and Marketing can improve results and create a seamless buying experience for prospective customers. The responsibility of creating content that generates qualified leads lies on the marketing team. From customer stories, case studies, and collateral, Marketing uses methods of promoting services to warm up leads. It is then up to Sales to follow up, build relationships, and close deals.

For Part 2 of our “B2B Marketing Tips You Have Not Thought Of” blog series (Read Part 1), Vende Digital Founder/CEO/B2B marketing guru, Paul Slack, who recently guested on AdVic’s “Salesforce Simplified” podcast, offered a five-step guide of strategies that can unifying Sales and Marketing teams: 

1. Importance of Sales and Marketing Alignment

“Sales and marketing have to work together as a system within an organization,” Paul states. “It’s not the sales department and the marketing department, it’s sales and marketing working together because at the end of the day, buyers don’t buy the best solutions. Wouldn’t it be awesome if they did and we had the best solution? But what they actually buy are the solutions that they understand the most from people that they like. And so when you think about that statement, that they buy the solutions that they understand from people that they like, sales and marketing plays a role in both of those. 

“Marketing’s job is to make sure that there’s a solution out there that your solution is one that they understand. 

“Sales’ job is to make sure that the solution they’re buying is from somebody that they like. That’s that human component.”

Paul describes the content Marketing produces as “Chum in the water that attracts prospective customers, that then allows reps to go in for the sale.”

2. Content Warm Up

Marketing uses methods, tactics and a variety of channels such as content marketing, social media marketing, SEO, email marketing and ads to target consumers. The content that Marketing produces is used as bait. Paul describes it as “chum in the water that attracts prospective customers, that then allows reps to go in for the sale.”

3. Cutting Through The Noise: Create Meaningful Content

Cutting through the noise is providing your prospects with impactful content. There is an abundance of content available that may not resonate, empower, or educate them, be the brand that does. 

Paul provides us with questions and solutions to be successful in content creation:

“If you’ll take the time to really understand who your customer is and what are the problems that they’re trying to solve, and not only as a business, but what are they trying to solve as a human? And really began to talk about what we call kind of an aspirational identity. What is their business going to look like when they solve their problem with your solution? What are they going to look like? How are they going to be the hero of their organization? And you can create content around those things. Instead of speeds and feeds, instead of features and benefits, really talk about the customer where you can kind of begin having, engaging in the conversation that’s already going on in their head.”

4. Social Ads for Optimal Success

Paul advises, “Promoting your content [on social media] is just as important as creating it. Promoting content to your audience is a way to stand out. It provides their problem with solutions and allows them to make educated buying decisions.

5. Reps on Socials 

Social media is a powerful tool for digital selling and marketing. LinkedIn in particular is notorious for networking, job hunting and connecting with previous colleagues and classmates, but is also beneficial for B2B selling. 

Pauls says, “Sales reps on social media should present themselves as experts that solve problems, not candidates looking for the next big opportunity. Their profile should display expertise in their field.”

In addition, Paul suggests a ”3×5 LinkedIn Marketing Plan” for sales reps:

• Reach Out to Five New Contacts: Send connection requests to five new contacts. 
• Comment on Five Posts: Engage with content on your newsfeed, especially from prospects.
• Send Five Direct Messages a Day: Use five direct messages to provide connections with useful information.

“If you’re doing this in tandem or coordination with the marketing department,” Paul remarks, “again sales and marketing alignment, then you should have lots of great resources that you can DM (Direct Market) or the sales reps can DM to their audience.”

Download Your Free “Developing a Digital Marketing Plan” Template

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Related Resources:

B2B Marketing Tips You Have Not Thought Of – Part 1 – Blog

B2B Marketing Tips You Have Not Thought Of – Podcast

Commerce Cloud – Unifying the Buying Experience Across all Channels

What is B2B2C?

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