The B2B Marketing space is NOT the B2C Marketing space. Now, after we got this said – let me expand a bit on the subject. In my work as a marketing & business development manager, I always tried cutting edge ideas, pushing the borders between traditional to digital.
Some of the tips I’m going to give you are relevant for both “B2B digital marketing” and B2B as a whole.
*The B2B marketing and sales funnel has its own structure (a full article will be provided soon).
1. Cross-platform always
If you ever tried to target hight value B2B prospects from scratch you’ll know the cost is high in comparison to b2c (not always but most of the time). It is especially present when using one PPC ad platform (like Linkedin). You must maximize your ad spend by remarketing cross-platform to a lower-cost platform (youtube, google, facebook and others) in order to relay the value proposition of your company and get conversions.
2. It is a long sales funnel
Get ready to wait! Like most B2B services sales funnels are long, especially when communicating with enterprise companies and even more when marketing a new service or product. Even still you must continue pushing your value in the available communication channels with the prospect. Make sure to nurture the prospect for the duration of the marketing campaign and even more after the initial conversion.
3. Think long term (1 year ahead)
We must create a long-term marketing strategy, it is not 5 years planning but a full year must be strategically planned because results may not appear fast, they may take several months, or even more than a year.
4. High-cost high reward
There are growth hacks that I have been using when working with small startups but the optimal scenario is a good budget dedicated to your digital marketing. Because of the way we are advertising in the digital marketing space we need to generate conversions or triggers, based on the data we generate from these actions we optimize the cost per lead and based on tip number 2 (it is a long sales funnel) we will have to advertise for a good amount of time. It is not all bad, after the first sale you could analyze the client’s journey and optimize the budget accordingly. In the B2B space we usually provide high cost long term services, so you must think of every deal as its lifetime value or Customer lifetime value (CLTV).
CLTV =Customer X Average Customer Lifespan > Cost Per Deal.
5. The team (the relevant departments in your company)
You can generate super relevant leads but from there it will be up to the sales department to convert them from prospects to clients. You must have 2 or more sales representatives – if 1 is not good the other will pick up the slack, generating the leads if very costly and if you have only one sells rep that is not closing, all the hard work is for nothing.
Use these tips and drive your business forward. If you need more info regarding B2B digital marketing you can contact me for a consulting session or if you have a B2B startup you can find more information right here on my page “B2B Marketing for Startups”.
