Creating Your B2B Marketing Strategies in 2024 – A Step-by-Step Guide

B2B marketing strategies are drastically evolving. Innovative solutions are yielding quicker and more effective results. Whether you’re struggling with an upcoming campaign or want to optimize your current one, it’s important to develop robust strategies. One that is in line with the latest trends to ensure you don’t fall behind and lose out on a valuable segment of customers. 

With many tools available in the market, distinguishing the best options for your B2B strategy can often be difficult. But worry no more! Follow this step-by-step guide to creating exceptional B2B marketing strategies. 

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Step 1: Understand Your Sales and Marketing Funnel

It’s no secret that B2B sales funnels are generally much lengthier than B2C funnels. Even so, your company’s funnel will look different from any other B2B company’s. Make sure you understand how you acquire customers and signals that they’re moving along the funnel. Use these signals as a basis for your key performance indicators (KPIs). Use social media to attract ideal clients 

Some examples of these signals, or KPIs for your sales funnel as part of your B2B marketing strategies, could be:

• A specific site page visit
• The user filled out a contact form
• There was engagement with your social media channels
• The user subscribed to your newsletter
• They registered for your event
• … and so on

Step 2: Assign Owners to Your KPIs

Give your marketing team a purpose. Assign a KPI for each member of your team to own. Giving your team members a measurable result to achieve is extremely motivating. The KPI owner will be more likely to flag and address challenges and work toward significant milestones.

Make sure to include both long-term and short-term targets for your B2B marketing strategies. Long-term targets help your team see the big picture and evaluate trends. Short-term targets make processes easier to understand and evaluate. They also break big projects up so that planning and taskwork feel more manageable. 

Step 3: Create Buyer Personas

Using the information you have about your customers via website, socials, and event analytics, create buyer personas. Go through your CRM tool and find out which buyer roles are contacting you first. 

Use analytics tools to find out how they came across you. Go through your sales calls and understand what questions they’re consistently asking. 

All the data collected during hybrid and virtual events is one of the most helpful sources for creating buyer personas. The brand personas elevate your B2B marketing strategies by providing clear information about your potential customers. 

Analyze the attendee’s journey and understand the performance and popular aspects of the event. Then ask your past customers about the best and worst parts of their event experience.

All of these items will help you build out buyer personas to effectively plan your B2B marketing strategies. List out everything they do before they become a lead, as they’re going through the sales process, and just before they purchase. This will help you develop a better understanding of your clientele, and find better ways to lead them through your funnel. Many companies even name their personas to help humanize them even further!

Pro-tip: Many B2B companies create multiple buyer personas based on their customer segments. Don’t be afraid to target multiple personas yourself!

Step 4: Build A Brand Persona for Your B2B Marketing Strategies

You should have a good idea about who is approaching you for services and what actions they take through the funnel by now. You might even have a name for them! Now comes the fun part.

Your marketing materials for your B2B marketing strategies need one clear voice, look and feel. Consider how your brand’s ‘persona’ could affect your market reputation and perception. A well-branded business, paired with the value that you provide to your audience, powers customer advocacy. This helps increase your customer base, with lesser marketing efforts in the long run. How do we do this?

Well, it’s simple. First, you find commonalities amongst your customer personas. For example, what are some common pain points they all want to resolve through your products and services? How do they want to be spoken to? From an authoritative expert who can solve all their problems? From an approachable source who collaborates with them to solve problems? Whatever tone works best for your audience, lean into it hard. 

What colors and images are they most engaged with? Use the graphics that get the best reactions as your brand colors. Take note of the words and phrases they use. Then, use those words in your marketing materials.

Events as part of your B2B marketing strategies are a great way to promote this brand image. Be creative and use the exhibition booths, banners, event landing pages, and the white labels in the mobile event app for splash ads. 

Make sure that your event venue is themed as per your brand and sparks the interest of your targeted audience. Such events can help you create a clear and concise brand persona for targeted B2B marketing strategies.   

Step 5: Arrange Events to Reach New Markets 

Virtual, hybrid, and in-person events offer a wide range of options for businesses to reach out and engage with their audience. You can arrange conferences, thought leadership programs, meetups and think tanks and invite interest communities to stay connected and share invaluable knowledge of the industry. 

Marketers can attract a global audience with virtual and hybrid events. Using in-person events as one of your B2B marketing strategies also provides brand awareness, relationship-building, and lead-generation opportunities. 

Event management platforms can arrange such events for you to help you reach out to new markets and attract potential investors in an organized manner. These events allow you to present yourself as a thought leader, and discuss the concerns and challenges of your potential clients. You can present solutions to those challenges by directly or indirectly promoting your products or services. 

In B2B marketing events like these, you get to collect all the data of your attendees and use it to your advantage by creating targeted marketing strategies. Such data also helps you understand your audience and buyers’ personas. 

The best part about integrating events into your B2B marketing strategies is that you can get live feedback from your potential clients to reassess your strategies, offers, and services. You can discuss how the attendees find your product to bring value to their businesses. Your past customers can share their experiences with everyone and help towards enhancing your brand image. 

Here’s how hosting an event can be a crucial part of your B2B marketing strategies to help you generate value for your business: 

• You can invite people from all around the globe to attend virtual, in-person, or hybrid events. 
• You can use your event marketing materials such as landing pages, exhibition booths, and also the mobile event app for brand awareness. Creative branding techniques such as welcome videos and customized virtual event locations can help you here. 

• It’s your chance to shine and present your product as a solution to the current challenges faced by the attendees. 
• B2B events help you rely on pull marketing instead of push marketing and attract customers without compelling them to interact. 
• You can gather real-time feedback from past buyers and potential customers about your product in virtual and in-person events. 
• You can review the event data via the reporting dashboards and attendee stats that can help you analyze your potential audience. 

You can consult our virtual event marketing plan to generate the best results from your next event as a part of your B2B marketing strategies. 

How Can Virtual Events Elevate B2B Marketing? 

Here’s how virtual events can help you achieve your goals in a competitive business environment:

1. Cost-Effective: Virtual events allow you to adjust to a reduced budget, as added event venue costs, travel fares, and visa costs will be eliminated. On the other hand, decor, equipment, and overhead costs will be the last of your concerns when hosting a virtual event. 
2. Set your offerings apart: For B2B Marketers, virtual events particularly help with the ‘evaluation stage’ in the Sales Funnel. Once your prospects have identified their need for your product and are scouting for the best option, a B2B marketing event, whether in the form of a virtual product launch or a trade show, can help set your offerings apart.
3. Showcase your product: Marketers can showcase the best product features through rich interactive tools like webinars, discussion forums, product demos, chats, and videos.
4. Better engagement: Once a prospect visits your virtual booth, you can engage with them to identify their unique requirements and tailor your product demo to deliver the most relevant experience to them, there and then.
5. Measurable success: Insightful statistics such as total registrations, unique logins, the total number of booth visits, downloaded documents, videos viewed, webinar attendance, chat volume, and many more are easily accessed.  
6. Personalization: What comes particularly in handy with a digital event is the room it allows for real-time customization and conversation. This personalized interaction develops a superior lead-nurturing environment that leaves a lasting impression on the attendees.
7. The global audience within reach: Scalability and reach are two other noteworthy benefits that help B2B marketers cater to a global audience and deliver as inclusive or exclusive an event as they require.
8. Trackability: Since an online event records every registration, login, click, download, and share, event tracking has become easier than ever.
9. Data-driven Approach: B2B event marketing has started to revolve around tracking metrics, measuring ROI, and developing data-driven follow-up strategies that improve the performance of upcoming events by enabling decisions backed by hard numbers.

Step 6: Trust the Growing AI Technology

Chat GPT is proof that artificial intelligence is here to stay. It was announced that GPT-4 will be launched in mid-March 2023 which is said to be 500 times more powerful than GPT-3. The only good idea now is to incorporate this futuristic technology into your B2B marketing and boost your brand reputation. 

You can make the best use of good old email marketing with the help of AI. Compelling emails play a huge role in maximizing your click-through rates. You need a good communication plan for your B2B marketing strategies with your audience and a functional email template to generate the best results. 

vFairs’ AI-powered marketing assistant can help you write emails to promote your upcoming event. You can also create detailed content for your landing pages, social media posts, press releases, and speaker bios in minutes. 

Step 7: Meet Your Customers Where They’re At

A key component of your B2B marketing strategies will be to find out where you should spend your efforts. For this, you can refer back to your buyer personas. You know where your customers are coming from. Analyze the data collected from your marketing events as well. Invest your time in the channels that get your customers, then scrap the ones that aren’t.

This is easier said than done for many marketers. Shiny, new communications channels crop up every week, it seems, and everyone buys into the hype. While testing new channels out is always important, never ignore something that gets you proven results.

Do your customers attend a specific event each year that you could exhibit at? Great! Lean into that with the right B2B marketing strategies. Make sure you optimize your content for Bing. Do your leads compare you to other similar companies before they seal the deal? Make sure you optimize your product pages on platforms like G2 and Capterra to give you a leg up. Use reviews and feedback as social proof on your marketing collateral.

It is crucial to develop a deep understanding of what your target customers do before and after they become a lead. This understanding will help you meet them where they are at any point in the funnel. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be answering questions your prospects didn’t even know they had!

Step 8: Create Communities

B2B companies rarely ever target one single persona. They usually tailor their core product to a variety of roles or industries. One thing remains constant, though: your product. There’s a lot of power behind that commonality. Enough that you could create communities around your specific area of expertise.

Look into social platforms that support communities, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and evaluate whether your target audience could make use of such an endeavor. You could also start a forum on your website where users submit questions or feedback and can interact with each other. 

Communities are a useful aspect of B2B marketing strategies. Not only do they help you stay connected to your customers, but they also position you as a thought leader in your field. Communities connect customers to customers, thus perpetuating referrals and word-of-mouth marketing. A well-managed community is a win-win for a company!

Step 9: Repurpose Your Content

Don’t waste time developing brand new content for every format when you can just repurpose the same content multiple ways. Repurposed content allows you to share the same information in the way various audience members would consume it. 

Remember: even though you have a buyer ‘persona’ planned out, everyone retains information differently. While one prospect might read a blog, another might prefer to see an infographic on the same subject matter. This is how you integrate all platforms into your B2B marketing strategies and target a wider audience. 

The easiest way to start creating repurposed content is to create one long-form piece that can be repurposed into smaller items. For example, perhaps you create an eBook as the core piece of content, and from there, you create smaller blog articles, social posts, newsletters, and videos. Add videos to your B2B strategy and reuse them. All the content, videos, pictures, and presentations created for your events can also be repurposed for your social media platforms. Easy, right? 

Final Thoughts

B2B marketing strategies are rooted in customer-centric principles. It’s crucial to know your customers, build buyer personas and solve critical problems through your marketing. Of course, your product or service also needs to add value to the lives of those you are pitching it to. While it’s important to evolve with the marketing landscape, make sure you’re still zoned in on the things that yield results.

Know what your customers want and use techniques that will highlight your products in the best way. Make the best use of growing technology and exploit AI tools to have a targeted marketing approach in less time. Leverage the power of hybrid and in-person events to elevate your strategies and capture better B2B marketing opportunities.