It’s no secret that B2B marketing is a rapidly evolving market — and effective B2B marketing strategies and experts are in high demand.
But how do you stand out from the crowd in the B2B space?
For marketers who are marketing to other marketers, this shouldn’t be so tough to do — your audience, after all, is like you. But, because it’s business to business, there can be a tendency to focus more on being professional than personal.
In this blog post, we’ll go through a couple of ideas and examples for developing successful B2B marketing strategies to connect with other marketers in a relatable way.
Do your customer research
Before you can start mapping out your strategy and marketing plan, you need to understand your target audience’s challenges.
To really answer your customers’ needs, you have to know more about them and go beyond buyer personas. You need to figure out their needs and pain points, where they look for information, and what kind of content they consume.
You can easily hop on a short call with your customers to find out what problems your tool is solving for them in their day-to-day activities and why they chose you specifically.
When you understand how your audience views these everyday challenges and how you can be the one to make their lives easier, you can use that understanding directly in your marketing.
When you write copy or create videos for your target audience, you can use the language your customers used when talking about the challenges they face. Use direct quotes and their language to speak to your potential customers in their own words.
Understanding your customers and their pain points will help you in numerous other ways as well. It can help you improve specific things your customers don’t seem to be happy with — in your customer service or product, for instance.
Read more: B2B video marketing strategy: How to reach your target audience
Set relevant goals for your content
Before you start figuring out how to create the best kind of content for your target audience, you should think about the purpose of that content.
In your marketing strategy, you should always understand what you’re trying to achieve with a specific piece of content and make sure everyone on your marketing team is on the same page about the intent.
In your video marketing, think about things like: Is it a detailed and technical product demo designed to help in the final steps of the decision-making process? Or is it a video that you’re creating to build brand awareness and credibility?
When you know the exact purpose of whatever you’re creating, it also helps you determine the correct content format and channels for it.
Be sure to identify the correct KPIs and focus on metrics that bring you the actual results you’re looking for.
For example, for a brand awareness video campaign, your KPIs might be something like impressions and clicks. If you’re looking to generate leads, you should focus more closely on things like conversion rate or new trial users and how many of those free trial users converted to a paid plan after their trial.
Build a relatable brand voice and visual identity
One way of standing out in this crowded field is to create a brand voice and look that are relatable and human, as opposed to the traditional formal approach that most B2B marketing campaigns follow.
Video offers ample opportunity to clearly and impactfully convey your brand voice, as video is a quick and easy way to say a lot about your company, product, or service.
Make sure your brand and tone of voice are up to date with how you want to portray and position your brand and remember to keep all your messaging consistent and true to your brand identity.
Think one-to-one. While your video will reach a large audience, each member of that audience should feel that you’re talking specifically to them.
Even with B2B companies, speak the language of everyday people. Move beyond business jargon and marketing lingo to connect with your audience just like you talk to the other people in your life. Lofty business-speak doesn’t make you relatable — plain language does.
Use color, sound, and movement to convey energy. Video lets you connect with your audience across a variety of senses.
Find out more: How to create your video branding guidelines
Examples of B2B marketing strategies that get it right
Ensuring a focus on B2B marketing strategies designed to be personal, not stodgy, can help you connect with your audience and compel them to action. Here are three different examples of how B2B marketers connecting with other marketers did just that.
HubSpot: Marketing to millennials
HubSpot, for instance, created a video for Facebook congratulating Millennials and Gen Z on the positive impact they’ve had on traditional workplaces.
Through images of these younger generations at work, their video is engaging and compelling, clearly showing the wide range of settings and types of interactions that engage these employees — who also happen to reflect their audience. Notice that HubSpot always includes a person’s face or hands in the video, making their brand feel more approachable.
LinkedIn: Making dry topics trendy
This SimilarWeb video for LinkedIn covers digital trends impacting e-commerce, finance, and travel — a topic that could have the potential to be dry, but not the way they spin it.
In this video, they show happy, smiling action shots of people interacting with people and technology. Upbeat music and short CG statements help lead viewers through the video.
MarketScale: Speaking to a specific audience
MarketScale, a marketing firm and publisher, helped their client, Stainless, reach out to prospects and customers to let them know that Stainless would be at the NABShow 2019 in Las Vegas.
For their manufacturing audience, the Vimeo spot they created certainly resonates by showing footage of a heavy-lift helicopter removing an antenna from a broadcast tower.
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