B2B Marketing Guide

Information for professionals

Buyers conduct their own information searches, assessing suppliers and collaborators long before making any initial contact. This means that there is work to be done to ensure that potential clients not only hear about you, but also do so sufficiently in advance in order to influence the process. In other words, making sure your information is uppermost in their minds.

It is clear that industrial product and service buyers’ behaviour is radically different from that of retail consumers, and therefore also requires a different marketing approach. Indeed, industrial buyers display a series of clearly differential features.

Get to know your buyer persona

It is essential to distinguish between accounts and buyers. In this sense, it is important to realise that your customer is never Company X, but rather the person within that organisation who decides to acquire your products or services. Let’s take a moment to elaborate on this. Your industrial company may do a lot of work with a plant that forms part of a large corporation, but which is unsuccessful at closing deals with other business units, despite the tremendous satisfaction potential for both buyers and sellers. Another possibility is that your company is a major supplier for the maintenance department of Company Y, but the production department fails to take you into consideration. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Your buyers are people: real, living human beings with their own concerns and problems to solve. These real people should lie at the heart of your industrial marketing strategy.

Not everyone involved in the buying process speaks the same language or has the same interests. Your company will often be faced with a succession of people who question your sales ideals. This includes engineers, buyers, plant managers, managers and even HoDs. Without forgetting the company’s senior executives or owners.

Each of these professionals have their own voice, face their own challenges and work to meet their own specific goals. They all require your attention, but are all different. Indeed, there is a voice and a message for each one. It’s not a question of “one size fits all”.

Set your business goals

A plan is an essential requirement in marketing for industrial companies. One of the most frequent errors is to focus on the tools before actually knowing what they do. Before revamping a website, creating social media accounts and sending out emails, it is essential to design a strategy that aligns all aspects with your specific goals. Your company needs a marketing plan even if it doesn’t sell to retailers, and regardless of whether it is an SME or a large corporation.

Nobody knows your company’s reputation, positioning and sales targets better than you. No consultancy firm or marketing agency is more familiar with your sector, your customers and your products’ sales cycles than you. Anyone who claims they do simply isn’t telling the truth.

Make the most of digital marketing

The long and complex process involved in B2B industrial sales must be underpinned by effective marketing. Having established that advertising is not the way to reach professional buyers, it’s time to start talking content marketing as part of an inbound strategy. Content marketing is a strategic approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and coherent content capable of attracting and retaining a clearly defined target market, and eventually launching a profitable customer action.

The idea is to show your potential customers how to move forward with their buying processes, providing answers to their frequent questions, helping them to solve problems and indicating possible solutions. Content marketing is intended to back up the traditional sales process, not replace it. Effective content that contributes value will capture more and better qualified prospects, attract their attention and gain their confidence, as well as generating real sales conversations that otherwise would never have taken place.

Inbound marketing is the best possible marketing approach for industrial companies selling complex solutions to many people over an extended period of time.

Use social media

B2B companies tend to be reluctant to join and be active on social media, no doubt due to their misunderstanding of how social media can and should be used in business. If tools such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn are disregarded as mere distractions, then in all likelihood these companies are missing out on many excellent opportunities.

Social media must be considered as an extension of face-to-face meetings, alternatives to commercial publications and the classic notion of PR. The reason for using social media tools is not different from any other marketing tactic – namely to achieve your commercial goals.

Social media are an opportunity to extend sellers’ regular relations (keeping in touch, attending trade fairs, taking part in congresses, making presentations, etc.) to the digital environment. They are also a platform for dialogue with individuals and organisations that would otherwise be inaccessible. What’s more, they enable us to listen to the market, analyse trends and find out what the competition is doing.

“But my customers don’t use social media”. Really? Practically everyone has a social media profile. Facebook has millions of users actively seeking information of all kinds (business, as well as leisure and recreation), and LinkedIn is great for B2B contacts. Even if your customer is not present on social media, don’t underestimate their potential for capturing the attention of journalists, sector organisations, specialised journals, as well as industry bloggers and influencers. They all have large numbers of followers and are extremely focused on the things that interest you. If your content is relevant and they spread your message for you, your audience will soon hear about you.