What Is B2B Public Relations? Technologies and Strategies

What Is B2B Public Relations? Technologies, Strategies

Adopting a well-crafted B2B public relations strategy can be challenging for many entrepreneurs. Many B2B business owners don’t understand how they must do PR, and this is why they neglect it.

Neglecting public relations is really a bad idea, especially for B2B businesses, because PR plays a crucial role in building credibility, trust and good reputation, and these two elements are critical factors for succeeding in the B2B sector.

However, in this guide you will learn how to start doing B2B public relations and I will give some PR strategies that work for all B2B companies with all sizes. Let’s get started.

This full guide will cover the following points:

What is B2B public relations?
Difference between B2B and B2C PR
Why B2B public relations is important?
How does B2B PR Work?
6 B2B PR strategies
Public relations technologies

What Is B2B Public Relations?

B2B public relations (B2B PR) is a set of techniques and strategies for controlling and managing how your B2B brand is perceived by the other entities including individuals, organizations and governments. The primary purpose of PR is building a strong reputation and credibility for the organization.

Difference Between B2B and B2C Public Relations

The difference between B2B public relations and B2C public relations lies mainly in the target audience.

B2B companies target and sell to other businesses, while B2C businesses sell to the final consumers, and so, their target audience differs significantly.

For instance B2B businesses target only key decision-makers and end users in a specific industry, while most of B2C businesses target a broad audience. Thereby, their public relations strategies differ significantly in terms of messaging and earned media type.

When B2B businesses create content, they focus on high-quality, problem-solving content and they must necessarily create a well structured buyer-journey, while B2C businesses don’t have to do all this, they often rely on paid ads and engaging, entertaining content.

And because of the difference between their ways of messaging, their PR approaches differ too, for example, B2B businesses generate earned media from thought leaders in the industry and other bloggers who operate in similar niches.

On the other hand, B2C businesses often generate earned media from different influencers who don’t necessarily have a well-defined audience. And so, the main factor that make B2B and B2C PR different is the nature of their target audience, which is different.

Why B2B Public Relations Is Important?

Public relations is so important for B2B companies because as I said previously, credibility and reputation are crucial for your success in the B2B sector.

And in order to convince you of the of the importance of public relations for your B2B business, I must highlight the benefits it can drive to your business. Consider the following benefits of B2B public relations:

Credibility and Reputation Enhancement: Public relation helps you in enhancing the credibility and reputation of your business by getting media coverage, accepting interviews, gaining free mentions and more.
Crisis Management: Public relations helps significantly in managing detrimental crisis when they arise.
Boosting Visibility: Public relations can help you double the monthly traffic that your owned media receives by leveraging the free earned media you acquired through your PR strategies.
Lead Generation: In the B2B sector, public relations are a powerful tool for generating leads, because PR improves your reputation, and decision-makers often opt for considering solutions of the most reputable and credible businesses.
Cost-Effectiveness: Unlike paid media, Public relations helps you in increasing your visibility and generating more leads with a cost that cannot be compared to the massive paid ads costs.

Consider the following statistics too:

The public relations industry was valued at $50Billion dollars, with 6,3% yearly growth (source: 99firms).
675 public relations professionals believe that PR brand mentions directly impact their brand authority and reputation (source: 99firms).

I think that the benefits I mentioned about public relations and the provided statistics must be enough to convince you of the advantages of adopting a B2B PR strategy.

How Does B2B Public Relations Work?

Public relations has many aspects and functions, it helps in enhancing the business reputation and building relationships by going through a strategic process.

Here is how B2B public relations works:

1. Research and Planning

The first task every PR professional do before implementing a PR strategy is conducting a research.

They start first by analysing the organization, understanding their target audience, researching the industry they operate in, and conducting a competitor analysis. Here is a breakdown of each element:

Organization analysis: PR professionals start by analysing the company, they understand the values of the company, its history, the problem it solves, the role it plays in the other companies’ operations, and its current reputation and credibility.
Audience research: They identify the needs, challenges and objectives of the end-users and key decision-makers involved in the buying-decision.
Industry research: The PR teams research the industry where the target audience operate, they understand its trends, challenges and which problems the organization product solves.
Competitive analysis: They analyze and understand how major competitors position themselves, their messaging tactics, and their public relations strategies.

Once they conduct this research, they start planning their PR moves accordingly in order to identify great public relations opportunities.

2. Content Creation

One of the most powerful ways for communicating and building a relationship with your target audience is to create high-quality, problem-solving content.

You must create content that addresses the problems your potential end users face, or a content that gives insights the key decision-maker of your target department looks for, you must also create content that favorises your B2B brand image like press releases and announcements.

However, in B2B public relations, technical, problem-solving content isn’t enough to have a lot media coverage opportunities, your B2B brand must create ‘likable‘ content that removes boredom and coldness from your brand image like inspirational and entrepreneurial content.

3. Owned Media Management

Owned media is the media that the company owns like its website and social media accounts,.

Managing owned media is crucial for your B2B public relations success because it is the gateway for unlocking exclusive media coverage and brand mentions opportunities.

For B2B businesses, managing owned media includes:

Optimizing Your Website’s Content for SEO: Your website must necessarily be optimized for SEO for enhanced visibility.
Social media management: With the rise of social media, PR professionals use platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter for sharing the organization’s news, the industry trends and insights.
Email marketing optimization: Email marketing provides a direct channel for distributing your pieces of content to your prospects, journalists, and other bloggers.
Digital customer service: The owned media must be used for addressing the customers concerns by engaging with them and responding to their problems in the comments, including chatbots in the company’s website…

Overall, owned media management is an indispensable practice in the B2B PR that must necessarily be done effectively.

4. Earned Media Generation

Earned media is the media, mentions, coverage and the attention that the company earn without paying for it.

It includes mentions on other articles (blog posts), social mentions on social media, reviews, mentions on online videos, mentions on interviews, on newspapers, on magazines…

In terms of B2B public relations, earned media generation is almost the most important component along with owned media management.

However we will delve deeper into this point in the B2B public relations strategies section.

5. Measurement and Analysis

Assessing your PR strategy performance and refining future tactics cannot be done without using key performance indicators (KPIs).

Here are some KPIs you must consider when measuring and analyzing the performance of your PR campaigns:

Earned media: How much positive media coverage and mentions did you get?
Audience reach: How much traffic did you get? How much prospects have interacted with your marketing messages? How much leads did you generate after the PR campaign?
Brand perception: How your brand is perceived by your prospects, employees, thought leaders and the government? What reputation your B2B brand holds?

Conducting a research to analyze these elements is worth your time and resources.

However, I think you understand the mechanism and key elements of B2B public relations, and in order to perform well in each process mentioned previously, you need to integrate some PR technologies and strategies.

6 B2B Public Relations strategies

In order to succeed in B2B PR, you don’t need a huge budget, but you need a strategy.

Unlike consumer-focused PR, B2B PR strategies focus on communicating and connecting with target businesses, key decision-makers and the other big actors in the industry.

Here are 6 B2B public relations strategies:

Strategy 1: Adopting a B2B Content Marketing Strategy

Adopting a content marketing strategy is a foundational element in your overall B2B public relation strategy.

This is because in the B2B sector, high-quality, problem-solving content is the primary tool that companies use in order to drive awareness and build reputation and credibility.

Here is how content marketing can enhance your overall B2B PR strategy:

Building awareness: The primary aim of a B2B content marketing strategy is to make prospects aware of your existence in the market.
Lead generation: If your content is high-quality and well promoted, you will start generating leads automatically, these leads could be key decision-makers or end users.
Thought leadership: Creating and distributing content helps you in becoming a thought leader in your industry, which fosters your reputation and credibility in the market.
Earned media generation: Great content can help you gain some social reposts, brand mentions, backlinks, media coverage, guest posting offers and many other earned media opportunities, which is the primary PR objective.

These are just few benefits of content marketing and how it contributes to the enhancement of your overall B2B public relations strategy performance.

Strategy 2: Media Relations

In the B2B sector, building thought leadership, credibility and reputation is a critical component that dictates your business success, and crafting a ‘media relations‘ strategy is one of the best practices for achieving that.

This strategy involves building robust relationships with big actors in your industry such as your prospects, business customers, thought leaders, and actors in other areas like journalists, interviewers, podcast hosts and producers…

These relationships enhance your public relations efforts in many ways including:

More audience reach: If you have well-founded relationships with other bloggers and influencers in your industry, you can reach a broader and more targeted audiences.
Earned media opportunities: These relationships help in generating more media coverage and brand mentions by engaging in podcasts, interviews, mentions in other thought leaders’ articles…
Advocacy and word of mouth: If a business customer is having a great relationship with your business, they are more likely to refer to you to other business owners who are looking for a type of solutions you offer.
Reputation management: Building such relationships help you in defending your brand reputation in case of a crises that threaten the company credibility and trust.

Strategy 3: Personal Branding

For me, every B2B business must consider adopting a personal branding strategy because it makes all the public relations processes easier and smoother.

In addition, it is one of the best ways for building trust, credibility and popularity for your business. It helps you in representing your business and promoting it effectively.

And the reason why I always recommend B2B business owners to opt for personal branding is because it removes the boredom and coldness around their brands by sharing content that give general insights for entrepreneurs like inspirational, entrepreneurial, and financial content, and of course, promotional content.

As a result, you will be able target the big heads in your target accounts like business owners and CEOs. However, personal branding actually gives many other PR advantages.

It helps you in defending your company reputation directly, simplifying it for interviewers and podcast hosts to do business with you, and so, earned media generation becomes much easier, leveraging media coverage for mentioning and promoting your business, building a sense of likability and appeal towards you, thereby, towards your brand.

This is why I always recommend B2B entrepreneurs to start doing personal branding because it is so beneficial for their PR.

Tip: I have a full article about personal branding in my LinkedIn account, after reading it, you will learn in details what B2B business models should adopt a personal branding strategy and the best practices for doing it.

Strategy 4: Events Development

During a PR campaign, there’s much more tactics for use other than content creation, while it is fundamental, it’s certainly not everything.

For better results, you must necessarily opt for other tactics like organizing events that affect the effectiveness of your public relations campaign for the long-term.

In the realm of B2B public relations, events are an effective PR driver because it helps in enhancing your ‘media relations,’ increasing your brand visibility, and facilitating partnerships with other major actors within the professional landscape.

Here are examples of some events that you must necessarily consider their inclusion in your overall B2B PR strategy:

1. Industry Conferences and Trade Shows:

Industry conferences and trade shows are types of events that serve the purpose of showcasing products, networking with potential clients and partners, and staying updated on industry development and trends.

However, the ‘host‘ and organizer of such events—which must absolutely be your brand—will gain a lot of benefits including an improved reputation and increased visibility, awareness and recognition.

2. Thought leadership forums:

Hosting thought leadership forums like seminars, webinars, and panel discussions allows businesses to position themselves as thought leaders in the industry, share valuable insights, and establish credibility among peers and potential customers.

Hosting such events make your brand recognizable and likable, and enhance your B2B PR campaign performance.

3. Customer Appreciation Events:

Your B2B company can organize an event to express gratitude to their loyal customer, and prove their commitment to customer satisfaction.

This practice help in strengthening your relationship with your customers and improve your company’s brand image in the customers’ perceptions, which is one of your PR campaign goals.

4. Industry awards and recognition events

Industry awards and recognition events allows your potential business customers to celebrate achievements, share their success stories, and build relationships with peers.

Such events, like the others, enhance your reputation and improve your brand image.

Developing and organizing such events is so beneficial for your B2B public relations campaign, as they make your brand more recognizable and likable within your audience industry.

Strategy 5: Strategic Partnerships

Strategic partnership has a significant, positive impact on your B2B public relations campaigns.

Partnering with reputable businesses can help your B2B brand in extending its reach, enhancing its credibility and reputation, hosting more events by sharing resources, managing crises better, and unifying points of strength and remedying weaknesses.

For that to happen, there are some ‘best practices’ that you must opt for if you want to leverage your strategic partnership in PR:

Co-Marketing Initiatives: Launch joint marketing campaigns that combine the strengths and resources of both partners. This could include co-authored white papers, webinars, or co-hosted events that draw attention from both partners’ customer bases.
Joint Press Releases: Announce your partnership through a joint press release. Ensure it highlights the benefits of the partnership, not just to both companies but also to the industry or customers. This can generate media coverage and industry buzz.
Shared Expertise: Utilize the expertise of both partners in public discussions, panels, and speaking engagements. This not only showcases thought leadership but also highlights the partnership’s value and depth.
Social Media Collaborations: Use social media platforms for cross-promotion. Regularly sharing each other’s content, participating in joint live sessions, or creating shared content can boost visibility and engagement.

By adhering to these best practices, you will be able to leverage your partnership and a great public relations value from it.

Strategy 6: Mention Your Brand Mission And Values

Wherever and whenever possible, always mention your B2B business mission, values and what does it actually do.

Whether in your social media accounts, in your blog, in online forums, interviews, , industry conferences… Always mention them because they have a great emotional impact and a great public relations advantage. However, the remaining question is:

How can I use them to boost my B2B PR effectiveness? You can do this by clearly articulating what your brand stands for in your content and your earned media if possible.

These values should resonate with your target audience and reflect the commitment and ethics of your company. You must develop content that reflects your brand values and mission in both message and tone.

Whenever I start talking about emotions, people argue that emotions have no place in the B2B sector, and that’s completely wrong, because let’s be honest, most B2B businesses offer almost the same quality of service.

And so, what makes difference is those small details that most boring B2B companies neglect, performance is the most important factor of success, sure, but what to do if your competitors’ products are performant like yours?

Public Relations Technologies

In order to implement your B2B public relations strategy effectively, you need to integrate with it some technologies and tools.

These technologies help you in structuring your work, automatizing tasks, streamlining processes and more.

Here are some public relations technologies that you may consider for enhancing your B2B PR campaign:

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems:

Customer relationship management (CRM) tools are so useful for B2B public relation campaigns.

They help manage their interactions with major stakeholders like leads, customers, journalists, and partners. By leveraging the data in the CRM database, public relations professionals can personalize their communication and strengthen relationships over time.

In addition, CRM systems provide valuable data that can help PR professionals measure the impact of their campaigns, understand audience characteristics and refine their PR strategies.

Analytics can show what messages resonate best, the most effective channels, and how interactions influence public perception and brand reputation.

However, CRM technologies also help in streamlining the organization of events , they can help manage invitations, registrations, follow-ups and attendees, which are critical for maximizing your event impact.

2. Media Databases and Coverage Tools:

For B2B businesses that are looking for media coverage opportunities, there are several tools that help in achieving that.

Media databases help in finding occasions for being covered by journalists, gaining interviews opportunities, and doing collaborations with relevant influencers.

Tools like Cision, Meltwater, and PR Newswire offer a set of information and data about journalists and media outlets, which help businesses target the most relevant reporters and influencers by industry, location and more.

In addition to media databases, press release distribution services like Business Wire and GlobeNewswire allow businesses to distribute and share their press releases with wide array of journalists and media outlets, which broaden the press release exposure and your overall B2B public relations campaign.

3. Event Management Tools:

Managing events includes a lot of tasks like planning and organization, registration and ticketing and more.

Here are some tools that help you in managing each task:

Planning and organization tools: These tools help in assigning tasks, setting deadlines, and tracking progress to ensure that all aspects of the event are managed in time. Examples: Asana and Trello.
Registration and ticketing: These tools enable attendees to register or buy tickets online. they often include customizable forms, payment processing, and automated confirmation emails. Examples: Eventbrite and Cvent.
Marketing and Promotion: Tools like Mailchimp can be used to send out invites and event updates. In addition, social media platforms are also useful for promoting the event within the community.

For virtual events that B2B businesses host like webinars, tools like Zoom and Webex enable virtual event capabilities, including live streaming, webinars, and virtual networking environments.

4. Social Media Tools:

When it comes to social media, there are many tools that can help you realize whether your B2B public relations campaign has performed well or not.

You can use a tool like Hootsuite to track ‘social mentions’ on LinkedIn, Facebook and the other platforms before and after your PR campaign.

In addition, it helps in scheduling your content publishing rate, which helps in maintaining a consistent online presence

You can also use it for analytics and reporting, it helps users track the performance of their posts and campaigns, measure engagement, and analyze audience behavior to refine their social media strategies.

5. SEO Tools:

SEO tools are essential if you want to make your public relations efforts on your website visible to the public, in addition, they help you in generating a lot of earned media opportunities.

For instance, if you want to acquire some backlinks for some specific articles, you can use a tool like SEMrush to get insights about relevant websites that may accept to link to you if your content is complementary to theirs.

In addition, they have features for analyzing keywords in terms of search volume, competition, and more insights.

6. Website Analytics Tools:

Website analytics tools are essential for your B2B PR campaign because they help in knowing how much visitors have visited your website, from where they came, which web pages are visited the most and more.

Google analytics is the most common tool used by webmasters and it is free and it is quite sufficient to track your website performance in terms of visibility and traffic.

However, when using a website analytics tool, always track the performance of your PR campaign by analyzing and checking the traffic of your website before and after the campaign.

These are the most common public relations technologies and tools that every PR professional or marketer should do.

However, our guide ends here. I hope this article was helpful.

Be the first one who get alerted once we publish our 250p B2B content marketing book

I'm Soufiane Zagouri, a B2B marketer and the owner of HubRefs. Before founding this business, I dedicated years to educating myself in many marketing aspects like content marketing, SEO and direct marketing, and gaining experience in the B2B sector, with a special focus on content marketing. My insights and strategies are tailored to increase brand awareness and conversion rates.

Illustrative infographic of B2B customer retention strategies

7 Effective Strategies For B2B Customer Retention

B2B General Marketing

7 Effective Strategies For B2B Customer Retention

Retaining customers can be challenging for many businesses, especially in the B2B sector where buying decisions are not made by a single individual, but by a group of decision-makers. And this is why you need a B2B customer retention strategy!

If you don’t know ho to retain your customers, all the budget and efforts invested in your customer acquisition strategy will be wasted, a result you definitely would not afford, nor would I.

However, there is nothing to worry about, in this article, I’m going to reveal seven surefire, time-tested strategies for B2B customer retention, so, keep reading.

This full guide will cover the following points:

What is B2B customer retention?
Customer retention rate (CRR)
Which Customers to Retain?
The 7 proven strategies for retaining your B2B customers
B2B customer acquisition strategies real-life examples

What Is B2B Customer Retention?

Customer retention is the capacity of a company to keep its business customers loyal. It involves engaging existing customers to continue buying products or services from a business and is often a key performance indicator for companies.

Effective customer retention strategies focus on delivering outstanding customer service, maintaining high-quality product, developing customer loyalty programs, personalizing the customer experience, and consistently exceeding customer expectations.

The goal is to create such a high level of satisfaction and value for the customer, so that they remain loyal to the brand, rather than switching to a competitor.

Customer Retention Rate (CRR):

Customer retention rate (CRR) can be measured by following these steps:

Choose a time period for which you want to calculate the retention rate. This should be semiannually or annually since B2B businesses cycles are long.
Identify the number of customers you have at the beginning (B) and at the end (E) of your chosen period, as well as the customers you acquired during that period (D).
Use the following formula: CRR = [(E _ D)/B]×100.

This metric shows you the percentage of customers that kept being loyal to your business during that period, this is why the CRR key performance indicator is crucial when it comes to business performance analysis.

The higher your CRR is, the better your customer retention will be.

Which Customers to Retain?

The reality is that not all customers are worth retaining.

The key targets for a company’s customer retention efforts must be those who have the biggest potential of a great customer lifetime value (CLV).

In the B2B sector, companies often focus their customer retention efforts on new customers, who have recently adopted their products.

They do this for many reasons, one of them is that retention rates rise over time, so if customer churn can be minimized in the early stages of the relationship, there will be a pay-off in future revenue streams and profitability.

Another reason for focusing on recently acquired customers is the fact that when customers will have a bad experience with the company in a specific touchpoint, they may be more forgiving if they have a history of good service with it.

So, the message here is that you must focus on recently acquired customers. Once they become loyal, the efforts needed to keep them loyal will be less.

The 7 Proven Strategies For Retaining Your B2B Customers:

In order to retain your customers and keep them loyal, you need to use some of the strategies that I’m about to cover.

But before I get in-depth into each strategy, I will give you a brief list of the strategies that we are going to cover. Here are the strategies for B2B customer acquisition:

Focus on the user-experience
Personalize and tailor your communication
Leverage your thought leadership
Leverage your customer feedback
Include free customer support in your plans
Update your B2B products regularly
Start a customer loyalty program

Strategy 1: Focus On The User-Experience (UX)

Focusing on the improvement of the user-experience is the cornerstone of your B2B customer retention strategy success.

User-experience simply means the experience that your customer goes through before, while and after using your product.

In the B2B sector, businesses must ensure that the user-experience is well-optimized at every touchpoint, starting from the awareness stage, until the retention stage.

Here is how you can ensure that the user-experience is satisfying and well-organized at every stage of the customer journey:

UX in the Awareness Stage:

In the awareness stage, when your target audience are still in the earliest stage of their relationship with you, you must prove them you are a trustworthy, credible business.

And I mean by this creating a high-quality, educational content that generates leads.

If you have a high-quality content in your blog or social media, your potential customers will start relating the quality of your content to the quality of your services, and vice versa.

Even if they did adopt your product as a solution, if another competitor creates content that is far better than yours, they may consider switching to them later as they have provided them with a better user-experience.

Another practice that improves the user-experience and the customer retention, is engagement, if you engage with your customers, whether in your social media accounts or even in your blog comments, this practice will enhance their loyalty towards your B2B brand.

UX in the Consideration Stage:

There is no significant difference between the awareness stage and the consideration stage in terms of the user-experience, all you will need to do in this stage is to provide another type of high-quality content.

In this stage, as you know, you must send to your leads content that proves why they must buy your solutions, and not those of your competitors.

For example social proof is a supportive content that builds trust and credibility.

When creating such content, assure that it is high-quality, well-organized and simple to be understood by your leads.

If customers don’t understand your competitive advantage, even if they adopt your product initially, they could switch to a competitor later if that competitor better communicates their differentiation.

Therefore, creating high-quality content in these two stages is key to improve the user-experience and the customer retention.

UX in the Decision Stage:

The decision stage differs from the other stages in terms of enhancing the user-experience.

At this stage, you will have to negotiate and make some concessions, especially if you are an important supplier for the functioning of the businesses you target.

Here is how you can improve the user-experience at the decision stage:

Offer free trials: If you are a B2B company that sells a software, consider giving your leads a chance to try almost all the features of your software for free for a certain period of time—10 days for example might be enough.
Give discounts and special offers: Offering discounts can benefit businesses beyond just easing customer acquisition; it also improves user experience. For example, customers who pay a high price for a product and find it unsatisfactory may become intolerant. In contrast, those who purchase at a discount are more likely to seek help rather than immediately deem the product problematic.
Offer Guarantees and Easy Returns: Remove the risk associated with purchasing by offering guarantees, warranties, or an easy return policy. This can give customers the confidence needed to finalize their decision. This practice will improve the user-experience significantly.
Streamline the Purchase Process: Make the purchase process as simple and straightforward as possible. Remove any unnecessary steps and ensure that the checkout interface is intuitive.

All these practices are important for enhancing the user-experience at this stage, and so, they are important for improving the customer retention rate of your B2B business.

UX in the Retention Stage:

Retention stage is the stage where a lead has officially become a customer, and he is now a user of your own product.

At this stage, as we said before, you must often focus on the new acquired customers and make them loyal first, here is how you can do it:

Ensure that you have high-quality tutorials: If a business has adopted your software as a solution and later can’t find a tutorial for particular problems they wanted to solve, both the user-experience and your customer retention efforts will suffer. Therefore, ensure you provide tutorial for all complex issues that may arise for your customers.
Keep creating high-quality content: High-quality content is crucial in all stages of the content marketing funnel. If your customers consistently find great value in your content, this will reinforce their belief that they made the right choice, confirming that you are likely the best provider. We will delve deeply into this point later in this article.
Engage with customers consistently: Engaging with customers is another way to show your customers that you are a caring supplier who cares about their best interests, so keep engaging.

These practices are crucial to enhancing the user-experience and retaining your newly acquired customers.

However, once they become loyal, your focus on them might reduce. Nevertheless, there are other practices you must adopt to ensure they remain loyal for as long as possible.

Strategy 2: Personalize And Tailor Your Communication

In this competitive landscape, personalization is crucial for customer retention, especially in the B2B sector, decision-makers need to to be convinced that your product is primarily made to meet their needs.

This personalization can be included in the educational content you create, in your emails, in the phone calls your sales team do, it can be included in any type of communication your business have with the potential customers.

In general, you can personalize your communication in many ways including leveraging CRM.

Start by ensuring your CRM system collects relevant customer data from various touchpoints, such as purchases, customer service interactions, and social media activity.

Next, segment your customers based on job role, behavior and purchase history. Personalize all forms of communication using the information stored in your CRM.

For example, address customers by name and in emails, customize email content based on past interactions, and recommend services or solutions similar to their past purchases.

Automate personalized emails based on triggers like the company’s date of foundation, purchase anniversaries, or specific customer behaviors (e.g., abandoning a shopping cart).

Another way is to use your B2B buyer personas. When creating content, your buyer personas characteristics must always be present in your content, your content must always address their needs, problems and objectives, and reflect the job role your customer plays.

Strategy 3: Leverage Your Thought Leadership

In the B2B sector, being a thought leader is a huge advantage that will make your customers consider you as the best and most secure service provider even if you do the same thing like others.

Being an extreme thought leader in your industry makes you credible and trusted by your customers to the highest levels, and this is the key element to enhance your B2B customer retention efforts.

However, you need to learn how to leverage your thought leadership to your advantage.

Here are some strategic methods for doing this:

Favor and compliment your solutions over those of your competitors: If you are a credible and likable thought leader, customers are more open to listen to you; therefore, from time to time, emphasize and highlight the advantages of your solutions while simultaneously pointing out gaps and flaws in your competitors’ offerings. This will make them think one thousand times before switching to another provider.
Start creating premium content: Since your customers are a group of decision-makers, a big learners, then there are a lot of opportunities. Start selling premium content with exclusive promotions to current customers or those with a membership. This exclusivity makes your customers feel special, which enhances customer retention. In addition, your thought leadership credibility will be enhanced in the perspective of your customers.
Implement a Mentorship Program: Set up a program where you or other experts in your organization mentor customers. Sharing expertise in a mentorship capacity can forge strong, lasting relationships.
Offer Exclusive Insights: Provide early access to new research or industry forecasts for your customers. These insights can help them stay ahead in their field, making your brand an invaluable partner.

By leveraging your thought leadership using the best practices mentioned above, you will make for you a lot of lifetime customers and the likelihood of your B2B customer retention strategy success will improve massively!

Strategy 4: Ask Your Customers For Feedback And then Leverage It

As I said before, asking customers for feedback isn’t just about using them as a social proof, they can also be used for many other reasons related to your B2B customer retention strategy improvement.

Asking your customers for feedback can improve your B2B customer retention strategy by:

Creating high-quality content in the consideration and decision stage: As we said before, including customers’ feedback in the consideration and decision stage’s content improves the user-experience.
Showing your customers that you care about their best interest: When asking your customers for feedback, you demonstrate to them that you are a caring supplier and that you care about their business success and performance, which significantly enhances your customer loyalty.
Leveraging it for your product development: When gathering your customers’ feedback, always use it as insights for developing your products or services. Once your development is complete, promote this achievement to your current customers to show that you are a business that consistently evolving based on their feedback.

By adhering to these practices, you differentiate yourself from cold, boring B2B businesses that still adopt the belief that in the B2B sector, performance is the only factor that matters, ignoring the fact that most businesses are doing almost the same.

This point of differentiation can enhance significantly your B2B customer retention strategy.

Strategy 5: Include Free Customer Support In Your Plans

Including free customer support in your plans is an effective strategy for customer retention.

If you sell a software and include a free support service in a specific plan of your business (often enterprise plan), those who are using that plan and receive consistent free support from your team will likely become lifetime customers.

You can also include it with the intent of ‘personalization‘ by offering your customers free, personalized customer support, where interactions are tailored to individual needs and history, this will make customers feel valued and understood.

This personalized attention can significantly boost their loyalty and their perception of your brand.

Another benefit from offering free customer support is to ask your customers for the feedback of their experience with your personalized customer support, and then promote these feedback to your current customers to encourage upgrading, and more importantly, improving your brand image in their perception.

These are the methods that you must use to leverage your free customer support to enhance B2B customer retention.

Strategy 6: Update Your B2B Products Regularly

If you can manage to change or adjust on your B2B product regularly, you will enhance your B2B customer retention strategy massively.

When I say this, I don’t mean that you necessarily have to add new features (do this as possibly you can), but rather, you can just change the design of it.

For instance, if you are selling a software, you can change the platform design including colors, images, buttons and everything that can be changed for the better.

Don’t be like the cold, boring B2B companies which believe that product performance alone is sufficient for customer retention.

While it’s true that in the B2B sector, product performance is definitively the primary factor influencing customers’ decisions about whether to stay with you, it’s not the only one!

However, remember that you are still operating in the H2H (human-to-human) sector, and the users of your solution are humans. Every human gets bored with anything they use for years without any changes or modifications.

Strategy 7: Start a B2B Loyalty Program

A B2B (Business-to-Business) loyalty program is a strategic initiative designed to reward and retain business clients by offering benefits and incentives for their continued patronage.

It is one of the most B2B customer retention strategies that often work and drive results.

Here are some B2B loyalty program ideas and considerations:

Customization and Flexibility: B2B loyalty programs are often highly customized to cater to the unique needs of different types of businesses. They can include flexible reward structures that accommodate the varying purchasing behaviors and volumes of different industries.
Volume-Based Incentives: Many B2B loyalty programs offer rewards based on the volume of business. This could be through bulk purchase discounts, tiered rewards that increase with more purchases, or rebates that are applied retrospectively based on spending levels.
Long-Term Partnerships: The focus in B2B loyalty programs is often on fostering long-term business relationships. Programs may include partnership benefits such as enhanced customer service, priority support, or access to exclusive services and products.
Value-Added Services: B2B loyalty programs frequently offer value-added services that help the customer business succeed, such as training, consulting, or access to exclusive industry reports and data.
Multi-tiered Levels: To encourage continued engagement and increased spending, many programs feature several tiers of membership. Each level offers progressively greater rewards, providing an incentive for businesses to move up through the ranks by increasing their engagement or purchase volumes.

By focusing on creating mutual value and fostering deeper business relationships, B2B loyalty programs can significantly enhance customer retention and encourage ongoing business.

These were the 7 strategies for B2B customer retention, however, the best approach you can adopt is to integrate some strategies with other ones and find what works best for you.

B2B Customer Acquisition Strategies Real-Life Examples

Now, it’s time for me to give you real-life examples of how a B2B customer retention should look like.

A well-crafted B2B customer retention strategy is a mix of some of the strategies that I mentioned previously.

I will offer two examples, one is fictional for enhancing understanding, and the other is real.

However, here is the fictional example that illustrates how a B2B customer retention should be:

Example 1: Public Relations Agency

Introduction to 'PRA' And 'Gus'

Let’s take as an example the case of a public relations (PR) agency that offers PR services, let’s call this agency ‘PRA‘ and its owner is called ‘Gus‘.

Mister ‘Gus‘ is a passionate entrepreneur who wants to become a millionaire through his PR agency, but the problem that hindered the achievement of his goal is customers churn.

He noticed that most of his customers quit doing business with him after dealing with him the first time, and then they switch to another business.

However, when he went and started reading about this topic, he found an article about B2B customer retention strategies in HubRefs blog.

When he read it, he understood failure primary cause, which was the fact that he had no B2B customer retention strategy.

And so, he stopped relying on cold outreach and organic deals from Fiverr and he started creating a B2B content marketing and customer retention strategies.

The Exclusive B2B Customer Retention Strategy Created by 'Gus':

Once Gus has read some guides about B2B customer retention, he started implementing their insights and approaches thoroughly.

First, he picked the most practical customer retention strategies that he could include in his overall strategy.

Then, he started harmonizing and structuring them to work better together.

Finally, he got the following:

Once Gus has defined the core elements he will use in his overall B2B customer retention strategy, he started harmonizing and structuring them.

The implementation of his strategy went this way:

The user experience improvement: Gus has adhered to the best practices for improving the user-experience, he improved his blog posts’ quality, and he offered some discounts and incentives to ease the buying-process…
Leveraging thought-leadership: Gus has started leveraging his thought leadership by favoring his service over those of his competitors’, in addition, he launched a mentorship program with a nominal price to forge great, lasting relationships with his business customers.
Asking for feedback and leveraging it: Gus has started asking his customers about their experiences, and what points should he improve in his service. This way, he was able to show that he cares about his customers best interest, and more importantly, he developed his service based on customers feedback and then he promoted this event to enhance his customer retention efforts.

By combining these approaches strategically, he succeeded in creating a well-planned B2B customer retention strategy that retains and makes lifetime customers.

Example 2: Rackspace Customer Retention Strategy

Here is a real example of a B2B customer retention strategy by Rackspace.

Rackspace is a good example because of its focus on improving the onboarding experience for new customers, particularly after mergers and acquisitions.

Initially using Zoom for this process, they found it difficult to manage with larger groups and lacked the staff to manage queues effectively.

By transitioning to Microsoft Teams, Rackspace was able to streamline the distribution of information, making the process more efficient and scalable regardless of participant numbers.

They developed a single onboarding channel in Teams, which included custom how-to templates, automated credentialing, tagged groups, and a support bot named OneBot.

This bot automated repetitive tasks and facilitated direct support, significantly reducing the need for manual involvement and improving the efficiency of the onboarding process.

This approach not only enhanced the initial experience for new employees but also demonstrated Rackspace’s commitment to continuous improvement and customer satisfaction, key elements in retaining B2B customers.

These were the examples that illustrate how you should create and implement a B2B customer retention strategy.

Wrapping Up:

Developing a B2B customer retention strategy is crucial if you want to increase significantly the chances of keeping your customers loyal.

And in order to create a great and well-crafted strategy, you must necessarily include some of the strategies that I mentioned previously in this article.

Remember, only include the strategies that are practical and not difficult to be implemented by your business in the current situation.

For instance, if you can’t afford to develop a B2B loyalty program, don’t do it! Only include elements that you are sure they can be implemented without problems and with affordable costs.

However, our guide ends here. I hope this article was helpful.

If you liked the content, subscribe to the HubRefs newsletter and don’t forget to share it with people you know they might get advantage of it…

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7 Proven B2B Customer Acquisition Strategies With Examples

8 Effective Strategies For B2B Customer Acquisition With Examples

BOFU CM

8 Effective Strategies For B2B Customer Acquisition With Examples

Acquiring customers in the B2B sector is a very challenging task for many businesses, especially startups; their owners are unsure about their B2B customer acquisition strategy.

The reality is that acquiring customers in the B2B sector differs significantly from the B2C sector.

In the B2C sector, customers are often acquired directly through paid ads on social media, whereas in the B2B sector, paid ads constitute less than 30% of the marketing efforts used for customer acquisition.

In the B2B sector, your content marketing strategy is the key factor that determines whether your B2B customer acquisition strategy will succeed or not.

However, in this guide I’m going to reveal 8 proven strategies for acquiring B2B customers for your business, so that you can achieve your desired results.

This full guide will cover the following points:

The 8 proven B2B customer acquisition strategies
B2B customer acquisition strategy real-life examples

The 8 Proven B2B Customer Acquisition Strategies

As I mentioned before, content marketing is the cornerstone of every customer acquisition strategy you adopt.

This is why most of the 8 strategies I’m going to reveal encompass a lot of content marketing tactics.

And in order to succeed, you must not rely on only one strategy, but rather, you need to use many of them so that you can reach and acquire more customers through different channels.

However, before I delve deeper into each step, I will give you a list of the strategies that we are going to cover in this article.

Here are the 8 B2B customer acquisition strategies:

SEO
Social media marketing
Email marketing
Video marketing
Leveraging earned media
Paid media
Account-based marketing (ABM)
Sales outreach

Strategy 1: SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your site pages to improve their visibility and rankings in search results.

When I discuss SEO in terms of customer acquisition, I am not referring to the practice of optimizing your sales pages to rank higher in SERP at all.

But rather, I’m referring to the practice of optimizing your own blog posts for SEO.

Blogging Importance In the B2B Sector

Blogs are the most trustworthy type of content that drives a lot of traffic and leads for most businesses in the B2B sector.

If you are not blogging yet, you better start doing so, otherwise, you are willing to give up on more than 70% of potential customers for the sake of your competitors.

And if you think I am speaking out of nothing, then I want you to consider the following:

87% of B2B marketers give priority to addressing their leads’ needs for information rather than focusing on the promotional messages (source : CMI).
70% of users prefer to get information from blogs rather than any other source (source : Deman Metric).

These statistics suggest that prioritizing the educational needs in the B2B sector is critical for acquiring customers.

This is why blogging must be a critical element in your B2B customer acquisition strategy.

Blogging Best Practices

When it comes to blogging, here are the best practices that you should implement to acquire more B2B customers:

Only share high-quality content: Creating high-quality content is the core factor that dictates your blog’s success, poor quality content leads to prospects perceiving your products and your brand negatively.
Always mention your business solutions in your blog posts: The undeniable fact is that blogging is not about generating direct customers, it is about generating leads, which is a crucial part of customer acquisition. However, you can still acquire direct customers through your blog if you keep mentioning and promoting your solutions in your content in a strategical and reasonable manner.
Include your call-to-actions strategically: Always include a CTA in each blog post and ensure that it is placed in the right place and in the right context. For instance, if your CTA is for an email subscription, always mention the main benefits your leads will receive from it, and relate those benefits to the blog post context as much as possible.
Mention your mission statement in almost every article: Mention this statement, or part of it in blog posts that drive you a lot of traffic. This practice helps you in strengthening your brand identity and ensuring that your audience understands the core values and goals of your organization, and this will increase your brand’s perceived value.
Optimize your blog posts for SEO: SEO is the cornerstone of your blog visibility and popularity success, we will delve deeper into this point now…

SEO And Blogging

Blogging is effective, but without SEO, blogging would be ineffective.

Because the primary purpose of blogging is to drive traffic to your website, along with building trust and credibility.

And if your blog posts aren’t well-optimized for SEO, they won’t be visible in the search engine results page (SERP), thereby you will not have any visitors for your website.

However, in order to optimize your blog posts for SEO, you must learn how to optimize your pages for the following three elements:

On-page SEO
Off-page SEO
Technical SEO

These three elements are the pillars of your SEO success; without them, your chances of ranking in the top 10 pages of SERP are close to zero.

(Every time you finish writing a piece of content for your blog, always give it to the SEO expert on your team to optimize it for SEO.)

Tip: If you are a B2B solopreneur with limited SEO knowledge, or if you don’t have an SEO expert on your team yet, consider subscribing to the HubRefs newsletter.

You will receive a Free 43 pages SEO e-book that specifies the articles in our SEO section and the exact order in which to read them.

This will provide you with the essential knowledge needed to effectively optimize your website for SEO until an SEO expert joins your team.

Subscribe:

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However, as I mentioned before, blogging is not about generating direct customers; its primary purpose is to generate leads (there is no customer acquisition without lead generation).

In order to convert these leads, you will need to integrate other strategies that we are going to cover in this article.

Strategy 2: Social Media Marketing

Integrating social media marketing as a strategy for B2B customer acquisition is an effective move.

While most entrepreneurs (your audience) often opt to look for information in blogs, the undeniable truth is that they spend most of their free time on social media (like any other human in the modern world).

Obviously, you will not find your B2B audience spending their time on certain social media platforms like TikTok or Snapshat.

For me, here are the best social media platforms where you can invest your time comfortably:

LinkedIn
Forums

I will explain how you can acquire customers through LinkedIn and online forums and the best practices for doing that.

Here is how you can use each social medium to enhance your B2B customer acquisition strategy:

LinkedIn Marketing:

For me, LinkedIn is the best social media platform for creating and distributing content, and the leads you can attract from this platform are the best compared to the others.

If we supposed that you have big followers, acquiring customers will become easy.

You will be able to do that by sharing helpful content and merging it with promotional messages and gathering their emails, and you will be the first one that falls into your leads’ minds when they start considering a solution.

However, even though LinkedIn is the platform where your leads spend most of their time, having a content strategy is crucial for success.

In short, here are the steps for creating your LinkedIn content strategy:

Set Clear Goals and Objectives: In our context, our primary goal is to acquire customers and leads.
Create B2B buyer personas: This practice helps you in tailoring your messages for your potential customers basing on the data provided in the buyer persona profile.
Create a content calendar: This helps you in scheduling your content creation and publication rate.
Create high-quality content: The same point I emphasized earlier about high-quality content in blogging applies now as well.
Promote your content: Promote your content by sharing it in LinkedIn groups, reaching out to influencers, including hashtags, posting on online forums, and linking to it from your blog posts.
Decide on the engagement techniques you are going to use: Will you drive engagement by dedicating a time to responding to comments? Sharing polls and quizzes? Sharing controversial posts?

Once you have made decisions about these elements, you will have a complete LinkedIn content strategy.

And once you apply it and succeed in it, you will find a lot of B2B customer acquisition opportunities.

Forums Marketing:

Online forums like Reddit and Quora are very effective platforms for B2B customer acquisition if used properly.

The greatest advantage of forums is that the content you share is visible to all users of the forum.

In other words, you won’t need to promote your content; simply make your posts catchy, valuable, and/or controversial to trigger engagement and gain votes .

This is why acquiring customers and generating leads from online forums is easier than any other social platform.

But there are some best practices that must be adopted while using online forums for B2B customer acquisition, these practices include:

Decide on which forums you are going to focus: Your target forums must necessarily be relevant to your niche in order to acquire customers and generate leads, and they must have active members.
Build a reputation and become noticeable and likable in each forum you target: By answering questions, sharing controversial posts, and using an approachable tone, you’ll make members more tolerant with your promotional messages, and you won’t be marked as spam.
Include your promotional messages wisely: Even if you’re likable, openly sharing promotional posts in forums that prohibit them can lead to being kicked out. Therefore, self-promote only when the context of a post is convenient for a self-mention.
Direct promotion: To avoid any risk, you can answer people’s questions (provide value first), and then promote your offers to them in private conversations.

If you adhere to these best practices you will increase your chances significantly to acquire customers for your B2B business.

For startups, focusing solely on these two social media platforms (LinkedIn, Reddit) is the best practice for you.

However, if you are a well-established website, you can spread your focus on other platforms like Facebook and X.

Strategy 3: Email Marketing

The reality is that the two previous strategies were primarily designed for lead generation. And as I mentioned earlier, there is no customer acquisition without lead generation.

This is why the two previous strategies are crucial and they must be integrated in your overall B2B customer acquisition strategy.

As for email marketing, it plays the role of a ‘customers generator‘ that converts acquired leads to acquired customers, you will understand what I’m talking about more.

What Is B2B Email Marketing?

Email marketing in B2B is a type of content marketing strategy where businesses send automated and non-automated emails that contains a specific type of content to increase conversion rates significantly overtime.

How Does Email Marketing Work?

Email marketing in the B2B sector differs significantly from the B2C sector, in the B2C sector, email is used often for direct promotional messages.

While in the B2B sector, it is used to make leads go through a journey (buyer journey) where they keep receiving specific emails until they reach a point where they are ready for conversion or closing.

In your automated emails series that constitute the buyer journey, you will have to create your emails’ content basing on three phases:

Awareness phase: In this phase, your emails must be helpful and valuable, they must contain educational content that educates your leads more about the problems they have and the solutions they must opt for. In this phase avoid creating promotional content, you can mention your product in the solutions part but don’t overpromote.
Consideration phase: When your leads reach this phase, they often become more mature and aware of the problem they face and the solution that solves it, but they are considering which provider they must buy from. This is why your emails’ content in this phase must contain content such as case studies, testimonials, comparison guides…
Decision phase: In this phase, your customers have considered you as the best solution provider (I hope), but they didn’t take any action yet. In order to make them accelerate in taking the desired decision, your emails’ content in this phase must contain incentives like discounts, free trials, product demos…

If you create the right content in each stage, your designed buyer journey will help you acquire a lot of B2B customers.

However, there’s more to know, in order to make your automated email campaign successful, you need to adhere to the email marketing best practices.

Email Marketing Best Practices:

Here are the best practices that you must do when you think of implementing email marketing as a B2B customer acquisition strategy:

Create automated email journeys: To ensure your designed buyer journey is effective, pre-create your emails. Sending separate emails to each new subscriber is neither feasible nor logical. Automating your emails and pre-setting the buyer journey is the cornerstone of your campaign’s success.
Create catchy and interesting subject lines: The most challenging step in an email campaign is crafting effective subject lines. They are the gateway to your success. If you fail to create them well, don’t even dream of having your emails opened.
Use your B2B buyer personas for email content creation: Once leads click through, the next challenge is keeping them engaged. Well-personalized, tailored content, guided by buyer personas, is key to maintaining their interest.
Use merge tags: Enhance content personalization by using merge tags, such as |First Name|, |Role In the Company|, and |Birth Day|. These variables adapt based on the information users provided when they first filled out your email form.
Respect the buyer journey stages: Use phase-appropriate content—informational content in the awareness stage, case studies and testimonials during consideration, and special offers and detailed product guides in the decision phase.

If you follow these practices, the likelihood of your B2B customer acquisition strategy succeeding through email marketing will increase significantly.

Strategy 4: Video Marketing

What Is Video Marketing?

Video marketing in B2B is a content marketing strategy used to share educational content with the intent of self-promotion.

It plays the role of a lead generator, similar to blogs and social media.

However, video marketing has greater capability for direct customer acquisition, without the need for leads to go through the entire buyer journey.

The same principles applied to blogs and social media are also applied here; success will require consistency in creating high-quality content and promoting it.

Video Marketing Best Practices:

Let’s say that you have chosen YouTube as the platform where you will distribute your videos, and it is the best choice by the way for most B2B businesses.

Follow these best practices for B2B customer acquisition through video marketing:

Focus on Educational Content: Create content that educates and informs your target audience. Webinars, tutorials, industry analysis, and product demos are particularly effective for B2B audiences. This helps establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry.
Case Studies and Success Stories: Share detailed case studies and success stories that demonstrate the effectiveness of your products or services in solving specific business problems. This helps potential clients visualize the benefits of partnering with you.
Optimize for Search: Use keywords relevant to your industry and solutions in your video titles, descriptions, and tags to improve SEO and help potential clients find your content through search.
Create a Professional Channel Design: Ensure your YouTube channel reflects your business’s professionalism. This includes a clean, branded banner, organized playlists related to different business needs or industries, and a professional channel trailer.
Optimize Your Videos: Conduct keyword research and optimize your video titles, descriptions, and tags with those keywords to improve searchability.
Leverage LinkedIn and Other B2B Networks: Promote your YouTube content on LinkedIn and other professional networks. B2B audiences are more likely to engage with content through these platforms, which can drive higher quality leads to your videos.
Call to Action: Include specific calls to action, such as visiting your website for a free trial, subscribing to a newsletter, scheduling a demo, or contacting sales. Make it easy for B2B buyers to take the next step in the buyer journey.

If these practices are well executed, your video marketing efforts will help you acquire direct customers and generate more leads.

Strategy 5: Leveraging Earned Media

Earned media is a goldmine for new B2B customer opportunities, and if you leverage it efficiently, you will see new customers flocking to you.

What Is Earned Media:

Earned media refers to the publicity gained through promotional efforts other than paid media advertising.

It includes coverage that comes from third-party sources without direct payment or advertising. Here are a few examples:

Media Coverage: Articles, news stories, or features about your company in newspapers, TV, or online platforms.
Earned Mentions: When users or influencers talk about your brand or product/service on blog posts or social media platforms without any solicitation or compensation from your side.
Reviews and Testimonials: Positive feedback from customers posted on various platforms or included in articles.

Earned media is indeed a powerful tool for discovering new customer acquisition opportunities, and you will learn how to leverage it effectively.

Leveraging Earned Media For Acquiring Customers:

In order to increase the customer acquisition rate through earned media, consider the following best practices:

Encourage Media Coverage: Build relationships with industry influencers. Provide them with useful information, expert opinions, and newsworthy stories about your business.
Track brand mentions for backlink acquisition: Use an SEO tool to identify instances where your brand is mentioned in blog posts without a corresponding link. Then, reach out to the authors and ask them to include a link back to your website.
Maximize Reviews and Testimonials: Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews and testimonials. You can facilitate this by offering incentives for reviews, or simply asking customers to share their experiences online.
Showcase Awards and Recognitions: If your company receives awards or recognitions, promote these achievements across all your channels. This enhances credibility and can attract the attention of potential customers looking for top-tier products or services.
Leverage Industry Events: Participating in or speaking at industry events can boost your brand’s visibility and credibility.

By adhering to these best practices, you will be able to take advantage of your earned media and open new doors for client acquisition opportunities.

Strategy 6: Paid Media

Paid media is any form of marketing that requires payment to place your brand or message in front of a targeted audience.

It includes LinkedIn ads, X ads, YouTube ads, Facebook ads, Reddit ads and more.

While everyone knows this, not everyone understands how to effectively use these paid tools to gain more B2B customers and maximize their investment.

If you want to maximize the potential of your budget invested in paid media, consider the following approaches:

Define Your Target Audience Precisely: Identify specific industries, company sizes, job roles, and geographical locations. Leverage data from CRM and analytics to understand characteristics of best customers.
Choose the Right Channels: Select platforms where your target audience is most active, such as LinkedIn, X, Facebook, Reddit and industry-specific sites.
Create Engaging and Relevant Content: Develop ads that highlight the unique benefits and solutions provided by your products and adhere to copywriting best practices.
Utilize Lead Magnets: Offer free trials, demos, webinars, or white papers to capture lead information. Design conversion-optimized landing pages.
Implement Retargeting Strategies: Serve ads to users who visited your site but did not convert, tailoring messages based on their site interaction.
Test and Optimize: Regularly perform A/B testing on ad elements like copy, images, and calls-to-action.
Focus on ROI Measurement: Establish clear metrics for measuring ROI, including cost per lead, acquisition, and customer lifetime value.

This structured format provides a clear, step-by-step guide to effectively using paid media for acquiring B2B customers.

Strategy 7: Account-Based Marketing

What Is Account-Based Marketing (ABM)?

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a targeted marketing strategy where organizations treat individual accounts as markets in their own right.

Instead of the traditional broad-based marketing approach that targets large groups of potential customers, ABM focuses on meeting the specific needs and challenges of individual customer accounts.

This means that all marketing and sales efforts are harnessed and directed towards a single target account.

How to Use ABM For B2B Customer Acquisition?

To effectively use Account-Based Marketing (ABM) for acquiring customers, start by identifying and targeting high-value accounts that align with your product or service offerings.

This involves customizing your marketing strategies to address the unique pain points and business objectives of each account, employing personalized communication and content, such as tailored emails, bespoke whitepapers, and case studies.

Next, you have to engage these targeted accounts across multiple channels where they are most active, ensuring your messaging is consistent and relevant.

Close collaboration between your sales and marketing teams is crucial to align strategies and streamline communications, enhancing the chances of converting these high-value prospects into loyal customers.

However, continuous monitoring and optimizing of your ABM efforts based on engagement metrics and feedback will refine your approach, leading to better resource utilization and increased and better chances for your B2B customer acquisition strategy success.

Note: Companies that adopt ABM as a marketing strategy can target multiple accounts at once, and the number of accounts or companies you can target simultaneously varies depending on the company’s size and the potential revenue made from it.

For instance, if your target account is a large company with complex needs and multiple stakeholders who may need your high-priced solution, or a large quantity of your mid-priced solution, then focusing all your efforts towards one account such as this is the best fit.

Strategy 8: Sales Outreach

Sales outreach is a direct customer acquisition strategy used by sales team to connect with potential customers and ultimately drive sales by engaging prospects who may not actively considering the company’s products or services.

While not a content marketing method, mentioning it in this article is crucial, because it is indispensable, in addition, it is often integrated with other customer acquisition strategies we delved into earlier.

However, when reaching out to your prospects, whether through direct phone calls or email, be aware of the following mistakes that sellers often make:

Not aligning sales efforts with marketing efforts: When identifying a prospect you wish to reach out to, check whether they are part of a buyer journey campaign. If so, inform your marketing team and request data on the prospect’s behavior throughout the journey, then act accordingly.
Not leveraging acquired data about existing customers: If your target is an existing customer from whom you want to upsell, then leveraging data about them, acquired through CRM and other analytics tools, is crucial for better personalization and tailoring.
Lack of Preparation: Failing to research the prospect and their company thoroughly before reaching out, which can lead to irrelevant conversations and missed opportunities to connect on key pain points.
Ignoring Customer Needs: Pushing a product or service without aligning it with the actual needs of the prospect. This approach can come off as insincere and is less likely to result in a sale.

These were common mistakes that sellers do when they reach out to potential or existing customers.

However, the strategies provided will work far better if they are integrated seamlessly with each other.

In the following section, I’m going to give you two exceptional examples of how some companies have mixed the provided strategies to craft a new one that has succeeded.

B2B Customer Acquisition Strategies Real-Life Examples

To illustrate how the provided strategies can work together I’m going to give two real-life (fictional) examples of strategies for acquiring B2B customers just to make you grasp how the process goes.

Example 1: Acquiring B2B Customers Using Video Marketing Strategy

Let’s consider the case of a business that uses video marketing as its foundational strategy for B2B customer acquisition.

The business we are going to highlight is a training and consulting firm that’s called ‘Business academy (BA)‘.

It specializes in marketing and leadership, it targets Arab business owners who may or may not understand English, it has 12 employees, and its founder is named ‘Ahmed Ammar‘.

This company sells consulting services, and online courses.

BA entered the Arab market, it had a customer acquisition strategy that relies primarily on video marketing.

BA Video Marketing Strategy Step1: Lead Generation

Ahmed (the owner) has decided to commit to a video marketing strategy using the YouTube platform.

He opened a YouTube channel where he began explaining digital marketing strategies and leadership insights effectively in Arabic.

At the same time, he taught the translation of core concepts from Arabic to English, making them more accessible and simplifying the teaching task for himself.

However, while teaching and educating them, from time to time, and in a strategic way, he includes some smart call-to-actions such as subscribing to BA’s email newsletter, checking BA online courses’ brochures and more.

In addition, he was sharing some YouTube Shorts that display the successful experiences of existing customers with his services and online courses, acquired through direct outreach and other customized sales promotion techniques.

This way, he was able to generate a lot of leads from his YouTube videos and acquire some direct B2B customers who have bought his online courses and demanded his employee training services because of the strategic product mentions he included in his videos, and the testimonials he was promoting on his YouTube channel.

BA Video Marketing Strategy Step 2: Leveraging Email Marketing

For the email marketing step, the process I’m going to illustrate doesn’t differ much from the finance manager example I provided earlier.

However, continue reading for a better understanding.

1. Awareness Stage

For those who haven’t taken action yet but have subscribed to the BA’s newsletter, the email marketer on Ahmed’s team, along with Ahmed, has created a fully automated buyer journey that takes leads from the awareness phase to the decision phase.

And so, the subscribers began receiving emails about selected videos or e-books that Ahmed wants them to read.

These videos and e-books were educational and contained little to no promotional messages. The content was helpful but intentionally a bit shallow to make leads eager for the exclusive knowledge available only in his courses and training services.

These educational items were not just about leadership and digital marketing knowledge, but also about the importance of self-investment, training and developing employees, and content that helps leads understand that the type of services he sells is important for every business—and it is.

2. Consideration Stage

However, once leads have become more mature and aware of various aspects of leadership and digital marketing, as well as the substantial knowledge and benefits they are missing from training and educational firms, they officially entered the consideration stage.

At this stage, Ahmed and his email marketer friend have added content to the buyer journey that makes leads think of them as the ultimate solution provider.

They include testimonials, case studies, comparison reviews, and educational content from time to time to maintain trust and credibility.

When leads read and watched this content, they become more encouraged to make a decision…

3. Decision Stage

Once leads have reached the decision stage, they were already willing to buy Business Academy products (courses, consultations, training, depending on the lead needs).

However, at this stage, they began receiving exclusive incentives such as free trials, discounts, new case studies, and videos showing the products being implemented by existing customers, and other conversional content.

This has leaded many or the most existing leads to convert, while some leads were still unsure of what decision to make.

BA Video Marketing Strategy Step 3: Integrating Direct Outreach

For leads who hadn’t taken a specific action yet, BA marketing team has started targeting them with personalized approach.

Those who primarily interacted with emails promoting training services, the marketing team informed the sales team to target them using direct phone calls.

They also alerted them to review these leads’ data and behaviors within the automated email campaign for more personalized engagement.

On the other hand, those who have shown interest in online courses have been received more personalized emails about the BA courses feedbacks, more incentives, and more educational YouTube videos that include strategic CTAs for buying the courses and so on.

In the end, most of the leads have converted, and the B2B customer acquisition strategy have succeeded.

This complete strategy is called ‘sales funnel‘, it is the most effective strategy for customer acquisition in the B2B sector.

Example 2: Acquiring B2B Customers Using Account-Based Marketing Strategy

The example provided previously was fictional, however, I will provide you now with real example of a company that implemented ABM which ‘Salesforce‘.

In this ABM campaign, Salesforce utilized its ABM framework to deliver precisely targeted content to key customers at optimal times, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of their outreach and engagement strategies.

The focus was on delivering the right content to the right customer at the right time, which is a hallmark of a successful ABM approach.

The campaign utilized Salesforce’s comprehensive CRM capabilities, which allowed the team to leverage deep insights and real-time data to deliver a connected engagement experience across departments.

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) played a pivotal role in refining the campaign’s targeting and personalization tactics.

By leveraging AI, Salesforce could optimize its engagement strategies, making it possible to identify high-potential accounts early in the buying cycle and tailor the messaging to meet the unique needs of each account.

This campaign is just one example of how Salesforce harnesses the power of ABM and AI to foster deeper connections with high-value accounts, ultimately acquiring many B2B customers and driving improved marketing ROI.

Wrapping Up:

Crafting a B2B customer acquisition strategy is crucial, and there are many elements that you can integrate while creating it.

For example if you are blogging you can integrate email marketing, video marketing, social media marketing, paid media and more.

However, I think that the sales funnel strategy is the best fit for any business that operates in the B2B sector, along with account-based marketing.

Traditional paid ads and influencer marketing must not be the core of you customer acquisition strategy.

Because in the B2B sector, trust and credibility are the critical factors that dictate your success, and not attention.

However, our guide ends here.

I hope this was helpful. If you liked the content, subscribe to the HubRefs newsletter and don’t forget to share it with people you know they might get advantage of it…

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The Full Guide to Developing a B2B Buyer Persona

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The Full Guide to Developing a B2B Buyer Persona

Developing B2B buyer persona(s) is a fundamental step for any B2B business because it is crucial for tailoring your messages to align with the specific characteristics, needs, and preferences of your prospects or existing customers.

If your messages are relevant and well-tailored for your prospects, they are more likely to pay attention and consider your solutions.

Although almost everyone recognizes the importance of developing a buyer persona, the real challenge lies in how to develop them.

However, this guide will cover everything you need to know about developing a B2B buyer persona.

This full guide will cover the following points:

What is buyer persona?
Difference between B2B and B2C buyer personas?
Why developing B2B buyer personas is important.
Steps for developing a B2B buyer persona.
B2B buyer persona template
B2B buyer personas examples
How to use B2B buyer personas
Examples of how the use of B2B buyer personas can enhance your content personalization
Wrapping up.

What Is B2B Buyer Persona?

A B2B buyer persona (also referred to as B2B customer avatar) is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.

It goes beyond basic demographic information to include detailed insights into the motivations, behaviors, challenges, and goals of the individuals or groups who are most likely to buy your products or services.

I will give in the final parts of this article detailed examples of B2B buyer persona profiles, but I will give a simplified one now to help you understand the definition mentioned previously.

Let’s say that you’re a business that sells an accounting software that helps in creating the accounting report, and streamlining the accounting team’s efforts.

In this case, your buyer persona will look like this:

Obviously, neither ‘Henry’ nor TechX is real. However, Henry and TechX are just fictional entities that represent who your prospects and customers are in a detailed manner.

There are many missed elements and data in the example above, but keep in mind that I provided it to help you understand what a buyer persona profile looks like, and as I said previously, I will give you more detailed examples in the final parts of this article.

However, now that you understand what is a buyer persona, let’s find out what is the difference between B2B and B2C buyer personas.

B2B And B2C buyer persona Key Differences

When it comes to buyer personas, B2B and B2C businesses differ in a lot of aspects in how to create them.

For instance, B2B businesses don’t focus so much on some details like age, gender, income, lifestyle and much more demographic information that B2C businesses aim to collect.

But rather, B2B businesses focus on information related to business and buying process like industry, responsibilities, role, position, company, and many other demographic and firmographic data.

Here are the key differences between B2B and B2C buyer personas:

1. Focus:

When it comes to B2B businesses, the focus is on companies that are purchasing products or services for use in their operations, production, or to resell.

B2B buyer personas often represent an individual with significant authority in the buying decision and the company to which they belong.

As for B2C businesses, the focus is on individual consumers purchasing products or services for personal use.

B2C buyer personas represent individual consumers with specific preferences, needs, and behaviors.

2. Characteristics:

B2B buyer personas’ characteristics include the industry sector, business size, job roles, business needs, and pain points.

B2B personas are detailed and consider the goals, difficulties, challenges, and complexities of business requirements.

On the other hand, B2C buyer personas’ characteristics include primarily demographic information (age, gender, income, etc…), psychographic information (interests, values, lifestyles), and behavioral traits.

3. Decision-Making Process:

In the B2B sector, the decision-making process is longer, more complex, and involves multiple stakeholders.

It often involve a formal procurement process with several stages, including need recognition, evaluation, and negotiation.

As for the B2C sector, the decision-making process is typically quicker and involves fewer stages. Decisions are often influenced by emotions, personal preferences, and immediate needs.

However, I will give you an example of a B2C buyer persona profile and I want you to compare it with the previous B2B customer avatar example.

Let’s say that you are a B2C business (ecommerce store) that sell products that can be used as gifts and offers for females above the age of 18.

In this case, here is how a B2C buyer persona profile looks like:

When you will compare those two examples provided previously, you will understand immediately the key differences I gave you above between B2B and B2C buyer personas.

Note: Keep in mind that the information you use to create your buyer personas (whether B2B or B2C) must be based on real data you collected from your CRM database or any other source of information, not from your head.

Why Creating B2B Buyer Persona Is Important?

Creating buyer personas for your B2B business is indispensable for tailoring your messages for your prospects and existing customers and for improving your overall marketing performance.

And in order to make you recognize their importance, I want you to consider the following benefits and statistics that demonstrate the importance of their integration in your marketing plan:

Benefits of Developing B2B Personas:

One of my favorite ways to demonstrate the importance of a particular element is by highlighting the benefits you can get from it.

And there are many benefits you can get from creating buyer personas including…

Directly address problems customers are experiencing: Solving problems your customers face is crucial to customer loyalty and revenue generation. And so, your content in all formats must focus on problem solving, and your buyer persona profile helps in that.
Use the right influencers to convince your B2B customers: Understanding which influencers your customers admire and heed is a crucial aspect of the content strategy framework. Including endorsements from these influencers in your content can be beneficial whenever possible.
Use buying triggers in emails and real-time messaging: Although the B2B buying process is more complex, and generally, these copywriting techniques don’t always work seamlessly, because decisions can’t be taken by one individual even if he is convinced, but including some buying triggers that are based on your prospects goals and pain points can grab your prospect attention and affect its buying decision especially in the consideration stage.
Rank content priorities: Personas are helpful when you have to create an editorial calendar that reflects true customer interest. Some content topics can be categorized as “nice to have” and others a “top priority”, and the list goes on…

Statistics That Prove the Importance of Developing a B2B Buyer Persona:

If you are not convinced yet of the importance of developing buyer personas for your B2B business. Consider the following statistics:

71% of businesses that exceed their revenue goals have established and officially recorded their customer personas (source: slideshare).
Companies focused on customer-centricity are 60% more profitable compared to businesses that are not customer centric (source: venturebeat).
77% of customers have chosen, endorsed, or paid more for a brand that offers personalized experiences (source: instapage).
63% of customers tend to interact and reply more to messages tailored to them, rather than to generic, broad-appeal communication approaches (source: broadridge).

I think the benefits and statistics mentioned previously are enough to make you convinced, however, even if you didn’t realize where their importance lies, later in this article, I will give a realistic example of how can the act of using B2B buyer personas enhance your marketing efforts, so, keep reading…

Steps For Developing a B2B Buyer Persona

Now that we understood what B2B persona is and why developing one is important, I think it is time to delve into how to actually create it.

There are many steps involved in the B2B buyer persona development, and here is an overview of these steps before we delve in depth into each one:

Identify your target audience.
Determine which company department will use your product.
Identify who is the decision-maker.
Collect real data and information.
Develop your B2B buyer persona.

Step 1: Identify And Understand Your Target Audience

There is no doubt that the first step you must take in order to develop a buyer persona for your B2B business is to identify and understand your target audience, which are companies you want to complete or enhance their business activities.

And in order to create a comprehensive buyer persona profile, you will need to collect some general information about your audience (target companies) that don’t require any interactions with your customers, and they must be included in your B2B customer avatar profile, which are:

Industry: Knowing the industry allows you to tailor your solutions to meet the unique challenges and needs of businesses within that sector. In addition, familiarity with the industry’s language, pain points, and key performance indicators enables you to communicate more effectively with potential clients.
Company size: Knowing your target companies size is important to identify which type of companies you are going to target, for instance, if you sell a high priced B2B product with a high quality, your target companies would be mid sized to large companies (you can measure a company size by its employees number and its yearly turnover).
What problem your product solves for your target audience: Knowledge of the specific problem your product solves allows you to craft precise marketing messages that resonate with your target audience. You can communicate the benefits of your product more effectively when you articulate how it addresses a problem they are facing.
Location: Are your target companies physically located in your city, country, or are they located abroad?
Your target companies goals and objectives: Knowing what your target companies aim to achieve will help you tailor your messages based on their goals. This will make them more interested in your solutions than your competitors’, especially during the consideration stage.

Understanding your B2B target audience requires a mix of qualitative and quantitative research, so take your time doing it because it is a crucial step.

Step 2: Determine Which Department Will Use Your Product

Determining and understanding which department within a target company will use your B2B product is crucial for several key reasons.

This knowledge can significantly influence your product development, marketing strategy, sales approach, and customer support.

Here are the main reasons why it is important:

Tailored Product Development: Knowing the specific department that will use your product allows you to tailor its features and functionality to meet their unique needs. This can include customizing the user interface, integrating specific workflows, or including department-specific compliance features. Tailored products are more likely to meet the needs of users, leading to higher satisfaction and adoption rates.
Effective Marketing: When you know which department will use your product, you can craft more precise and relevant marketing messages. Your content can address the specific challenges, goals, and industry terminology of that department, making your marketing efforts more impactful.
Improved Sales Conversations: Sales teams armed with the knowledge of the target department can have more informed and relevant conversations with potential buyers. They can highlight features and benefits that are directly relevant to the department’s needs, address specific concerns, and anticipate objections. This relevance can shorten sales cycles and improve conversion rates.
Customized Training and Support: Understanding the departmental context of your product’s use allows you to offer more customized training and support. You can develop training materials that reflect the department’s workflows and challenges, making it easier for users to understand and adopt the product. Similarly, customer support can be tailored to anticipate and quickly resolve issues specific to that department’s use of your product.

However, the department that will use your product must be included in your B2B persona profile.

Step 3: Determine Who Is the Key Decision-Maker

Determining who is the decision -maker in the department that will use your product is the cornerstone of your B2B buyer persona development.

Clearly, the key decision-maker in your target department may not have the ultimate authority, especially if your solution impacts other departments’ operations due to its functionality or cost.

However, if you can convince that decision-maker, the likelihood of your product being adopted increases significantly.

Step 4: Collect Real Data And Information

Once you have determined who is the key decision-maker in your target department, it is time to start collecting real data and information about him.

To do this accurately, you will need to know two things: ‘what data to collect‘ and ‘where it should be collected from‘.

What Data to Collect?

As mentioned previously, once you have identified the key decision-maker, you must start collecting data and information about them to ensure you have all the components that will enable you to complete your customer avatar profile.

Here is a list of information about the key decision-maker you need to collect:

Professional Background: Understand their career trajectory, including current position, roles held, industries worked in, and professional expertise. This helps in customizing your pitch to resonate with their experiences and challenges.
Decision-Making Authority: Identify their level of decision-making authority within the organization. Are they the final decision-maker, or do they influence decisions at a higher level?
Business Goals and Challenges: Know the business objectives they are trying to achieve and the challenges they face in reaching those goals. This information enables you to position your product or service as a solution to their specific problems.
Interests and Preferences: Identify their content preferences and interests. What kind of articles do they read? What kind of content do they engage with the most? Which events do they attend? Which channels do they spend most of their free time on? Knowing this can help you create engaging content, in the right format, that catches their attention and interest.
Purchase history: If you are a B2B business that sells different products, then knowing what type of products these key decision-makers have decided to adopt is important, because you don’t want to keep wasting your budget on a segment of customers who are not interested in a specific product category.
Engagement History: Track their interactions with your company’s content, including website visits, webinar attendances, and email responses. This gives you insight into their interests and how they prefer to engage with vendors.
Social Media Activity: Review their activity on professional networks like LinkedIn. Posts, comments, and shared articles can give you information about what’s important to them.
Technological Environment: Understand the current technologies and solutions they use. This helps in positioning your product or service as compatible with or superior to their existing solutions.
Peer Influence and Networks: Identify who they turn to for advice or recommendations. Knowing the influencers and networks they trust can help you find the best influencers and thought leaders to collaborate with (B2B influencer marketing).

From Where to Collect Data?

There are many sources from which you can collect the required data, whether you have interacted with some customers before or not.

Here are 7 reliable sources from which you can mine the information you need:

Source 1: CRM Database

Your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is a gold mine of information on existing customers and prospects.

It can provide historical data on purchase history, engagement levels, and customer acquisition channel (source from where they came: blog, LinkedIn, YouTube…).

Customer Acquisition Channels: This tracks the initial interaction or touchpoint through which a prospect entered your CRM, including referral sources such as organic search, social media platforms, email campaigns, direct website visits, or specific marketing campaigns. Identifying the source helps pinpoint the channels preferred by your prospects, guiding where to focus your marketing efforts.
Purchase History: Records all the purchases a customer has made, detailing the product or service bought, the purchase date, amount spent, and frequency of purchases.
Engagement Levels: CRM helps you measure how customers interact with your brand across various channels and platforms, monitoring metrics such as email open and click-through rates, website visitation behaviors, and social media interactions.

Source 2: Website Analytics

Website analytics provide detailed data about how visitors interact with your site, offering invaluable insights into user behavior, preferences, and type of content that generate engagement the most.

Here’s an expanded look at what website analytics can reveal:

Visitor Demographics: Understand who is visiting your site in terms of geographic location, age, gender, and interests. This helps tailor content and marketing strategies to better suit your audience.
Traffic Sources: Identify where your website traffic is coming from—whether through search engines (organic search), social media platforms, referral sites, or direct visits. This information allows you to identify channels where your prospects spend most of their time.
Content Performance: Determine which pieces of content perform best in terms of attracting and engaging visitors. This guides content creation efforts, helping you produce more of what your audience values.

Source 3: Social Media Platforms

Social media platforms offer a treasure trove of data that can be instrumental in understanding your audience and creating customer avatars.

Here’s are the most relevant types of data you can collect from social media platforms:

LinkedIn Engagement Metrics: Track interactions on your posts, including likes, comments, shares, and identify the most type of professionals who engage with your content, this will help you in determining the professional background of your B2B buyer personas.
Content Performance: Analyze which types of content (articles, videos, infographics) resonate most with your audience, focusing on metrics like engagement rates and click-throughs to your site.
Audience Insights: Gather data on the demographics and interests of your social media audience, particularly on LinkedIn and online forums (related to your niche), to tailor your messaging and content strategies.
Customer Feedback and Engagement: Monitor and analyze feedback, questions, and discussions from customers and prospects on social media to gauge sentiment and identify common pain points or needs.
Social Listening for Industry Trends: Utilize social listening tools to keep tabs on industry trends, relevant discussions, and emerging topics of interest to your target audience.

Source 4: Sales Team Feedback

Gathering feedback from your sales team is a crucial data collection method for B2B businesses, offering deep insights into customer preferences, concerns, needs and pain points. Here’s how to leverage sales team feedback for strategic advantage:

Customer Pain Points and Needs: Sales representatives are on the front lines, directly interacting with prospects and customers. Their insights into the common challenges and needs expressed during sales conversations can guide product development, marketing messaging, and content creation to better address these areas.
Industry Trends: Sales teams can provide firsthand observations on emerging trends within your industry, as they discuss ongoing projects and pain points with a variety of clients. These insights can help anticipate market shifts and position your company as a forward-thinking leader.

Source 5: Customer Surveys and Interviews

Customer surveys and interviews are vital tools for B2B businesses to gather data and information directly from their target audience.

Demographic Information: Data on the customer’s role within their organization, industry, company size, and geographic location.
Product Usage Data: Insights into how customers use your product or service, including frequency, features most valued, and potential gaps in functionality.
Customer Challenges and Pain Points: Information on the challenges and pain points customers face in their businesses that your product or service may help to address.
Buying Criteria and Decision Factors: Insights into what factors customers consider most important when choosing a product or service, including pricing, features, support, and brand reputation.
Customer Expectations: Data on what customers expect from your product or service and how those expectations match up with their actual experience.

Source 6: Market Research Reports

Market research reports are rich sources of data for B2B companies, they offer data that can help massively in creating B2B buyer personas. From these reports, you can collect data such as:

Industry Trends: Information on current and emerging trends within your industry, including technological advancements, regulatory changes, and shifts in consumer behavior.
Customer Segmentation: Insights into how the market is segmented by types of businesses, industry sectors, company size, geographic regions, and other relevant criteria.
Technological Developments: Data on current and emerging technologies impacting your industry, including opportunities for innovation and potential disruption.

Source 7: Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis in the context of B2B businesses involves collecting and analyzing data about your competitors. Here are the types of data you can collect from competitor analysis:

Marketing and Advertising Activities: Analysis of competitors’ marketing strategies, including advertising channels, digital marketing efforts, content strategy, and engagement tactics on social media.
Customer Base and Segments: Information on the types of customers your competitors target, including industry sectors, company size, and geographic markets.
Customer Feedback and Reviews: Collecting customer reviews and feedback on competitors’ products or services to identify their satisfaction levels and any common complaints.

These were the most common and reliable sources of data you can use.

However, keep in mind that these sources can actually include more insightful data that can benefit your business, but our focus was on data that helps in creating B2B personas.

Here is a schedule that simplifies the details we have been talking about:

Step 5: Develop Your B2B Buyer Persona(s)

I think this step is the simplest one, now that you have collected the required information about your target audience and the key decision-maker(s), it is time for you to develop your customer avatar using that data.

The first thing you should do is organizing your collected data into segments containing customers with shared characteristics, such as the products they adopt, key decision-maker, the channels they use, and other information that significantly differentiates one group of customers from another.

Then you must represent each segment with a fictional person (key decision-maker) and company (target companies).

For example if you have a segment A that contains specific decision-makers and companies type, you will have to make them realistic by giving them a name and identity.

However, this step will be clearer for you once you use the B2B persona template I’m going to give.

B2B Buyer Persona Template:

When you have all the required data in hand, all you need to do is employing it accurately to create your customer avatar. And I’m here to help you.

So, all I want you to do is to fill the following, detailed B2B buyer persona template:

B2B Customer Avatar Examples:

In order to make the process clearer as much as possible, I will have to give some examples of a real-world B2B buyer personas.

And to do that effectively, let’s consider the following situation…

Let’s assume that you are a content marketer or a marketing manager, possibly even the owner, of a mid-sized company called ‘Pristine‘ in Dubai, which specializes in providing cleaning services to other local firms, your prices change according to your target company size.

Recognizing the value it can add to your marketing efforts, you decided to focus on developing B2B customer avatars.

The initial step involved identifying the companies you aim to target. While the industry of these companies wasn’t a primary concern, their size, whether they operate in a physical or virtual space and obstacles of conversion were critical information you need.

Eventually, you ended up segmenting your target companies into the following segments:

Once you segmented your target companies, you moved to the next step, which was determining which department would use your product.

However, since your service concerns the entire company, there was no specific department to target as the primary user.

Thus, you skipped this step and proceeded to the next one: identifying the key decision-maker.

After conducting some research on Google and doing customer surveys, you found that the ‘facilities director‘ holds the highest authority and relevance regarding the company’s physical buildings and facilities management and oversight (which includes the cleanliness of premises).

For small and mid-sized companies, you discovered that the CEO or the founder is the key decision-maker, as having a facilities director might still be costly for them.

And once you determined who are the key decision-makers, you started collecting real data and information using the methods and tools mentioned above.

You interviewed your customers, you looked for relevant information in online forums, you checked LinkedIn profiles of your key decision-makers, you mined relevant data from your CRM database, your read some industry reports…

Eventually you got the following and more:

Now that you’ve gathered almost all the data you need, it’s time to create your B2B buyer persona using the template we provided.

When you finished developing them, here is what you got…

Warning: I will repeat it again, the information that you use must be real and based on your internal data or some real, trustworthy statistics and surveys!

However, you still need to create additional personas by identifying companies that already adopt your products and those that don’t, as well as distinguishing between those that have interacted with your company and those that have not, among other criteria we have previously determined.

Remember, the primary goal of creating buyer personas is to tailor our messaging and promotional materials as much as possible.

Now that you have successfully created your B2B customer avatars, you will absolutely want to know how to use them for your business advantage, and this is what we are going to discover in the next section of this article.

How to Use B2B Buyer Personas

Using B2B buyer personas involves primarily leveraging the data and information in the customer avatar profile and use it to tailor effectively your content and offers.

Here’s how you can use B2B buyer personas:

Tailoring Marketing Strategies: By understanding the specific needs and behaviors of different personas, you can tailor your marketing strategies to address the particular challenges and pain points of each group by using the collected information, this increases the relevance and effectiveness of your campaigns.
Content Personalization: Use personas to create content that resonates with your target audience. Whether it’s blog posts, white papers, or emails, speaking directly to the identified needs and interests of each persona can greatly improve engagement.
Product Development: Personas can inform your product development by highlighting specific features or services that are most valuable to your customers. This can guide you in making improvements or introducing new offerings that better meet the needs of your market.
Sales Alignment: Equip your sales team with persona information to help them understand the buyers they are engaging with. This can lead to more effective sales conversations and a higher conversion rate because the communication is highly relevant to the buyer’s context.

And you can use buyer personas in more ways. However, in order to illustrate how the use of B2B buyer personas can boost your marketing efforts, consider the following examples.

Examples Of How The Use Of B2B Buyer Personas Can Enhance Your Content Personalization

Let’s return to the situation we discussed before and imagine that you are a B2B business that sells cleanliness services for other firms.

And let’s consider two cases, the first case you didn’t develop personas, and in the second case you did, and then we will compare the content effectiveness in each case.

For example we will see how your content calendar and email copy would look like in each case.

Example 1: Your Content Calendar With and Without Using B2B Buyer Persona:

Let’s say that you wanted to create a content calendar for your cleanliness service provider business to generate leads, without using customer avatars.

As a content marketer of a cleanliness service provider business that has a general understanding of his target audience, here is how your content calendar without using B2B personas would look like:

Here’s how your content calendar might look without using customer avatars: overly general, lacking in varied subject ideas, and devoid of personalization.

But more importantly, it fails to appeal to key decision-makers such as facilities directors, CEOs, and original founders, who are crucial to closing deals. Now, let’s see what your content calendar would look like when you use one.

Now, look at the following content calendar that you created based on your developed customer avatars profile:

I just want you to compare these two content calendars and tell me which subjects are more likely to attract our key decision-makers; obviously, they are subjects in the the second content calendar!

And if you are asking how those customer avatar profiles contributed to the creation of the last content calendar, the answer is that I leveraged data and information about the key decision-makers (needs, interests) and used them to tailor my content and messages.

It is that simple; buyer personas help you tailor your content to make it more personalized and engaging, which can greatly increase your conversion rates and closed deals.

Note: The headings suggested above might not be good subjects for creating blog posts unless you conduct a keyword research and find that they contain good keywords. If they don’t, consider distributing them in the format of LinkedIn posts or sharing them in online forums.

Example 2: Your Email Copy With and Without Using B2B Buyer Persona:

Let’s imagine again that you are a content marketer working for that cleanliness company, and you want to send an email to some prospects—for example, to a CEO of a mid-sized company who perceives cleanliness services as being too costly (according to the collected data) to convince them that your company’s offer is the best choice for them.”

Here’s how your copy would look like without using buyer personas…

Not bad—the subject is catchy enough to grab a CEO’s attention, and the copy effectively communicates why a business should choose Pristine as its cleanliness service provider. However, I wonder if every CEO would continue reading the email until the end!

I think you noticed it, there is no personalization in the copy, the message is general and doesn’t address the CEOs’ needs specifically, it doesn’t mention their objectives, pain points or any other relevant information for him that might make him interested!

Now, I want you to read the following, adjusted email copy that is based on the B2B buyer persona profiles we developed earlier…

Upon careful reading, you will notice that the copy directly addresses CEOs in a personalized manner; it includes all the incentives and elements—goals, needs, location, pain points, and all the information from the persona profile—that will likely motivate your target CEOs to continue reading.

Information that will make him feel as if the message directed personally to him. And remember! 63% of customers tend to interact and reply more to messages tailored to them, rather than to generic, broad-appeal communication approaches.

I think these examples are far enough to show how you can use B2B buyer personas to your business advantage and how they can benefit your business.

Wrapping Up:

To wrap this up, B2B buyer personas are essential tools in the arsenal of modern business strategy, especially in marketing and sales.

They are detailed profiles of the ideal customers within a business’s target market, crafted through a combination of real-world data and educated assumptions.

These personas encompass demographic details, behavioral patterns, professional challenges, and personal motivations, giving businesses a blueprint of whom they are trying to reach.

In essence, B2B buyer personas are not just profiles; they’re actionable insights that, when integrated across business functions, can significantly enhance the alignment of product offerings with market demand, optimize customer engagement strategies, and drive business growth.

They serve as a foundational element in building customer-centric business practices that resonate with both the logical and emotional aspects of B2B purchasing decisions.

However, our guide to developing B2B buyer personas ends here.

I hope this was helpful. If you liked the content, subscribe to the HubRefs newsletter and don’t forget to share it with people you know they might get advantage of it…

Subscribe to our newsletter for exclusive Insights into B2B content marketing and general B2B marketing approaches to lead your team and organization to ultimate success.

Written by Soufiane Zagouri.

B2B content marketing strategy best practices

7 Steps for Creating a Full B2B Content Marketing Strategy

B2B content marketing, blog, BOFU CM, TOFU & MOFU CM

Main Page > Archives for

7 Steps for Creating a Full B2B Content Marketing Strategy

In today’s marketplace, every B2B business including yours need to have a well-planned B2B content marketing strategy.

It is your key for generating more leads and loyal customers, increasing sales and conversions, and maximizing your ROI.

Although B2B content marketing tends to be much more complex and difficult because of the considerable length of the sales cycle and the complexity of the purchasing decision-making process…

Yet, you can still perform well and avoid detrimental mistakes if you create and implement an effective B2B content marketing strategy.

This full guide to creating a B2B content marketing strategy will cover the following points:

What is a B2B content marketing strategy?
Why is a content marketing strategy important for B2B?
7 Steps of Creating a B2B content marketing strategy.
Real-life B2B content marketing example.
Wrapping up.

What is a B2B Content Marketing Strategy?

B2B content marketing is a comprehensive plan developed by businesses to create and distribute content for a B2B audience.

The ultimate goal behind a B2B content marketing strategy is, on one hand, to acquire more leads and prospects by offering educational and problem-solving content that helps other businesses address industry-specific issues.

On the other hand, it aims to increase conversion rates and acquire more loyal customers by creating strategic promotional content.

Why is a Content Marketing Strategy Important for B2B Businesses?

Now that you understand what is a B2B content marketing strategy, let’s see why creating one is so important.

A well-planned B2B content marketing strategy is a critical component for B2B businesses because it helps businesses in many aspects.

However, here is a list of some benefits of creating a content strategy for your B2B business:

Structuring and directing their marketing efforts in the right direction.
Scheduling content by determining what content should be published and at what frequency.
Choosing the right formats for each piece of content.
Implementing the best tactics and practices for promoting the content.
Setting metrics and benchmarks for measuring and analyzing the content marketing efforts. And the list goes on…

And so, without having a well-planned B2B content marketing strategy, your content marketing efforts will lack direction and structure, thereby, your marketing efforts will go in vain!

Insightful Statistics

If you still neglect the importance of creating a B2B content marketing strategy, this implies that you dismiss the importance of the benefits mentioned above too.

However, the following statistics will dispel your doubt by certainty:

According to Content Marketing Institute (CMI), businesses that commit to a content marketing strategy have less difficulties with maintaining their relationships with customers.
As reported by CMI, 69% of successful B2B content marketers have a B2B content marketing strategy.
Only 7% of B2B content marketers say that they will not create a content marketing strategy any soon, while 93% are willing to create one or already have one.

Source: CMI.

These statistics should be enough to demonstrate how a well-crafted B2B content marketing strategy is important for your enhancing your marketing efforts.

Now, let’s move to the next section and learn what are the 8 steps for creating a B2B content marketing strategy that will lead your content marketing efforts to success…

7 Steps for Creating a B2B Content Marketing Strategy:

When it comes to designing a well-planned B2B content marketing strategy, there are many steps that should be followed in order to do it accurately.

But before we delve deeper into each step, I will give you a list of the steps that we are going to discover in this article.

Here are the steps that must be followed in order to create a complete B2B content marketing strategy:

Know your target audience.
Set clear goals and objectives.
Develop a content calendar.
Conduct a content audit and a competitive analysis.
Determine the content formats you are going to leverage
Plan strategically your content promotion.
Set KPIs for measuring your content performance.

Step 1: Know Your target Audience:

Understanding your target audience is a cornerstone of a successful B2B content marketing strategy.

In the B2B sector, where sales cycles are longer and purchasing decisions involve multiple stakeholders, knowing your audience can significantly impact your content effectiveness and business growth.

Here is a list of information you should know about your target audience for an effective B2B content marketing:

Industry and market trends impacting their business.
Company size and structure to tailor your approach.
Decision-makers’ roles and influence in purchase processes.
Business goals and objectives driving their strategies.
Key challenges and pain points they face.
Solutions they currently use and their satisfaction levels.
What they value most in vendor relationships (e.g., cost, quality, service).
Preferred channels for research and purchasing.
Buying cycle length and factors influencing their decisions.

Now that you have the enough information about your target audience, let’s delve into the second step for creating your content strategy.

Step 2: Set Clear Goals And Objectives

Your content strategy must necessarily be created basing on your business goals and objectives.

And there is no doubt that for a lucrative B2B business, the ultimate goal of content marketing should be to acquire more loyal customers and drive more sales and conversions.

However, this is just the broad objective.

Your content marketing goals should delve deeper, ranging from establishing brand awareness to engaging and educating loyal customers on the best practices for using your products.

Consider giving the highest priority to one of the following goals in your B2B content marketing strategy depending on the content marketing funnel stage your audience are in:

1. Establishing brand awareness:

If your brand is still unknown on the web and lacks an audience that recognizes its existence.

This makes your target audience aware of your brand should be your highest priority.

Establishing brand awareness can be done through many ways including…

Optimizing your website for SEO.
Becoming active on social media especially on LinkedIn
Becoming active on relevant forums (related to your niche) like those on Reddit and Quora, and the list goes on…

2. Generating leads (or lead generation):

If your brand already has a considerable online presence, and your audience is already aware of your B2B business activities, then your mission at this stage should be generating leads as much as possible.

This can be done through many approaches.

One of them is sharing general content that addresses your audience needs and pain points, and then initiating your product as the ultimate solution for that problem.

This process isn’t done in a single blog post!

In fact, you should keep sharing a lot of non-promotional content that addresses your customers pain points as much as possible.

This practice will help you to gain their trust, and only then you can promote your B2B products as a solution.

3. Driving Conversions:

I think it is clear, if your brand has acquired a considerable number of leads, your next goal should be driving sales by converting those leads into customers.

And this can be achieved through several methods, including…

Creating well-crafted landing pages for your products (services or software).
Sharing content that encompasses case studies, or targeting your leads with promotional content through email, paid ads, etc…

4. Enhancing loyalty and maximizing the customer life-time value (CLV):

If your B2B brand has recently acquired new customers, then your highest priority should not be to acquire more ones.

Instead, it should be to transform these recently acquired customers into not just paying customers but, more importantly, into ‘loyal’ customers.

This can be achieved by creating engaging and educational content that adds value for them.

Or by consistently nurturing them through many channels including email, social media posts, blog posts and more…

Note: Relying solely on content for maintaining and retaining your customers is obviously not enough.

Making your customers loyal for your brand encompasses many other elements including product development and updates, effective sales promotion strategies, and more…

Tip: Follow us on LinkedIn, where we share helpful and useful content on topics complementary to what we publish here, including general B2B insights and more.

Now that you determined the primary goal of your B2B content strategy, it is time for us to move to the third step for creating your B2B content strategy which is…

Step 3: Develop a Content Calendar

Content calendar is a schedule that content marketers use to plan, organize and manage the creation, publication and often distribution of their content.

But before I tell you how to create one, I want to emphasize the importance of it.

Content calendar is an indispensable element in your B2B content strategy.

Without it, you will end up like more than 75% of content creators who publish content randomly.

And this randomness is the factor number one that leads to their content marketing failure.

This because they either create content that doesn’t resonate with their audience at that moment, publish it in an inappropriate frequency, promote it through the wrong channels, or they stop publishing at all!

So, a content calendar will help you in scheduling your content and work so that you don’t go astray.

Content Calendar Components:

To be concise, a content calendar should include three essential components:

What content should be created.
When it should be published (frequency).
How it will be distributed (channels).

1. What Content Should be Created:

In your content calendar, the content you should create must be based on the goals and objectives you determined previously.

For example, if you want to make your target audience aware of your existence and your offers, then you should create helpful and educational content.

And if your audience already knows much about you but they are not interested in converting, then you must publish content like case studies, webinars, product comparisons, email content, etc…

However, your content calendar should include the type of content that will be published, the specific subjects your content will cover.

2. When it should be Published:

This component refers to the publication frequency, the frequency at which your content will be published.

For example, here in HubRefs, we prefer to share 2 blog posts and 2 to 3 social media posts a week.

However, the publication frequency depends on many factors, for example, if you publish a lot of content, but nobody knows about its existence, then you may want to lessen the publication frequency and focus more on promotion.

On the other hand, if your content is well-known and you have a big number of followers, then you opt to create more content on the condition that you can assure prioritizing quality over quantity.

However, the publication frequency depends primarily on your content marketing situation and you are the best one to decide which frequency rate you should opt for.

3. How it should be Distributed:

Once you create your content, you should know which channels you must use to publish it, and which content format you must leverage in order to distribute your content properly.

(We will delve deeper into how to know which channels and content format to use later in this article, so keep reading.)

Now, let’s move to fourth step for creating a complete B2B content marketing strategy which is…

Step 4: Conduct a Content Audit And a Competitive Analysis:

Once you start publishing content, it will be essential for you to review it in order to identify opportunities and gaps.

Along with analyzing the content of your competitors to identify their gaps and then leverage.

And so, in order to conduct an effective content audit and competitive analysis do the following:

1. Conducting a Content Audit:

To measure the effectiveness of your content you should put some metrics and then analyze your content basing on them.

Here are some metrics you must keep them into consideration while reviewing your content:

1. Traffic Metrics:

Page Views: The total number of views that your content receives.
Unique Visitors: The number of distinct individuals who view your content, highlighting its reach.
Traffic Sources: Where your visitors are coming from (e.g., organic search, social media, direct visits), which helps in understanding which channels are most effective.

2. Engagement Metrics:

Time on Page: The average amount of time visitors spend reading your content, indicating how engaging it is.
Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who leave after viewing just one page, which can suggest the content may not be meeting users’ expectations.
Comments and Shares: The number of comments on a blog post or shares on social media, reflecting direct user engagement and approval.

3. Conversion Metrics:

Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors who take a desired action (e.g., signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase) after viewing your content.
Lead Generation: The number of new leads generated from your content, useful for content aimed at driving business growth.

4. SEO Metrics:

Keyword Rankings: The position of your content in search engine results for specific keywords, indicating visibility.
Backlinks: The number of external sites linking back to your content, which can improve search engine rankings and increase credibility.

As for the SEO metrics, I want to add another one that’s linked to your content performance which is your site health.

That’s right, your content effectiveness and your site health are directly linked.

If your site is not well optimized for technical SEO, then your content might not be visible in the search engines results pages (SERPs).

Thereby, no matter how your content is effective, it won’t have any positive impact on your business.

In fact, it will be just a lost of time and resources.

2. Competitive Analysis:

Conducting a competitive analysis in terms of content marketing involves systematically evaluating your competitors’ content strategies to identify their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities for differentiation, and potential areas for improvement in your own strategy.

So, in order to do that you must first identify who are your competitors in terms of content.

This means that whether their businesses engage in the same activity as yours or not, if their content addresses the same needs as yours, they are considered competitors.

Second, identify their content’s gaps and weaknesses, and then make sure that your content outperforms theirs in their flawed areas.

Finally, you will have to repeat this process regularly, at least once a quart to make sure that your content is still competitive.

Steps 5: Determine The Content Formats You Are Going to Leverage

For a successful B2B content marketing strategy, you need to integrate different types of content formats such as blog posts, LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos and more…

Because limiting your presence to just one channel could result in missing many lead opportunities.

And your brand might not achieve any recognition, so, determining which content formats you are going to use should be considered essential.

Now, let’s explore some of the most important content formats and when each one of them must be used:

1. Blog Posts

Blog posts are foundational to B2B content marketing strategies.

They’re important, allowing businesses to establish thought leadership, share industry insights, and address common customer questions.

Format: Your content format should be long and well-detailed (between 2000 to 7000 words), and you should use multimedia elements to enhance engagement.
Goals: Drive website traffic, improve SEO rankings, and generate leads.
Best Practices: Incorporate SEO strategies including On-Page and Off-Page SEO, in addition to technical SEO to improve visibility and user experience.

2. LinkedIn Posts

LinkedIn is a powerhouse for B2B marketing, offering a platform to connect with professionals and industry leaders.

Format: LinkedIn posts should be concise, typically under 150 words, while articles can be more detailed, ranging from 500 to 2000 words.
Goals: Build brand authority, nurture professional relationships, and lead generation.
Best Practices: Share industry news, company updates, and professional insights. Engaging with comments and leveraging LinkedIn articles can also enhance visibility and engagement.

3. Videos

Video content can significantly increase engagement and information retention rates.

From explainer videos to customer testimonials, videos can convey complex information in an easily digestible format.

Format: Keep videos concise, ranging from 5 to 20 minutes maximum, especially if the information shared is purely related to the niche industry (this means that the content doesn’t contain any entertainment elements).
Goals: Increase engagement, explain complex products or services, and enhance brand recall.
Best Practices: Use captions for accessibility and ensure high production quality. Host videos on platforms like YouTube to improve discoverability.

4. Email Newsletters

Email newsletters are a direct line to your audience, allowing for personalized content distribution.

Format: Keep your emails concise, ensure that images include alt texts, and always make sure your calls-to-actions (CTAs) are highlighted in the email and appear in the first lines of your copy.
Goals: Nurture leads, keep your brand top-of-mind, and promote content or events.

Best Practices: Segment your email list to tailor content to different audience needs, spend time creating an attractive and well-crafted subject line, and include only ‘one’ clear CTA (not two nor three, only one CTA per email !)

5. Case Studies and Whitepapers

Case studies and whitepapers are essential for demonstrating expertise, providing in-depth analysis, and showcasing real-world applications of products or services.

Format: Ensure conciseness and clarity. Design a professional layout that aligns with your brand, this includes using your brand’s color scheme, fonts, and logo.
Goals: Establish thought leadership, generate leads, and support sales efforts.
Best Practices: Use real data and customer testimonials in case studies. For whitepapers, focus on providing thorough research and actionable insights.

However, the details provided about each content format are just an overview.

This is why I invite you to subscribe to the HubRefs newsletter, where we consistently share (at least once every two weeks) helpful and insightful approaches tailored specifically for B2B businesses.

Now that you know some of the most important content formats, let’s move to next step which is…

Step 6: Plan Strategically Your Content Promotion:

Planning the way you are going to promote your content is indeed the most important step alongside determining which content are you going to create.

This step involves many elements and tasks that you should perform in order to promote your content effectively.

Here’s how to effectively craft a strategy for your content promotion:

1. Review Your target Audience characteristics:

You have already analyzed your target audience and you know much useful data and information about them.

Now, what I want you to do now is focusing only on two pieces of information which are:

The industry of your target audience, their job role, and the stage of the funnel they are in (awareness, consideration, decision).
Channels where your audience spends their time online. LinkedIn and B2B forums, for example, are powerful channels for B2B content promotion.

Understanding your target audience industry, job role and the stage of the funnel they are in helps you to know what content you should create.

For example, if you have a B2B product that solves a specific problem your audience have, and they’re not aware of the problem, your content should not be promotional at all.

Instead, you need to first create content that makes people aware of the problem.

This can be achieved by highlighting the issue and sharing it on your social media accounts, blogs, and through YouTube.

Once, your audience becomes aware of the problem, then you can start creating a promotional content.

2. Include Social Media In Your Content Strategy

Social media is the simplest and easiest way to make your content visible to your audience.

And in order to promote your B2B content on social media, consider the following:

LinkedIn: Share articles, participate in discussions, use hashtags, and engage with LinkedIn groups to reach professionals and decision-makers. Then, continue building your reputation and credibility as a thought leader in your industry.
Twitter: Engage in industry conversations and use relevant hashtags to increase visibility.
Facebook and Instagram: While more B2C-focused, these platforms can still be valuable for certain B2B sectors, especially with targeted advertising.

3. Email Marketing

Email marketing is an essential component of B2B content promotion, offering a direct and personalized channel to reach and engage your target audience.

For B2B companies, where the sales cycle is longer and involves multiple stakeholders, email marketing can nurture leads, build relationships, and ultimately increase your content reach and enhance its impact.

Reach: Email marketing allows you to reach your audience (email accounts you have acquired organically) directly, often without problems, and your content will be read if you follow email content best practices.
Impact: Email marketing allows you to tailor your content for every segment, and make variables (like *|first name|*) for every email account in your list, and this makes your content more impactful and effective.

4. SEO and Blogging

If you are planning to start optimizing your blog posts for SEO to promote them and increase their visibility (and it is a must), you must consider learning the SEO basics and best practices, or hire an SEO expert.

Because no matter how your content is helpful and engaging, it will never be visible to your audience if you don’t optimize it for SEO.

5. Paid Advertising:

Integrating paid advertising in your B2B content marketing strategy is a good practice if you want your content to be visible and reach your audience faster.

However, before you launch your paid advertising campaign, you should first choose wisely which channels you’re going to use.

And you should also decide on which message will you deliver (informational, promotional…).

And I think you will not find any problem with this since you have already reviewed your target audience characteristics and you know the stage of the funnel they are in and where they spend their time the most.

So, consider the following practices to enhance your paid advertising effectiveness in the most effective B2B channels:

1. LinkedIn Ads:

Here are the best practices for promoting your content on LinkedIn through paid advertising:

Use LinkedIn’s detailed targeting options to reach the audience most likely to engage with your content. Target by job title, industry, professional interests, and other relevant criteria to ensure your content reaches the right professionals.
Consider Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategies for targeting specific companies or decision-makers.
Select the appropriate ad format like sponsored content ( ideal for directly appearing in the feed), or sponsored InMail.
For content that aims to generate leads, such as white papers or webinars, leverage LinkedIn’s Lead Gen Forms. These forms pre-populate with a user’s LinkedIn profile data, making it easy for them to sign up for your offer.

2. Google Ads

Here are the best practices for promoting your content (blog posts) through paid advertising (Google ads).

For blog post promotion, consider using Search Campaigns to appear in search results for relevant queries or Display Campaigns to reach audiences browsing websites in the Google Display Network (GDN).
Conduct thorough keyword research to identify terms your target audience is searching for related to your blog content.
Use a mix of broad and long-tail keywords to balance reach and specificity. Incorporate these keywords naturally into your ad copy and landing pages.
Write a compelling meta description to draw the attention and interest of users.

These were my pieces of advice for promoting your content.

Now, let’s move to the last step for creating your content marketing strategy which is…

Step 7: Set KPIs for Measuring Your Content Performance:

Many B2B content marketers dismiss the importance of measuring and analyzing the performance of their content marketing efforts (and I was no different).

So, before I tell you how to measure and analyze your content strategy performance, I think I should first convince you of the benefits of this practice.

Here is a list of some benefits you can get if you commit to this practice:

Insights into Preferences: Analysis helps you understand what types of content resonate most with your target audience, including topics, formats, and channels.
Strategic Adjustments: Data-driven insights allow you to refine your content strategy, focusing on what works best and phasing out less effective tactics.
Search Visibility: Analyzing which content ranks well on search engines can inform your SEO strategy, helping you to produce more content that is likely to perform well in search results.
Data-Driven Decisions: With concrete performance data, you can make informed decisions about where to focus your efforts, rather than relying on guesswork or intuition.
Resource Allocation: Understanding content performance helps you allocate resources (time, budget, personnel) more effectively to the areas that will generate the most impact. And the list goes on…

These benefits should be enough to emphasize the importance of this practice.

Now, let’s find out the steps you should follow to measure and analyze your B2B content marketing performance.

1. Review Your Goals

Start by reviewing your content marketing goals. Knowing what you wanted to achieve (e.g., enhancing brand awareness, lead generation, sales, customer engagement) will help you determine which key performance indicators (KPIs) to focus on.

2. Identify Relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Select KPIs that are directly tied to your content marketing goals. For instance:

For Brand Awareness: Website traffic, page views, social shares, and time spent on page.
For Engagement: Comments, likes, shares, and average session duration.
For Lead Generation: Conversion rates, number of leads generated, and cost per lead.
For Sales: Revenue attributed to content marketing, sales conversion rates, and average order value.
For Customer Retention: Repeat visits, subscription renewals, and customer lifetime value (CLV).

3. Use the Right Tools

Leverage analytics tools to track and measure your KPIs. Some essential tools include:

Google Analytics for website and content performance.
Social Media Analytics (native platform analytics or third-party tools) for engagement and reach on social platforms.
Email Marketing Software for email campaign performance, including open rates and click-through rates.
CRM Software for tracking leads, conversions, and sales metrics.
SEO Tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs for keyword rankings and backlink analysis.

4. Collect and Analyze Data

Regularly collect data for each KPI and use analytical methods to interpret the results.

Then look for trends, patterns, and insights that can inform your content strategy.

For example, if certain types of content consistently generate high engagement, consider producing more content in that format or on those topics.

5. Benchmark and Compare

Set benchmarks for your KPIs based on industry standards, historical data, or specific targets.

For example you might want to set the following benchmark (8% conversion rate).

Then compare your performance against these benchmarks to assess progress.

Also, consider competitive benchmarking to understand how your content performance stacks up against competitors.

6. Report and Communicate Findings

Create reports that summarize your findings, highlighting successes and areas for improvement.

Communicate these results with stakeholders to inform decision-making and strategy adjustments.

And yes, measuring and analyzing content performance was the last step for creating a well-planned B2B content marketing strategy.

Wrapping Up:

To wrap up, having a well-planned B2B content marketing strategy is crucial for B2B businesses especially in today’s days when content is considered as a king.

So, if you want to make your B2B business visible in search engines and social media, creating a content strategy is the best practice you could ever do.

And creating one encompasses many steps that he have covered in this post, and they must be done without exception.

However, our guide to B2B content marketing strategy best practices ends here.

I hope this was helpful for all of you dear B2B marketers or entrepreneurs. If you liked the content, don’t forget to share it with people you know that you know they might get advantage of it…

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