What is Business Marketing?

Business marketing, also known as business-to-business (B2B) marketing, is when a business markets its products or services to another business. The businesses that purchase these products may use them in manufacturing, resell them or use them for other purposes.

Business marketing differs from consumer marketing, or business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, which is defined as the attempt to sell products or services to potential customers.

Business Marketing VS. Consumer Marketing

Before You Start Business Marketing…

1. Define your brand identity

To execute any marketing strategy, you need to have developed a brand identity. This includes: a logo, brand colours/fonts, and a good understanding of your brand. Who are you? What do you hope to achieve with your brand? How? When? Where? These are the important questions you need to ask yourself, as you will need to communicate these answers to potential clients. Writing a brand positioning statement will help you clarify your brand identity and start business marketing on the right foot.

2. Identify your target audience

It is important for you to identify your target audience so you can be aware of their habits, goals and buying behaviour. This will allow you to cater your marketing strategy to target them most effectively. You can use Google and social media analytics to do this if you already have a digital marketing strategy in place. If you do not, websites like AnswerThePublic or survey tools like SurveyMonkey can help.

3. Run a competitive analysis

A competitive analysis is when you look at the market, identify which other companies have the same target audience or goals, and what they are doing that is working for them. Looking at their social media and website, which platforms they use, how much engagement they have on posts, what offers and tactics they may be using are all useful things to study in a competitive analysis. Use what they do as inspiration to help you improve your strategy.

Business Marketing Strategies

Now you have defined your brand identity, target audience, and scoped out the market for inspiration, it is time to think about your strategy. To start business marketing successfully, your strategy must involve a combination of email, digital and content marketing.

Email Marketing

In a B2B strategy, email marketing is the sending of email campaigns to businesses, targeting them through their work email. It is important to speak about your brand in the campaign to inform the readers about who you are are what you do (you can include your brand positioning statement). Depending on different goals you may have, you can structure an email campaign in different ways and analyse their success through different key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you can achieve it by sending the email campaign out to a large number of businesses and use email traffic as your KPIs.

Read more about how you can write an engaging email campaign to increase your revenue here.

Digital Marketing

In the most simplest of terms, digital marketing is the act of having a digital presence through which you can market your business. It is essential for every business to have a website and social media accounts. Start with at least 1 or 2 social media accounts, like Instagram and Facebook and use them to grow awareness and spark interest in your business. When combined with a website or blog, social media is a way to convert your followers into customers. Make sure your social media and website reflect your brand identity, and are straightforward enough for users to browse and quickly find information about your business and your contact details.

Your website also needs to be discoverable, though. You can achieve this by implementing SEO techniques. These include: using keywords, writing alt text and meta descriptions, and having a fast-loading site.

Content Marketing

Content marketing and digital marketing go hand in hand. It is the distribution of content to increase brand awareness, leads, sales and other goals. Types of content that are useful for business marketing are: email newsletters, images posted onto platforms your target audience may use eg. LinkedIn, informative guides and blog posts, and video content.

Try out a few different forms of content and analyse their performance to figure out what is best for your brand and target audience. It is integral that you keep carrying out target research and competitive analysis’ on a regular basis to help you.

Summary

Business marketing (B2B) is the marketing of products or services from one business to another. Before embarking on a B2B journey, you must define your brand identity and target audience, and carry out a competitive analysis. Once you have these factors in place, you can execute a combination of different business marketing strategies, such as email, digital and content marketing, for the best results.

To learn more about how Media Chameleon can help with your business marketing, email us: contact@mediachameleon.co.uk