Compared to their B2C counterparts, B2B marketers today often grapple with longer, more complex sales cycles involving multiple decision-makers. Unlike consumer-focused marketing, which can leverage emotional appeals and drive impulse purchases, B2B strategies must emphasize rational benefits, ROI and long-term value to sway corporate buyers.
Moreover, B2B marketing has undergone a dramatic transformation in the past decade, shifting from traditional outbound tactics to a more digital, data-driven approach targeting smaller, more specialized audiences who require highly tailored, highly personalized content and engagement. Below, 15 members of Forbes Agency Council explore unique challenges B2B marketers face and how they can overcome them to build long-lasting relationships with their customers.
1. Hire Writers With Industry Experience
In highly specialized B2B verticals, the terminology of the business is equally specialized. Even when writing in a business-to-human voice, there are acronyms and technical terms writers need to know to strike the right tone. For agencies creating content on behalf of technical experts, it is essential to have writers who speak the language of the industry. There is no substitute for experience. - Margy Sweeney, Akrete
2. Create Value Propositions For Several Audiences
B2B marketers need to remember that there may be several audiences for their messages—the product user, the influencer and the approver—and create specific value propositions for each. Use cases, testimonials, success stories and ROI data need to be available to support each of these audiences. - Eyal Danon, Ignite Advisory Group
3. Bridge The Trust Gap With Partner Marketing
B2B marketers need to build trust—more so than B2C marketers do—to grow relationships and drive results in today’s evolving marketplace. As a result, B2B marketers are turning to partnership marketing to help bridge that gap. With growing competition, partnering with other brands can expand reach, enhance credibility and reduce costs. - Robin Clayton, Fifty-Five
MORE FOR YOU
4. Present Knowledge Your Ideal Buyer Values
Incentivizing action is taken to motivate a highly specific group of individuals who share the same challenges, goals or needs. Discounts rarely inspire conversions, so the B2B marketer must fully understand their ideal buyer’s needs and present them with valuable knowledge to inspire a conversion. - Andy Etemadi, EYEMAGINE
Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?
5. Drip Educational Content To Multiple Stakeholders
One unique challenge B2B marketing presents is that the consumer journey is longer and involves more decision-makers compared to the buyer’s journey for a B2C product. If you are selling a T-shirt, one good ad can convince people to make a purchase. However, if you’re selling a complex piece of software, you need to create a wide array of educational content, stagger its distribution over time, and appeal to multiple stakeholders. - Erik Lehmann, Spekk
6. Speak In The Way Your Audience Does
B2B marketers face the challenge of balancing insider terminology and plain language anyone could understand when communicating about their products. We call the overuse of insider terminology “the curse of knowledge.” B2B marketers live with their product every day and can quickly forget to speak in the way their audience does, which leads to confused potential customers. - Dustin Schultz, Union
7. Leverage Lead Scoring And CPQ Knowledge
B2B marketing’s unique challenge is mastering the account-based experience, which is distinct from customer relationship management but leverages similar tools. Effective lead scoring and CPQ knowledge are vital for navigating complex buying cycles, building trust and aligning multiple stakeholders. It requires specialized strategies to ensure targeted engagement and facilitate seamless decision-making processes across organizations. - Merag Shahzad
8. Tailor Precise Approaches To Target Specific Roles
Marketing to B2B buyers poses a greater challenge compared to B2C marketing. In B2C, you can reach consumers across a variety of platforms, leveraging broad-based strategies to capture attention. However, targeting a specific role, such as the vice president of marketing for a health tech company, requires a more precise and tailored approach. - Danielle Sabrina, Society22 PR
9. Show Your People In Leadership And In Action
B2B marketers rarely, if ever, get the opportunity to ride trends or cash in on the “cool factor” of their product. This requires them to work harder at being more personable and showing company value on top of product value. The strategy is to be personable. A key tactic is showing more of your people—in leadership and in action. B2B customers need to see this. - A. Lee Judge, Content Monsta
10. Leverage SEO For Remarketing And Adding Value
B2B requires a more holistic campaign approach compared to direct B2C sales. One strategy is to use SEO to drive traffic to a blog post on a specific topic. You can then create an audience you can remarket to, but instead of sending them an offer, you target them with additional content about the topic—such as a case study or a calculator, for example. Only after providing additional value do you send them an offer. - Toren Ajk, TAC Marketing Group
11. Address Pain Points In Memorable Ways
It’s a misconception that B2B requires a different approach than B2C. To inspire action in humans, you must address their emotions, needs and pain points. B2B benefits greatly from emotional appeals and memorable (entertaining) brand experiences. Humans are drawn toward relatable and engaging content that resonates on a personal level. Look at Slack, Intel, John Deere and Mailchimp—they all understand that. - Shanna Apitz, Hunt Adkins
12. Do A Lot Of Research On Your Targets
Needing to attract the attention of the right person within the organization makes B2B marketing trickier than B2C marketing in several ways. With B2B marketing, you need to do significantly more research on your targets to ensure not only that they are a good fit for your products or services, but also that your marketing materials are reaching a decision-maker and not getting stuck in the front office. - Evan Nison, NisonCo
13. Be Consistent
Often, B2B marketing comes down to numbers. Businesses want things cheap, but they still want quality. They also want consistency. If you can guarantee that you will be available for them whenever they need it, a business might overlook some other advantages your competitors might have. The last thing a business wants is for another company to cost them revenue, and consistency prevents that. - Jason Hall, FiveChannels Marketing
14. Message Each Member Of The Buying Committee
The B2B purchasing process relies on the buying committee, multiple stakeholders, company cycles, operational timelines, budgeting constraints, strategic shifts and potential budget cuts. Therefore, a B2B communication strategy should effectively deliver the product-benefits message to each stakeholder of the buying committee, with consideration given to the company’s operations cycles. - Oksana Matviichuk, OM Strategic Forecasting
15. Adapt Your ‘Brand’ To The Modern Landscape
B2B organizations often misjudge the value of their “brand”—what their customers are saying about them when they aren’t present. The folks who are making buying decisions across all industries care about what companies stand for. The landscape is changing, and having a poorly functioning website, no social media presence and no marketing team will hurt brands that don’t adapt. - Nina Ojeda, Good Creative
