It’s the time for B2B companies to get bigger and more successful with the help of ecommerce websites. B2B startups have a lot on their plates. A solid marketing strategy framework is what I consider a must-have for B2B startups.

The framework is a guideline that will help you manage your payments and achieve positive results. This blog will show you how to create your own B2B framework that redirects your business towards profit segments, your ideal customers profile, and focuses on the right market to attract more leads. 

Let’s get started.

What is B2B Marketing?

B2B Marketing is a form of business marketing that serves to meet the needs and wants of other businesses. These firms are usually driven by domestic production. High-quality leads are the main goal of business marketing. This is difficult when you have limited resources and less appealing products to offer.

Startups need to be able to market B2B

Before we get to the main point of this blog, it is important that you take a moment back and examine the trends and challenges in the current B2B Marketing Trend. Wholesale marketing is different from retail marketing. It serves only a select group of clients and executives who are experts in negotiating. B2B companies often face many different issues than the retail industry.

Hubspot created a statistical report that highlighted the challenges facing businesses in 2019. It includes a chart below. B2B companies face the greatest challenge in generating leads and traffic, and ensuring that marketing activities have a return on investment.

Startups can create a strategy to address specific issues and improve their system starting from the beginning by analyzing the report. The new firms that provide excellent customer service will be able to improve the satisfaction of B2B customers in the buying process.

How to market B2B to startups

It is important to have a strategy in place before you go on the battlefield. A poorly planned strategy can cause a company to lose market share to other companies. To market your business better, you need a backbone for a B2B strategy.

You must first structure your marketing plan. This usually consists of five main criteria.

• Visualize your goals (e.g., penetrate the online market, increase sales by 40 percent, etc.).

• In the process, set milestones for shorter phrases

• Concentrate on a small market segment

• Prioritize the marketing tool that will be used to implement the strategy

• Estimate resources (team, budget, etc. )

Your strategy should also include:

• Deadline

• Budget

• Execution and Evaluation

• DRI (Directly Responsible Individual).

• Outcome expected

Step 1: Perform research

Businesses must list all required fields in order to develop a B2B marketing strategy. Once the framework is complete, it’s time to tailor the backbone so that it can be integrated into your business. It is necessary to conduct extensive research to gather the following:

Find a market segment by targeting customers’ data

It is important for businesses to identify the buyers and deciders who will purchase your product from their clients. How can you accomplish this? Let me give you some ideas! It is difficult to track customer behavior because of the constantly changing internet industry. With ease, the system will track every movement, click, and touch. You can also save your time on site without any problems. This valuable data will come in handy when you analyze and research it in depth. The support tools available on websites and other platforms can help you gather this information. This platform allows you to quickly and easily gather the information that you need.

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is a system that helps to manage customer relationships and recruits. This allows businesses to be successful. CRM is a central database that allows customers to access their information, record service issues and plan marketing campaigns. CRM allows every employee at your company to access valuable information about customer interactions.

Mageplaza offers a useful Zoho CRM extension for B2B businesses that use Magento. This extension can sync Magento data including Subscribers, Customers, Sales, and Invoice. It allows the corporation to maintain prospects and organize its business better.

CRM specialized can be used to help you track revenue, manage business sales, and reduce churn. So that they can tailor the requirements of their prospects, firms must evaluate their needs. You can choose to perform some functions that are specific to your business. You can conduct research on clients for niche businesses such as B2B.

LinkedIn is another platform that businesses can use to advertise. However, B2B topics are not very popular on social media. It is a great channel for companies to participate in the marketing plan. LinkedIn is a great social platform for B2B companies to increase leads and traffic.

According to research by LinkedIn this social site generates approximately 64% visits from social media channels to firm websites. A majority of B2B marketers believe that LinkedIn is the best way to win leads.

For your market segment, create an ICP

ICP stands for Ideal Customer Profile. It helps you find the right lead that will be a key customer. It is not the same as a Simple Customer Profile. This common misconception can lead to the firm not using all of the information they have to create an average persona. Firms might try to appeal to everyone who will buy their products.

You can enjoy many benefits when the firm applies an ICP such as:

• Personalizing marketing materials such as pages, proposals and ads.

• Instead of relying on your intuition, find the right channels for lead generation.

• Assess the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns using appropriate marketing criteria

This guide will help you understand the process of creating an ICP if you don’t know how to do it.

• Choose one segment of the market

• Randomly select ten customers from the group

• Include the profile template for the ideal customer

• Social media data can be used to research the client you have selected

• Continue the survey with customers

• From your data, create the final profile of ideal customers

Collecting customer information is the most basic and easiest. This includes sex, age (age, location), industry, job role, and even sex. LinkedIn can provide general profile information for the researcher.

For best results, it is important to prepare the question throughout.

• Why should you choose our product over other products? 

• What are your current challenges?

• What is the biggest pain point you have that our product can solve?

• What if your problem cannot be solved?

• Where can you find out more about our products?

• Which function do you enjoy most when using our products?

• Are you satisfied with the product (quality, support, quality, etc.)? What areas could you improve upon?

• Are there any features that you would like to see in our product?

• Would you be willing to recommend our company?

• Which social media platform do you prefer to frequently interact with?

• Are you following blogs, websites, or influencers in your industry?

• Which stakeholder is most influential in your company?

Insight data can also be used to collect additional data such as:

• Gather information from customers who share content and profiles. This will allow you to continue guest posting and collaboration.

• What influencers do they currently interact with? This information will help businesses decide with which influencers to build relationships.

• What communities are your prospects involved in? These communities will help you to use them for content distribution, co-marketing, and contribution.

The technical advancement has made it much easier to collect customer information for B2B eCommerce businesses. Mageplaza has developed the Customer attributes extension to allow customers to provide additional information through the account page or registration process.

Magento 2 Customer Attributes Extension

Clear insight into the shopping habits and shopping behavior of customers with more attributes 

You can also collect information during checkout using the Order attributes extension. This module’s core function is to add additional attributes to any position in order to obtain data about orders and collect valuable customer information.

Magento 2 Order Attributes Extension

Get a clear view of customer shopping habits and shopping behavior with your checkout page 

Analyze your competition

It is important to regularly research competitors in order to keep an eye on their marketing strategies. There are many growth hacks, tools and channels available for marketing, such as SEO, Facebook advertising, etc. It is smart to study the marketing strategies of your competitors in order to avoid spending too much on experimentation. You will need to determine the most effective and practical way to market your product. However, there are better options based on external factors. This will help you determine which marketing channel to focus on:

• Ask your core customers

• Pay attention to your competitors

Online tools such as Ahrefs, BussSumo and SimilarWeb can provide valuable information. This will allow you to see the traffic patterns of your competitors. This will allow you to analyze the data and determine which channel is best for your business.

Owners should also make an effort to understand the sales process, strengths, weaknesses, USP (unique selling proposition), and other details.

Step 2: Create your USP

Your unique selling point (USP) is what makes you stand out from your competitors and how you can help your prospects. The five steps that will help you create your USP are:

• Ask your customers to contact you and ask them about the special features that make your products stand out.

• Make a list of the top features you offer and rank them according to customer preference.

• Compare the top 3 features with those of your three top competitors.

• List the features that are being evaluated more highly than your competitor.

• USP will be created using the information above. It will focus on factors such as impact, feature, need, target audience, etc.

B2B marketers will need to summarize it. Your core client will be the most important feature. These are just four ideas:

• Result + important feature + guarantee

• Important feature + Need

• Result + target audience + guarantee

• Unique feature

Step 3: Set goal

Yogi Beard said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you will end-up somewhere else.” Setting realistic goals will help you focus your business, make better marketing investments, and take advantage of opportunities.

Your business core value will be able to achieve the goals based on the key data that you have gathered from the previous phrase. Revenue goals are a must-have goal for your company. This requires detailed estimation. The goal must also be achievable. It should also be possible to break it down into smaller phrases that attach to the key elements of your strategy.

Step 4: Calculate your budget

The Content Marketing Institute forecasts that the B2B content market will grow in 2019. The bar chart below shows that around 50% of marketers expect to see an increase in their marketing budgets for 2019.

The marketing department should invest more in inbound marketing. Marketing professionals are more likely to invest in audio and visual content.

The distribution of the marketing budget is crucial, especially for startups in B2B. If your budget is small, it’s important to use it properly based on previous research about customers and competitors. Alex says that startups under five years old should invest 12-20% in marketing revenue.

If you have a tight budget you will need to list all expenses that your business must incur, not just the money you wish to spend. Here are some ideas to help you list your expenses.

• Marketing costs are fixed annually

• Branding

• Paid advertising

• Public relations

• Websites design

• Manage websites

• SEO

• Writing content

• Event

This expense should be made so that the company can calculate the capital needed to purchase other items.

Based on current trends, I recommend that you focus your budget on a few areas. Digital marketing is the first area you should be focusing on right now. According to Forrester’s research, nearly half of B2B marketing budgets went into online marketing. This percentage is expected to rise from 42% to 45 percent in 2020. The budget increase will be used to produce video and increase social media interaction.

Demand generation is another way to increase interest and awareness in your brand solution. In 2020 and 2021, the solution will increase demand generation funding.

The store should also allocate some budget for evaluating the marketing program. The online analytics, which calculates click-through and conversion rates, will help you determine the impact of your marketing program on the market. You will get professional insight to help you design a better marketing campaign.

Marketing plan that increases the chances of success

You can increase your success chances by including the focus areas and adding detailed activities with tight deadlines to each zone.

You may still be unsure what a focus zone is. I’ll give you some examples. Lead generation This type of focus group will allow you to organize different marketing activities based on each segment.

• Lead nurturing: Activities to increase the likelihood of a closed deal.

• Trade Marketing: Activities that encourage sales with customers you know

• PR: Strategies to increase mention by influencers and the media

• Product: Add new product analysis tactics

• Partnership: Strategies to create partnerships

Here are some examples of business marketing strategies

Many businesses use Inbound Marketing at the start of their business. Graphcore is one of these. This firm was established in 2016 and is one of the most successful startups that uses content marketing well. They are the semiconductor company that wants to change the way AI works at a subtracted level. They are a green entrepreneur and must compete with Thinci, which has an advanced five years of experience.

They have created a series of blog posts that focus on AI and machine intelligence to position themselves as a serious competitor. Despite their unsteady posting schedule, their content writers are Graphcore experts and members at the top of the team. This is why the information provided to the readers is so valuable.

Their site interface design is clean and simple, which allows customers to focus on the information rather than being distracted by graphics effects.

Summary

Now all that’s left is your determination and will to turn your marketing plan into a reality.

Marketing is crucial for B2B startups, especially if you don’t have a close relationship with certain industries. Marketing can help you establish new relationships with potential clients for your company.

You should create a plan for your marketing activities. It will help you stay on track. The estimated marketing budget and resources can be easily compared to the actual investment, allowing you to create a detailed marketing plan with tight budget control.