3 Things You Need to Build the Ideal B2B Marketing Strategy

Whenever clients ask me about designing a marketing strategy for a business-to-business pathway (B2B),there are two things that matter most. First is an understanding of the kind of marketing strategy to use, namely one based on nurture marketing. Second, you’ll need to know how to build a funnel that works for your small business.

What a Sales Funnel Does

A sales funnel allows for an understanding of the route that people go through in order to go from the connection stage to the conclusion.

First starts awareness, where you make your small business known to a potential client. Then comes consideration, where your potential clients start to learn about your small business.

Conversion and loyalty follow, with the potential business you speak to learning that more about the benefits of your company and the services you offer.

Finally, you get your small business relationship to the mutual advocacy phase, where they become one of the means of marketing that you possess.

What Is Nurture Marketing and How Can it Benefit My B2B Strategy?

Nurture marketing is a concept based on communicating with potential leads in order to make them convert into clients. Ellen Gomes at Convince & Convert spoke about effective lead nurturing well in an article, but that has more to do with B2C (business to customer) sales. Your strategy needs to be a bit different for B2Bmarketing.

A Nurture Marketing Funnel

A marketing funnel involves getting people from an introduction to your brand all the way to a sale or a deal, in a B2B strategy. This involves three steps.

1.      Generation – discovering the kinds of leads your B2B company needs

2.      Nurturing – communication with the lead, and constant feedback

3.      Conversion –Turning your lead into an ally.

Three Steps to Build a B2B Marketing Strategy

Here are our two tips for your B2B marketing strategy:

1. The traditional marketing funnel has outlived its usefulness. In truth, sales B2B sales were never strictly linear in the first place, but now, technology has magnified this effect. Now it's the norm versus the deviation.
2. Time to think about the customer journey: It's more helpful to think of the sales process as a journey that a customer takes from the time of first awareness to the final decision point. There are multiple meanders on the path, where he or she could get side tracked.
3. Our job is to keep them on course: We can't force them to go one way or the other, but we can and should have multiple touch points so they see us advisors helping the navigate their path to a final solution. Content marketing is a great way to make that happen.