6 Time-Tested B2B Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Business

Your marketing strategy is the blueprint that shapes the future of your business—whether you stagnate or achieve 10X growth.

The right strategy will consistently bring quality leads into your pipeline. However, coming across such a strategy is easier said than done.

But don’t worry, you are not alone in this!

In my decade-long journey as a marketer, and now as the CMO of a successful SaaS company, I’ve faced the challenges and seen firsthand what the market and buyers can throw your way.

To help you navigate these challenges, I wrote this guide on “6 Time-Tested B2B Marketing Strategies.”

I have packed it with insights, tips, and all that I have learned, so let’s dive in and find the right strategy for your business.

Also Read: What is B2B Sales? Process, Techniques, Examples, and More

B2B Marketing Strategies: Table of Contents

• What Is B2B Marketing, and How Is It Different From B2C Marketing?
• The 6 Marketing Strategies for Rapid Business Growth
• 5 Must-Have Tools for B2B Marketing
• Achieve Consistent Business Growth With the Right B2B Marketing Strategy
• B2B Marketing Strategies: FAQs

What Is B2B Marketing, and How Is It Different From B2C Marketing?

To put it simply, B2B marketing involves the strategies and activities you use to promote your product or service to other businesses.

Unlike B2C marketing, where you target individual customers, in B2B marketing, your focus is on convincing key decision-makers of other organizations.

Your aim: to understand the needs of your target market and position your product/service as the best solution to their current or future challenges.

Let me break down the three core differences between B2B and B2C marketing plans.

1. Decision Markers and User Personas
2. Must Prove Return On Investment (ROI)
3. Longer Buying Cycles

1. Decision Markers and User Personas

In B2B markets, the decision-makers are often different from the end users.

For instance, the executive who will green-light the purchase of your B2B product will not be the one using it. 

So, B2B marketing is driven by different buyer personas and user personas: individuals who will approve of your product and those who will actually use it.

2. Must Prove Return On Investment (ROI)

As we have seen, B2B marketing aims to reach two different audiences: the end users and the decision-makers.

To appeal to the decision-makers, your B2B marketing efforts must prove the ROI of your product or service. 

For instance, it’s not enough to tell a company that your business communication software will foster smoother collaboration – you must also communicate its impact on the organization’s ROI. 

3. Longer Buying Cycles

On average, 89% of B2B researchers look at at least 12 options before visiting a specific brand’s website.

Thus, a B2B buying cycle is a long-winded process. After all, businesses look for product suppliers or service providers that are trustworthy and reliable in the long run.

Meanwhile, a B2C marketing exchange is about satisfying an immediate or intermediate need. 

So, in summary, B2B marketing is different from B2C marketing in three crucial respects: 

• It aims to reach specific buyer personas in prospective organizations, 
• It requires you to prove an increase in ROI.
• It is the opening key to a long symbiotic relationship. 

The 6 Marketing Strategies for Rapid Business Growth 

An average B2B enterprise spends 8.7% of its budget on marketing. But, more than 70% of its revenue will be generated as a result of its success. 

So, the marketing strategy or strategies you choose to implement in your company should help increase sales and provide a high ROI.

Let’s examine different B2B marketing strategies you can adopt for increased growth.

1. Cold Email Marketing
2. Content Marketing
3. Social Selling
4. Account-Based Marketing
5. Go-To-Market Strategy
6. Full Funnel Strategy

1. Cold Email Marketing (Can Achieve 4400% ROI)

A cold email is a personalized message you send to a specific person in an organization with whom you have no prior contact.

The aim of a cold email is to initiate a conversation with the aim of converting a prospect into a client. 

On average, cold emails consist of 70-125 words and can drive marketing ROI upwards of 4400%! 

So, if you’re looking for a high-ROI B2B marketing plan to communicate a professional offer with a personal touch, then cold emailing can be quite effective.

Why Cold Email Marketing Should Be a Part of Your B2B Marketing Plan?

I’ll share 5 points and prove why you should definitely consider cold email marketing in your B2B marketing strategy plan:

1. Cost-Effectiveness and High ROI
2. Hyper-Personalization
3. Can Be Automated
4. Seamless Scalability
5. Offers Valuable Insights into Client Behavior

1. Cost-Effectiveness and High ROI

One major constraint of B2B marketing is that it requires considerable financial resources and commitment.

But that’s not the case with cold email marketing!

You can easily reach many B2B decision-makers without spending a lot of money or resources.

So, if you’re on a budget and want to generate a high return on your investment, you can consider cold email marketing.

2. Hyper-Personalization

A simple and easy way to stand apart from your competition is by showing your prospects you genuinely care about them and their problems.

You can easily do this by personalizing your emails and making them relevant to the pain points that they care about.

Moreover, you can use email personalization tools to personalize your cold marketing emails quickly and at scale.

3. Can Be Automated

The one problem with cold emails is that they can be quite a hassle to manage manually, especially when reaching out to multiple people.

So, you’ll need to hire a lot of resources to handle sending large volumes of emails.

Alternatively, you can get cold email software for a fraction of the cost to completely automate sending emails and simplify managing replies.

4. Seamless Scalability

As your cold emails can be automated with the help of a tool, does that mean you can blast hundreds or thousands of emails at once?

No, you shouldn’t do it, as email service providers (ESPs) will flag your emails as spam, and ultimately, your email account will be blocked.

But there is a workaround where you can even send 10,000 emails in a day.

You can do this by purchasing multiple domains and email accounts to help scale your outreach efforts.

Yes, you’ll have to invest some money, but you will be ultimately rewarded for your efforts.

If you want to reduce your costs further, you can use tools like Saleshandy, which allows you to connect unlimited email accounts at no additional charge to help you scale cost-efficiently.

5. Offers Valuable Insights into Client Behavior

Cold email marketing can give you a real-time opportunity to test your business offers.

Based on your cold emails’ responses, you can revise your offers when sending them to another organization with the same purchasing profile. 

The Building Blocks of Cold Email Marketing for B2B Enterprises

Lastly, we have come to the first step in crafting a successful marketing strategy: building the perfect B2B cold email marketing plan.

Follow these simple six steps to create your cold email campaign: 

1. Identify Customer Profiles
2. Craft USPs for Different Profiles
3. Build a Prospect List
4. Find a Reliable Cold Email Outreach Solution
5. Write Compelling Cold Emails and Follow-ups for Your Prospects

1. Identify Customer Profiles 

The first step to successful cold email marketing for B2B is to send them to the people who make buying decisions. Here’s how to find and reach them: 

• Pinpoint Your Target Market: Make a list of the industries and companies you’d like to target. Within the list, create classifications with priority targets and fallback options. 
• Identify Pain Points: You must identify your target companies’ most pressing pain points. These will help you understand how to position your offer as the perfect solution to their problems. 
• Create Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs): Cold emails work best when combined with a tailored approach. For this, you must create ideal customer profiles that match your target companies and decision markers.

Once you’re done identifying the right customer profiles that align with your product/service offering, you can move on to creating unique selling points that address their specific pain points.

2. Craft USPs for Different Profiles

If your product/service solves multiple problems, then you should definitely focus on creating Unique Selling Points for each.

This way, you can take a highly tailored approach when reaching out to potential customers.

Think about it: If some of your prospects are facing issues landing in their prospects’ inboxes, then it won’t make sense to talk to them about scalability.

Instead, you should focus your offer on how your tool can help improve their inbox placement rates.

Next is building your email list.

3. Build a Prospect List

With your ICPs, buyer personas, and USPs ready, the next step is to build a well-targeted prospect list for your cold email marketing campaigns.

For this, you can use a B2B business database to find relevant prospects along with their contact information.

While curating the target list, consider segmenting them based on the scale of services or products you can supply.

This will help ensure that you neither underestimate nor overcommit your products/services.

4. Find a Reliable Cold Email Outreach Solution

You may ask if a cold email software solution is necessary.

The straightforward answer – Yes, using a tool to automate and manage the process will help you scale, avoid human errors, and get more out of the cold email marketing strategy.

Here are a few things you should look for in a good cold email platform:

• Automation Capability – Can it completely automate all your cold email sequences?
• Deliverability – Are there features that can help increase the chances of your emails landing in your prospects’ primary inboxes?
• Scalability – Does it support scaling of your outreach as and when you want?
• Team Collaboration – Can you invite your team members to help scale and manage your cold email marketing strategy?
• Client Management – This applies to you if you’re working in a lead generation agency managing multiple clients. Check the ease and cost of managing multiple clients and their campaigns.
• Reporting and Analytics – Check if the cold email software of your choosing has inbuilt features to help you easily track, measure and monitor key performance metrics.
• Bonus: Lead Finding – Some cold email automation platforms have an in-built database that you can use to build your mailing list.
• Cost Effectiveness – Finally, make sure you find a platform that has all the above at a cost-effective pricing that suits your budget.

5. Write Compelling Cold Emails and Follow-ups

Now, let’s talk about the most important part—writing cold emails that actually get responses and take your business to the next level!

Here’s the thing: if you want your cold emails to work, you’ve got to keep them short and straight to the point, about 75 to 125 words long.

And here’s a pro tip: focus on starting a conversation instead of diving straight into pitching your product or service.

Show them you understand their challenges and offer a solution that feels natural, not pushy.

But here’s the catch—it’s rarely enough to send just one email. Even if your email lands in your prospects’ inbox, busy schedules might cause them to overlook it.

One way to tackle this is by sending follow-up emails.

Make sure your email sequence includes the initial email followed by 3 to 4 evenly spaced follow-ups.

This dramatically increases your chances of being noticed and starting a meaningful conversation with your prospect.

Now that you know how cold email marketing works, let’s explore a B2B marketing strategy that takes a more inbound approach—content marketing.

2. Content Marketing: The King of In-Bound Marketing

Content marketing is one of the most important strategies for B2B marketing. 

It is an inbound marketing strategy that enterprises deploy by creating engaging written and visual content that their target audience looks for. 

Though content marketing is one of the oldest B2B marketing strategies, it has not lost any of its importance.

In fact, 45% of B2B content marketing teams expect their budget to increase in 2024.

That said, content marketing is a long-term strategy to build your presence, expertise, and authority online.

So, if you’re looking to get quick results, then content marketing is not the strategy for you.

Why Content Marketing Should Be a Part of Your B2B Marketing Plan?

Let’s take a look at why content marketing still ranks at the top of most B2B marketing strategies: 

1. Create Once, Share Anywhere
2. Helps Educate Customers
3. Easily Integrates with a Full-Funnel Approach

1. Create Once, Share Anywhere

Additionally, once created, content can be shared on different platforms in different forms without altering its value.

So, a short blog can be converted into a LinkedIn Newsletter, an email, an X (formerly Twitter) thread, or a Facebook post.

Not to mention, it will always be on your website. 

2. Helps Educate Customers

The most important advantage of content marketing is its ability to create brand awareness. 

People rarely forget a website or a company that answered their questions or solved their problems. 

And that’s exactly what content marketing does: it helps people answer questions through simple, engaging content! 

So, content marketing expands your brand’s reach and awareness by fulfilling both a social and a commercial function.

3. Easily Integrates with a Full-Funnel Approach

Content is truly a one-form-fits-all strategy. It can educate customers, showcase products and drive customers down a sales funnel. 

It can thus be integrated into a full-funnel sales-and-marketing approach. 

Moreover, it creates an awareness of your product or service in prospects, which can shift into interest and a buying decision under the right circumstances.

Thus, content offers you a versatile option for marketing on different platforms.

The ABCs Of A Content Marketing Strategy: 

Here’s how you can build a long-term content marketing strategy:

1. Thoroughly Research the Pain Points of Your Clients
2. Identify and Cater to Different Parts of the Funnel
3. Create a Content Marketing Plan and a Team
4. Invest in Paid Partnerships
5. Establish Pointed KPIs to Measure Content ROI

1. Thoroughly Research the Pain Points of Your Clients

The best content empathizes with a range of problems that your prospects face. 

So, to generate such content, thoroughly research where, how, and when your prospects’ pain points.

Conduct market surveys, host webinars, and participate in active social listening to understand and anticipate the problems of your target audience. 

This will help you curate content that solves your prospect’s problems and builds authority.   

2. Identify and Cater to Different Parts of the Funnel

Take a comprehensive and proactive approach by creating content that caters to Top of the Funnel (ToFu), Middle of the Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of the Funnel (BoFu) problems. 

This will help you gain ground on prospects and lead them down your sales funnel, ultimately converting them into customers. 

A full-funnel content marketing strategy will also help you build domain authority and diversify your website traffic. 

3. Create a Content Marketing Plan and a Team

Only 25% of B2B enterprises don’t have a dedicated content marketing team. Thus, a specialized team is a must for a successful content marketing campaign.

This is because a content marketing plan requires a long-term approach to show its impact. It has to be backed up by: 

• Continuous SEO 
• Maintaining a Social Media Presence
• Publishing White Papers
• Writing Clear Content,
• Multimedia Releases and more. 

So, investment in content marketing must be complemented by investment in a content marketing team that goes with it. 

4. Invest in Paid Partnerships

Another important component in a content marketing strategy is paid partnerships. This can take several forms: 

• Partnering with other organizations to publish content,
• Building a backlink portfolio by submitting content to dedicated websites, 
• Publicizing successful case studies on LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter).

When marketed to the right audience, promoted content communicates confidence, expertise, and authority. 

So, don’t shy away from spending on paid content: it will help you build domain authority, increase traffic and boost brand awareness. 

5. Establish Pointed KPIs to Measure Content ROI

The #1 challenge of content marketing is that companies can’t measure its ROI.

This is because enterprises can’t tie the performance of their content with the business goals they want to achieve. 

To avoid problem-solution mismatch, establish KPIs before initiating a content marketing strategy. These can include: 

• Driving website traffic,
• Number of published content pieces 
• Ranking for specific keywords.

Remember, the best B2B content marketing KPIs are tailored to and combine your enterprise’s long-term and short-term objectives. 

3. Social Selling: The Rising Star of B2B Marketing Strategies

Social selling is a marketing strategy that harnesses the power of social platforms to create brand awareness, engage customers, and introduce products/services.

It’s a must-have strategy in today’s market.

Reddit, LinkedIn, and X all play significant roles in driving seismic shifts in today’s B2B market. 

And its impact is visible in B2B marketing: nearly 90% of B2B companies have disseminated content through social media in the past year. 

YouTube, LinkedIn, X, and Reddit reported an increase in digital marketing for B2B. 

Why Social Selling Should Be a Part of Your B2B Marketing Plan?

So, why is social selling driving transformative changes in B2B marketing? For a variety of reasons:

1. Reach Clients Where They Hang Out
2. Build Brand Awareness by Solving Problems
3. Showcase for Referrals and Positive Reviews

1. Reach Clients Where They Hang Out

In today’s world, prospects try to solve their problems on social media before visiting specific websites. 

Thus, it’s safe to say that the clients have flipped the B2B landscape into a buyer’s market. 

So, the major advantage of social media marketing for B2B enterprises is that it can help them reach out to places where several clients gather to discuss their problems. 

2. Build Brand Awareness by Solving Problems

On social media, when a client poses a question or raises an issue, other prospects and leads also get to see how you respond. 

If they find your response prompt and useful, they will be sure to compare it with their own service providers. 

Thus, your brand’s social behavior can create confidence and boost awareness through creative engagement. 

As they say, there’s no such thing as a bad social media presence. 

3. Showcase for Referrals and Positive Reviews

While negative interactions on social media are undesirable, they can easily be managed through dedicated follow-ups and skilled management. 

Additionally, positive reviews and interactions also have positive effects on your social presence. 

You can do this in two ways. 

First, you can position positive reviews on your social handles so that visitors will notice them. 

Second, happy clients often share their professional growth by crediting your product or service as instrumental in their success story. 

In both cases, it’s a win-win situation.

The Secrets to Successful Social Media Marketing for B2B

To create a powerful social presence, follow these five steps:

1. Create Customer Profiles to Target
2. Identify the Right Social Platforms
3. Create a Content Calendar
4. Engage with Complaints, Queries and Feedback
5. Utilize Paid Marketing

1. Create Customer Profiles to Target

First, understand your prospects’ demographic, firmographic, and physiographic information.

Understand where they are most likely to hang out and what messaging they will be most receptive to. 

After all, a vibrant infographic may not work with a slightly older demographic while being extremely popular with young startup executives. 

2. Identify the Right Social Platforms

Next, identify which social platforms are right for you. 

Here, there may be more than one, depending on your target audience.

For instance, you might want to:

• Reach developers on Reddit to understand their problems, 
• Engage executives on LinkedIn to analyze pain points, and 
• Talk to your prospects’ team members on X to break down message reception. 

So, choose the most appropriate social platforms for a comprehensive social presence. 

3. Create a Content Calendar

When it comes to social media marketing, a content calendar is a must for a sustainable social presence.

Remember, an outdated social presence could be as damaging as no social presence at all. 

To avoid this, work with a content calendar. 

4. Engage with Complaints, Queries and Feedback

When it comes to social presence, the rule of thumb is to always respond to your customers. 

B2B certainly involves a quieter social presence than B2C, but that’s a long way from a hands-off approach. 

So, do three things to boost engagement:

• First, offer multiple accessible channels to avoid queries flooding your social media page.
• Second, take an aggressive approach to solving queries raised through social platforms.
• Third, always acknowledge, respond to, and share positive feedback. 

All of these measures will help you drive positive engagement and brand image. 

5. Utilize Paid Marketing

Just like content marketing, social selling may also require paid efforts at first. Social media platforms also offer a wide range of paid marketing. These include: 

• Sponsored X Threads, 
• Paid Promotion on LinkedIn Messages, Feed and Carousels,
• Audio-Visual Ads on YouTube and LinkedIn

A paid social media presence will help you build an initial user community. 

It will also help you understand which platform is most conducive to your enterprise’s messages.

Next, let’s look at a more comprehensive marketing strategy that many B2B businesses use.

4. Account-Based Marketing: The Hyperpersonal Strategy

Account-based marketing is the process of targeting high-value clients with hyperpersonal offers. 

ABM is a tactic that combines marketing and sales into a unified operation. 

It inverts the sales funnel to create a client-based marketing strategy. 

Additionally, it is highly compatible with a LinkedIn-centric sales process. And not without reason: 

• 84% of marketers say ABM helps them expand existing relationships.
• 91% of marketers say they are able to strike larger deals because of ABM. 

So, if you’re looking to convert potent prospects into high-value clients, account-based marketing is a must-have tool in your B2B marketing plan. 

Let’s look at the B2B marketing strategy that is all the rage with today’s marketers. 

What Makes ABM a Great Addition to Your B2B Marketing Strategy?

Unlike traditional strategies, it prioritizes precision over reach.

Let me share 3 reasons why ABM can be a perfect fit for your marketing strategy:

1. Promotes Hyper-Personalization
2. Provides Data-Driven Insights and Increased ROI
3. Shortens Sales Cycles

1. Promotes Hyper-Personalization 

An ABM strategy asks your marketing and sales teams to target a selected group of high-value accounts. 

Through hyper-personalization, the ABM strategy eliminates the gap between lead generation and prospect conversion. 

2. Provides Data-Driven Insights and Increased ROI

Further, ABM provides detailed data-driven insights into your marketing strategy. 

It thus eliminates one of the most important challenges in B2B marketing: measuring marketing ROI. 

Through ABM, you can easily verify if there is a corresponding increase in your marketing investment and revenue generation. 

3. Shortens Sales Cycles

ABM is also known to shorten sales cycles. 

This is because it bridges the gap between marketing and sales targets by asking both teams to come up with a common list of prospective clients. 

Thus, an account-based marketing approach ensures that no prospect slips through the cracks.

How to Craft the Perfect Account-Based Marketing Strategy For Your B2B Business

Now that you understand why ABM can be a game-changing strategy for your business let’s dive into how you can craft an ABM strategy tailored to meet your specific needs:

1. Cultivate Marketing and Sales Alignment
2. Curate a List of Accounts to Target
3. Create an Account-Specific Timeframe
4. Use Sponsored Messages, Sponsored Content, and Dynamic Ads
5. Utilize LinkedIn Analytics to Monitor and Measure Progress

1. Cultivate Marketing and Sales Alignment

The first step to successful ABM is to integrate your marketing and sales teams into a unified operation.

We recommend you start with alignment exercises like setting goals and picking the most promising high-value clients. 

The goal of marketing and sales alignment is to ensure that your team conveys capacity, expertise, and intent through a set structure. 

Remember: to execute an ABM strategy, your marketing and sales teams must be aligned. 

2. Curate a List of Accounts to Target

Once your marketing and sales teams are used to working together, the next step is to identify a list of accounts to target. 

Ensure that your product or service competence closely matches the pain points of high-value prospects. 

Here as well, you must utilize the demographic, firmographic and physiographic data to curate a list of accounts. 

LinkedIn is a rich source of information that will help you curate a socially intelligent list of high-value leads to convert. 

3. Create an Account-Specific Timeframe

Next, it’s time to create a week-by-week timeframe for lead generation and prospect conversion. 

Here’s what a time frame could look like: 

• Week 1 – Marketing approaches a prospect with sponsored messages
• Week 2 – Marketing determines the accounts that will make the buying decision
• Week 3 – Marketing communicates product/service competence to the stakeholders
• Week 4 – Sales conveys intent and invites a meeting with the decision-makers 
• Week 5 – Sales either converts the prospect or loses it for good. 

Following a timeframe comes with two advantages. 

• First, your sales cycle becomes short and close-ended.
• Second, you can quickly implement what you learned from a successful or unsuccessful sales cycle into the next one. 

4. Use Sponsored Messages, Sponsored Content and Dynamic Ads

As we have seen, LinkedIn offers a host of avenues for paid promotion. 

The idea is to choose the most appropriate tool for sponsored messaging such that it aligns with marketing objectives. 

• If brand awareness is important, start with text and document ads that promote case studies. 
• If engagement is the objective, go with event ads that invite prospects to a webinar. 
• If conversion is the goal, harness the power of sponsored messages to invite a sales-driven conversation.

5. Utilize LinkedIn Analytics to Monitor and Measure Progress

One of the reasons for ABM’s popularity is that it makes KPIs easy to monitor and measure. 

The LinkedIn Analytic Tools and Ads Center will help you understand whether your message resonates with the target audience. 

It will also help you measure conversion rates, average sales cycles, ad performance, and more! 

Thus, through ABM, you can create a long-term client acquisition strategy based on regular learnings and long-term earnings. 

5. Go-To-Market Strategy: The All-In-One Marketing Approach

A Go-To-Market strategy is a marketing approach that focuses on client-led product/service development.

It uses comprehensive market research to decide on the distribution, pricing, marketing and sales strategy for B2B products/services.

It is a marketing strategy and a product development approach in one. 

There are very good reasons why the B2B sector has come to rely on a go-to-market strategy: 

• An astonishing 95% of products fail outright, 
• 45% of launches follow delayed development cycles. 

These statistics aren’t just numbers. They represent years of lost time and investments due to poor market research. 

The solution? 

To invert the sales funnel through prospect-driven product development! 

What You Should Go for a GTM Strategy?

If you’re wondering whether client-led development and marketing is the strategy for you, consider the following benefits of a GTM strategy: 

1. Ensure Product-Market Fit
2. Budget-Friendly Marketing Strategy
3. Aligns with Sustainable Business Growth Strategies
4. Increased Launch Success

1. Ensure Product-Market Fit

First and foremost, a GTM strategy ensures product-market fit by creating products or services for a specific user profile. 

It eliminates the challenge of potential problem-solution mismatch altogether. 

So, it removes a scenario where your product or service fails because there’s no buyer out there. 

2. Budget-Friendly Marketing Strategy

Second, a GTM is a budget-friendly B2B marketing solution. 

Why? Because you never have to go on a scavenger hunt for high-value prospects. 

In fact, most GTM-based products are created for a specific list of prospects. 

So, you know exactly where and when to market your products and how to market them. 

3. Aligns with Sustainable Business Growth Strategies

As we have seen, GTM doesn’t require you to take a leap of faith in product development or marketing. 

Thus, it creates a sustainable pathway to business growth. 

It will also give you a reputation as a company that accounts for user feedback when developing its B2B solutions. 

Not bad for a marketing strategy, right? 

4. Increased Launch Success

It is widely known that product launches affect revenue and that defined launches see higher success rates. 

A GTM strategy caters to both these facts in its development as well as marketing phases. 

An increased rate of launch success is no mean feat for a marketing strategy. In fact, it’s the most prized achievement of all marketing teams.

The Pre-Requisites of a Successful Go-To-Market Strategy

So, what does it take to craft a successful GTM Strategy? How can you make one for your enterprise?

Follow these five easy steps:

1. Analyze the Market
2. Study the Competition
3. Craft a Value Proposition
4. Establish a Launch and Distribution Plan
5. Eyes on the Price

1. Analyze the Market

While a market survey is one of the most basic business processes, it takes a new and prominent place in a GTM strategy. 

It is perhaps the most important step in the GTM process. 

In B2B marketing, market research accounts for customer pain points, market saturation, and viable opportunities to develop and deploy B2B products in the marketplace. 

2. Study the Competition

Analyzing the competition is important to a GTM strategy. 

Imagine two different scenarios for your B2B enterprise:

• There are existing players in the market you want to enter or 
• You’re looking to tap into a potential market that doesn’t yet exist. 

The GTM way tells you to take two different approaches for the two different scenarios:

• First, it tells you to focus on product differentiation, faster distribution channels, and pricing. 
• The second tells you to focus on quick product development to create a minimum viable product and secure a future market for it. 

3. Craft a Value Proposition

Once you have understood the market and analyzed the competition, it’s time to develop your product or service. 

However, product or service development is more than just about engineering. It involves crafting a robust value proposition for your prospective clients. 

One way to create an effective GTM strategy is to create a customizable product/service for different clients. 

This will also help you take a hyperpersonal approach to product/service marketing. 

4. Establish a Launch and Distribution Plan

Post-development, launch, and distribution are very important to a GTM plan. 

You must ensure that launch timing and distribution processes are closely aligned for maximum impact. 

This will help you keep the promises made by your marketing team and sales pitch. 

5. Eyes on the Price

Lastly, marketing is easier when the product price or service quote is sales-friendly. 

So, most GTM strategies deploy either the skimming model or the variable model of pricing. 

Both of these will help you position your products as competitive or tailored offerings to your prospects. 

Thus, a GTM is a reverse-funnel, end-to-end marketing strategy. It inverts the sales funnel and accounts for all the important aspects of your B2B company, including distribution, sales, and marketing.

6. Full-Funnel Marketing: The End-to-End Strategy

Full-funnel marketing uses all available outreach channels and touchpoints in a customer’s buying journey.

It imagines a “funnel” as an average buyer’s journey, from awareness and interest to decision and purchase. Then, it aims to cater to all the different points through a unified strategy. 

In this marketing strategy, you prioritize the buyer’s journey and experience. It is the equivalent of CX (customer experience) marketing in today’s world. 

Consider this: 89% of B2B researchers look at at least 12 options before choosing their supplier.

This is the first phase of the funnel: awareness and interest, which leads to the second phase, decision, and action. 

So, your marketing strategy should ensure three things: 

• First, none of the 89% of B2B researchers are your existing customers, 
• Second, your marketing efforts intervene at this critical point of research,
• Third, your funnel marketing leads the prospect to a decision and action favorable to your enterprise.

What Are the Key Stages of a Marketing Funnel?

A marketing funnel that envisions the typical buyer journey consists of four phases: 

1. Awareness – Top of the Funnel Phase (ToFu)
2. Interest – Middle of the Funnel Phase (MoFu)
3. Decision – Bottom of the Funnel Phase (BoFu)

1. Awareness – Top of the Funnel Phase (ToFu)

In the first phase, the prospect is aware of one thing: that they need a product or service similar to the one you provide.  

Your goal is to lead them to it. 

Typically, the prospect will search for something like: “What are the best communication solutions for B2B enterprises?”

2. Interest – Middle of the Funnel Phase (MoFu)

The next phase, the interest phase, is when the prospect shows interest in your product or service for its ability to solve their pain points. 

At this juncture, their intent takes on a different form: “What features of Product X can solve B2B communication problems?” 

3. Decision – Bottom of the Funnel Phase (BoFu)

In the third phase, interest crystallizes into a decision to buy a product or service. 

Here, the prospect poses questions like: “Does product X come with maintenance support?” “How long does it take to implement X in an organization of 50 people?” 

They may also reach out for a quote or a price brochure.

Why Choose Full Funnel Marketing? 

There are several reasons why marketing gurus recommend a full-funnel approach: 

1. Lead Generation and Customer Retention in One
2. Builds Brand Credibility by Focusing on Acquisition and Nurturing
3. Comprehensive Approach to Market Expansion and Domination
4. Allows Clear Measurement of Progress

1. Lead Generation and Customer Retention in One

Since a full-funnel approach covers all the touch points of the buying journey, it ensures that you not only convert leads into clients but retain existing clients through a re-funnel experience. 

This may include:

• Periodic renewal of existing orders or services, 
• Introduction of new products or services, and
• Loyalty programs that celebrate your long-term working relationship. 

Thus, a full-funnel experience doesn’t stop at conversion. It also involves an automatic relaunch as well. 

2. Builds Brand Credibility by Focusing on Acquisition and Nurturing

Further, a full-funnel approach helps you build credibility. 

Consider this: not all the prospects that you educate through TOFU tactics will end up becoming clients. 

So, if you have an article discussing the best B2B communication tools, it serves a social purpose that positions your brand as a problem solver.

Thus, full-funnel marketing provides indirect benefits by treating lead generation and nurturing as equally important as conversion. 

3. Comprehensive Approach to Market Expansion and Domination

The full-funnel approach also leverages domain expertise to promote market penetration. 

This is because it asks you to utilize reviews, customer experience, and business achievements to educate prospects about your products or services. 

4. Allows Clear Measurement of Progress

Lastly, the funnel approach also gives you good grounds to measure progress. 

For instance, it asks you to measure how many people, in a given period, went from TOFU through MOFU to BOFU content. 

This also helps you understand which part of your funnel marketing is the most effective and which needs reworking. 

It thus not only helps you take a comprehensive approach to marketing but also tells you which parts need reworking. 

Talk about a self-sustaining marketing strategy!

Next, let’s look at some of the tools that will help you execute these 6 time-tested B2B marketing strategies with ease.

5 Must-Have Tools for B2B Marketing

Now that we have discussed the best marketing and business growth strategies, we would be remiss in our duty if we also didn’t tell you which tools can help you enhance your B2B marketing efforts. 

So, here are the five-must have tools in your B2B marketing arsenal: 

1. For Cold Email Outreach
2. For Content Marketing + SEO
3. For Webinars and Tutorials
4. AI Chatbots
5. For Social Selling

1. For Cold Email Outreach

G2 Rating: 4.6/5 (600+ reviews)

A simple and feature-rich cold email outreach solution you can use to generate leads on autopilot is Saleshandy.

It helps you:

• Find high-value prospects as well as their email accounts, 
• Craft hyper-personalized emails at scale,
• Reach out to as many prospects as you want,
• Allows you to collaborate with your team members easily,
• Most importantly, it has various features to ensure your emails land in the inboxes of your prospects.

The best part?

You get all this and more at a very reasonable cost!

Here’s why it’s considered as one of the best cold emailing tools out there: 

1. B2B Lead Finder

Saleshandy has in in-built Lead Finder that has a vast updated database of 700 million+ B2B contacts from over 60 million companies worldwide.

You can use the various advanced search filters to narrow down on prospects who exactly fit your ICP and buyer persona.

Apart from accurate email addresses, you also get mobile numbers and direct dials of your prospects. These would be quite useful if you are taking a more aggressive approach like cold calling.

2. Complete Sequence Automation

You can easily create as many cold email sequences as you want with multiple follow-ups.

This will help you create personalized and highly relevant campaigns for your segmented list of prospects.

3. Personalize at Scale

You can easily personalize your emails at scale in Saleshandy. It doesn’t matter if you’re reaching out to hundreds or thousands of prospects.

There are various personalization features like Merge Tags, Variable Tags, and Spintax that can help you personalize your emails in seconds!

4. Ensure High Inbox Placement

Your cold emails are only effective if they land in the inbox of your prospects and not in spam or promotional folders.

You can use various deliverability features in Saleshandy, like email warm-up, email sending limit control, email ramp-up, sequence score, etc., to ensure the same.

You’ll find all the necessary features to avoid spam folders in Saleshandy.

There’s so much Saleshandy can offer. Check out our Saleshandy Review blog to learn more about the platform and its capabilities.

2. For Content Marketing + SEO

When it comes to content marketing, Ahrefs is the best tool.

Over the past decade, it has become an authority in all things B2B content marketing. It provides innovative features like: 

• A centralized dashboard where you can monitor the progress of all your projects and websites, 
• A Site Explorer where you can research your competitors’ backlinks and site rankings, 
• A Keyword Explorer where you can research the most relevant keywords in your industry, 
• A Site Auditor to understand where you can identify the most glaring issues with your website,
• A Rank Tracker where you can find the relevant mobile and web rankings for your website.

3. For Webinars and Tutorials

Ever since the pandemic, webinar tools have become important. 

This is because webinars help you reach a community of users or prospects and answer common queries in a public forum – all from the comfort of your home or office.  

And when it comes to webinar tools, EverWebiner is the evergreen tool you can trust. It comes with several advantages, including: 

• High Definition audio and video broadcasting, regardless of your hardware or camera,
• A flexible scheduling system for recurring or one-time events along with calendar integration so you never miss a date, 
• On-demand webinars without any wait time and with in-progress join-in so you can get started whenever you need to, 
• Browser-based solutions so your prospects never have to download a special streaming app, 
• Live chat so you never miss a question or a query from your listeners. 

4. AI Chatbots

AI chatbots have become increasingly important as they deliver 24/7 support and live problem-solving capabilities that are too valuable to ignore. 

With Drift, you can also deploy AI chatbots for your B2B enterprise so you never lose a customer for lack of maintenance or support. Harness the unique benefits of Drift, such as: 

• CRM Integration with popular interfaces, including Salesforce, Clearbit, and Marketo,
• Automated replies with the “saved replies” feature for instant query-solving, 
• Chat routing so your customers can raise questions through emails, websites, or mobile devices, 
• Detailed buyer-level intent for enhanced insights into consumer behavior, 
• Conversational marketing through which Drift can help you sell products with minimal human intervention. 

5. For Social Selling

If you’re looking to deploy the ABM strategy, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the tool to use.

Through it, you can find and convert valuable leads based on data analytics and prospect behavior. It comes with benefits like: 

• Account Finder that can help you grow and nurture your business,
• Account Prioritization that you think are the most important leads, 
• Key signals that indicate buying intent and help you engage with the most promising prospects, 
• Instant notifications on important leads or contacts, 
• Powerful search with visibility into extended networks through personalized algorithms. 

Achieve Consistent Business Growth With the Right B2B Marketing Strategy

As we have seen, marketing is crucial to B2B growth: after all, it generates 100% of the revenue. 

You can deploy different marketing strategies for your B2B enterprise based on your long-term objectives and short-term requirements. 

But how can you choose the best strategy that helps you balance business objectives? 

Try to construct the ideal B2B marketing strategy based on four factors: 

• Business Priorities
• Industry Profile
• Organizational Goals
• Enterprise Growth Journey 

The ideal business growth strategies contain a mix of inbound and outbound tactics. 

Remember, it is not only which marketing strategy you select but how you deploy it that will help achieve increased growth and success. 

B2B Marketing Strategies: FAQs

1. What Is B2B Marketing?

B2B, or business-to-business marketing, refers to the process of informing your organization’s products or services to another business.

Unlike B2C marketing, the aim of B2B marketing is to reach and convince decision-makers within another business organization. 

2. What Are the Most Effective B2B Marketing Strategies?

Cold email marketing, social selling, and content marketing are some of the most effective B2B marketing strategies.

That said, the right strategy can change based on your business. 

3. What Are the Most Essential B2B Marketing Tools?

B2B Marketing Tools help you deploy, maintain, and measure your marketing strategies.

The most popular and useful B2B Marketing Tools include Saleshandy for highly effective cold email marketing, Ahrefs for comprehensive B2B content marketing, and LinkedIn for detailed sales navigation. 

4. How Can Cold Emails Help B2B Marketing?

Cold emails empower B2B marketers to create highly effective hyper-personal pitches to create and convert prospects.

They provide an extremely high ROI (4400%), can be automated, and allow marketers to analyze the behavior of their most prized leads. 

5. How Does Cold Email Outreach Work?

Cold email outreach is one of the most effective business to business marketing tactics through which you can create a campaign to generate and convert high-value leads.

It helps you send personalized emails, follow up, and analyze the success of your campaign.