In the world of business-to-business (B2B) marketing, staying ahead of the competition and reaching your target audience is critical to sustainability. The phrase “B2B growth marketing strategies” is a cliche mention when talking about digital audience growth but still very much table stakes when it comes to futureproofing your brand’s market position in markets where buyers are changing constantly in how they make decisions.
If you answered Errr, ammm, or no to any of the above, you’re setting yourself (and your brand) up for an uncertain future.
That said, with the rise of generative AI and literally thousands of tools to help marketers and sales leaders ramp content and marketing operations at an unprecedented pace, there are a few growth strategies worth your team’s team and focus. We will explore seven proven B2B growth marketing strategies that can help you:
- Scale your content footprint to 50+ pieces of content within a quarter to start amping up your organic SEO and SEM efforts.
- Find keywords and phrases that connect your brand’s messaging to how your customers talk about their pain points (and your solution).
- Align your sales and marketing demand generation workflows to catch and convert prospects that fit your ICP.
Understanding B2B growth marketing – the paradox of defining your ideal customer profile (ICP)
To embark on a successful B2B growth marketing journey, it’s important to first understand the concept itself. B2B growth marketing involves implementing targeted strategies to attract and engage potential buyers, nurture leads, and ultimately drive conversions.
Obvious right?
The challenge comes when it comes to defining and finding who those potential buyers are.
We’re told buyers are always changing, looking for new attributes, and are fickle in their digital buying journey and yet at the same time, encouraged to come up with static, defined characteristics of what they may look like in terms of the buying decisions they make.
Unlike traditional marketing, B2B growth marketing aims to create long-term value by focusing on building relationships and delivering personalized experiences to buyers that fit a unique profile based on demographic and firmographic details. Those details include:
Demographic (B2C) details:
Firmographic (B2B) details:
Market position (often determined by a company’s self-description, market share data, or third-party reports)
There’s no getting around it. When it comes to B2B growth marketing, it’s essential to have a deep understanding of your target audience. This involves conducting thorough market research to identify their pain points, needs, and preferences. By gaining insights into what’s causing them frustration and impacting the business’ performance, you can tailor your marketing efforts to resonate with them on a deeper level.
One of the key benefits of B2B growth marketing is its ability to establish your brand as a thought leader in the industry. By consistently delivering valuable content and insights, you can position your brand as an authority in your niche. This not only helps build trust with potential buyers but also increases brand awareness and credibility.
The criticality of B2B growth marketing strategies, tactics & operational workflows
B2B growth marketing plays a pivotal role in the success of any business. By implementing effective strategies, you can establish your brand as a thought leader in the industry, increase brand awareness, and generate a steady stream of qualified leads. In a highly competitive marketplace, it’s crucial to adopt growth marketing tactics to stay ahead and capitalize on opportunities for business expansion.
Another significant advantage of B2B growth marketing is its ability to nurture leads throughout the buyer’s journey. By providing valuable content and personalized experiences, you can guide potential buyers through each stage of the sales funnel, from awareness to consideration and ultimately, conversion.
Again, obvious right?
The challenge usually resides in the how.
Not to mention, when you’ve figured out a reliable, repetitive recipe for targeting who your ideal buyers are, continuous optimization and improvement is another step that requires clarity on strategy and go-to-market motions across your paid and organic channels. By building rich, insightful zero and first-party data streams, you can track the performance of your marketing campaigns, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions. This iterative process ensures that your marketing efforts are constantly evolving and adapting to the changing needs and preferences of your target audience.
Key components of a successful B2B growth marketing strategy
A successful B2B growth marketing strategy encompasses various key components that work together to drive tangible results. These components include understanding your target audience, conducting market research, setting clear goals and objectives, and creating a data-driven approach. That includes:
- Customer validated outcomes
- Implementation results
- Partnership & onboarding experiences
- Team productivity improvement
- A clear, impressionable brand/campaign identity
- Consistent visual elements
- Professional audio and multimedia asset mixes.
- Strong, clear, and value-driven positioning.
- Reliable channels and platforms of engagement
- Research and identify key platforms
- Engage in webinars and virtual events
- Leverage email marketing
- Collaborate with industry influencers
- Optimize for search
Understanding your target audience is the foundation of any successful growth marketing strategy. By creating detailed buyer personas, you can gain insights into your audience’s demographics, pain points, motivations, and buying behaviors. This knowledge allows you to tailor your messaging and marketing efforts to resonate with your target audience effectively.
Market research is another critical component of a successful B2B growth marketing strategy. By analyzing market trends, competitor strategies, and customer feedback, you can identify gaps and opportunities in the market. This information helps you develop unique value propositions and positioning strategies that set your brand apart from the competition.
Questions that are most useful when creating research-led tactical marketing plays include:
A data-driven approach is crucial in today’s digital landscape. By leveraging data and analytics tools, you can gain valuable insights into the performance of your marketing campaigns. This data allows you to identify what’s working and what’s not, enabling you to pivot and recalibrate without spending weeks in brainstorming meetings. From tracking website traffic and engagement metrics to analyzing conversion rates and customer behavior, data-driven decision-making is at the core of a successful B2B growth marketing strategy but more on that in another post.
The 7 proven B2B growth marketing strategies
Now that we have a good understanding of B2B growth marketing, let’s explore the seven proven strategies that can help businesses expand their reach and achieve growth.
Strategy 1: Scaling from single digits to 50+ content assets that provide insane value and visibility to your brand’s digital presence.
Content marketing involves creating and distributing valuable and relevant content to attract, engage, and retain your target audience. By producing high-quality blog posts, articles, videos, and infographics (yes ALL of them), you can position your brand as an industry expert and build trust with your audience. If that’s the only thing you take away from this article, we’ve done our job.
Building trust with your audience should be a #1 priority.
Additionally, optimizing your content for search engines will help drive organic traffic and increase your visibility online.
I know you must be thinking “Wow, TB team, you really know how to state the obvious!” But it’s worth being said because creating compelling content is becoming more and more ubiquitous, making it harder to be seen, heard, and valued.
Enough of that then, let’s dive into how with Strategy #1.
- Start tapping into the power of AI-driven features on call recording apps like Gong, Zoom, and Grain. You can now sift through your call transcripts to pick up on phrases and keywords your existing customers and prospects-in-pipeline are dropping. Why’s this cool? Well, it’s like having a translator for your customer’s language. You get to understand how THEY talk about their needs, their pain points, and how they categorize your solution. It’s not just about what they’re saying, but how they’re saying it.
- Use a free tool like Semrush’s Organic Research to dive into which keywords your competitors are organically targeting and ranking for. Qualify the ones that connect to how the prospects in your ICP communicate their needs. You can find a few more free tools here.
- Once you’re done qualifying, use those same tools to figure out the keyword volume and where it’s worth targeting the content’s message. Large keyword volumes may infer that the term has a broad audience base and may not prove as fruitful as more targeted, niche keywords your ICP is using to find solutions specifically, like yours.
- Now we’re getting to the juicy part. Onboard an AI-powered writing assistant such as Byword, Anyword, Jasper AI, or any preferred choices by marketers today. This will allow you to generate copy by means of the keywords or article titles you and your team have qualified as most valuable for your ICP’s research journey. Byword takes max. 30 minutes to generate your articles so you can do 10, 15, or even 20 articles at a time, using their batch generator. If you’re looking to onboard multiple copywriters/users, platforms like Jasper AI are more sophisticated in their ability to have your brand tone and personas embedded across your enterprise plan.
- At a base level, the content should identify the general value propositions the keyword is required to fulfill in your buyers’ journey. Now it’s time for your team to input YOUR brand’s value proposition and product information. Packaging those tidbits through the lens of your existing customer success can make your content marketing experience insightful and actionable for prospects looking for advice and support in their research journey.
- Test with existing prospects, and refine based on their feedback. Then rinse and repeat.
20+ articles multiplied by 3 promotional pieces of content (videos, listicles, social posts, ads) gives you a minimum of 60+ pieces of content. You’re welcome.
P.S. If this still feels overwhelming we’re happy to walk you through it on a call, no strings attached.
Strategy 2: Socially converse (and sell!) on social media
Social media platforms have become powerful tools for B2B growth marketing. They have become a valued source of product and CX feedback where users typically engage in meaningful conversations. Social media also provides an opportunity to leverage user-generated content, collaborate with B2B influencers (yeah that’s a thing), and run targeted ad campaigns to reach a wider audience.
To put it in perspective:
Sources: Hubspot, Sprout Social, Contentsify
When it comes to social media marketing, it’s important to have a well-defined strategy. You need to identify the platforms that your target audience frequents and tailor your content accordingly. Each platform has its own unique features and best practices, so it’s crucial to adapt your approach to maximize engagement and results. Platforms worth spending time researching your ICP prospects on include:
LinkedIn – Sales Navigator:
- Sales Navigator isn’t free, but it’s a great tool for learning more about your ICP. Creating lists based on their firmographic details, allows you to spend more time on prospects that matter, versus 10s of searches that are yielding uncertain profile results.
- Place alerts on top personas within target accounts and take a multi-threaded approach by following top decision-makers and their wider teams to understand what’s on their mind (social-media post-wise.)
- Use those insights to tailor your InMails, cold or warm outreach as well as thought leadership content initiatives.
Meta
The cardinal rule we see B2B brands breaking is communicating the SAME message across ALL social media platforms. Facebook and Instagram require your brand to share who they are on a human level.
- Spotlight top talent, their day IRL, and the top events and customer success stories you’re contributing to on a weekly basis.
- Personal audience affinities like parenting, pets, and DIY can yield growth for your B2B audience. Why? Because at the end of the day, we’re human and driven by personal ambitions even when it comes down to commercial outcomes.
- Use these affinities to highlight the more engaging side of your workforce and what’s their vibe.
- If you’re expecting to close a sale on these platforms, close your browser altogether on this article. Audience growth (through content and organic tactics) is a long game. Creating a footprint that spans all digital environments takes thoughtfulness, time, and a considerable amount of effort in determining what works for YOUR brand and what’s not a key priority at the current stage of your team’s productivity sprint.
Redditors are unforgiving and trustworthy (most of the time). They come to this platform to seek valuable advice on just about anything, including B2B products. For example, check out the below subreddits to understand what we mean. To take advantage of this research playground, brands like Google, Acura, and Notion are using paid advertising on the platform to increase their perceived value on subreddits that solve the points their ICP is looking to solve.
https://www.reddit.com/r/salesforce/
https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/
Hot tip! Give Sparktoro a spin to find the subreddits that’ll resonate the most with your ICP using their Reddit research feature within their wider audience research platform.
YouTube
Alright, let’s dive into the world of YouTube.
Think of it as the Wild West of video content. Everyone’s there, from your grandma sharing her secret cookie recipe to Fortune 500 companies dropping their latest ads. But here’s the catch: it’s not just about showing up; it’s about showing up consistently with top-notch content.
Now, why should B2B folks care about YouTube? Well, it’s the second-largest search engine after Google. Yep, you read that right. People aren’t just looking for cat videos; they’re searching for product demos, reviews, and how-tos. So, if you’ve got a product or service, there’s an audience waiting to see it in action.
But here’s the deal:
- You can’t just drop a video and ghost. You’ve gotta keep ’em coming. Think of it as a TV series – keep your audience hooked and waiting for the next episode.
- Don’t just churn out videos for the sake of it. Make sure they’re slick, professional, and, most importantly, valuable to your viewers.
- Reply to those comments, give shoutouts, and maybe even host a live Q&A session. Make your audience feel seen and heard.
- Team up with industry experts or influencers for interviews or joint content. It’s like getting a co-sign from the cool kids in school. Folks like
- Optimize for Search: Use catchy titles, relevant tags, and killer descriptions. Remember, YouTube is a search engine, so make sure folks can find your content easily.
Strategy 3: SEO Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial strategy for increasing your online visibility and driving organic traffic to your website. By optimizing your website’s structure, content, and meta tags, you can improve your rankings on search engine results pages. Investing in keyword research, creating quality backlinks, and ensuring mobile-friendliness are all integral parts of an effective SEO strategy.
But SEO is not just about technical optimizations. It’s also about creating valuable and relevant content that aligns with the search intent of your target audience. By understanding the keywords and phrases they use when searching for solutions, you can create content that not only ranks well but also provides value to your audience.
To understand your website’s technical SEO health:
- Download Screaming Frog SEO Spider. (Note: There’s a limit of 500 pages crawled but it provides a reliable indicator of where your most critical issues are.)
- Click the issues tab and filter the results by High Risk.
- Evaluate whether those issues can be one-off fixes or require further evaluation.
- Then look for opportunities (a label just like High Risk) for improving your site’s technical health.
- Work with a freelancer or internal resources to fix these critical issues but be open to recognizing and investing in a technical resource when the problem seems less than simple.
Strategy 4: Email marketing
Email marketing continues to be a highly effective strategy for nurturing leads and driving conversions. By building a targeted email list and delivering personalized and valuable content, you can establish strong relationships with your audience and encourage repeat business. Segmenting your email list, A/B testing subject lines and content, and measuring campaign performance is essential for optimizing your email marketing efforts.
When implementing an email marketing strategy, it’s important to strike the right balance between promotional and educational content. While it’s tempting to constantly send promotional emails, providing valuable insights and resources to your subscribers will help build trust and credibility. Additionally, personalization is key. By segmenting your email list based on demographics, interests, or past interactions, you can tailor your messages to resonate with each recipient. Here’s a starting recipe for success:
- Add all your existing customers and prospects (if they’re not there already) to your CRM smart list.
- Segment them by buying stage, use case, and account. If you’re not already collecting this data, it’s critical that you work on adding them as custom objects in CRM platforms like Salesforce or HubSpot so your content drives more resonance within a shorter span of time.
- Dump all your content in a master spreadsheet and determine based on those use cases (and some of those keywords you would have championed in strategy 1) which content is suited for which segment.
- Create 5-7 email email sequences that drip said content to really nurture and educate these segments.
- Be sure to be educative first and less promotional. Keep your CTAs to a minimum and measure audience engagement to understand where your content is driving more interest, and then work with sales to continue with more personal outreach and demo offers.
Strategy 5: B2B influencer marketing
Influencer marketing involves collaborating with influential individuals or industry experts to promote your brand and products. By harnessing the reach and credibility of these influencers, you can tap into their audience and garner trust. Identifying relevant influencers, developing authentic partnerships, and tracking campaign performance is key to a successful influencer marketing strategy.
A few B2B influencers worth following and learning from:
P.S. We have no idea if they work with brands on a commercial basis but their INFLUENCE is undeniable.
When selecting influencers to work with, it’s important to consider more than just their follower count. Look for influencers who align with your brand values and have an engaged and relevant audience. Authenticity is crucial in influencer marketing, so it’s important to give influencers creative freedom and allow them to authentically promote your products or services in a way that resonates with their audience.
Strategy 6: Webinars and virtual Events
Webinars and virtual events have become increasingly popular as effective B2B growth marketing strategies. By hosting educational webinars or virtual conferences, you can provide valuable insights to your target audience, position your brand as a thought leader, and generate INTEREST. Note we didn’t say leads because the main goal of these mid-funnel tactics is to provoke curiosity and intent where the buyer is keen to reach out before you do. Things to note:
- When planning a webinar or virtual event, it’s important to choose a topic that is relevant and valuable to your target audience.
- Consider their pain points and challenges, and create content that addresses those issues.
- Additionally, make sure to promote your event through various channels, such as social media, email marketing, and industry partnerships, to maximize attendance and reach.
Strategy 7: Channel partnership marketing
If you’re in the B2B SaaS realm, you probably have a few integration partners that have an install base of their own. Think HubSpot and every major MarTech application, they go together like John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John in Grease. Channel partners can give you an organic channel for audience and demand growth in a few, thoughtful ways:
- Look for businesses that vibe with yours. You’re not competing; you’re complementing each other. It’s like peanut butter meeting jelly – both awesome on their own, but even better together.
- How about co-hosting a webinar or whipping up a joint case study? Two heads (or companies) are better than one, and your audience will love the fresh insights.
- Got a marketing budget? Great! Combine forces with your partner and make those ad dollars stretch further. It’s like hosting a potluck – everyone brings something to the table.
Now on to the fun part.
Implementing B2B growth marketing strategies
Alright, folks, we’ve laid out the playbook with those seven killer B2B growth marketing strategies. But, as they say, knowing is only half the battle. Let’s dive into the nitty-gritty of making these strategies work for you.
1. Understanding your team’s capacity
First things first, you gotta know what your team can handle. It’s like planning a road trip – you wouldn’t set off without checking if your car can make the distance, right? So, sit down with your crew, have a chat, and figure out what everyone’s strengths are. Can you handle that webinar series? Got the chops for a YouTube channel? Know your limits, but also know when to push ’em. We always recommend starting with one channel, bringing it to the point of a frequently engaged audience, and only THEN split your resources to accommodate another one.
2. Finding the right growth mix for your enterprise
Alright, so not every strategy is gonna be a slam dunk for every business. It’s like ice cream flavors – while some folks are all about that mint chocolate chip, others are team cookie dough. The key is to find what resonates with your audience. Test out different strategies, see what sticks, and then double down on what’s working.
Start with 2-3 strong, achievable goals. What guides these goals? (Tip: It’s not your quarterly outbound quota). Ask questions like:
- Are we visible on search, social, and other key digital platforms where our target audience is researching new solutions?
- Depending on your answer to a., Should we invest more in SEO and SEM paid campaigns or focus on organic?
- What’s the balance we need to strike between product awareness and customer proof when it comes to the tactical GtM motions in our B2B growth marketing strategies?
What are the most critical pain points buyers want to solve today and how can we show them as fast as possible, we’re the brand to help them do that.
3. Measuring success and adjusting your GtM plan
Here’s where the rubber meets the road. You’ve got your strategies in play, but how do you know they’re working? Time to break out those analytics tools and dive into the data. Keep an eye on those KPIs, and don’t be afraid to pivot if something’s not panning out. Remember, it’s not about being right; it’s about getting it right. So, tweak, test, and tune until your Go-to-Market plan is humming like a well-oiled machine.
We’re a fan of Google Analytics 4 because it evolved to inform brands less about a series of data points and more about user behavior, audience segmentation, and funnel insights. Have you checked out the explore tab yet? Be sure to capture meaty insights about where your funnels are driving the most conversions and understand the segments which are having the most influence on your traffic metrics.
Source: Nomensa
In a nutshell? Dive in, get your hands dirty, and keep your eyes on the prize. With the right mix of strategies and a dash of determination, B2B growth marketing success is just around the corner.
2024 is just a sneeze away, let’s get to it! 🚀🌟
