Business-to-business (B2B) marketing is a form of behaviour where a business sells a product or service to another business. Unlike business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, B2B marketing doesn’t require many customers to generate a substantial income as the price point is generally much higher. The process of selling to a business rather than a consumer is not commonly discussed as it is much smaller compared to B2C marketing. Here are a few known methods of B2B marketing:
Email outreach
Like every other form of outreach, email outreach has a low success rate and generally followed up by another form of outreach. This simply involves sending an email directly to your target. Most businesses have an email address or contact form on their website, so this is also the easiest method. Since it doesn’t cost any money and their is no barrier to do it, it’s often overused and misused. Businesses have gotten used to receiving email outreach from offshore companies and this attempt is very difficult to pull off unless you have a unique approach and an awesome title and opening sentence.
Telemarketing
This method involves a bit more skill and budget. You need to have a calling plan, which most marketers get through Skype for an affordable rate. For optimal performance, you also need to have an accent matching the country of the business you are reaching out to. So if you’re calling US companies, you generally have to hire someone from the US or Canada, or someone with an American accent which can be costly compared to email outreach.
Direct mail
Direct mail is the process of sending physical mail to your target. Currently, it costs $0.49 USD in the US and $0.85 CAD in Canada to send an envelope. If you decide to send a larger package, which will get more attention from the receiver, the price is only going to rise. Direct mail can receive the highest response rate but since it costs the most, it can be hard to make profitable.
Search engine optimization
This is one of the hardest to perform, but it can lead in a lot of interested buyers and inquiries. B2B search terms on Google generally have a very low monthly search count because the market by customer count is lower, but since the value per buyer is so high, it’s often overlooked by new B2B companies. These terms do have very large competition in most cases, and most established companies can afford to stay at the top and hold any newcomers out.
Industry media appearances
This is probably the most difficult method to pull off, because there’s not much info on it. By appearing in industry magazines, blogs and other publications, you can easily get in front of who you need to. For example, if you have a software that helps car dealers manage their inventory you might appear in a magazine geared towards car salesman and car dealerships. An article you might appear in would be something like “Top 5 inventory management software in 2016,” for example.
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