With dozens of business to business marketing channels available, B2B marketers find it increasingly difficult to choose where to invest their marketing budgets. However, selecting the right channels is a critical decision your marketing department must make to ensure you reach the right leads and build brand recognition.
To help out, this article ranks the top 6 B2B marketing channels ranked by ROI and shares tips for implementing campaigns with each option. Let’s begin.
What is B2B marketing?
B2B marketing stands for business-to-business marketing. In a nutshell, it encompasses any and every marketing strategy or channel used by one business to target another business.
What are the best marketing channels to promote your B2B brand?
Below are seven of the most effective B2B marketing channels in terms of ROI and customer acquisition cost. To clarify, this data is based on an analysis of 150+ B2B marketing projects from 2018 to 2023, conducted by firstpagesage.com.
1. Live Events
With an average ROI of 856% over the study period, we have in-person events (think trade shows and networking occasions) at number one.
When done right, these traditional marketing models allow you to demonstrate credibility to a targeted and engaged audience, often including key decision makers.
Yet, unlike digital media e.g videos and white papers that can be retrieved at will, the experience of a live event comes then goes, so to establish a lasting impact, you need to partner with influential speakers and participate in recurring events.
When it comes to live events, your options vary in terms of focus, format, and scale. In other words, depending on your objectives, you might host or participate in workshops, product launches, field events, conferences, award ceremonies, or holiday-themed events.
If you’re not sure how to maximize growth with live events, consider inviting satisfied customers to share their stories, hosting engaging product demos, setting up one-on-one interactions between your sales reps and prospects, treating high-value clients to exclusive benefits, collecting attendee data for future marketing, and following up with leads after every event.
These six tips aren’t all there is to know about successful live events, so I’ll go ahead and link to this guide on participating in-person B2B marketing events.
2. SEO
SEO or Search Engine Optimization refers to several practices that focus on optimizing your webpages for keywords to increase your site’s visibility in organic search.
In the B2B sales funnel, every customer’s journey begins with a search result. This insight resonates with findings from BrightEdge, which reveals that organic traffic accounts for 76% of traffic to B2B websites.
Meanwhile, B2B companies are said to generate two times more revenue from organic search than any other channel. In other words, B2B customers are always using search engines to research solutions to their ongoing problems.
When this happens, correctly applied SEO will help to put your content and more importantly your brand in front of the right people. As you optimize your B2B business site for SEO, keep in mind the following tips:
- Understand the B2B sales funnel and the different buying stages customers undergo. With that knowledge, thoroughly research keywords for each part of the funnel and ensure they are relevant to your offering.
- Publish original content related to your industry and include keywords your audience uses in strategic areas of your site such as your meta descriptions, titles, heading tags, landing pages, and body copy.
- Reach out to other reputable sites in your industry to earn links to your content. The more authority links you have, the higher you can rank in Google.
3. Email marketing
Email marketing is highly regarded because it’s an effective way to build and sustain rapport with customers. However, there are important distinctions between B2C and B2B email marketing that B2B marketers must understand to get the desired results.
One of which is the fact that B2B customers make purchase decisions to increase ROI, whereas B2C customers make purchase decisions based on emotion. Furthermore, B2B customers have longer purchase cycles compared to individual consumers.
Therefore, any email marketing campaign you run should consist of multiple workflows that build customer relationships over time. That said, you should focus your email efforts on offering customers value in the form of insights and tips on how they can save money and resources instead of blasting them with sales pitches.
Additionally, segment your customers based on the stage of the sales funnel they’re in and send them the appropriate content. Doing so enables you to personalize your messaging to your audience’s unique problems.
4. PPC
PPC is an advertising model that allows you to promote your brand on social networks and search engines. Marketers consider it beneficial because, as its name suggests, you only have to pay your publisher for each time a user clicks and visits your website. Therefore, no click, no charge.
With PPC, you bid money for keywords. If your bid is among the highest bids, your ad will feature at the top or bottom of the search results.
Because the overall success of your PPC campaign depends on the keywords you use, you need to research, evaluate, and then bid on keywords most relevant to what your company offers.
By doing so, your operation will benefit from a higher number of qualified clicks and eventually more revenue. Additionally, well-optimized PPC campaigns generate better returns on investments because the value of quality visits exceeds the cost per click.
However, as much as PPC campaigns can be valuable marketing assets, they can be a total stumbling block if you don’t know what to do with PPC and the mistakes you’re probably making. After all, the last thing you want is to overspend on ineffective ads.
5. Account-Based Marketing
Put simply, account-based marketing or ABM involves treating your businesses’ high-value clients and prospects as individual markets.
This is achieved by personalizing buyer journeys, content, and communications to each of these prospects instead of focusing resources on unqualified leads. With an ROI of 240% over the study period, ABM proves to be beneficial when you’re looking to secure contracts with large accounts.
However, the success of your campaigns depend on how effectively you collect detailed information on all your high-value prospects, research each prospect, and work with tactful salespeople to close these high-value sales.
Because ABM becomes very expensive very quickly, remember to prioritize a small number of top-level accounts instead of low-value leads.
6. Webinars
Unlike other passive content marketing strategies, B2B webinars allow you to share information, distribute content, and engage with potential clients in real time.The webinars you create can be audio-only or in video format.
However, you might want to avoid audio webinars because without visual aids like slideshows, graphs, and screenshots, it’s harder to communicate your message effectively.
After hosting it live, you can then publish the video webinar on your site for free or offer it as an email capture to generate leads. Wondering what exactly to cover during virtual events?
Considering hosting how-to workshops, sharing customer success stories, live question-and-answer sessions, product demos, and industry insights and developments.
Together, these different webinars will help you connect with your audience and establish your brand as an authority.
The benefits of webinars are many. You can reach a wide range of potential customers from all over the world, without significant investments into venue and furniture rentals, hiring event staff, and travel expenses on your part, as well as travel and lodging costs for speakers and attendees.
7. LinkedIn Organic
While it’s completely fine for B2B companies to use social networks like Instagram and TikTok, LinkedIn is truly the only social media platform built for B2B marketing.
Ask why. Most of its subscribers use the platform to conduct business, and over 59 million companies have a LinkedIn company page.
With content repurposing, the barrier to entry for building authority on LinkedIn has been greatly reduced. Assuming you’ve created thought leadership content for your other B2B marketing channels, you can easily improve and tailor content from those other campaigns for LinkedIn.
That being said, content repurposing for LinkedIn is only smooth when your company is doing other content marketing. If you don’t have content to modify and post in the first place, then the cost and difficulty of growth are bound to increase.
To help out further, here’s a comprehensive article that discusses everything to know about creating organic B2B marketing campaigns on LinkedIn.
Final thoughts
To sum up, There are numerous marketing channels that you can explore to grow your B2B brands. In terms of CAC and ROI, the seven listed above are some of the best B2B marketing channels worth exploring.
However, you mustn’t overwhelm yourself by using every channel as you begin. Rather, pick one or two then include new ones as you begin seeing results and your b2b marketing skills sharpen.
