What is B2B marketing?

As a business, you may be trying your best to reach out to and attract new customers. However, there are some businesses that work diligently to market their products or services to other businesses instead.

Of course, even if selling the same thing to both, there are fundamental differences between marketing to a business and marketing to a consumer. We’re here to give you a quick rundown on the ins and outs of B2B marketing!

What is B2B marketing?

B2B marketing: a different focus

In the realm of business to business marketing, emotions don’t play a major role like they do when marketing to a consumer. In fact, it is recommended that you focus on the logistical side of your products or services in order to entice other businesses towards working with you. This is because personal emotions will not play as much of a role when attempting to connect with a business.

Although you're still dealing with people, and thus emotions will play a minute role, make sure that the wants and desires of these business owners are backed with logic, financial benefits as well as hard-hitting data. Instead, other business owners will be looking for you to have a competent understanding of how your specific marketplace works, as well as organizational and operational procedures.

It is important to remember that B2B marketing is not about the product or service itself, but rather how customers can use the product or services to move their lives forward in a dynamic way. For this reason, another general focus of B2B marketing is concrete information. With this in mind, make sure you have a marketing plan that offers cold hard facts regarding how your business can improve the lives of others, whether that involves saving time, money or resources. 

Lastly, another major point of interest for businesses will be the ROI or the return on investment. This will be a marker of your profitability, and thus it's necessary for the ROI to have a concrete benefit for the business you're looking to work with. 

Consider products or services that consumers can’t use

In certain instances, B2B marketing exists for businesses that have products which consumers can’t actually use. As an example, consider the ownership or marketing of natural resources such as steel or aluminum. These resources are of no practical use to the average consumer, and would thus be quite difficult to profit from in a B2C, or business to consumer, marketplace.

However, in the world of B2B marketing, these resources can be purchased and sold between companies to be turned into consumer-based products at a later date or in a variety of other business to business deals. 

B2B e-commerce

As a result of our current cultural landscape, B2B e-commerce has emerged. This means that businesses can work to sell directly to other businesses by way of leveraging an online platform. Further, this is a way for e-commerce businesses to share resources between one another, including data and information about products, services or general aspects of the marketplace. B2B e-commerce involves 3 major categories and we'll be going to go over them below.

Looking for a B2B marketing expert?

Contact us so we can refer you to specialists in our network

Development services

A common facet of B2B marketing is for internal website and development services. A company website can be used to develop relationships between businesses, and can further be maintained as an intranet for internal use. Websites that operate between businesses alone can be beneficial for a number of reasons, as it offers the ability to sell products or services directly from your site while simultaneously e-tailing to other businesses.

In some cases, B2B companies may provide software for building B2B websites, making them a B2B that targets B2B’s. If you choose to adopt this business model or work with a company that does, there can be an exchange of anything from site-building templates and tools, database features as well as methods for updating, maintaining and other web development practices.

Supply and procurement exchange

These websites will sometimes be referred to as e-procurement sites, and this type of B2B marketing will look to focus on a niche market or serve a specific industry. Essentially, these are in place to enable the exchange of supplies as well as their procurement.

This type of B2B marketing is left to specialized industries or markets, such as education, healthcare, construction and so forth. In most cases, they provide crucial information including product and service listings as well as discussion groups. Again, these sites are best to create a line of communication between service providers and their industry business customers.

Infomediaries

In a nutshell, this type of website is used for information. They offer tailored information that is targeted towards a specific marketplace or industry. These are generally left to trades and other industry organization sites. 

It's crucial to remember that B2B marketing doesn't exist in a vacuum and should be used alongside different strategies, including B2C marketing as well as C2B.