3 Practical Steps for a Better B2B Marketing Strategy

You’ve heard it before from authors, LinkedIn speakers, and conference presenters: 

• “B2B marketing is boring, but it doesn’t have to be.” 
  Sure.

• “It can be just as clear, digestible, and inspiring as consumer marketing.” 
  Got it. 

• “You just have to know your audience and talk to them like real people.” 
  Yawn.

The problem is, that’s usually where the pep talk stops. What’s missing is how you ought to go about doing it. You’re on board, now how do you steer the ship away from boring and towards inspirational? 

We’re here to help. In this article, we’re sharing our POV on making your B2B brand stand out, and along the way, we’ll reveal why B2B brands are actually at an advantage, regardless of category or product. 

It all comes down to three things: connection, focus, and commitment. 

Here’s how to apply those principles for a standout B2B website design.

Step 1: Connect With Your Consumer

Whether in ads, website content, or sales materials, B2B marketing leaders tend to get stuck focusing solely on their product, solution, and benefits in excruciating detail. 

There’s a time and place for this, sure. But for your prospects, the B2B “decision journey” mindset is exactly the same as B2C at the top of the funnel. Your first goal is simply to connect with your audiences, and a fintech enterprise can achieve this as easily as a candy bar maker. 

You just need to find that emotional VELCRO: the reason to believe that will resonate and stick with the audience you’re targeting. It might not be your main selling point, or even your unique point of difference, but it is your way in.

Of course, final decisions usually come down to specs and cost. But the decision making process starts when you first begin a relationship, establish trust, and prove credibility. It’s emotional before it’s rational. 

We’ve helped even the toughest of B2B brands tap into emotion. When we partnered with a leading cybersecurity brand, we discovered their true ethos by looking beyond their products to the bigger picture and asking:

• Why does our brand exist?
• What challenge do we help our customers conquer?
• How do we approach our work and relationships with customers?

The answers to those questions informed every brand governance and digital marketing strategy decision we made together, from brand architecture to web content. 

Step 2: Focus on Your Community

Your brand is made up of the emotions, ideas, images and stories that exist in your consumer’s mind about your company or product. The more you know about your consumers, the better your brand can connect with them. 

Here’s where B2B companies actually have an advantage over consumer brands: your target audience is much more targeted. You’re not trying to appeal to just anyone who enjoys, for instance, sparkling water or driving a safe car. You know your SaaS product, services, or other solution is relevant to people within a specific role, company, industry, and with a consistent set of concrete challenges. So you can focus on a much more specific insight, truth, pain point, or attitude they share with your brand to make a genuine connection. 

Once you’ve made that connection, you’ve got to keep it real to keep it. Just remember, real people have personalities, interests, insecurities, ambitions and worries - and if you can understand and relate to them on those terms, it will make your brand’s connection with them stronger. 

The best B2B website design responds to what your real audiences really need. For example, in the immediately post-COVID, work-from-home business environment, we partnered with our sister agency, Jack Morton, to help Eaton Corporation break through the clutter and reach a skeptical B2B audience: IT professionals. Dynamic content addressed a wide range of this audience’s concerns: "deskercises" to counteract hours of sitting, power management tips to help their infrastructure run smoothly, even a fantasy game that transformed IT problems into epic quests. It was content that Eaton’s specific audience segment truly wanted, and it succeeded. 

Step 3: Commit to Your Message

None of this is to say you have to completely boil down your message – this is just the starting point. Once you’ve found a way to connect to your audience and focus on their specific interests, it’s time to build that foundation into an ongoing conversation.

Commit to the insight, challenge, or tension you’ve chosen, and take the time (ideally over a period of months or quarters) to play it out. Just like with B2C campaigns, once you’ve invested in a B2B marketing strategy with a creative platform and key message, you can get a lot of value for little effort by unpacking that topic and evolving it over time as your audience evolves. 

Showing this commitment and brand governance will also reinforce to your ideal audience that you really do get them: you know what keeps them up at night, you know what they’re excited about, what they’ll find funny, and what they really need to know to succeed. It’s all about having conversations that are person to person, brand to human.

For example, in the Eaton work we referenced, we didn’t just create content and messaging to reach the IT Professional audience. After the campaign launched, we also commissioned the first study in the country focused specifically on IT professionals’ workloads, stressors, and sleep patterns. This helped Eaton own their message because they’d fully and authentically committed to it.

Bonus Step: Get a Partner Who Gets It

Making a genuine connection is your ticket to standing out in a sea of B2B sameness. And that’s what we at Genuine help brands do. We’d love to help you find what makes your brand genuinely different, genuinely you - and translate that into a B2B marketing strategy. 

We’re ready. Are you? Connect with us today.