10 Best B2B Marketing Channels

With so many advertising and distribution channel options available today, it isn’t easy to select the perfect option that provides you with the best returns for your B2B company. 

Taking the help of B2B marketing channels is essential because they increase your brand visibility by educating other businesses about your product and services.

This article concentrates on various B2B marketing channels and their importance for your business.

Let’s begin!

What Is B2B Marketing?

Business-to-business marketing means using advertising techniques to amplify your products and services to other businesses.

B2B advertising takes place on both online and offline methods. It creates value for your products, further converting that into sales and profit opportunities.

Also read: 6 Biggest B2B Marketing Challenges

Why are B2B marketing channels important?

Promotional channels act as a vessel between you and your audience. Understanding its importance is a vital concept for B2B businesses.

Here is the importance of B2B marketing channels:

Cost-Efficiency

Business-to-business advertising strategies like SEO and social media platforms are highly cost-efficient as they don’t require a lot of investment like printing pamphlets and fliers, billboard spacing, and other expensive advertising channels. 

Trackable Performance Metrics

Business-to-business advertising channels help you measure your advertising success while providing insights to improve the loopholes and weaker sections of your business to provide customers with the best results. These channels help you identify SWOT for your firm and make you aware of what’s working in your favor and what’s not. Key metrics you can measure to identify an organization’s performance are website traffic, social media metrics, customer retention rate, cost per lead, customer acquisition cost, etc.

Attracting Quality Leads

Generating quality leads is extremely important for businesses. Using promotional strategies like social media, emails, direct mail, PPC, etc., to catch audiences’ eyes can reap fruitful results for your company. Giving your organization a diversified advertising strategy using various channels helps you generate high-value leads that can turn into long-term customers.

Quick Results

Promotional strategies offer quicker and more evident results as the mode of communication between leads and business are plenty and easy. Through an effective advertising plan, When customers notice your product and services via different mediums, they tend to research and take action for them quickly without delay.

Now that we have understood the relevance of promotional channels for your B2B firm let’s discuss the different channels to improve your brand value and visibility.

Also read: How To Develop B2B SaaS Sales Process

10 Best B2B Marketing Channels

1- Social Media Marketing

In today’s world, social media marketing or optimizing and creating appealing social media accounts is much more important than your website. Creating an impactful social media presence is a core part of your B2B full-funnel marketing plan. 

Social media advertising allows you to maintain an always-on relationship with your customers and engage them organically through your content and posts.

About 77% of B2B content promoters say that social media platforms produce the best results with maximum ROI and minimum customer acquisition cost.

Here are the best ways to engage your buyers on social media platforms:

• Line up your goals with business objectives: Your social media strategy must answer two crucial questions, i.e., what is your business motto, and how will your strategies help achieve those objectives?

• Identify opportunities: Social listening is the best way to analyze and discover opportunities to act by tracking social media trends and fads, which can convert into valuable leads.

• Pay keen attention to the audience: You must know your target audience and where your content is reaching. If you are sponsoring your content to a different audience, the chances of increasing your conversion rates are meager. It’s essential to identify the right kind of audience and create personalized content for them to retain them.

• Choose the right social media platform: You should be present where your prospective customers are. It’s the key rule of social media advertisi. Reaching your niche audience and ensuring you are available for them at the right time and place is essential to keep them engaged.

• Use insights to measure your efforts: You’ll only know your social media performance through metrics and KPIs. You should measure your engagement rates, social media conversions, sales, and post impressions to see how well you advertise your product and services. These metrics allow you to quickly identify what kind of content is working in your favor and what needs to be improved for the best results.

Also read: 3 Budgeting Tools to Help You Create the Ideal Social Media Marketing Budget

2- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

B2B search engine optimization is an advertising channel that offers business-to-business websites and pages that rank higher on search engines for better reach and visibility, such as Google and Bing.

B2B SEO focuses on optimizing relevant keywords that other business decision-makers search for when they want to buy a product or service that you offer. B2B firms use keywords whose cost-per-click is usually higher than B2C.

Search engines are looking for meaty content that serves users’ with relevant information. The content for business-to-business firms is optimized, keeping decision-makers in mind. You should focus on winning the ranking game on search engines by implementing EAT (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness) in your SEO strategy, i.e., creating and delivering high-quality pages which contain accurate, recognized, and insightful information.

About 68% of users’ online experience begins with search engines.

Almost 70% of advertisers believe that SEO is a better audience and sales generator than pay-per-click marketing.

Also read: Best SEO Courses To Become A Master SEO

3- Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC refers to advertising your products by running paid ads on search engines (Google Ads) and social media platforms (Facebook Ads). Your advertisements are displayed to the audience when they search for content related to your niche. Pay-per-click runs on the keywords search.

A well-designed PPC ad is a cost-effective advertising channel as the value of each customer visit(click) outreach the cost paid to the publisher for the ad.

There are two kinds of pay-per-click models that are available for B2B companies:

• Flat-rate model: In the flat-rate model, the promoters pay a fixed amount to the search engines and social media platforms for each click. Publishers have rate cards based on the competitiveness of keywords your content is offering.

• Bid-based model: In the bid-based model, all the advertisers bid on the amount they can pay for a particular ad spot. The ad publishers use automated tools to decide the marketers’ ranking based on the quality of their content and the price they are offering. The higher your rank, the higher your chances of you getting the ad spot.

4- Video Marketing

Video marketing is a digital B2B marketing channel that plans and creates valuable and interactive content through video format to attract other businesses.

Engaging your customers through video format on social media platforms and your website educates your audience, creates, and helps them in the decision-making process of buying a product. Video advertising is precious for your sales funnel to generate leads and escalate conversions.

Here are the top reasons why your B2B business should choose the video advertising method:

• Video content improves your search engine rankings as video suggestions appear on the first page of Google when a particular keyword is searched. Optimized video publishing will help you get free exposure on search engines.

• Video publishing affects buyers’ decisions as customers are driven more to be visually appealing and on the go. It highly affects buyers’ behavior and decision as videos build trust and grab viewers’ attention. Before buying a product, customers are more likely to research the product through videos than pictures or readable content.

• Video creation provides better conversion rates and drives quality traffic as producing video content helps you engage viewers on your website for longer, which alerts search engines that your content is valuable, leading to higher SERP rankings, and ultimately driving traffic and converting leads.

Some of the popular video creation examples are:

• Customer stories and testimonials
• Product and service reviews
• Promotional videos
• Webinars
• Virtual events
• Product demo
• Live videos
• Behind-the-scenes videos
• Social media videos
• Tutorials, etc.

Also read: How Video Marketing Improves Website Conversions

5- Email Marketing

B2B email marketing refers to sending out email campaigns via email to other businesses who are capable of turning into your prospective buyers. The content of emails is product and company updates and promotional offers.

When dealing with other businesses, email advertising is an important promotional strategy as most business professionals spend most of their time using and checking their emails. An optimized email strategy will help you catch the eye of your prospects quickly.

Creating personalized and interactive emails for your clients and future customers helps you increase your customer retention rate and generate new leads.

Here are the benefits that an email marketing strategy offers for your B2B company:

• It provides a customized communication option that enables you to segregate businesses category-wise and create tailored messages for each segment with personalized information, helping lead generation and engaging your clients via the sales funnel.

• Email advertising helps develop a cordial relationship with your customers since it’s two-way communication, and both parties can chat and respond at their convenience. There is no cold calling or disturbance from your end.

• It is the most preferred form of reaching out to customers if your advertising budget is not so high. It is one of the most cost-effective channels of B2B advertising. With the minimum investment, you can receive high returns.

• The accessibility is extremely easy for the audience as they can easily understand your message in the nick of time with a few clicks, even on their mobile. You should ensure that the email you are sending is easy to read with valuable information.

Also read: Best Free Tools For Email Marketing [2021]

6- Direct Mail

Direct mail is a promotional strategy that refers to sending out physical letters, brochures, flyers, postcards, etc., to your current and future customers.

This marketing strategy lets you target and sends tangible products to your industry-specific prospects.

Direct mail ensures the following advantages for your business:

• It received better response rates from leads.
• It attracts customers as they like goodies and specialized mail.
• It’s considered an essential asset for account-based promotion.
• It creates a positive brand image resulting in future sales.
• It helps in customer retention and increases repeat orders.
• It enables cross-selling to existing customers.
• It helps in building brand loyalty.

7- Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a business-to-business marketing method that endorses and promotes your product and services with the help of influencers and individuals with a high follower base on social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.

Since these influencers have a good amount of followers, it’s more accessible to build trust among customers through them, and their recommendations act as social proof for your brand.

Engaging audiences via different social media platforms enables your B2B brand to improve awareness and generate new leads for your sales funnel.

Here are the advantages of implementing influencer marketing in your promotional strategies:

• Improves brand awareness and reach
• Boost trust and credibility 
• Enhances SEO, return on investment, and bottom line
• Drives buying decisions
• Saves time and money
• Reaches to the target audience

Also read: Strategy to Increase Your Brand’s Social Value Using Influencer Marketing

8- Public Relations (PR)

B2B public relations refers to creating and maintaining your business-to-business brand image in the eyes of your prospects. It enables them to create a positive reputation and a healthy relationship with other businesses.

You should be clear about when to include PR methods in your promotional strategy. Here are the advantages of PR for your business-to-business firm:

• Public relations will help you create a buzz among other businesses when launching a new product.
• When your audience base and growth have become stagnant, public relations will introduce your product and services at new places with their advantages to attract new buyers from all over.
• Public relations can significantly help you share your previous success stories with your potential clients in an appealing way.
• With strong connections and in-depth knowledge of the media, public relations channels help you get press coverage and plan and pitch for link-building on your behalf.

9- Content Marketing

Content marketing is a promotional strategy that produces and distributes educational and creative content to increase your brand awareness, visibility, leads, and revenues for B2B firms.

Content promotion is considered extremely important in B2B organizations for the following reasons:

• Google loves content. Hence developing a solid and valuable content strategy will help you rank higher on SERPs.
• Unlike other interruption tactics like ads and pop-ups, it provides valuable information to the users.
• Providing consistent and high-quality content will let your audience stick longer to your organization.
• A good content tactic will help garner audience attention on social media platforms and search engines, increasing your online visibility.
• Excellent content creation will help you build brand authority in your niche.

Here are the valuable forms of content that you can offer to your customers for a better understanding of your business operation:

• Case Studies
• Blogs
• Audience Reviews and Testimonials
• Collaborations and Partnerships with other Businesses
• Webinars and Live Videos
• Podcasts
• Ebooks
• Business Statistics

Also read: 8 Content Marketing Tips For Faster Success

10- Referral Marketing

B2B referral advertising is promoting your product and services by various referral methods by your loyal and existing buyers. It generally includes practices that compel your happy customers to spread word-of-mouth in return for loyalty points and referral codes.

It increases your chances of acquiring new customers as they tend to trust their network and real testimonials by existing users more. Customer retention rate also tends to increase as the focus is mainly on buyers’ satisfaction.

Here are the ways you can implement referral promotional channels in your advertising strategy:

• You need to provide exceptional buyer experience to existing users.
• Collect genuine reviews from buyers for your product and services
• Create helpful content to share with most people showing your best services.
• Provide discounts, offers, and loyalty points on referrals for your products and services to existing and new buyers.

B2B Marketing Channel FAQs

1- What is a B2B marketing channel?

A business-to-business promotional channel is any advertising medium through which you can reach out to your future prospects and target audience and convert them into valuable leads. 

B2B promotional channel examples include:

• Paid searches and organic search listings
• Social media promotion and paid ads
• Blog posting
• Email advertising, etc.

2- What are the Types of B2B buyers?

B2B buyers can be profitable and non-profitable businesses. Here are the four major categories of business-to-business buyers:

• Producers: Producers are the buyers that buy products and services from B2B companies to use them as a part of their final product. Examples include Mcdonalds, HP, P&G, etc.
• Resellers: They are B2B buyers that acquire products from your company and, as it is, sell them to consumers with any changes. They include wholesalers, retailers, and brokers.
• Government: They buy products and services from B2B companies to use for their services. From paper to machines, the government buys everything from other businesses to promote entrepreneurship for small and medium businesses.
• Institutions: Institutional market refers to non-profit organizations that buy your product and services in large quantities to cut down their expenses, as lower expenses will help them serve more people. These institutions include hospitals, churches, NGOs, etc.

3- Why is B2B marketing important?

promotion is essential for any business. Talking about B2B promotion, it becomes extremely important to promote your business via different channels for the following reasons:

• It helps set your business apart from the rest and create awareness among the audience for your brand.
• B2B promotion is important as it drives heavy traffic toward your web presence via different mediums like paid ads, social media platforms, search engines, etc., ultimately leading to higher lead generation.
• It helps measure your company’s performance through qualitative and quantitative metrics and provides your customers with the best experience through insights and feedback.
• Opting for different promotional channels for your business allows you to get the best ROI for your efforts and resources with the least CAC.

Also read: Best B2B SaaS SEO Tools That Marketers Use Secretly

Conclusion

Choosing the right promotional channel for your business is not easy. B2B advertising is challenging as it requires educating your customers deeply since the sales cycles and business-buyer relationships are longer. You need to take help from experts or consultants before selecting the proper advertising channels for your company.

We have listed the top 10 B2B marketing channels you can implement in your business advertising to get more reach and leads with the least effort and money. Depending on your business type and scale, you should decide which channels to choose to bring you higher revenues, MQL and PQL.

Also read: Top B2B Ecommerce Marketing Stats [2021]