1. Dig deeper when targeting your demographic

Often times business to business (B2B) marketers take the “spray and pray” approach when it comes to targeting their demographic. This can be a huge waste of valuable marketing money. You can fix this by narrowing down your audience using “hyper-targeting”. Creating fake, target personas can, psychologically, put you into their mindset so you can make marketing decisions that are more likely to resonate with them.

2. Get feedback

Not doing customer research or surveying your audience is like flying a plane with a blindfold on. Getting feedback from your target demographic isn’t an option, it’s a necessity. B2B marketing must be driven by data over anything else and without truly understanding your audience, your marketing strategy is as good as guessing. One of the best ways to go about getting feedback is to employ a survey process into your marketing methods. This can unlock incredibly useful data when it comes to events, conferences and trade shows.

3. Extend your funnel

What differentiates B2B marketing strategies from business to consumer (B2C) strategies is that the cycle a user takes to go from prospect to lead to customer is much longer. This is for many reasons: product/service education takes more time, buy-in is usually needed from higher-ups and budget allocation/approval is a lengthier process. However, many B2B marketers create a short marketing funnel thinking that it will lead to faster sales. Here are some proven ways to nurture your leads by extending your funnel:

• Create content that helps educate potential customers on your product or service
• Host webinars that offer more value than sales pitch
• Use social media to build your brand by engaging with your target audience rather than selling them

4. Invest in an explainer video

An eMarketer study found that B2B buyers name video among the top 3 most useful types of content for making work purchases. One of the most popular (and successful) ways of utilising video in a B2B marketing strategy is by creating an explainer video. This type of video content usually takes the form of a story to inform the potential customer about your product or service, your unique value proposition and exactly how it will benefit them.

5. Create goals and milestones

Goals are important but milestones are even more important. You can think of goals as the final destination, whereas milestones are the steps needed to reach that destination – your map. It may seem simple but often times marketers forget the importance of understanding exactly how to reach their goals. You can start by evaluating your marketing goals and reverse engineering them to discover the most efficient way to reach them. Break down this analysis into simple, easy to understand milestones. Doing so will make the entire marketing process easier to comprehend for your team and there will be no hesitation as to how you’ll be reaching your marketing goals.