Whether yours is a B2B company or B2C company, marketing is the lifeblood of any business. An effective b2b marketing strategy provides the companies a definite edge in an increasingly competitive business landscape. A business to business marketing strategy involves dissemination of information about the company’s products, solutions and services, and thus, setting its offerings apart from those of its competitors.

In today’s economy it is imperative for those in the b2b marketing to spend more in online marketing. The recent findings of survey conducted by B2B Magazine reveal that more than 48% of those surveyed were in the process of increasing their online marketing spend. Moreover, if your competitors are proactively targeting your prospective clients online, an effective B2B marketing strategy for the digital media is an absolute must.

Below is the rundown of Online Marketing Strategies that should form part of an effective B2B marketing strategy:

Email marketing

Email marketing is a hugely popular way to stay connected to your customers and prospects. It is a cost effective toll for sending newsletters, targeted emails, email newsletters, bulk emails to your customers. It is also helpful for those operating on the B2B marketing. Converting your target audience into leads and generating new customers through email marketing campaigns is one of the essential components in your b2b marketing strategy for 2015. According to the findings of a study conducted by Regalix, about 84 percent of b2b marketers are regularly using email for marketing events.

However, it is of utmost significance that email marketing should be aligned with content marketing in order to improve effectiveness. There is no point of taking resort to email marketing if you are not able to use it properly. You have to personalize and provide value in your email content. Your inability in doing so will result in your email going in spam box or getting ignored and deleted as soon as it is received.

There are three types of email marketing which are quite popular in B2B marketing companies; Email Nurturing, Email Blasts and Email Newsletters.

By Email nurturing via an automated series, you can provide useful information to solve a prospect’s business pain points. An Email nurturing helps you maintain contact with your sales leads, establish thought leadership and grow and nurture relationships. An important part of busiess to business marketing, email blast is an awesome tactic to stay in touch with your customers and prospects. An email newsletter is an effective digital tool to disseminate information about your industry to your existing and potential customers.  In the email newsletter, you can share your blog posts that should focus on educating the reader which will engage the reader.

Advertising

It is obvious that going for fancy advertising should not be on the agenda in a b2b marketing strategy. A B2b start-up can ill afford to go for fancy advertising; not to speak of the old billboard that is quite expensive. However, a B2B marketing company with high budget can derive immense benefits by going for online advertising. Today, several B2B companies around the world are spending on advertising in the social networking sites such as Google, Yelp, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to promote their content such as case studies, whitepapers, blogs and videos.

According to the analysts, in the coming years advertising will consume more from the companies if they have to become more visible in listings on search engines and social media.

 Content Marketing

Content helps you build trust and confidence.  Through content marketing you can target your potential customers and prospects by sharing relevant content with them in the form of articles, blogging, press releases, videos, infographics, etc.  You can guest post on blogs and news websites that your customers and clients are most likely to visit. The content should address the pain points of the customers. Hence, there is a need to align your content strategy with you B2B marketing strategy. If you are in the league of B2B companies, particularly start ups, you can afford to ignore content marketing at your peril. For a B2B startup, content marketing can be an effective strategy to target your prospects. You will have to take recourse to content marketing by delivering variety of content.

After aligning your content marketing with your business to business marketing strategy, you will find that your cost per customer acquisition will come down.

According to the findings of the Content Marketing Institute, in North America, more than 90% B2B businesses use content marketing but only 9% were using it very effectively and 33% effectively. So it is incumbent on the B2b companies to put an effective content marketing strategy in place.

Social Media

A study conducted by SiriusDecisions shows that though that 95 percent of marketers in the B2B companies have created corporate social media accounts, about 50 percent of these B2B marketers are regularly not active on the social networking sites.

Accooridng to the fidigs of the survey, only 10 percent of respondents were able to derive the business value of social media.

However, it can be said with absolute certainty that customer engagement on social networking sites will be a sine qua non for B2B marketing success in 2015. These sites are providing a majority of the B2b marketing companies the platform to reach out to current and potential customers. Social media has become a preferred tool for making connect with their prospects. A survey by Regalix in December lats year has revealed that 87 percent of B2B marketers used social media to commonly promote their events. Approximately 68 percent of the respondents were of the opinion that social media played an effective role in marketing events. A total of 91 percent of business to business marketers are using some form of social media during marketing events.

Today social media, which has changed the dynamics of the B2B marketing, is being used by these companies around the world on a greater scale. Social media has changed the way the B2B companies interact with customers and how they market their products and services.

Consequently, it has been found that increasing number of B2B companies are using social media platform to unveil the latest ad campaign. However, it is not out of the context to mention that just having their presence on social networking sites serves no purpose when it comes to increasing the consumer engagement. It makes no sense if you are only interacting once a month.

The challenge for many B2B companies is trying to find ways to build social media into the overall framework of the business. For this, they need to have an effective social media strategy and a plan.

Against this backdrop, it is incumbent on the B2B companies have to maintain closer relationships with their clients and understand what they’re looking for and what they can offer to them.

The B2B companies should keep in mind that while using social media, they should focus more on thought leadership than simple marketing. The true ROI of social media in business to business marketing strategy does not come only from disseminating your products and services, but from the engagement you make with the businesses.

Among the popular social media platforms, LinkedIn is the appropriate platform for business-to-business marketing. Being a more professional networking environment, LinkedIn can be used by the B2B marketers for showcasing their business and establishing their brand. Twitter can also be a highly effective tool for B2B marketing if it is used in combination with other social networking media including blogs.

Video Marketing

According to the findings of a study conducted by DemandMetric and Vidyard on the state of B2B video marketing, over 60 percent of B2B marketers have shown propensity to enhance their video spending while more than 80 percent B2B marketers were able to report success in their video marketing strategy.

Video marketing, according to Adobe2013 video conversion playbook, can offer upto 90 percent increase in conversion rate.

Video media should play an important role in the B2B marketing strategy of a company. A b2b marketing company can post technical guides, user manuals, handbooks to their customers and new prospects. It is not a surprise that these days the B2B businesses are devoting employees, time and money for Video marketing through the use of social Media Optimization (SMO), search engine optimization (SEO), and through your website. If you don’t have a strong presence across these digital media channels, you can send the video content through email as and when they need it.

Online marketing channels are useful inbound approach for Business to business marketers for making new business connections and connecting and interacting with their business clients and prospects. These online channels can help you know your business clients and establish closer relationships with them which are an integral part of the business process. To sum up, those operating on the realm of the business to business marketing can ill afford to lose sight of the online business activities.