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What is B2B Positioning: Why It Matters And How to Do It Effectively?
December 2, 2024
For the longest time, B2B businesses have viewed their marketing and sales journey as a funnel with four stages—awareness, intent, desire and action. In contrast to this traditional sales funnel, HubSpot came up with a different approach towards inbound marketing known as the flywheel model, which redefined the process as follows:
Imagine your business as a giant flywheel. The faster it spins, the faster your business grows! There are three main things that affect how fast that flywheel spins: Attract, Engage, and Delight.
Attract: This is all about getting people interested in your business. You’ve got to grab their attention and make them want to learn more!
Engage: Now that you've got their attention, you’ve gotta make it easy for them to buy from you. Talk to them where they like to hang out online, answer their questions, and show them why your product or service is awesome.
Delight: It's not enough to just make a sale and move on. Happy customers are the best kind of customers! Make sure your customers are successful with your product and keep them feeling good about your business. Happy customers tell their friends, and that means even more business for you!
B2B decision-makers go through a complex buying process before they purchase a product or service. But they are just as quick to leave a bad relationship. This is why customer engagement and delight play a pivotal role in the growth of a business. After all, you don't want to keep chasing new customers with high acquisition costs just because you fumbled customer relations after closing a deal. The traditional funnel dit not account for this.
Keeping this in mind, here are some inbound marketing strategies that look beyond the traditional sales funnel and treat "deal closed" as the end result. These lucrative inbound marketing strategies help you generate recurring revenue and help turn customers into brand advocates for further growth:
Since these inbound marketing strategies each serve different purposes in the flywheel model, none of these strategies work individually. They are often combined to provide the best results.
In layman's terms, demand generation is a B2B inbound marketing strategy that involves creating a buzz around your product or service. It's about getting people excited and interested in what you have to offer before they are ready to make a purchase. Think of it as building a community around your business-
Say you're selling a new type of software that helps businesses save money on energy costs. To create demand, you might write blog posts about how much energy businesses waste, share case studies of companies that saved a lot of money with your software, and offer free webinars on energy efficiency. This will help people understand the problem and see how your software can solve it.
Demand generation, like any other inbound marketing strategy, takes time and resources (marketing personnel, software, etc.) but it leads to increased brand awareness and improved brand reputation.
Lead generation is turning interested people into potential customers. Once the target audience initiates a relationship with the business, lead generation is the inbound marketing strategy through which they become potential customers.
Let's consider the same energy efficiency business we talked about. Once the target audience starts to notice your business due to the demand generation efforts, you might offer a free energy audit in exchange for people's contact information. This way, you can follow up with them and see if they're interested in learning more about your software. This is lead generation.
In contrast to traditional lead generation, Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a highly targeted form of lead generation that focuses on specific high-value accounts rather than a broad audience. While lead generation is about capturing potential customers' information, ABM is about nurturing and converting these high-value accounts into customers. In this way, ABM reduces the customer acquisition cost, compared to traditional lead generation tactics. However, the setup does take more investment in terms of software and data.
Here's how ABM works:
Using ABM tactics, an organization called Multiplier achieved $400,000 in revenue. Prior to implementing ABM, they faced challenges with marketing and sales team alignment. As a result of ABM, Multiplier achieved 100% SOM penetration in less than a quarter and $30,000 ACV from ABM intent mapping.
Product-led growth (PLG) is an inbound marketing strategy that focuses on the product itself as the primary driver of customer acquisition and growth. By providing a valuable and easy-to-use product, PLG aims to let the product sell itself.
Say a SaaS Company struggled to acquire new customers through traditional marketing strategies. To implement PLG, they may look at optimizing product onboarding, provide free trial or freemium models, and include in-app onboarding and tutorials to increase adoption. In theory, this will lead to increased user acquisition and adoption while decreasing churn.
Loyalty programs are designed to reward and retain existing customers by offering incentives for repeat purchases. They can be a valuable inbound marketing strategy for building customer loyalty and driving long-term growth.
A software company offering a subscription-based service could implement a loyalty program that rewards clients for long-term usage. Here's how it might work:
Referral program is an inbound marketing strategy that incentivizes existing customers to refer new customers to a business. This can be a highly effective way to acquire new customers at a lower cost and build brand loyalty. It is one of the most cost-effective customer acquisition methods.
A B2B company can structure a referral program with the following types of incentives:
Every B2B inbound and outbound marketing strategy is incomplete without the right selection of marketing channels. Here are the most popular inbound marketing channels for your B2B business:
Content marketing refers to a marketing strategy that involves creating and distributing content that encourages your target audience to take action. The content can be in the form of blog posts, guides, thought leadership, gated content, case studies, affiliates, guest posts, etc. Good content helps generate demand and establish your brand as thought leaders. It also supports search engine optimization efforts and increased visibility in search engines.
While content marketing is a long-term marketing strategy that takes time to show effect, it is one of the most cost-effective and keeps giving returns long term.
Read how TripleDart employed content marketing strategies to increase Rezolve.ai's organic traffic by 99% and leads by 136%.
B2B SEO is the process of making changes to your website (technical SEO), creating content based on keyword research, and acquiring links from other reputable websites (backlinks), among other things. These efforts help your website rank better in search engines and gain credibility among your target audience.
Search engine optimization is one of the most scalable and effective inbound marketing methodologies, but it also takes the most time and effort to see tangible returns.
Read how TripleDart helped RentoMojo successfully reduce CAC by 62% & boost orders by 15% through effective search engine optimization.
PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click. It's a model of online advertising where advertisers pay each time a user clicks on one of their ads. By strategically incorporating PPC into your inbound marketing strategy, you can promote your best content pieces, promote important landing pages or help increase conversions.
While PPC shows quick and measurable results, it is a costly channel and it should be used in conjunction with other inbound marketing tactics to achieve the best results. The best platforms for B2B PPC campaigns are search engines, Linkedin, Facebook, and TikTok.
Read how TripleDart helped Sprinklr achieve 16% increase in SAL via Paid Search within one quarter!
Email marketing is a powerful inbound marketing strategy that involves sending targeted emails to potential and existing customers. By nurturing leads and building relationships through personalized communication, you can prompt more sales conversions over time.
Whale Mail by TripleWhale is an engaging email newsletter that addresses various tactics and benchmark metrics for ecommerce companies and has helped TripleWhale effectively drive customer acquisition and retention.
Webinars is an inbound methodology that acts as a digital seminars or workshops that aim to educate audiences or train them. You can use webinars to launch new products, explain updates, or simply create a strong network like ActiveCampaign has done with their webinar resources.
Video is a great inbound marketing channel that can be used to educate your ICP on the importance of your products or services. You can’t do without exploring this because video traffic has accounted for an estimated 82% of customer internet traffic in 2024.The biggest pro of inbound marketing is you can repurpose content into multiple formats, such as transcribing and publishing video to create blogs and social media posts. They do require expertise and investment in terms of resources and equipment.
Social media platforms play an integral role in today's digital marketing efforts. An average user spends 143 minutes on social media platforms—it helps businesses build communities and create connections with their marketing allows your prospective customers a more personal connection with your company.
Both inbound and outbound marketing suffer due to the complexity selecting the right mix of channels. Most in-house marketing teams are siloed and do not have expertise to create a cohesive marketing strategy. An inbound marketing campaign on the surface is cost-effective and does not have high monetary requirements. However, a good campaign takes a team of experts and a lot of time to implement. Hence, creating an ineffective inbound marketing campaign affects bottom-line revenue in the long run. It also requires constant oversight and the knowledge to measure the right KPIs, not superficial metrics which discount marketing efforts in the long run.
TripleDart has successfully created effective B2B inbound marketing strategies for multiple clients. With our team of experts acting as an extension of your team, you can achieve the growth you desire.
Contact us today to learn more!
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