B2B Marketing

What is B2B Marketing?

Business-to-business (B2B) marketing is when you market or cross-sell your products and/or services to another business, not individual consumers. It’s more complex than business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing because a single sale requires you to identify, engage, and convert several stakeholders. For example, to market an A/B testing tool, you’d want to interact with end-users (marketers, UX designers, app developers) and decision-makers with purchasing power (project managers, financial executives, the C-suite).

B2B marketing can require multiple simultaneous campaigns to convince all these stakeholders that your product serves the needs of their organization. As a result, marketing campaigns often take longer and are more data-driven in B2B settings in order to convince prospects of your solution's ROI.

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Examples of B2B marketing tools

Shopify Plus

While Shopify caters to B2C eCommerce retailers, Shopify Plus lets you create an online storefront to sell to other businesses.

With Shopify Plus, you can:

• Review and approve wholesale account sign-ups

• Implement volume-based pricing

• Set minimum and maximum order thresholds

• Review orders or allow instant checkout

If you’re a direct-to-consumer business and want to start distributing your product through retail partners, you’d want to use Shopify Plus to access the same inventory pool for both your B2B and B2C shops. That means if you have 1,000 units of a product and a wholesaler buys 700 pieces, both your B2B and B2C shops will automatically reflect the updated inventory data: only 300 units left.

However, if you want complete control over your online shopping experience, you may want to build your own site from scratch instead of depending on Shopify’s templates and functionalities. Shopify also gets more expensive as your storefronts and inventory grow.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp started out as an email service provider. In 2019, it began expanding to become a marketing automation platform. Now, you can do these things on Mailchimp:

• Build landing pages and websites

• Run multichannel ad campaigns

• Design and edit marketing graphics

• Get data-driven insights on audiences and campaigns

• And, of course, send emails and deploy automated email marketing workflows.

With its freemium model, Mailchimp attracts many SMBs. It also gives charities and nonprofits a 15% discount.

Slack

Slack is best known for communication between co-workers. But some businesses have found it to be an effective tool for building a community, which serves as a valuable marketing channel. It’s a great platform not just for networking but also for discussing industry issues and learning from peers and customers.

Superpath, for example, used Slack to build a community of content marketers. It offers structured courses for a fee and has a marketplace where businesses can find freelance writers. Many Slack communities target founders and startups, too.

Intercom

Intercom is a customer communications platform used by more than 25,000 businesses, including tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft. It's best known for its Messenger, which you can use to send personalized, contextual messages to your website visitors either through a chatbot or a human.

For example, you'd send a pop-up chat message based on what a visitor read and clicked on your site. Intercom would also alert account managers whenever a prospect they're nurturing visits the site so they can start a conversation. These functionalities support account-based marketing, a B2B marketing approach that focuses on identifying, nurturing, and converting stakeholders within a company.

Intercom offers different plans for businesses ranging from very small companies and early-stage startups to enterprises.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a CRM, sales, marketing, and customer service platform rolled into one. Its marketing software lets you design, automate, track, and manage inbound marketing campaigns. For example, you’d set up a marketing automation workflow to retarget a prospect with social media ads based on content they downloaded on your website.

HubSpot’s enterprise customers get access to workflow templates for account-based marketing. The platform tracks interactions with prospects and uses AI to identify and recommend potential high-value accounts.