Discover 11 innovative B2B marketing campaign ideas designed to drive sales and elevate your business strategy. From targeted content to strategic partnerships, these actionable tactics can transform your lead generation and conversion efforts.
Having trouble with lead generation? It’s time to take a look at your strategy.
Maybe you aren't sending the right emails to the right people, or your ads aren't targeting the right audience segments. Perhaps you didn't optimize your content for search engines, and your target audience can't find the articles you worked so hard on.
The good news is there are tried-and-true B2B marketing campaign ideas that do work, and we’ve listed them out for you.
Content marketing involves using written, visual, or audio content to promote your brand and engage your customers. Businesses use it at all funnel stages, from blog posts that help customers discover their product to comparison guides for those evaluating different providers.
When developing personalized content for specific customer groups, consider using SEO, search engine marketing, or gated content.
B2B companies get 2x more revenue from organic search than any other channel—so if you aren't creating SEO content to bring in your ideal customers, you're missing out. To start building a content marketing strategy, research your target audience's pain points and find out what they're interested in.
Say you sell support software that improves agent productivity, and you're targeting CEOs and managers at mid-size SaaS companies. To reach these decision-makers, you could write about topics like the impact of support automation and AI on customer happiness and operations.
Find keywords related to your topics using tools like Ahrefs or Semrush, and examine their search intent to make sure you're giving searchers information that's relevant to their interests. Each article's goal should be to get potential new customers to submit their contact information or request a product demo.
Search engine marketing (SEM) primarily uses paid ads to boost your domain’s visibility in search results. The paid results are labeled as ads. For example, Google marks these results with “Sponsored.”
SEM uses keywords (search queries) to target your audience with the right content, products, and offers.
These ads are charged per click (also known as pay-per-click ads), which means you only pay every time a user clicks on your ad.
Many marketers use Google Ads for paid search marketing. It allows you to target specific keywords important for your business, create personalized ads, and set location requirements. The platform also offers a quality score, which helps you improve your ads and ROI.
Gated content is accessible to users only after they’ve performed a specific action, such as sharing their email. It acts as a lead magnet, providing you with the contact information of people likely to be interested in your product.
Semrush reported that gated content was ranked among the top 10 top-performing content formats according to marketers and business owners. It can target customers at any stage of the sales funnel.
For gated content to convert, it needs to offer original and valuable insights. Make sure that the landing page clearly outlines the content’s value – visitors will rarely give up their contact information for a generic piece of content.
If the gated content includes expert interviews, survey data, or original research, mention it on the landing page. It’s a good idea to provide a small sample (a quote or a statistic) to further entice website visitors.
Consider the following types of formats for your gated content:
Webinar: Virtual event where a speaker or a group of people talk about a specific topic and answer audience questions. The live event is recorded and added to the website as gated content.
Template: Documents such as budgeting spreadsheets, checklists for various tasks, content calendars, etc.
Report: A piece of content backed by original research, such as a consumer survey or market analysis
Whitepaper: A guide that provides information about a specific topic or issue and suggests different solutions.
e-book: An in-depth guide into a particular topic. It can be based on thought leadership – unique insights by industry experts.
Whichever content format you choose, be careful not to overpromise and underdeliver. For example, if your industry report promises brand-new data but offers mostly old statistics, it will frustrate your audience and leave a lasting poor impression.
Once you have customers' contact information (and they’ve opted in to receive emails from you), add them to a drip email marketing campaign. Email campaigns help nurture your B2B leads and nudge them toward conversion through relevant content.
Say someone downloads a whitepaper. You'd send them a thank-you email and follow up with an email featuring related blog posts, another with a case study about your product, and then a final message inviting them to do a free product demo. Use the insights from how your audience interacts with those emails to inform future marketing campaigns and identify elements that can be improved, including subject lines and CTAs.
If you're running a paid ads campaign, make sure your corresponding landing pages are designed to convert. Say someone visits your landing page but can't locate a CTA button, or the design feels outdated. They'll likely bounce, and you’ll lose that lead.
Make your landing pages as high-quality as possible. Use vivid product imagery, write solid copy, and design CTA buttons that stand out, so the user doesn't have to hunt them down.
Then, conduct A/B testing to make sure you're using the most effective version of your landing page. Compare different versions to see how they perform against each other, and test various elements, like images, copy, and CTAs. Once you have the best-performing version of each element, bring them all together into one super-star landing page that will increase conversion rates.
Incorporating live chat on your website means you can provide immediate answers to customers and increase the chances of them making a purchase.
This functionality also provides more insight into how customers interact with your brand and what questions are commonly asked about your products. If you see a trend where customers ask the same questions, you can create an FAQ page that gives them that information.
66% of B2B marketers see ROI from social media marketing. Target your customers via social media ads by creating custom audiences for each campaign you run.
Build audience segments based on demographics or around how they've interacted with your brand so you can deliver the most relevant ads. Analyze your ad performance constantly to see what types of content perform best on each platform. If people engage more with ads to download whitepapers on LinkedIn, but videos with product demos on Facebook, then use those types of ad content to get the best possible results.
Hosting or sponsoring a live event can help boost brand awareness and build trust with your target audience. If you want to sponsor, search for live events in your industry and contact the organization hosting them to get information on the sponsorship opportunities.
Hosting an event is a more complex undertaking, so you may want to hire an event planner to coordinate it. You'll need to decide on the format (in-person, virtual, or hybrid), find a venue, acquire software, find sponsors, and coordinate with speakers for each session.
Whether you host or sponsor, you'll have a chance to network with other businesses and build relationships with them. At the event, create opportunities for face-to-face interactions by handing out company swag and business cards. Similarly to what you'd do post-webinar, use attendees' information to retarget them with further relevant content to drive them down the acquisition funnel.
Influencers are often used in B2C campaigns to sell products like makeup or clothing, but the right kind of influencer can also help your B2B company with marketing to your potential customers.
Find businesspeople, especially experts in your industry, who already have a large following on social media. B2B products aren't always easy to understand right off the bat. Use your influencers to help explain your product in simplified terms to their followers. They can also provide social proof to their audience through testimonials and show them that your product is effective. If you're not sure where to start, there are agencies like The Shelf that link businesses to influencers in their database.
Referral programs leverage word-of-mouth marketing, which makes them highly effective as most consumers trust recommendations from friends and family. Plus, referrals nurture engagement by rewarding existing customers and encouraging them to continue using your products or services.
The company Imperfect Foods (which uses Twilio Segment’s CDP and Friendbuy’s referral program software) has seen a 20% increase in lifetime value and a 5% increase in retention for referred customers compared to non-referred ones.
Integrating customer data boosts the success of referral programs. With integrated data, you are able to segment your brand advocates and personalize their experience. For example, you can give your top advocates exclusive rewards.
Learn more about supporting personalization with unified customer profiles in this tutorial.
Engaging with your user community allows you to clear up customer doubts, generate a positive brand image, and be in control of your product narrative. You can find B2B professionals discussing different industry topics on forums such as Reddit or Quora.
In the following example, the CEO of payroll API provider Argyle responded to a Reddit post that inquired about the best payroll API.
Remember to be transparent about your connection with the business – whether you’re the CEO or a member of the marketing team. Online communities appreciate transparency, and hiding your affiliations might backfire.
Account-based marketing (ABM) targets high-value accounts with customized marketing communications and experiences.
If your B2B product targets banks, for example, you could create a personalized landing page for Goldman Sachs. This landing page would explain how your product could help the bank reach its specific goals, which requires a fair amount of customer research.
Successful ABM campaigns are also characterized by seamless collaboration between marketing and sales. Because the marketing team provides a tailored experience, the customer will expect the same degree of personalization and dedication from the salesperson. And this requires both departments to work side-by-side throughout the process.
Almost half of decision-makers said they got their business-related content from podcasts in one study. To engage that key audience, create your own podcast and produce a steady stream of content backed by research and expert guests. Doing this helps build your authority in your industry—increasing trust in your brand.
To start, research topics to discuss that will be relevant to your audience and are related to your company's products and values. Then, reach out to industry experts and ask them to be on an episode. You can also ask potential customers if they'd like to participate and talk about their career experience or any common pain points.
A podcast gives you a chance to speak to a captive audience. You can get your point across in 10-minute episodes (or longer) and provide more detail than in an email or social media ad.
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You can attract a B2B customer through content marketing, email campaigns, social media ads, podcasts, webinars, and live events.
B2B is short for "business-to-business," and B2C is short for "business-to-consumer." B2B marketing has a longer sales cycle and tends to focus more on building relationships and networking with potential clients as you lead them toward buying. In B2C marketing, marketers play more on customer emotions and create a transactional relationship throughout a shorter sales cycle.
The first step in creating a B2B marketing campaign should be identifying your target audience. Who is your product for? What problems does it solve? Once you answer those questions, start targeting your audience with paid ads, SEO content, webinars, and emails that address the audience's pain points.
With Twilio Engage, you can collect first-party customer data and build audience segments based on their interactions with your brand. Integrate Twilio Engage with your existing systems and create highly personalized B2B marketing campaigns that speak to your ideal customer and give them the information they need about your company and products.