Staying Ahead in 2024: Top 13 B2B Marketing Strategies to Boost Growth

B2B marketing is not as simple as creating a store experience that appeals to consumers. It needs to be more refined yet, at the same time, appeal to a broad range of stakeholders.  

Whether it’s PPC, content marketing or referral programs, you need marketing strategies tailored to a B2B audience. However, with so many different methods and tools available, it can be overwhelming, and the implementation can be complex. 

Here at MADX, we work closely with B2B SaaS clients and have a real-world experience of how things work. In this guide, we won't just discuss B2B marketing strategies; we’ll show you how to adopt them from a B2B perspective.

First, let’s understand the basics. 

What We'll Cover:

What is B2B Marketing? 

B2B marketing refers to strategies and techniques a business uses to attract, engage, nurture, and convert other businesses (rather than individual customers). Examples of these businesses include SaaS companies like Asana, service firms like MADX, and tangible product sellers like printers for organizations.

‍
Note that B2B marketing is also adopted by companies that serve both individual customers and large organizations. For example, a budgeting tool could target individuals and finance departments in organizations. 

‍
To understand B2B marketing more clearly, let’s find out how it differs from B2C marketing:

• The sales cycle for B2B organizations is generally longer and more complex.
• The audience that B2B businesses cater to uses logical process-driven decision-making to come to a solution. Your marketing strategies need to consider that.
• The focus is on creating relationships with customers in B2B.
• Retention plays a considerable role in B2B strategies as opposed to B2C strategies.

Why Should You Prioritize B2B Marketing Strategy? 

Creating a detailed B2B marketing plan involves significant time and experimentation. But once you see its benefits, there’s no going back.

Here are five reasons to prioritize a B2B marketing strategy:

• Create awareness: To select your business among a range of other options, you need to create awareness of what you do and how you can help your customers. A B2B marketing strategy helps make your business reach a wide audience.
• Drive traffic: Content and other marketing campaigns drive more traffic to your website.
• Generate leads and conversions: By creating awareness and driving traffic, you can capture more leads and put your marketing team in a better position to convert these leads.
• Improve retention: You improve retention by delivering constant value to your customers and engaging them with different strategies. Retention also helps stabilize your revenue.
• Become an authority leader in your niche: Companies like HubSpot and Zapier have become an authority in their niche with robust B2B marketing strategies like content marketing. This also helps create trust and improve search rankings.

Top 13 B2B Marketing Strategies in 2024 

As workforces and audiences evolve, you must modify your strategies to achieve better results. With these top 13 B2B marketing strategies, we’ll see how to adopt each of them in a specific manner. 

#1 Content Marketing 

Many B2B businesses have adopted content marketing to drive awareness and revenue. Whether you’re utilizing email marketing, website content, or blogs, you need to think from a B2B perspective to get the best results from these strategies. 

Let’s take a few examples to understand what this means. 

• Use of dynamic content on the website: ClickUp positions itself as a project management tool that every company can use. When you navigate their website, you’ll see they have different use cases and industry-relevant content to suit their major niches. Here’s a web page catered to software development teams and firms.

Image source 

• Content for different stages of the buyer journey: Buffer is one B2B company that creates purposeful content. For example, here’s one TOFU guide by the company.

Image source 

They also have different blogs for MOFU and BOFU. Here’s one that helps the users make a decision (BOFU content). 

Image source 

• Experimenting with different content formats: Gone are the days when B2B content marketing was limited to blogs and ebooks. Now, businesses are experimenting with videos and short-form content as well. Here's how Ahrefs creates video content on YouTube.

Image source 

If you need help creating content for the new age, reach out to us at MADX.  

#2 Competitor Analysis 

If you’re new to the market or aren’t getting good results from your marketing campaigns, it may be time to run a competitor analysis. A competitor analysis shows you the strategies that work for your competitors and the gaps you can capitalize on. 

Here are some questions to help you start your competitive research: 

• What kind of businesses is my competitor targeting?
• Do they target a particular set of keywords?
• What kind of content are they focusing on?
• Are they active on any social media? If so, which ones?
• Can I use some tools to gauge their content or social media performance?
• Are there any sales tactics that I can find?

Depending on your B2B business, these questions may differ. You might also want to include niche-specific questions that give you better insights. 

We also use tools like Ahrefs and Semrush to dig deep into the content strategies of our competitors. Here’s a guide on how to get started. 

#3 Adopt a Niche-Focused Perspective 

Adopting a niche-focused perspective is a valuable B2B marketing strategy because it helps give a personalized experience to your audience and engage them better.  

Here’s what it looks like: 

• Providing category selection: Shopify provides a means to create online stores for different niches. On their success stories page, it allows users to jump to a category that is relevant to them.

Image source 

• Creating content around niche-specific keywords: Sprout Social provides a social media management tool many businesses can use. Here’s how they target digital marketing agencies with this article.

Image source 

• Creating different landing pages: The best way to convert customers is to showcase the product features and functions best suited to their requirements. Slack does this by creating different landing pages.

Image source 

Note that you’ll first have to clearly understand your buyer personas and the niches your customers are in. This will help you create a clear copy that appeals to these visitors.  

#4 Backlinking 

Backlinks are an important ranking factor and an essential strategy for businesses to adopt in 2024. 

The more high-quality backlinks you get for your B2B business, the higher the probability of it coming up in search engine rankings for relevant keywords. It also gives your B2B business the credibility and trust people require to make a significant purchasing decision.    

Here are some link-building best practices you can follow:

• Use SEO tools like Ahrefs to find relevant websites where you can create high-quality backlinks.
• Develop shareable content and make it easy for readers to share with one click.
• Collaborate with other businesses and create linkable assets.
• Be a part of podcast interviews on relevant sites.

While creating backlinks, ensure you drive traffic to your most popular assets. Also – and we can't state this enough – steer clear from following black-hat practices to link-building. Search engines may detect it and levy penalties, leading to a drop in rankings and traffic. 

If you do not want to spend thousands creating low-quality backlinks, delegate your link-building activities to our team. 

#5 Product-Led Marketing 

What if your product could do the job of attracting users and converting them into paid customers? More and more B2B businesses are adopting this model instead of spending money on PPC and other ad campaigns. 

One way businesses adopt this approach is by aligning all teams and encouraging them to put the product at the forefront. 

Many SaaS companies now create product-led content. For example, if you go through Ahrefs' blog, you’ll see that most of their articles are geared, so their product insertion seems unforced and informative. 

For example, in their guide to evergreen content, they start by talking about how to find evergreen content ideas with their Keyword Explorer tool. 

Image source 

When adopting product-led marketing, focus on creating a repository of case studies and success stories where prospects can see the value of your product. You can even develop exclusive webinars and ebooks to capture lead information and promote your product to them. 

#6 On-Site and Off-Site Search Engine Optimization 

SEO is a valuable part of your B2B marketing plan. It helps your business get on top of SERPs and bring valuable traffic to your site.  

On-site Search Engine Optimization 

On-site SEO refers to the process of tweaking different factors on your site, like internal links and keyword implementation, to increase organic visibility and traffic. 

The various best practices included are utilizing keywords in your content, optimizing visual assets, titles, and meta descriptions, perfecting website architecture, etc. 

Here’s a detailed guide on on-site SEO for further reading. 

Off-site Search Engine Optimization 

Off-site SEO refers to actions taken outside your website to influence rankings and traffic, like building backlinks to critical pages on your site or earning social mentions and press coverage. Many B2B businesses even host events and include guest posting as a part of their off-site strategy. 

Instead of prioritizing one over the other, make both on-site and off-site hacks a part of your SEO game plan. 

#7 Influencer Marketing 

Influencer marketing is no longer restricted to B2 businesses. Many SaaS companies and agencies now use it to reach a wider audience and demonstrate business credibility. 

For example, getting your content marketing tool mentioned on a blog by a popular content strategist can do wonders for your business. It can help reach more relevant people and bring qualified leads. 

Canva is one B2B company that generated a lot of enthusiasm with influencer marketing. Guy Kawasaki, a marketing guru and ex-Apple employee, used to make graphics with Canva’s freemium version. 

Once Canva noticed this, they brought him in as a brand evangelist, and this move helped the company reach a broad audience and stand out in this competitive segment. 

Image source 

While selecting influencers for your business, ensure their audience is similar to yours. Look at their engagement statistics like comments and shares, not vanity metrics like followers or likes. We’ve found it works best to give influencers some time to try your product and see the results before they start creating posts or content about it. 

#8 Online and Social Advertising 

If you’re just starting or have adopted various organic marketing channels, it may be time to boost your business with advertising. Unlike organic means, this channel will get you immediate results. 

You can run PPC campaigns, social ads, and third-party ads. All of these avenues can boost revenue when implemented strategically. 

Many businesses have become clever with the keywords they target in these ads. For example, look how Asana gets in front of readers who type the keyword “Monday.com.”  

Image Source

The company tries to lure visitors searching for a project management tool like Monday to arrive on their site instead. 

With these ads, you can drive traffic to relevant landing pages and articles. When creating social media ads, first research the platforms where your target audience is most active. You can even use video content and UGC for these ads. For example, many brands now showcase their products and tools using video options like reels on Instagram.  

Do you need help creating these paid ads? Get in touch with the team at MADX. 

#9 Referral System 

Referrals are an underrated B2B marketing strategy, but they can bring a lot of new business to your company.  

The key to setting up a referral system is knowing when to ask for one. For example, asking someone for a referral who has only used your design tool for a few weeks won't leave a good impression. The period you set will change from business to business. For more complex products, you’ll need to give your users more time.  

For example, Canva’s referral system gets activated whenever a user completes a design and saves it.  

Image Source

By providing premium elements for free, they encourage their free users to shift to paid plans if they find significant value in these premium elements. 

You can schedule regular check-ins with your active customers. If they leave good feedback or get lots of value from your tool, that becomes the right time to ask them to enroll in your referral system. 

#10 Email Marketing Automation 

Whether you want to attract more leads or engage existing customers, email marketing helps you do that. But instead of wasting time scheduling emails and copying email lists every time, why not utilize email marketing automation? 

This helps your team save time and utilize that time to create effective email campaigns instead of working on activities that can be automated. 

For example, many tools like Zapier and HubSpot allow you to set up drip campaigns. For example, whenever visitors enter their email address on your website, an email campaign introducing them to your tool is sent automatically. 

Here’s what an email workflow may look like. 

These tools also allow you to store and manage your email lists to create high-converting segmented email campaigns. You can even experiment with different visuals in your emails, like UGC and videos, to make an engaging experience. 

#11 Personalization and Customer Experience 

As most B2B businesses work on a recurring purchase/subscription model, you must create personalized experiences to retain your customers. This also helps build connections, which are crucial in the B2B model. 

You can do that by understanding your buyer personas, tracking their online activity, finding their needs and requirements, etc. 

The most common use of personalization can be seen in emails and guided tooltips while using SaaS products. 

Let’s say you offer an email marketing tool. You have a blog with different email tips for real estate, ecommerce, and SaaS companies. Instead of sending general content emails to all your segments, you can create different emails based on this content.  

Here’s how Monday.com creates a personalized experience for its website visitors based on what they want to achieve with the tool. 

Image source 

The more you work on shaping your customer experience, the better connections you can build, which will eventually impact your conversion and retention rates. 

#12 Data Driven Marketing Analytics 

Gaining insights from your SEO strategies and other campaigns is essential to optimizing them and getting better results. Analytics tools help you achieve that easily.  

But first, you must set the metrics you want to measure. For example, to increase engagement, you want to track the number of people replying to your emails or clicking on the given links. 

Once you set these metrics, you can adopt analytics tools that help track them. For example, HubSpot lets you track email opens and responses. Tools like Google Analytics show you the number of website visitors, click-through rate, traffic on individual web pages, etc. 

When you have all the insights you need from your campaigns, ensure you utilize them to design your next campaign or strategy. Remember, these insights will only benefit you if you implement them. 

#13 Brand Management, Awareness, and Advocacy 

When dozens of similar tools and products are available in the market, you need to create strategies that help increase brand awareness and advocacy. 

Here are three ways you can do this: 

• Encourage your community to talk about your product: Many businesses now encourage their customers to create user-generated content. For example, design tools prompt users to showcase their designs on social media.
• Create valuable content: Those in-depth guides and how-to content can help target relevant keywords and bring user traffic to your site.
• Participate in podcasts and other events: Instead of getting in front of the same audience, you can research relevant podcasts in your niche and other virtual events where your business can get involved. This way, you get more people to notice your brand.

Thrive Through Experimentation 

With B2B marketing, you need to be agile and adaptable and experiment with different strategies to find the ones that bring results. 

With customer needs changing and people wanting personalized ways to connect with brands, you must keep optimizing your game plan to stay in the lead. 

When it comes to content marketing or PPC, it’s best to rely on experts who have the knowledge and experience to get you the best engagement and ROI. If you need help with setting up your SEO, get in touch with our team now.