B2B Marketing

What is B2B Marketing?

Define and identify new revenue opportunities (marketing strategy)
Raise awareness of the company’s products and services (enhance brand awareness)
Attract qualified potential customers (lead generation)
Support the sales or business development team in converting leads into customers (sales support materials and brand reputation)
Retain and grow customer relationships (customer loyalty and cross-selling or upselling)

Marketing

A set of activities that brings in interested people and sign ups

to the business

Sales

A set of activities that converts sign ups into customers

What is the difference between B2C and B2B?

Kill the myths:

B2B stands for Business to Business, meaning dealing with organizations like companies and start-up. In AIESEC, it is iGET sales

B2C stands for Business to Customers meaning dealing with end consumers or people. In AIESEC, it is OGX and HR recruitment

B2B

Relationships driven
Small focus target market
Big size of orders
Long sales cycle
Brand identity is created mainly by customers’ service.
Rational buying

B2C

Product driven
Large target market
Small size of orders
Single step buying process (go to shop and buy)
Brand identity is clearer
Emotional buying process
Status allegation (buying a product to improve the status in the society)

Why is B2B Marketing needed?

You know that bit in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy rst wakes up in a strange, technicolour world, looks around, turns to Toto and delivers the classic understatement, “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore”?

If you’re a B2B marketer, you’ve probably got that post-Kansas feeling. You went to sleep one day in a black & white world of trade magazines, telemarketing, exhibitions and direct mail and woke up on some psychedelic, virtual planet.

It’s a new area now! Everything is going digital and online. We must adapt to the environment and to the trends.

How to do B2B Marketing?

Have you heard about inbound marketing? It is the marketing focused on getting found by customers, which means “pull”.

The 4 stages of the inbound marketing (methodology): Attract > Convert > Close > Delight

The best practices of inbound marketing:

Create remarkable content
Leverage content
Use the buyer’s journey
Use buyer personas

Content is King! It’s the fuel of B2B Marketing.

Examples of effective B2B marketing tactics:

Case studies, white papers and technical papers, blogs, articles, websites, landing pages, SEO (search engine optimization: getting the website as high as possible in any search engine result, like google), email marketing, videos, webinars, social media, executive seminars and lunch & learns (max 45 min presentation/training at lunch time), trade shows, speaking engagements (like TEDx or other conferences), customer appreciation events, etc.

If you want to learn more about Inbound Marketing, check out this free course from Hubspot

What is content Marketing?

Exceptional content, like remarkable products, induces conversations and incites sharing. Content marketing doesn’t end at “awareness” or “buzz” that you could create. Companies that develop compelling content through all stages of the buying cycle (from stranger till promoter) are more effective at nurturing leads, acquiring customers and reducing churn.

Effective content marketing requires to shift the thinking from marketer to publisher. This shift consists of 4 new steps:

Define a critical group of buyers (buyers’ persona)
Determine what information prospects really need and how they want to receive it.
Deliver that information in a way that maximizes impact on the company’s goals.
Measure and recalibrate.

In Sommer 2017 we had a content CEEDer in Germany who created exceptional videos from some of our partners. Find the videos here and feel free to use them in your mails as attachment, during company meetings etc. One example is Trivago headquartered in Düsseldorf.

Click for Video Testimonials

What can I do from the local level in terms of B2B marketing?

Here are some small ideas you can implement from the local level to initiate B2B marketing in your LC:

Go to local events like networking events or coffee circles or fairs to increase the brand awareness of AIESEC, get connections and raise meetings and opportunities
Contribute to content creation (pictures with partners, from events, video testimonials from companies, written testimonial from interns or companies, any relevant topic you feel you’d like to write about, etc.) to share in the website, blog, LinkedIn, email, etc.
Push LinkedIn followers: ask your members to put it as their current work place. It will increase the visibility and awareness in the online network. This is our LinkedIn Page
Start a Refer-me program. Not only a company referring you to another but also between the departments of the same company. For example, you’re currently sourcing interns for the IT department of a company X, if the IT department refers you to the Sales department and they start asking for Sales interns as well, then you’d offer a discount or something to interns for the IT department.
B2B marketing education/training for your members, etc.
If you are interested in Inbound Marketing (e.g. Social Media Marketing, Content Creation), approach Stefan or one of the NST. We are always searching for people who want to contribute to the development of Online B2B Marketing.
We cooperate with LeadGuru, a start-up from France, in terms of email automation. They send for us automatic mails and hence, raise meetings for us. Thereby, you can "buy" meetings. Find the respective sheet here and feel free to approach Stefan (MCVP) for this.

Those are just to name a few but it’s already a great start!

→ If they still want to learn more about the basics of B2B Marketing, then this article sums it up pretty well: http://www.alleywatch.com/2014/07/the-basics-of-b2b-marketing/