101 Marketing Guide: How To Sell A B2B Product Online In 5 Steps

Finding B2B customers without spending large budgets can be difficult.

If you have a product you want businesses to buy, it is crucial to find the right marketing strategy and the right channels to increase sales fast and efficiently.

In this article, we will overview the most efficient ways how you can promote your B2B products or services, and sell them online fast!

Identify Your Target Audience

The first thing you need to understand is who your target audience is. This might not be the type of people or companies that your product was intended for, but rather those who need it more.

The larger your project and marketing budget, the more important it is not to drain it on less efficient strategies and by targeting buyers who don’t really need your solution.

So, the first thing to do is to perform in-depth research on your target audience. 

Some of the questions you need to answer are: What kind of companies mostly use your kind of product? Who has problems that it will help to solve? Who is most likely to spend money on it (a small business rather won’t pay for a costly service)?

You can research your target market using popular methods like focus groups, surveys, personal interviews, observation, and field trials. The research can also be conducted in several stages.

Market research is a different topic that requires a separate article. 

Learn how to increase your email CTR

Analyze Customer Journeys

In the case of business purchases, the process of making a decision takes much more time and steps until its completion.

When you know about your target audience - who they are, where they look for information, how they prefer to make purchases - you can easier imagine their customer journeys.

Those are the steps from looking for a solution to purchasing it. The length of the journey can be very different depending on the product you’re selling. 

Searching for a solution to buying a service with a $10 monthly subscription may take several minutes and just 2-4 steps. Moving from looking for to buying a $50K CRM license might take weeks and dozens of steps to decide. 

There can be many customer journeys in the case of your product. The more likely journeys you can find, the more opportunities you have to find the most efficient option - where you spend the least for each conversion and get the most of them.

Choose Sales Funnel Stages

There may be dozens of potential customer journeys with multiple steps in each one. You don’t have to target them at every step of every customer journey. 

Pick the journeys and steps, where your target customers are more likely to convert. 

The closer to the end (lower part) of the sales funnel, the higher the probability of purchase, but the cost per lead is also higher. You can try targeting users in the middle to lower parts of the funnel. 

Below, you can see two examples of what stages in the sales funnel you should target in various situations.

Example 1: marketing analytics tool

Let’s use an example of a user researching for good marketing analytics tools online. 

He already identified his problem, looked for possible solutions online, and realized that he needs a marketing analytics app. Now, he searches for the best apps and tools of that kind. 

For this point of the journey, you can publish a list of 10 useful analytics tools including yours on your blog, or on a popular outside resource. 

If the user read such information on a different resource, he might be searching for one of the mentioned apps online. If you know your main competitors, you can target their brand names as keywords in paid search, thus appearing in the first positions when the user searches for your competitors.

In case the user has never heard of your company before and the cost of the service is higher than he can just waste, he is likely to look for reviews of your service. To cover this step, you need to publish real reviews of your clients on your website, and on outside review platforms like Trustpilot.

Example 2: new special tablets to manage storage spaces 

If you have a new kind of product that doesn’t exist in the market yet, your potential buyers won’t be looking for a product like yours, because they don’t know such products exist. This means you need to work on the higher levels of the sales funnel first.

Here are some of the strategies you can try to make sure they see your product:

• social media marketing - creating enticing content that indirectly promotes your product, 

• social media ads targeting people by interest and work status rather than search queries,

• email outreach to potential buyers.

Just showing your product once is not likely to generate many sales. To increase the chances that people who were interested in your initial pitch, actually buy your product, it is necessary to connect and keep communicating with them. 

Some of the possible ways are - remarketing ad campaigns, offering them to sign up for your newsletter or follow on social media. Including useful content along with occasional product information in your social media and email marketing content will increase the chances of closing the deal in the end.

Find Right Marketing Channels

Taking into account where your potential customers usually spend time, and where they get information while being in the sales funnel stages you want to target, you can pick the right marketing channels and kinds of information that will most likely turn them into your customers.

Below is a short overview of some of the most efficient online marketing channels to use.

SEO

When you offer a product from an existing market, and people search for products or solutions of that type, a good idea for you is to optimize your website for search engines, so that you get found for the most relevant search queries. 

SEO is regarded as one of the most efficient marketing channels. However, it is not enough to create a website with a few landing pages to get traffic. Receiving decent traffic means creating useful and relevant content for your target audience. Creating useful content builds trust. And once you build trust with them, they are more likely to buy from you.

An additional benefit of such content is that informational queries in total stand for a much higher search volume than several commercial industry-specific searches.

A disadvantage of SEO compared to other marketing channels is that it takes time to take effect, but in the end, the effects are long-term. So, many marketers use SEO in combination with other strategies - search ads, social media marketing, and email marketing.

Search Ads

Even having one landing page, you can set up a paid ads campaign from day 1 of your project's existence. It is enough to present your product or service, its features, and benefits, then set up the ad campaign, and you can start selling.

Here the disadvantage is that you get one-time effects, not long-term like with SEO. You spend $100 on ads, get some clicks, some conversions, and if you don’t spend more, you won’t get more sales.

Also, initial setting up and optimizing the campaign to be profitable can drain part of your budget, so it is good to have a large marketing budget to have enough time to optimize your campaign.

Email Marketing

One of the oldest online marketing channels, email marketing hasn’t lost its relevance and efficiency. Many say, it is still the most effective channel to target consumers. Such a direct one-to-one contact in combination with a personalized message makes the communication more intimate, thus increasing the impact on the final decision.

The disadvantage of email marketing is that collecting a decent mailing database takes a lot of time and effort. You need to create some content and offer something useful to your website visitors for them to sign up for your newsletter.

To save your time, you can purchase international business email lists of your potential buyers, and send them your pitch right away. This is definitely worth trying in the case of B2B products and services.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a good way to stay connected with your potential customers but works more for B2C kinds of businesses. If you have a product for other businesses, LinkedIn and Twitter can be sometimes good places to promote it.

Social media can also be good for maintaining and improving your brand image and brand recognition. Users who recognize your brand are more likely to react positively to your offer, this way indirectly increasing the efficiency of other marketing campaigns.

Social Media Ads

Advertising on social media is a good way to target people who are your potential buyers but don’t know about your product, or don’t know they need it. This works especially well in the case of new products.

Depending on the type of your solution and target audience, you might want to advertise on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.

Check these marketing strategies for 2022

Plan Your Budget

After you pick your preferred marketing channels, it is time to allocate your budget between them. Allocate a higher one to those that you think are more efficient. 

You can also start with an equal budget allocation across different channels, and later adjust by allocating more budget into more efficient methods.

Take into account that some methods take time for the effects to be noticeable. For example, you can only see the results of SEO optimization and obtained backlinks after several months of work.

When you collect email databases with a newsletter signup form on your site, it will take time for you to fully use the long list of potential buyers you’ve collected. 

That’s why we recommend purchasing ready mailing lists with the necessary contact data of your potential buyers on sites like Global Reuters, where email outreach specialists collect email lists customized for you.