What You Need to Know About Business Marketing

Marketing has evolved and so has business marketing. There are lots of distractions out there that can derail your company's marketing effectiveness and efficiency. It's important to remain focused on the fundamentals. Business marketing consists of three key areas: positioning, content, and promotion.

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Today, the market is bursting with innovative products, services, technologies, solutions, business models, and more. Every new offering that’s brought to the market needs to be commercialized. Otherwise, it would be extremely difficult for it to take off, generate revenue, and make a profit. That’s where business marketing comes in.

As a business owner, you already know that innovation can only take a company so far. It doesn’t matter how groundbreaking an offering is, it won’t sell itself. That’s why impactful business marketing is not only essential, it’s vital.

In this blog post, I will provide an overview of B2B marketing so you can understand the most important concepts and learn how to use them to boost your business. Done properly, your company can thrive even in the face of overwhelming competition and business marketing will help you do that!

Business Marketing Has Come of Age

Marketing has evolved so much it has become an entirely new beast. Without it, small and mid-size businesses have more of an uphill battle. Gratefully, the technology available makes it easier for business owners to understand business marketing and take full advantage of it.

There’s a wide range of affordable platforms and business marketing tools that provide small and medium companies with the opportunity to reach a wider audience and have a fighting chance against more established brick-and-mortar companies.

Technology has leveled the playing field for businesses of all sizes by making B2B marketing accessible to everyone. Not just large companies with deep pockets. Moreover, the fundamental marketing principles and concepts never change.

That makes it easier for business owners who are new to the market to understand marketing and create powerful strategies. For instance, the success of digital marketing still relies on strong positioning and engaging messaging. You must get to know your target audience well and nurture prospects through a well-crafted marketing funnel.

These concepts continue to hold true and I suspect that won’t ever change. If anything, they’ve become even more important than ever. Combining solid knowledge of fundamentals with the right strategy and execution will make your business marketing as effective as can be.

All this to say that this is easier than it looks! If you’re new to B2B marketing, focus on understanding and internalizing the fundamentals so you can apply them with the help of available technology, platforms, and tools. That’s what I want to help you with today, so let’s get started.

The Three Pillars of Business Marketing

If you want to successfully market your business, there are three pillars you need to master: positioning, content, and promotion.

Positioning. This is all about the value your product, service, company, or brand delivers and how it aligns with your customer’s needs. It allows you to create a predisposition in the minds of your audience to choose your offering above others. Positioning requires you not only to understand your client’s needs and challenges but also how the solutions you provide address them. It also requires you to know your competition so you can make your offering stand out.

Content. It’s impossible to engage and attract target customers without valuable content. It’s the lifeblood of any marketing campaign, both online and offline. You need good marketing content across your entire marketing funnel. This is how you’ll engage your audience and convert contacts into prospects, and prospects into sales.

Promotion. This consists of delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. The success of your promotion will depend on the marketing channel you choose, which needs to be in line with the audience you’re trying to reach. It doesn’t end there, though! Once you choose your channel, you need to format your content and message to engage and convert.

Each of these pillars is unique and necessary, and vital to the success of any marketing campaign. You need them to adopt a balanced and effective marketing approach, which will make a huge difference in your company’s success and bottom line.

Now, let’s expand each of these concepts to get a deeper understanding of the fundamentals of business marketing.

Positioning Your Business and Offerings

To put it simply, marketing content refers to all the information and experiences directed towards an end-user or audience. In other words, it’s everything you put out to deliver your message. That includes written and visual content, such as images, videos, infographics, etc.

You need your content to be meaningful and make an impact on your audience, so it must be purposefully designed to meet your audience’s needs. Your business marketing content needs to be inspiring and encourage your audience to interact with your brand while raising your business profile and uplifting your brand.

For example, let’s say you have a tech company. Your marketing content should communicate your technical ability and the superiority of your offering while also engaging your audience.

Positioning Dimensions

Determining your best positioning is the intersection of three things: knowing your customer, knowing your capabilities, and knowing your competition. When you consider all three of these dimensions, your positioning will fall into place.

The first dimension starts with knowing your customer. In any successful business, you need to understand your customer exceptionally well. You need to understand what motivates them, their pains or troubles, what they stand to gain, do they have any specific needs or preferences, how they are measured, what success looks like to them, etc.

This type of information should be well known and documented. Later in the course, we will introduce customer personas as a tool by which this type of information can be captured and used.

The next dimension is about knowing your capabilities. This can be capabilities from a specific product, your product portfolio, or your business. In terms of capturing your capabilities, this should be an honest assessment of what you can offer your target customers and the market.

You need to understand which of your abilities solve your customer’s problems and whether or not your competitors have similar capabilities. You'll also want to identify if you have any unique capabilities that your competitors may not have that help differentiate you from them.

And finally, the last dimension is about knowing your competition. Knowing your competition is extremely important since it shines a light on all of your customers and your target customers' choices.

In essence, you'll want to know your competitors and yourself. You want to know their capabilities, how they are unique, how they position themselves in the market, their message, etc. You should continually keep your eye on learning your competition since they will continue to evolve and change to market and customer conditions just as you will.

By focusing on all three of these dimensions and keeping in mind that positioning is about securing a position in the mind of your target customer, you will be in a better position to determine your ideal positioning.

As we progress through the course, we will look at each of these three dimensions in more detail and provide you with the information you need to know to help you define your ideal positioning.

Marketing Content Your Customers Desire

To put it simply, marketing content refers to all the information and experiences directed towards an end-user or audience. In other words, it’s everything you put out to deliver your message. That includes written and visual content, such as images, videos, infographics, etc.

You need your content to be meaningful and make an impact on your audience, so it must be purposefully designed to meet your audience’s needs. Your business marketing content needs to be inspiring and encourage your audience to interact with your brand while raising your business’ profile and uplifting your brand.

For example, let’s say you have a tech company. Your marketing content should communicate your technical ability and the superiority of your offering while also engaging your audience.

As you may imagine, content drives your business marketing funnel. From generating high-level awareness to consideration to conversion to retention, effective marketing content is at the heart of it all. Think of it as an exchange; you want your prospects to provide their personal contact details, but you need to give them something in return. That’s what valuable content is for.

You can deliver it through any available media or channel, including the Internet, cinema, TV, radio, books, e-books, magazines, social media, and live events such as speeches, conferences, and performances, to mention a few. The one you choose will depend on your audience and your goals.

There’s no doubt that, as technology continues to advance, new channels and means will continue to pop up. One day, we will be thinking of ways to engage target audiences within the Metaverse! The sky is truly the limit, so marketers need to keep up with the latest trends and meet customers in their preferred channels for engagement.

Promotion and Spreading the Word

Last but not least, marketing promotion is the icing on the cake, the cherry on top, the crux of the biscuit. In other words, it’s the pay-off for all the hard work you’ve done. Promotion is a type of communication between buyers and sellers, where sellers persuade their target audience to buy their products.

From a tactical point of view, it’s the set of outbound communication activities that are used to inform and engage customers and prompt them to take action. This is how you get leads and make sales. As mentioned earlier, it’s about reaching the right person at the right time with the right message.

Needless to say, promotion is vital to businesses of all sizes. Without an effective marketing promotion strategy, product awareness will suffer and revenue will be lower than expected. Marketing promotion requires a dedicated budget to create and execute the best possible tactics to increase awareness and brand visibility. Ultimately, this will drive more revenue, so the ROI is huge.

Strategy: The Force that Brings Everything Together

Your marketing strategy is vital. It provides a game plan so you can reach prospects and turn them into customers. Essentially, your strategy defines how your marketing efforts will help you reach your goals. It also helps you choose the best lead generation tactics.

Marketing strategy is all about determining who you will target, what you will offer, how you’ll deliver, and who your competitors are. The three pillars of business marketing should be aligned and help you execute your overall business strategy.

One of the most important things about marketing strategy is that it will allow you to get the most out of your investment. Additionally, it will help you keep your marketing on track and focused on the right goals instead of doing things willy-nilly to see what sticks.

A sound marketing strategy requires you to set your company goals, find your ideal buyer persona, identify their pains, issues, and challenges, come up with solutions that align with their needs, and determine how to differentiate your company from all others.

There are many ways to approach business marketing because there are many different tactics you can use. I believe that applying a broad mix of marketing tactics across all stages of your marketing funnel will yield the best results.

That’s why it’s so important to have a game plan where different tactics complement each other to reach your target audience at the right time and with the right message. It’s also important to understand that marketing promotion is defined by marketing activity.

In other words, marketing activity will allow you to determine which tactic will drive promotion. Whether that’s advertising, personal selling, direct marketing, sales promotion, PR, or any other.

Final Words

Business marketing may seem a bit daunting for the uninitiated, but it’s not difficult to understand and master if you apply a systematic approach. It’s a very interesting topic and I’m happy to explore it with you in these blog posts. Today, we focused on the fundamentals of business marketing to get a clear idea of what it entails.

Understanding the pillars and learning to embrace them as part of your marketing strategy is the most important thing you can do. It will allow you to create successful and effective business marketing campaigns that will serve your business well and allow it to thrive. To learn more about business marketing and related topics, please visit skillspot.org.