How to Create a Winning B2B Startup Marketing Strategy in 2022
It isn’t easy to get marketing right. When developing a marketing strategy, marketers must balance creative demands, budget constraints, and channel options. For B2B startups, there are also so many other things outside of marketing on their plate.
B2B tech startups are constantly evolving and currently booming as new technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) come into play. But how do you make your potential customers want to use this technology and help them understand your unique value and differentiation from competitors?
The answer is to create a winning B2B startup marketing strategy.
This article offers practical advice on creating your B2B tech startup marketing strategy to stimulate incremental and efficient business growth.
The Importance of B2B Startup Marketing
It’s a good idea to take a step back and look at the current B2B marketing trends and challenges. In contrast to retail marketing, wholesale marketing targets a select group of customers or business executives who are often skilled negotiators. B2B companies face many challenges distinct from those encountered in consumer (B2C) businesses, requiring marketers to deeply understand the tech industry, search engine trends, effective messaging, and the latest advertising tools and techniques (or to find a B2B startup marketing agency who does).
According to the HubSpot 2021 State of Marketing report, the biggest challenge for B2B startups is delivering a personalized experience and understanding which accounts they should target.
Image from HubSpot State of Marketing Report 2021
A quality B2B startup marketing strategy ensures new businesses are ready to deliver their product or service to the industry and helps solve some of the challenges above.
If you subscribe to a site like TechCrunch, you will see articles every day about SaaS companies receiving investment to propel their growth. The B2B startup space is one of the most competitive in 2022. Convincing buyers that your product or service is better than all those competitors is no simple task.
Naturally, some get lucky when the startup is a pioneer of an emerging trend, but even with that, competitors will arrive pretty soon after. Knowing how to market your tech startup consistently and effectively can give you the edge.
Before looking into the different B2B marketing channels that startups and SMBs can leverage, you should consider your strategy at a high level.
- A one-size-fits-all marketing strategy does not exist. Probably, what worked for someone else will not work for you. Moreover, what worked one year or three years ago may no longer be applicable in a constantly evolving ecosystem.
- There is no single correct answer. Be careful of “gurus” who insist that their approach is the only right way. Before establishing your go-to-market strategy, evaluate your strengths and shortcomings and adjust your plan accordingly.
It’s better to build a marketing plan around what you do best. If you’re an introvert, don’t strive to become an influencer just because it’s what everyone is trying to do. If your business solution caters to one industry more than others, focus your SEO on-page optimization efforts to those related pages first, and structure your initial PPC campaigns around the buyer journey of decision makers in that industry.
Establishing your Startup Brand and Customer Personas
Do not undervalue branding as it is a core component of your B2B marketing strategy. It’s not unusual for marketers to focus on things that they can measure, and other essential factors such as branding slip through the cracks.
Branding is a process and takes time to fully develop, but acts as the foundation for any B2B startup marketing activity. If buyers don’t recognize you, how will you convince them to respond to an email or pick up the phone? Something simple like picking a signature color for your brand can increase recognition by up to 80%. The quiz below probably tells you everything you need to know about the importance of brand color palettes.
Image from Reboot Online
Color is only a small aspect of branding. Consider your tone of voice and the narrative that sits behind your business. Are you formal or reliant on humor? What terminology do you use for your products and services? These questions are vital to give you brand identity, and are important to articulate before scaling new marketing campaigns.
Branding and buyer personas go hand-in-hand when creating B2B marketing strategies for startups. As a brand, you need to know how your business solves a buyer’s problem and why they value the product or service. Understanding buyer pain points is a vital element in SaaS services when there is no tangible item to transact. Discover what drives your buyers, which will help formulate your startup’s core values and mission.
A good place to start when narrowing your target audience is to create a user persona outline. Here are a few free user persona templates we suggest:
Image from Dream Factory Agency
Prioritizing B2B Marketing Channels
Now that you have branding, personas, a website and a product to sell, you’re ready to scale. But first you need to understand how to develop a startup marketing strategy across the primary inbound marketing channels your target market resonates with. We will look at how content marketing, SEO, paid advertising, and social media should form the basis of your B2B startup marketing strategy.
Content Marketing
After all these years, content is still king (Bill Gates, 1996) when it comes to marketing. In contrast to a traditional PR campaign, content marketing provides relevant information and educates the consumer—which is exactly what B2B buyers are searching for.
Image from Postcron
The ideal approach to increase the number of people who visit your website and keep them coming back is to provide them something of value in exchange for their time.
Focusing on the end-user is the best B2B content marketing strategy. While it’s critical to optimize your SEO copywriting content for search engines like Google, you shouldn’t write for the sake of it. When writing a blog post or other educational article, make sure it’s interesting and full of helpful information for your viewers. Learn how to optimize your writing for increased traffic with our SEO copywriting checklist, or our free SEO Copywriting 101 eBook.
When marketing for B2B startups, writers should focus on quality over quantity. WordPress blogs host 70 million new posts per month, but many of them are filled with useless content. Make your content valuable and unique to avoid becoming part of the statistic.
The perfect B2B website content strategy should include these elements:
- Lots of research to validate your products and services
- Thought leadership and opinions on industry trends
- Leverage first-party data to generate unique content
- Quotes or interviews from industry experts
Create content for each step of your sales funnel. For a B2B startup that will likely focus towards the top of the funnel, but consider the middle and bottom of the funnel as part of your marketing strategy as well.
For example, writing an unbiased technical glossary of terms related to your industry provides a great opportunity to include the valuable keywords that your ideal users are searching for, enabling you to rank highly on search engines and drive organic visibility and traffic. To bring those top of funnel users further down the funnel, establish a nurturing user experience by linking to other internal content such as industry pages, use cases, role pages, or ungated solution briefs that explain your unique value within that niche.
Then you can generate leads by leading users to optimized landing pages for whitepapers, demo requests or free trials via remarketing with paid advertising and UX improvements with CTA content blocks in your content. Finally, focus on testing and CRO to increase those form submissions and have your sales team follow up quickly with new prospects.
SEO
Following the creation of your B2B content marketing plan, you must ensure that your high-quality material is found. For blog posts, SEO is often accountable for this.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is implementing strategies to improve a website’s position in search engine results (primarily Google and others like Bing).
There would be too much to say to get granular about SEO in this article as it needs a strategy in its own right. Many startups will outsource B2B SEO services to an agency like Stark Visibility as it takes time and requires expert knowledge.
SEO is a long-term strategy, unlike other popular marketing methods. The average professional expects to see results in as little as two months, yet SEO for tech startups can take up to a year to impact. Even though each company’s SEO approach is unique, most firms should expect to see significant returns within six to twelve months.
It’s easy for a B2B startup marketing strategy to forget about SEO, as leadership often creates pressure to drive short-term results. However, it’s one of the few marketing tactics that comes at no cost and, in the long run (if using proper keyword mapping and on-page optimization techniques), will outperform other channels like paid search or social media advertising.
Image from Search Engine Journal
Paid Marketing
Paid marketing channels can offer excellent short-term gains and exposure for a B2B startup. For example, Google Ads are really simple to execute and help you quickly reach your target audience. To clarify, paid ads are the ones that appear at the top of search engine results like below.
Image from WordStream
This specific example is one of the more commonly used B2B advertising strategies called competitor conquesting. This is a tactic used to target competitor’s customers through SEM, display ads or social media using audience segments that indicate strong interest in competitor brands and products. We find that competitive conquesting advertising is best approached through Google Search ads, as marketers can create custom landing pages with comparison tables and other competitor information to create relevance between the landing page, keyword targeting and ad copy – a key intersection that is directly considered in Google’s advertising algorithm by a metric known as quality score.
However, even when reducing CPC by having a high quality score, paid advertising can be expensive and difficult to scale in a competitive marketplace. For example, if you are releasing a new SaaS product, we showed you towards the start of this article how many companies are doing the same. You’ll potentially need to spend a lot of money to get to the top of search results and acquire some customers. That’s why SEO is the better long-term marketing strategy for tech startups (and a key component in advertising).
If you do some quick math, imagine you offer a free trial as part of your value-added package and then 10% of users sign-up and 10% of those become paid subscribers. To work, you need 100 clicks to achieve a paying customer. If it is $3 per click, that’s a $300 cost per customer.
You also need to target the right keywords. A professional Google Ads management service like Stark Visibility knows the tools to find search terms that are high volume with low competitiveness. In an industry niche, paid advertising can be hard to scale and keyword research takes time. Many B2B companies outsource keyword research services so they can focus on creating content and building their business.
Social Media
We’re not going to talk in-depth about social media here as I think everyone knows how important it is as a marketing channel in the 21st century. However, social media platforms like Facebook can be tough to crack for B2B marketing campaigns as people are not using those sites to make business decisions. That said, it can be helpful to get you in the public eye if you set up some retargeting campaigns or blog promotion ads.
LinkedIn Ads are more lucrative for B2B startups that focus on enterprise-oriented SaaS products. LinkedIn advertising is more expensive, but it can be a high converting channel if you have a buyer persona that exudes lifetime value, due to the narrow targeting capabilities and exposure to decision makers.
People on LinkedIn look for educational content such as eBooks, webinars, and case studies. You should make that material a central part of your B2B marketing strategy if you want users to engage with your social content. An experienced LinkedIn lead generation service can help you organize and present this content, identify the right audience segments and ABM lists to target, and effectively nurture users down the sales funnel.
HubSpot research shows that B2B marketers are investing in influencers for their social marketing strategy:
Image from HubSpot
However, that doesn’t mean you should pick any influencer because they are well-known. You’ll want to ensure you’ve got the right partners in place (remember your branding). Be careful when looking for influencers with large followings; many companies have found more success by working with smaller niche influencers. Do some investigation into which influencers have the most genuine relationships with your target demographic.
Analytics
The best digital marketing strategies for startups pay close attention to the key performance indicators you want to measure. Ultimately, you cannot optimize adequately without measuring marketing effectiveness accurately. Integrate marketing tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console to your website, CRM, and reporting tools, then set up relevant goals and conversion metrics within the platforms. Review traffic sources, keywords, pages, and audiences to see what is working for you. This will enable you to test, optimize and improve your marketing operations.
Understanding your marketing impact in real-time is essential to any effective omnichannel marketing strategy. Leveraging the primary B2B marketing channels throughout your everyday operations is important for success when going to market, but understanding what is actually working and improving upon those activities requires an up-to-date knowledge of the modern tools and systems available to marketers today.
About Stark Visibility
Stark Visibility provides effective B2B lead generation services that leverage the modern B2B lead generation channels your target customers are using.
Our B2B lead generation agency uses best-practice keyword theming, ad development, and website optimization strategies to generate brand visibility and engagement throughout all stages of the sales funnel.
To learn more about how to build the ideal B2B startup marketing strategy for your business, request a free consultation with Stark Visibility today.