Social media today is that the most used medium for communication and transfer of data and knowledge between businesses of all types. It has become generally accepted norm that social media channels provide a superb way for businesses to urge access to consumers, but many companies remain unaware of the potential that social networks provide in business-to-business (B2B) marketing efforts. The reality is that as businesses became increasingly visible on social media, the utility of these networks for B2B marketing has grown in parallel.

Marketing is not a child’s play and to form marketing effective one must understand the market in-depth, the merchandise or service to be marketed and therefore the end consumer. Additionally, the tastes and likes of the recipient business have to be kept in mind.

Social media is an efficient tool to succeed in the massive numbers of companies worldwide since the entire world has now become a smaller place thanks to the spread of social media like Facebook, twitter, and LinkedIn to each nook and corner of our planet. Social media is often simpler compared to television or other sorts of media since it is fast and covers a good geographic area.

Millions of businesses worldwide are hooked to social media via the web wherein they will get up-to-date information about a few product or service in seconds. Such is the reach of the social media that any product or service is often marketed with ease and deals between two businesses are often struck within seconds.

For instance, LinkedIn may be a social network specifically built for professionals that is focused on developing business relationships, making it a natural place to start social B2B marketing. If your business does not have a corporation profile on LinkedIn, it is missing excellent connection opportunities. LinkedIn company profiles allow businesses to spotlight their products, services, and available job opportunities, facilitating outreach to new talent and partners.

Another social media platform aside from LinkedIn is twitter, which is additionally a useful gizmo as far as B2B communication cares. It is going to be a fast-paced, short-form channel, but that permits businesses to form consistent, repeated impressions on other industry members. Business professionals are active on Twitter, using the network to get industry news, events, and other relevant content. The expansive nature of Twitter makes it an excellent place to develop new business connections.

Eventually, i might reckon that a robust social presence is important for any modern business to optimize its discoverability and outreach efforts, including B2B marketing.

Best b2b marketing campaigns

While it is easy to consider memorable samples of successful business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing campaigns, it is far more difficult to consider B2B marketing examples that get people talking. Why is that so?

Perhaps it’s due to the parable that B2B marketing is either dull or boring, that creativity has no place during this business. However, that practice is changing quickly. because the following examples show, B2B marketers are using consumer insight to make marketing campaigns and methods that are fun and even as engaging as many B2C marketing campaigns.

Here are three B2B marketing examples that illustrate how companies inject life and creativity into their campaigns.

1. Tetra Pak demonstrates its marketing and merchandise expertise.

To highlight the merits of a replacement design, Swedish food packaging concern Tetra Pak recently launched a whimsical B2B marketing campaign. The planning, called the Dream Cap, sits at a small angle for easier drinking and fewer nose-to-container collisions, consistent with marketing. Despite the innovativeness of its new cap design, however, the corporate decided to not specialize in its technical aspects alone.

We did not want to inform prospective clients a few packages. We would like to speak about what millennials do, thinking and buying, and offer an answer to satisfy those needs,” says Larine Urbina, communications manager at Tetra Pak U.S. and Canada. “We want to demonstrate our broad expertise in marketing and merchandise formulation, not just sell a package.

To do that, the corporate sent select prospects colorful, fun mailers that take people to a mini-adventure. It includes a foldout that mimics the Instagram look and feel, directing prospects into a portal that gives additional design concepts and merchandise features.

We want prospective clients to be ready to envision their product in our package, knowing that they have to face bent the millennial market,” Urbina says. “And we are consciously aware that a lot of those marketers are millennials themselves.

The hyper-targeted campaign was highly successful, gathering quite 500 responses from its audience.

Urbina’s advice for other marketers? “Whoever you’re marketing to, even within the B2B space, everyone’s a consumer and you would like to stay it interesting.”

2. Xerox uses humor to drive rebrand

American company Xerox is not any longer almost hardware, it’s employing a marketing campaign called Work Can Work Better to spotlight its business services, which now structure a big portion of its revenue.

The campaign goal is to evolve the Xerox brand during a way that more accurately reflects the role Xerox is playing within the world today,” says CMO John Kennedy, in an interview about the campaign. “Xerox has universally been related to one specific category, which is all about technology. The business has evolved into one among the most important business-services providers, competing with IBM, Accenture and other business-service outsourcing firms.

Humor plays a serious role within the campaign, which incorporates TV spots, print ads and even a rebrand of the corporate website. The 30-second TV ad shows a corporate executive in various settings being bombarded by jargon including the cringe-worthy “bigger data.” Finding the proper solution should not be such a lot of work, consistent with the ad, which “Work Can Work Better.”

For instance, the Xerox ad is up and running, gaining positive coverage from publications like Digiday, Forbes, and MediaPost.

3. Adobe leverages content hub to shift buyer perception

Insight Community of the Year finalist Adobe made its name in the desktop publishing business. It needed to expand market perception beyond desktop publishing when it acquired Omniture, a marketing analytics company. In particular, the company needed a way to regularly engage marketing leaders, Omniture’s main target audience.

In an article for the Harvard Business Review, Mark Kovac, a partner at Bain & Company, shares how Adobe used content marketing to engage this audience.

Adobe came up with a solution by using Omniture’s website CMO.com to help reposition its brand as a precursor to generating demand,” Kovac writes. “It gradually turned CMO.com into a powerhouse of original and curated content that’s highly relevant to heads of marketing.

Today, CMO.com is recognized as one of the leading content marketing hubs in the world, allowing Adobe to keep its brand name top of mind among businesses that need marketing solutions.

Conclusion

The success of these campaigns is rooted in an understanding that B2B buyers have the same appetite for useful, interesting and authentic marketing as everyday consumers. These initiatives are successful because they demonstrate deep customer intelligence on the people they are trying to target. Ultimately, success in B2B, just like in B2C, is highly dependent on an accurate and genuine understanding of your target audience.

Future of business-to-business marketing

A company will never succeed in marketing if it continues to embrace the past without looking forward to the future. In essence, you need to constantly look where you think the puck is going instead of sitting back and hoping the puck will come to you.

The good news is that keeping up with the trends and future of marketing is becoming easier and easier. Sure, it is happening more rapidly but the connectivity of brains from around the world and the mass distribution of thought are making it easier to stay ahead of the curve. It is definitely no easy task to identify what trends are going to shape the future of business but it is definitely a lot of fun.

Over the last few years, the entire sales and marketing process for B2B and enterprise organizations has shifted. These companies are no longer armed with information that is hidden from the public and sales teams are no longer in the driver seat. Leads and prospects now hold the power as information is more readily available and the increase in competition has resulted in a plentiful supply of choice. Apart from this, technology has totally rattled the linear buying process and behavior of B2B customers and has forced marketers to become strategic and efficient in their approach.

Here are a few changes that are going to redefine marketing in the B2B space over the next few years:

1. Social Data leads to a broader customer base

One of the most powerful channels in B2B is found in the professional social network, LinkedIn. In a leaked report published on Business Insider, LinkedIn highlights its plans to build a $1 billion B2B marketing business by 2017. The plan is something that every B2B marketer should read and a forward-thinking plan that highlights the predicted role that social data will play in B2B marketing and sales moving forward.

Every hour, every day, every week, the amount of data being distributed and created on social media channels is growing. Whether we are talking about the data associated with our existing relationships or data that highlights organizational trends, the future of business will be built on this data. Relationship data companies have already started to unlock the power of relationship data for sales teams; it is time for relationship data to arm the marketing departments with insights that drive results.

Imagine that your connections list on LinkedIn becomes a CRM system. Imagine that you have the ability to tag someone on LinkedIn as a potential prospect and automate outreach and conversations with these individuals over the course of three to six months. For example, you can create your own system that spontaneously sends out a message like “Congrats on the New Job” when a user changes their position on LinkedIn and are able to test the different automated messages to see which works best.

To proceed further, imagine you are able to compile a significant amount of employees if you are the admin of your company page. The insights you are able to pull from this company page includes trends in what companies are adding your employees to LinkedIn and how many of your employees are actually leveraging LinkedIn to communicate potential prospects. On top of that, the company page shares broad yet actionable data surrounding the types of prospects that have looked at your company page in the last one year.

All of this data ultimately arms managers and executives with the ability to better understand their workforce and develop strategies that will drive conversion. Furthermore, insights into what types of organizations are viewing your profile give you the ability to be strategic in advertising. Layer in the ability to automate messages to these users when they visit your company page and you are instantly presented with a quality opportunity to turn strangers into customers.

2. Substantiated Tracking Hits the Real World

Imagine you are walking down the street and you see a digital billboard for the pair of shoes you have been looking at online. Imagine that the website you were visiting has the ability to track you in the real world because you happened to visit it using your mobile phone, which is now traceable. Now let us imagine that you are walking into a conference and upon your arrival, you see a welcome sign from one of the brands competing for your business. In addition, yes, it does not just say Welcome to the Conference; it says your name at the end of the sentence.

This is what the longer term of personalized tracking could appear as if. As a consumer, you would possibly be thinking this is often getting to be invasive and creepy. As a brand or marketer, you would like to consider the chances that this might open up for brand spanking new touch points and new areas of conversion. Within the future, the way we browse the online are going to be almost like the way during which we browse the planet. The personalized experience we have online once we leave one website to subsequent are going to be replicated within the world and shift from solely being a B2C opportunity to being a crucial driver of B2B success.

3. Big Data Starts giving optimistic results

Today, one among the most important challenges related to big data is that the marketing team’s ability to assess and determine what information is worth it. A study from eMarketer.com found that 71% of marketers were curious about adding predictive analytics round the lifetime value of consumers to their customer data profile – deciding who would be their best customers moving forward and possibly even the way to attract more of those customers.

The most innovative and forward-thinking companies are already using big data to find out about their customers and use this information to drive results. The bulk of those organizations contain SaaS products, social networks, mobile apps and other sorts of software. The very fact that these organizations are built on innovative technology makes it a neater sell and a more logical decision to maximize big data. That said, all B2B organizations might benefit from the facility of massive Data when their plan is implemented correctly.

For example, an HR firm could quickly leverage insights around their existing clients and therefore the strength and weaknesses in their recruitment tactics. Big Data can uncover insights like what channels do the simplest recruits come from, what sorts of emails tend to perform better during the primary contact or what sort of clients tend to be the higher fit this firm. All of those insights are going to be captured by implementing the proper technologies and. help companies starting from Human Resources to Industrial Relations unlock insights about their organizations that they never seen before.

4. Growth hacking goes from B2c to B2B

Many B2B marketing teams are still brooding about B2B marketing as a linear process between inspiration and acquisition. Actually, the method of converting a B2B lead into a customer is becoming more and tougher as time goes on. The emergence of companies like DropBox and Yammer has resulted in blurred lines between products that solely serve B2B and people that serve the B2C market. As a result, organizations of all shapes and sizes must remember of the challenges and opportunities that exist during a word where brands are more connected and consumers are more empowered.

Welcome to the planet of Growth Hacking. If you’re unacquainted Growth Hacking, it’s a term coined by Sean Ellis of GrowthHackers.com who defines it as being an individual whose true north is growth. Surely, traditional marketers and marketing teams have always considered growth together of their pillars of attention but a Growth Hacker has one singular goal. Truth power of a growth hacker is found in their obsessive specialize in growth.

Presenting the chance to ignore almost everything else, these individuals are able to do the one task that matters most. Growth hackers are individuals who search for opportunities like tool development and content marketing and use them to assist organizations succeed.

Conclusion

In the future, growth hackers are going to be an integral a part of the B2B landscape as they also play a task in helping the organization create an optimized sales funnel. For instance, when a customer signs up for your product, how does one ensure word of mouth. If you are like most B2B professionals, you merely ask your new customer to stay you in mind and obtain down on your knees and pray that they really send leads your way. Everyone knows that referrals are the foremost important and best driver of latest business. A growth hacker also understands this but has the skillset to style simpler and efficient referral programs for your organization and company.