Must-try B2B marketing channels

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Your brand has a story, and the business-to-business (B2B) marketing space is your opportunity to tell that story. Don’t be modest: Your B2B brand is great, and you want to shout it from the rooftops.

But like all stories, your B2B marketing can only shine in one form or another.

Have you ever seen a favorite book made into a badly flawed movie, or a children's cartoon Albania WhatsApp Number List made into a live-action version that looked downright horrible? If the B2B marketing channels you choose don't align with your intentions, this frustration and disconnect can plague your customers. They may walk away with the wrong idea of ​​​​your company's purpose, goals, or values.

Your brand deserves better.

Here are 5 marketing channels to choose from, and how to craft the right messaging.

Choosing B2B Marketing Channels
Imagine you're a happy, wide-eyed kid in a candy store (helicopter hat optional). Of course, you want to try everything—but all you have is a little pocket money left over from last month's allowance.

This is what it’s like for B2B marketers to choose between all of these incredible distribution channels.

The trick is to choose those channels that present your brand, story, and products in the best light. That way, you’ll get the most bang for your advertising budget and leave a memorable impression on your target audience during your presentation. Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to stick to what you know; there’s always something new to try in this B2B marketing candy store.

To strike the perfect balance between novelty and familiarity, and ultimately get all the right marketing channels in place, you need to deliver a few key messages:

Know Your Story
Remember that brand story we mentioned earlier? It’s back again, and it’s at the top of this guide for a good reason: it will drive every marketing decision you make.

Whether you realize it or not, you know what your brand story is about. It’s why you got into this business in the first place. However, to communicate all of this information to buyers, you need to polish some details:

Positioning: When you position your brand narrative, you’re essentially choosing a genre. If you started in a garage like Mattel, HP, or even the Walt Disney Empire, you might play up the “rags to riches” storyline. Or maybe your brand is generational, in which case you’d go with a famous slogan like “SC Johnson: A Family Business . ”
Tone and Voice: In storytelling terms, tone and voice are the way a narrator conveys the content. Let’s say you’re reading Little Red Riding Hood to a group of children; you might use a fun, playful tone and voice to match the fairy tale. However, if you were telling the same story to a group of wolf cubs, your solemn speech might work as a deterrent to identity theft. The same is true with your marketing content: tone and voice create meaning, which means they need to be tailored to your audience.




Value Proposition: Why are you telling this story? Why should your customers care when they have their own brand story to create? Determining your value proposition will help you shape, refine, and deliver marketing content that captures your audience’s attention.
Know your information
Knowing your brand story is different from knowing your message. While a story encompasses everything your marketing needs to say, a message conveys one angle of the narrative at a time depending on who your audience is.

Let’s say you sell multifunction printers. Your story might be about how every company must have one of these amazing machines — but your message will change depending on your intended target.

If you're trying to sell printers to startups, your message might be how these machines can support growth and protect fragile budgets. On the other hand, if you're trying to get the attention of an enterprise company, your message might focus more on how multifunction printers can help manage hundreds of users and extremely complex workflows.

Know your audience
As you consider your B2B marketing channel options, remember who your target audience is. They’re the people you want to reach — and if you do your job well, they’ll reach out to you, too.

To build this connection with existing and potential customers, ask questions like:

What industry are they in?
What are their pain points?
What makes them trust a B2B company like yours?
What kind of marketing materials or content do they find valuable?
What social, news, educational or entertainment channels do they follow?
Know your strengths
We all have strengths. That’s why I’m writing about B2B marketing, you’re reading about B2B marketing, we’re not all experts at chainsaws.

As a B2B marketer, it’s your job to figure out what those advantages are. If you’re deeply interested in obscure grammar rules, great—you might be a great fit for content writing. Are you convinced you can change the world in 280 characters? You’re a natural born social media marketer.

Remember, you can always outsource the creation of your marketing content — but anything that happens organically is likely to capture the essence of your brand best.

Know Your Options
There are all sorts of marketing options out there. No one has enough fingers and toes to count, so here’s a simpler way to break it down:

Traditional Marketing: Cold calling, direct mail campaigns, and brochures are part of traditional marketing tactics. Simply put, if it’s not online, it’s considered “traditional.”
Digital Marketing: All of the biggest advertising buzzwords—content marketing, social media marketing, inbound marketing, and even the older but still relevant email marketing—are digital. They may be the new kids on the block, but they’re big.
Now, some marketing firms may tell you that traditional marketing is dead. Ignore them. Take cold calling, for example — while it may be inefficient by some standards, it may still be an effective way to make valuable connections with specific audiences. This means that the best B2B marketing strategy will most likely use both digital and traditional channels.

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5 B2B Marketing Channels to Try
Main Event Time: Explore some of our all-time favorite B2B marketing channels. Here are some options for where you can advertise:

1. Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing (SEM) is basically performance art—but in this case, your "audience" is actually full of search engines. That's right: to use this particular marketing channel, you need to gain the fickle attention of Google, Bing, and their siblings. Now, this doesn't mean you should forget about your actual customers; the goal is to attract search engines but also create value for customers. This can be achieved in two ways: organic scanning and paid scanning.

When you take an organic approach, you use search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to create blogs, landing pages, and other content that plays well with search engine algorithms . This helps you rank higher on the SERPs, or search engine results pages — which in turn means that customers searching for related keywords and topics are more likely to stumble across your content, like finding a gold nugget in the river.

Now, if that nugget is deliberately placed right in front of them and illuminated with a spotlight or two, that’s paid SEM. The process involves ads appearing at the very top of the SERPs, taking users directly to your product or service page – for a fee, of course.

There’s still a lot to explore in terms of search engine marketing but hey – you’ve got to save your time to explore other options, right?

2. Content Marketing
Content marketing is perhaps the biggest jewel in the crown of digital marketing. It’s all about creating content that your customers will find valuable — whether it’s a snazzy infographic, an embeddable video, or even a blog post on must-try B2B marketing funnels (sound familiar?)

Generally speaking, “content marketing” is an umbrella term that includes social media, email, video, and even inbound marketing. Basically, if it involves content, it’s content marketing.

Of course, you don’t need to cram every marketing channel into this approach. B2B content marketing can be as simple as setting up a high-quality blog on your website. Take Trello, for example. This productivity app calls its content library Team Blog , and you’ll find material there chock-full of B2B wisdom.