Marketing your products or professional services to other businesses isn’t always easy. You need to figure out how you can reach decision-makers and their influencers, figure out how to best guide potential customers through the buyer’s journey, and accept that the decision-making process may take a while.
In business-to-business marketing, multiple touchpoints are usually needed before you can close a sale, which means that building trust and keeping your audience engaged is crucial.
But how?
The eight B2B marketing examples in this post will provide you with inspiration. We’ll also go over the different types of business-to-business marketing you can employ, and share some best practices for creating campaigns that convert.
Table of Contents
What is B2B Marketing?
B2B marketing or business-to-business marketing takes place when one business promotes itself, its products, or its services to another business. This can happen in various ways, such as through content marketing, event marketing, and paid advertising.
The goal of B2B marketing is to drive demand and generate leads that can be turned into sales.
B2B marketing vs B2C marketing
In B2B marketing, companies try to sell products and services to (people at) other companies whereas in B2C or business-to-consumer marketing, companies try to sell to non-business-entity, individual consumers.
An example of B2B marketing would be a SaaS chatbot company publishing blog content in order to attract people who work at companies that could use a chatbot.
An example of B2C marketing would be a clothing brand running billboard ads to persuade people to buy its newest line of shirts.
While similar tactics are used in both, they’re often executed in different ways because of the difference in the audience:
- B2B audiences are generally (much) smaller than B2C audiences. Nike, for example, markets its products to active people all over the world while a Gmail extension SaaS such as Gmelius specifically targets companies with small teams.
- The lead time for B2B sales is often longer than for B2C sales, so there is a higher focus on building trust, authority, and lasting relationships in B2B marketing.
- B2C marketing will more often play to the emotional side of potential buyers by inducing things such as a sense of scarcity and a sense of urgency, while continuously demonstrating value is more important in B2B marketing. B2C customers are more likely to purchase something based on how it makes them feel, while B2C customers are looking for things that help them save time or money, or that help them generate more revenue.
Types of B2B Marketing
There are a lot of different ways in which a company can perform B2B marketing. Here are a few of the most popular ones.
Inbound vs Outbound B2B Marketing
All types of B2B marketing we’ll discuss below fall into one of these two categories.
Inbound marketing aims to draw in leads by being present and sharing valuable content in the places where prospects hang out. Examples are:
- Blog posts that rank on Google.
- LinkedIn posts that can be read by followers and non-followers alike.
- Having a booth at a summit.
Outbound marketing interrupts the prospects to get their attention and win their interest. Examples are:
- Cold calling.
- Cold emailing.
- Walking up to someone at a conference to pitch them.
B2B Event Marketing
Event marketing entails organizing or attending an event that is – ideally – relevant to your business goals. Examples include:
- Organizing a virtual summit.
- Hosting a webinar.
- Attending a conference.
- Going to a trade fair.
B2B Content Marketing
Content marketing is any type of marketing that uses content to build trust, interest, and engagement with your target audience with the goal of generating new leads. A solid content marketing strategy determines what will be published, where, and when.
The five main types of content marketing are blog content marketing, social media marketing, video marketing, podcasting, and email marketing.
Blog Content Marketing
Publishing interesting content that is highly valuable to your ideal customers on your website is a great way to build authority but for that to work, two key criteria need to be fulfilled:
- Your articles need to be engaging.
- Your audience needs to be able to find them.
Because of that second criterium, blog content marketing often goes hand-in-hand with social media marketing (blog posts get shared on the company’s social media channels) and SEO.
While Search Engine Optimization isn’t a pure marketing strategy in and of itself, optimizing your articles for the search engines ensures that they can get found by your target customers and keep performing for months, even years after you’ve published them.
Is your blog content not getting you any leads? At Flow, we specialize in creating content strategies that generate the right kind of traffic. Get in touch to find out more.
Social Media Marketing
The key to successful social media marketing is engagement. No matter whether your audience is predominantly on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or elsewhere still, all of these platforms reward brands that generate likes, comments, and shares.
Video Marketing
YouTube is the second biggest search engine after Google and the average of 3 billion searches a month on the platform are definitely not all for cat videos. B2B brands that have a YouTube channel use video marketing to explain complex concepts in tangible ways, provide how-to’s for their products, and share knowledge with peers and prospects alike.
Podcasting
Podcasting not only gives you the opportunity to broadcast your knowledge, it also gives you an excuse to talk to your target audience and other authorities in your industry if you decide to go with the interview format.
On top of that, podcasting is also a good way to reach those who prefer consuming audio content over written content.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is content marketing as far as it concerns sending promotional emails such as marketing campaigns and newsletters (not cold email outreach).
The exact number differs depending on which study you read, but it’s safe to say that for each dollar invested in email marketing, you’ll generate a return of $36. That makes email marketing a highly valuable B2B marketing tool.
B2B Referral Marketing
In referral marketing or affiliate marketing, companies pay other companies to bring them new customers. This can happen through a brand’s official affiliate program that companies can sign up for and that offers them marketing material to use to promote the brand. Other times, companies will close affiliate deals behind the scenes.
Project management tool Asana’s affiliate program is a good example of public B2B referral marketing. Other companies can sign up to become an Asana affiliate and earn a commission each time they refer a new client.
An example of behind-the-scenes B2B referral marketing would be a video marketing agency paying a paid ads agency a commission for each client they send over. As clients of paid ads agencies often need video creative, it makes sense for these two types of agencies to become referral partners.
B2B Influencer Marketing
In influencer marketing, companies collaborate with individuals who have an audience that is part of the companies target audience. Oftentimes, brands will pay these influencers to use, showcase, or talk about the brand’s products on the influencers’ channels. Sometimes, they’ll strike a barter deal, which means they’ll offer the influencer a free product sample in exchange for being featured by them.
B2B SMS Marketing
SMS marketing consists of sending promotional text messages to leads and customers. Just as with B2C SMS marketing, B2B marketing requires you to have these people’s permission to contact them via SMS.
A few use cases for B2B SMS marketing are:
- Keeping customers informed about product updates and features.
- Reminding leads about upcoming webinars and meetings.
- Sending follow-ups.
- Gathering customer feedback.
B2B Paid Advertising
Facebook ads, advertorials, and billboard ads are all forms of paid advertising. This type of marketing can be highly effective but also highly costly if you don’t nail your targeting. Before you start putting money in paid ads, it’s important to get very clear on:
- Who you are targeting.
- What kind of ad creative they might respond well to.
- Which stage of the buyer journey they find themselves in.
A subtype of paid advertising is performance marketing. This is a type of paid advertising in which the company that advertises only pays when a lead takes action, such as clicking a link or filling out a form. Facebook and Google ads are types of performance marketing.
Inspiring B2B Marketing Examples
Now that you have an idea of the different types of B2B marketing out there, let’s have a look at some companies that get them right.
Startups.com’s Podcast
Online startup accelerator Startups.com tackles questions and pain points startups are facing on its Startup Therapy Podcast. What really makes it valuable is that the two hosts are serial entrepreneurs offering their unique perspectives on running a startup. They are trustworthy authority figures founders want to hear from.
The podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, TuneIn, and Stitcher, meaning it can draw in new leads from all of those platforms while offering its existing audience to chance to listen through their favorite podcast app.
360Learning’s Reality Show
360Learning takes it a step further with the full-blown reality TV or – as they call it – “unscripted docu series” Onboarding Joei. The series follows Joei as she starts working for a tech startup and is, at the time of writing, already on Season 2.
The series shows how Joei learns about her company’s expectations for her, its culture, her tasks, and more. In essence, it’s about how Joei grows into her role.
This theme fits well with 360Learning’s goal of helping companies turn their in-house experts into trainers and making professional development a smooth experience for everyone involved.
Mailchimp’s Trend Analysis
Mailchimp’s Briefings section of its online publication Courier keeps the brand’s target customers up-to-date on the latest trends in industries that matter to them. Rather than creating content around email marketing – the brand’s product, Mailchimp provides an analytical look at and valuable insights into topics that are of interest to companies that (could) use Mailchimp for their email marketing campaigns.
It’s an approach that sets them apart from other email marketing tools and that gives readers a reason to come back.
ConvertKit’s Pillar Content
We’ve written before about the importance of pillar content for ranking well and for providing a pleasant on-site user experience. Email marketing tool ConvertKit does a good job at creating pillar content tailored to its target audience of content creators.
This article on how to vlog tackles a concern many beginning vloggers have – “Do I need that expensive camera?” – and goes over vlogging basics such as how to build an audience and how often to create a new vlog. It links through to more detailed guides on video equipment and choosing a niche, as well as other pillar content on blogging on podcasting, keeping the reader engaged and on the blog.
Animalz’s Thought Leadership Content
Content marketing agency Animalz is great at creating highly targeted, long-form content for its target audience of SaaS marketers. Sometimes, that happens in the form of data-driven long-form analytical pieces. Other times, with articles such as this one about the Content Value Curve.
Great thought leadership content builds trust and authority. It also shows that your brand stands for something by sharing its unique perspective, thus solidifying your brand positioning.
Chris Walker’s Founder Brand
Chris Walker is the founder and CEO of Refine Labs, a demand generation agency, and a great example of how founders can use their personal brands to market their companies.
When you look at Walker’s LinkedIn profile, the things he posts, and the threads he engages with, it’s clear that all of his actions on the B2B social media platform are meant to strengthen his brand as an agency founder and thus, by extension, his agency’s brand. He has a clear content strategy for his LinkedIn that allows him to increase brand awareness for his agency at the same time as building his own founder’s brand.
There is nothing on his profile that is not somehow related to demand generation, which makes it very clear what he is a thought leader on, and this type of authority transfers over onto his agency.
Canva’s Events
One of the best ways to make people want to use or keep using your product is by showing them all the amazing things it can do and that is exactly what Canva does with its Canva Events. Canva Events is a series of webinars, workshops, and Q&A sessions all about creating amazing graphics and video content… using Canva.
Since Canva has a diverse audience of both individual creators and larger companies, it adds a “Canva for Teams workshop” to those events that are specifically targeted at teams. All of the events are free and signing up is as easy as clicking a “register now” button.
Monday.com’s Paid Billboards
Workflow and productivity tool Monday.com may be an online platform, it knows part of its target audience lives in London and takes the tube, so a few years ago, it decided to meet them while they were waiting for their train.
With billboards such as this one, the brand referred to work then Prime Minister Boris Johnson was unable to accomplish to promote its product. It’s relevant, it’s funny, and it’s highly customized to the people who see it and the events they were facing at the time.
Dave Gerhardt’s Viral Video
While you can’t control whether a piece of content goes viral, there are a few things that increase its chances of gaining traction. One of them is humor, another is stirring the pot, and this video on how life is too short to work for a CEO that doesn’t get marketing by entrepreneur Dave Gerhardt uses both.
The video also stands out because it’s non-promotional – something that’s rare in B2B marketing where everything is aimed at generating leads and sales. It only shows a brand logo at the end and has a simple CTA in the video description.
At the time of writing, the video gathered over 224.000 views in a year’s time. Gerhardt’s LinkedIn post sharing the video got over 4,000 reactions, 272 comments, and 47 reposts.
And the related tweet, finally, gained 116 retweets, 26 quote tweets, and no less than 872 likes.
Not bad!
B2B Marketing Best Practices
The examples above all stand out for different reasons, but that doesn’t mean creating an effective B2B marketing campaign is a matter of luck. There are some B2B marketing best practices you can follow to increase your chances of a high ROI.
Create And Maintain Brand Consistency
No matter the marketing channels you’re active on, you want your ideal customers to recognize you. That means being consistent with how you present your brand both in terms of the topics you talk about and the look you give your content.
Maintaining brand consistency across diverse markets is crucial for global companies. Localization specialists ensure that the brand’s message resonates universally by adapting content to cultural and linguistic nuances. While machine translation has advanced, it still cannot fully capture these subtleties, making human expertise indispensable.
Michelly Purz, Localization & Content Specialist at Sinch
While localization ensures your brand resonates across diverse markets, it must align with a unified visual identity to build trust and recognition. This alignment starts with robust brand guidelines that provide a foundation for consistent messaging.
Creating and maintaining brand consistency is also key to building trust and recognition. Start by developing clear brand guidelines that define your tone, colors, and messaging. Ensure every touchpoint, from your website to social media, aligns with your brand’s identity. Regular audits, team training, and clear communication ensure everyone stays on the same page for a cohesive and impactful brand presence.
Rhianna Clavering, Strategic Business Marketer at PestFix
Have A Clear And Relevant CTA
Whether it’s hitting “like”, clicking a link, or filling out a form, you need to let people know what you want them to do. That means having a clear call-to-action on your marketing materials, from your Facebook ads to your LinkedIn posts and your promotional emails.
Framing your CTA is everything. A vague “Learn More” won’t cut it. instead, focus on outcomes that matter to your audience. For example, “Save 10 Hours a Week” speaks directly to their pain point and makes the value clear. The right frame turns a simple ask into an easy yes.
Christine Orchard, Head of Marketing at Arc.dev
Your CTA should also be relevant and related to the message of your campaign – and vice versa. If you’re selling an email marketing tool and you just published an article on how to run webinars for lead generation, you’ll CTA will perform better if you ask people to sign up for a free trial to see how your tool can automate their email marketing funnels, than if you highlight its list segmentation feature – which isn’t as relevant to the content of your blog post.
When you begin focusing on the outcome of your CTAs, then the next natural step is to get behind the psychology of it. Who knew there were so many things to consider?
When optimizing CTAs, many focus exclusively on the wording, but the psychology of engagement lies equally in its design and placement. A highly effective CTA integrates strategic color theory—using contrast to draw attention, but also aligning with brand trust signals. The shape and size of the button play into user intuitiveness; rounded corners, for instance, subtly guide the eye inward toward the message. Equally important is the frequency of CTAs—balancing visibility without overwhelming the user. Position them where intent naturally peaks, such as after an informative section or near interactive elements, to maximize conversions.
Dii Pooler, Founder of Pooler Digital
And one final important tip is to create the connection for your audience so that they’re not trying to connect the dots on their own. Be clear, and ensure that you draw their attention and that you don’t lose it.
Think of CTAs as your opportunity to create a seamless connection between your audience’s needs and your solution. Use outcome-driven CTAs at the right moment. For example, a CTA like ‘Reduce Operational Costs by 25% with Our Scalable Solutions,’ strategically placed within your content and intuitively integrated into your page design, can capture users’ attention, build trust, enhance engagement, and drive conversions.
Nadia Mojahed, SEO Consultant and Founder at SEO Transformer
Know Your Audience
To reach and engage your target audience effectively, you need to know them deeply. That means knowing where they hang out online and offline, which words they use to describe the problems you can help them with, who the decision makers are within the companies they’re targeting, and who influences their decisions.
Audience is absolutely key to B2B marketing – and not just knowing your audience, but understanding the why and the how is critical to ensuring that you are answering their questions and meeting their emotional needs – helping to ensure they engage with your product and service. Taking time to carefully research and tailor your journey uniquely to your audience will not only ensure they are more engaged it will ensure that when you’re in front of them for the first time that you make a strong first impression and that it lasts. Audiences want to build an emotional connection with the brands that they are engaging with – so help this process along by researching how you can help them.
Amanda Walls, Director at Cedarwood Digital
Learning how to not only engage with your audience, but to know when, where and how to attract their attention is also key.
Spend time creating detailed audience personas to guide your messaging. Drawing on your team’s own insights as well as conducting research, consider your target audience’s demographics (such as age, education level, and income) and psychographics (such as values, interests, and social media usage). Identify their biggest pain points and goals. Then use this information to craft messaging that will resonate with them, delivered on the channels they frequent most.
Lauren Walter, Search & Content Director at Online Optimism
Identifying the pain points is truly the path to conversions. But the way in which you identify them definitely says something about how you’ve chosen to address these challenges in a way that will resonate and be both relevant and memorable to your customers.
Addressing the pains of your target audience is the best way to convince them. You know those Instagram ads that show you an app that will help that dying plant of yours to survive? For sure you’ve got the next orchid dying on your windowsill. So this ad definitely resonates with your pain… and directly offers you a solution. It’s the same in B2B. Unless it’s more complicated, because there is more than just one decision-maker. You need to know how to speak to each one and when and then build a journey of it that navigates to the conversion.
Sasha Lazarchuk, SEO Manager at YOYABA GmbH
Understand the B2B Buyer’s Journey
Of course, you’re not going to move forward or engage your audience if you haven’t taken the time to understand the cycle of how they make purchasing decisions. You have to do your research and understand that each buyer has specific needs, and you may be dealing with multiple people to reach a final decision.
The buyer’s journey looks different for B2B customers. It’s not linear. They don’t click on your ad, land on your homepage, and buy. There are multiple decision-makers and the process can last months. There’s also more fear about making the wrong choice, meaning around 40% of the time the process ends with no decision.
Nicola Wylie, Copywriter at Filestage
Plus, it’s crucial to collaborate with your team to understand the issues that they’re facing. Know these challenges as if they were your own, even down to how you explain the details.
I have weekly meetings with our sales and customer success teams just to hear what customers think and what are clients’ biggest pain points. We’ve also started recording our client meetings so that marketing has access to the exact words people use to describe their issues. This helps us focus on the issues customers struggle with by using the words they themselves use to describe the issue.
Erica Ylimäki, Growth Marketer at Trustmary
And finally, you have to really ask yourself questions about the audience’s journey. You have to know them as best you can. This shouldn’t be guesswork.
Ask yourself the right questions: “Who is your audience?” “What do they look like?” “Where do they hang out?”. It’s good to follow trends, but, if your targeted customers are not on TikTok, then don’t put your time and effort there. Investing in the right channel is important if you want to increase your conversion rates.
Neha Gunnoo, Founder of Luova Digital
Deliver Value
Good B2B marketing campaigns deliver value. They provide the answer to a problem, teach the audience something, or sometimes simply entertain. Briefly put, they leave whoever consumes the campaign with a positive emotion and put your brand in a positive light.
Your audience also needs to know what your product can do for them from the get-go. No fluff, meandering hooks or lengthy introductions. Show what your product can do for potential customers and create content around topics that interest them. I find MailChimp to be a great example of this. Their marketing efforts focus on what their customers find valuable and interesting. And it pays off.
Farah Ahmed, Content Marketing Strategist at Zillion Designs
B2B Marketing: an Array of Options
There are many ways in which you can market your offer to other business professionals. What matters is that you stay true to your brand and follow the B2B marketing best practices outlined above.
If you need some inspiration while crafting your marketing plan, review the B2B marketing examples we shared. They’re all great in different ways but what they have in common is that they share relevant content for their target audiences.
Not sure where to start? We’re a bit biased, but we think blog content marketing is an indispensable marketing strategy for software and eLearning companies who want to drive organic traffic. Get in touch to discuss how we can help you with that.