B2B marketing or business to business marketing is a form of marketing whenever businesses market their products and services directly to other businesses. Such businesses could be a supplier advertising themselves to retailers. Therefore, businesses market themselves in order to sell their products and services to other businesses.
Some of the B2B marketing types and channels include blogs, email, Search Engine Optimization, social media, whitepapers and eBooks. To understand it better, we will focus on the advantages and disadvantages of B2B marketing.
Contents
Advantages of B2B Marketing
1. Increased exposure
B2B marketing provides more exposure to a business online and helps to improve brand awareness. It also creates more trust among customers by providing a platform where they can interact with customer support. Also, how you interact and respond to customers on social media can help to sell your business brand.
2. Attracts new customers
When you are carrying out B2B marketing, you will find new customers who are not aware of your products. New customers will try your product and when they like it, they will stick to it and also tell their friends about it.
3. Product improvement
Through B2B marketing, a business is able to interact with its customers. Customers can raise concerns about a product if they don’t like it or suggest some ways a business can improve it. Through customer interaction with the business during B2B marketing, a business is able to improve its products.
4. Increases sales
B2B marketing increases the number of customers to your business thereby boosting your sales. Through it, you can tell your customers what your business sells. B2B marketing helps you recommend products and services to your customers depending on their needs and in the end, they buy your products.
5. Identify new opportunities
B2B marketing helps a business identify new opportunities by solving customer problems or meeting their needs. When you interact with customers through B2B marketing, you get to understand their challenges and see how you can provide solutions. As such, your business can find new opportunities and develop powerful products with better features that customers will be willing to buy.
6. Improves return on investment
B2B marketing brings about deeper insights if there’s better reporting and useful data collected from customers. The data can be used to improve products and service, which may lead to better return on investment.
Disadvantages of B2B Marketing
1. It is expensive
To market your business to other businesses is expensive since you need to invest in promotional material and distribution channels. Once you have set it up, there is no guarantee that your audience will respond positively to the ad.
2. Challenging to get feedback
There are difficulties in getting feedback in B2B marketing. It is because communication is one way while opportunities for interacting with your audience are very slim. If you want to get feedback in B2B marketing, you may need to carry out a survey that can be expensive and time-consuming.
3. Ads get avoided
Since B2B marketing nowadays is mainly through the internet, many people avoid ads as they find them irritating. Many people have installed ad blockers to avoid seeing ads. Customers also avoid websites that have too many adverts and they tend to close such pages.
4. Customers are not attracted to ads
People have become savvier and are not relying on ads to purchase products. Instead, many people want to discover about a product by themselves and have some experience with it. They don’t want products to be forced onto them and thereby avoiding ads.
Final Word on B2B Marketing Advantages and Disadvantages
B2B marketing involves aggressive product promotion. There is a limited market and as such, businesses have to compete for the few customers available. As such, they are forced to market aggressively. It is best that you first develop a relationship with other businesses before getting started with B2B marketing.