What Is B2B Marketing – Definition, Strategies, and Examples

What is B2B Marketing?

B2B is an abbreviation of the definition of a “Business to Business”, which expresses the sales practices between businesses. Unlike B2C marketing strategies, B2B marketing doesn’t consider consumer attitudes. Sellers and buyers are only businesses. So, B2B is trading activities that take place between at least two or more companies.

E-commerce has caused global trade to grow at an unprecedented pace. Nowadays, a local coffee shop in New York, through B2B platforms, is able to manage an organization that will allow buying coffees from Ethiopia to be processing in Germany, bottled in Poland, and reaching store shelves in New York.

Until recently, international trade was only under the monopoly of large companies. To find a supplier, you needed to attend fairs, go on business trips, do factory visits, get support to follow mixed customs and paperwork processes.

Many economists agree that digital transformation is an opportunity for sustainable growth. At this point, we can say that B2B e-commerce will be an important factor in the commercial leg of digital transformation.

B2B Models & B2B Platforms

There are 2 alternatives for companies operating in the B2B e-Commerce field, these are; A Marketplace B2B platform & The Direct B2B platform. Sometimes one of these options is essential due to the company’s industry or way of doing business. However, some companies use both B2B models.

Giving retail buyers the ability to place orders online through a B2B platform at their convenience is now an industry standard. The next step is to choose which B2B platforms you will implement, and that means choosing between a “Direct B2B or Marketplace B2B platform model”.

a) Marketplace B2B platform: It is an online e-commerce platform that companies sell their products wholesale in the e-marketplace along with their competitors.

B2B e-markets are a practical, fast, and low-budget solution to promote their products and companies, especially for small and medium-sized companies.

Amazon Business, Alibaba, eWorldTrade are some of the examples.

As an example, you have subscribed to the “Amazon Business” B2B platform, you added content information about your company and products to the page of the business on the site. After this stage, all buyers searching for your products and services can reach your page. Visitors who are interested in your products or company will be able to contact your sales representatives on the site.

b) Direct B2B platform: In this B2B model, a company creates an online store only to sell its products and services. This business model, called the direct model, is mostly used by companies that open e-stores to sell and distribute to their dealers’ affiliates and suppliers. Some companies use the Direct B2B model to get orders online from their retail buyers

It will be costly to open a B2B sales channel on your company’s domain name website and it will be unlikely that potential customers will discover this website. On the other hand, your company page on popular B2B e-commerce will allow your company to reach a large number of customers in a short time if supported by the right marketing strategies and advertisements.

As an example of the Direct B2B platform, consider a B2B platform owned by a furniture manufacturer with hundreds of dealers across the country. The furniture company can use this B2B channel for its dealers, its possible to manage all orders on a single screen, dealers easily access the necessary quality documents, catalogs. and new product information with this network.

What is B2B Marketing?

B2B is an abbreviation of the definition of a “business to business”, which expresses the sales practices between businesses. Unlike B2C marketing strategies, B2B marketing doesn’t consider consumer attitudes. Sellers and buyers are only businesses. So, B2B is trading activities that take place between at least two or more companies.

E-commerce has caused global trade to grow at an unprecedented pace. Nowadays, a local coffee shop in NewYork, through B2B platforms, is able to manage an organization that will allow buying coffees from Ethiopia to be processing in Germany, bottled in Poland, and reaching store shelves in New York.

B2B Models & B2B Platforms

a) Marketplace B2B platform: It is an online e-commerce platform that companies sell their products wholesale in the e-marketplace along with their competitors.

B2B e-markets are a practical, fast, and low-budget solution to promote their products and companies, especially for small and medium-sized companies.

Amazon Business, Alibaba, eWorldTrade are some of the examples.

What are the differences between B2B, B2C, and C2C?

The main difference between these three business models is the identity of buyers and sellers. The fact that the buyer or seller is a company or consumer causes different details such as how to determine the procedures of the sale, how to bill, and how taxation will take place.

“C” refers to consumers and “B” refers to Business.

B2B is a business model where B2B retailers sell products to each other. (example:Alibaba)
B2C is a Business model where retailers selling directly to consumers.
(example: Amazon)
C2C is a business model where consumer sells a product to another consumer through an online platform. (example: eBay)

Examples of B2B companies

The biggest brands in the B2B e-commerce market are; Alibaba, Amazon Business, eWorldTrade, eBay, Indiamart, EC21.

Alibaba is the world’s most popular online e-commerce platform, established to bring Chinese manufacturers together with international buyers. It is a company that has dominated the B2B e-commerce market with Amazon Business, which has risen in the last few years.

Amazon Business has near two million accounts and more than 200,000 sellers globally. Founded as a subsidiary of Amazon in 2015, the company sold 1 billion USD in a year, the company grew by 115% in the first 3 years. Amazon Business is expected to turn into a B2B e-commerce platform, with an annual turnover of 50 billion USD by 2023.

Future of the B2B Market

B2C e-commerce revenues were 3,53 trillion USD in 2019. On the other hand, the B2B figures were dazzling, The global B2B e-commerce market valuing 12.2 trillion USD in 2019. This is over 3 times that of the B2C market. (source: statista.com)

There are many statistics about internet users’ interest in e-commerce, online shopping statistics in Europe, the USA, and Asia, but the B2B segment is very different. It is only an e-commerce activity between companies, therefore the audience is more limited, but the commercial size of the shopping is much larger due to the wholesale.

By 2025, the share of e-commerce in the total trade in G20 member countries is estimated to exceed 50%. It is predicted that the growth in the B2B platform will be realized in small and medium-sized companies, especially in developing countries.

B2B Marketing Strategy

B2B marketing strategies use various tactics to reach multiple companies. Unlike B2C, marketing strategies focus on cost and payment methods rather than promoting companies and products.

B2B marketing strategies use various tactics to reach multiple companies. Unlike B2C marketing strategies, marketing elements are focused on cost and payment methods as well as promoting companies and products. It should not be forgotten that the B2B marketing strategy should be created taking into account longer sales cycles. Companies that work well in the purchasing department, especially before the first purchase, thoroughly explore the available options and wish to work long-term with a supplier that meets their expectations.

The B2B marketing strategy should be created taking into account longer sales cycles. Companies that work well in the purchasing department, especially before the first purchase, thoroughly explore the available options and wish to work long-term with a supplier that meets their expectations.

Since B2B platforms are online platforms that contain all historical data, the harder it is to stand out among thousands of competitors, the more difficult it is to erase negative data from an existing customer from the customer’s database.

B2B marketing trends

Machine learning and artificial intelligence enabled the creation of personalized data and repositories for marketing and sales. We see that B2B e-commerce platforms benefit from these innovations as much as B2C platforms. It is very important to identify your customers and categorize their demands on an e-commerce platform where hundreds of thousands of companies are located worldwide.

The B2B address of a company is also the online store of the company. Therefore, marketing should be done not only within the B2B platform but also on all electronic channels. A complete e-marketing strategy should be determined.

Briefly, with a few titles, we can list what should be done in e-marketing content with the following titles:

Improve the user experience on main website
Do email marketing work
Turn to social media marketing
Improve the user experience on your website plus B2B channel
Improve your content quality and focus on content marketing
Focus on video content and visual content such as info-graphic

The basic strategy when creating B2B marketing is to find the right customer. For B2C marketing, the diversity of customers and numerous sales strategies mean increasing risks and uncertainties and decreasing profitability projections for B2B marketing. Customers should be analyzed in detail, customer profiles should be determined correctly, and a sales marketing policy should be determined to find customers who can develop a joint project and work long-term.

Developing customer policy requires a methodological and systematic study. However, the basic parameters that will be needed at this stage are:

The number of customers and their capacities yearly/montly
Profitability rate
Average payment term of the customers
Share of forwarding sales in total trade
Product variety purchased by customers
Development potential of the company
Company’s projects and investments
Payment methods available to customers
Your firm’s share in the total purchasing capacity of the customer
Company’s staff and capabilities

B2B Digital Marketing Strategy

The digital marketing strategy mainly targets B2C sales, Even so, the links between social media platforms such as Linkedin and your B2B pages give successful results. Social media channels and registration forms are also useful methods for companies to find each other in the B2B market.

1) Outreach: There are 3 steps to be taken in digital marketing, respectively, these are reached, engagement, and conversion. At the end of these 3 steps, you aim to sell your product or service to your loyal followers, that is, the final stage will be sales.

In the first step called Outreach, your main aim is to reach your target audience through social media channels and blogs.

Number of viewers of businesses blogs linked to your page

Your company’s YouTube channel Traffic also channel views

Your company’s Social media channel followers or visitors

Email marketing The open and the click-through rates

LinkedIn Activities

2)Engagement: The frequency of visitors to your social media channels and website and the activities they perform on your site determine the extent of the interaction between your company and this audience. To understand the extent of the interaction, you must scale the parameters listed below.

Social Media link return and visitors

Social media feedback; shares, like …..

Twitter likes, answers, re-tweets

YouTube material ratings, subscribers

Linkedin feedback

3)Conversion: Conversation is an important point, it’s a process of converting your visitors to customers. To accomplish this, you should ensure that your visitors contact you by membership, downloads, and content sharing.

Content downloads, filling forms, and record emails

Number of the online registrations

The density of bounce rates about your pages

LinkedIn dialogs, adding each other

Final Step: Sales: The main goal of the strategy

B2B Marketing and Customer Management

The heart of sales and marketing today is based on customer data. If you can get detailed information about your customer and purchasing behavior at regular intervals and analyze this information correctly, your chances of profitability and success will increase.

B2B marketing offers you the chance to survive digitally, find new customers, and sell in proportion to your ability to analyze digital data. Customer forms, a record of customer movements, cookies they leave on your site or pages, all provide you with tips to understand your customer.

Individual product groups should be analyzed very well for each customer, a general link should be established between your general targets and customer targets for your product groups, and all information about your customer, as well as sales figures, should be analyzed.

The main goal is to find customers with whom you can create parallel commercial targets and to maintain the commercial relationship interactively.

e-commerce requires you to be ready for constant change. You should revise your strategies for customer management at regular intervals based on current trends. The world is changing, people are changing, your customers are changing, what about you?