While there are many similarities between B2B and B2C marketing, they are fundamentally different in the fact that it will take a lot more to convince a business to buy. This is purely from the nature of it taking on average 3-5 decision makers in the buying process. Because of this, it is obvious that we encounter several problems as B2B marketers, but what are the main issues that we face on a daily basis?

Finding The Right People At The Right Time

As we know, with B2B marketing we’re not marketing to one single person. Instead, we need to target specific influencers and decision makers in the buyer’s company that can authorise such a purchase.However, the challenge that comes with this is that you need to create content that speaks to both these influencers and the decision makers, too. 

Finding these stakeholders and engaging with them is no simple task. You can create the right content, but it will not be worth it if you don’t get that content in front of the right people. Even when you do, you need to make sure that you are regularly posting high quality, engaging content that people will want to read and interact with. More often than not, you’ll need to appeal to a wide range of interests for these decision makers, so it can be very easy to lose the identity of your product or service. 

One way that you can manage this is to work together with your sales team. If you work together then you can have your sales team deliver content through social media, immediately engaging with your target market as they make meaningful connections with potential buyers. This way, it takes the pressure off the marketing department while creating cohesion between the sales and marketing teams. 

Measuring The Effectiveness Of Your Marketing

Measuring how effective your marketing efforts are in generating leads is extremely beneficial. However, it can also be one of the most difficult things to carry out. You could create a fantastic marketing strategy, but if you cannot measure the strategy then it can be very difficult to gauge how effective it is. 

The best way to combat this is to use marketing tools like Hubspot that allow you to track your efforts. This allows you to see measurable data about your social media, blog, website traffic, and most importantly lead generation. You can then see which content is going to be the most effective, and which is likely to be unique, interesting content from your inbound marketing methods.

However, this doesn’t mean that you should give up on immeasurable efforts in your marketing. These are still essential as you create a persona for your company through the content you create. It simply means that you can inform this part of your marketing with your measurement tools to see what engages your clients more. Similarly, this affects how you can measure your ROI. It can be extremely difficult to quantify marketing as you cannot always analyse the effectiveness of your lead generation. If you aren’t able to do this, how can you show just how much your marketing is worth? 

The answer is you can’t to the extent that you can quantify a sales role, but you can work on using tools to measure your marketing over time. Once you can start to measure and analyse your efforts, you can decipher what does or doesn’t work in your current strategy and improve it. You can also then show evidence of the effectiveness of your strategies to non marketers.

The Globalisation Of Marketing

There is also a great challenge when it comes to globalisation. As we are now working on an international level with our marketing, we must appeal to business from very different backgrounds, traditions and norms. This means that we must adjust and tailor our content differently depending on the business that we work with. This proves to be a great task as it means that you are constantly altering the identity of your business to suit the client, which can become exhausting. 

This begins to ask another question regarding the identity of your business. If you are marketing to so many different channels and tailoring your company to their interests or needs, how do you retain your company’s identity? It can be very easy to lose the company’s ethos if you are busy trying to ensure you appeal to a client. The problem with this is that you need to change your company’s style for this to work, you cannot simply translate your current marketing content to their language and hope for the best. You want to show that you can understand their problems and offer them a solution for their work. 

This can be one of the most difficult problems that you face as a B2B marketer, as you cannot really have a solution for this. Instead, you need to create a guideline of your company’s ethos, so that you know what you need to stick to in order to retain your identity, but you can then also know the parameters of which you can personalise your strategy to the specific business.

As B2B marketers, there are so many challenges that we face on a daily basis. Unfortunately there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to these problems, either. The best we can do is identify a potential lead, approach them at the appropriate moment, and have strong communication with the sales team. Then, you can also look at implementing more marketing technology to improve this, or even hire a B2B marketing agency to help you.

Do you know any other problems with B2B marketing, or perhaps you can solve one or two? Please let us know over on social media!