B2B Software Marketing

How is B2B software marketing different from B2C?

There are a number of ways in which B2B software marketing is quite a bit different from selling software directly to end consumers:

• Purchase decision is more likely to be driven by ROI, improvements in efficiency or addition of expertise (business value), rather than driven by impulse, discounts (more analytical decision process rather than an emotional one).
• More need to educate customers before they are ready to buy (content marketing).
• Often multiple stakeholders involved.
• Business customers like/need to have support and help through the sales and usage of the product.

Because of the points above, business buyers don’t usually make immediate purchase decisions. Instead, they must progress through a series of stages called the “buyer’s journey”: 

1. Awareness (buyer first identifies that they have a problem needing a solution, or identifies an opportunity), 
2. Consideration (when they are researching and evaluating solutions to their problem), 
3. Decision (when they have decided on a specific solution approach & are ready to select among vendors). 

Depending on the scale and price of your software, the buyer’s journey can take weeks, months or in some cases even years.

B2B startup marketing strategy

If you're just starting up a B2B software company, a lengthy buyer's journey can be a significant challenge unless you are really well capitalized. There are various strategies to get momentum and early wins as a startup, including focusing on smaller businesses to start, getting pilot or POC accounts to provide early case studies, etc.

Key ingredients for the best B2B marketing

These are the two most important ingredients of a successful B2B software marketing strategy:

1. Know your niche – What is your buyer persona? Who are the stakeholders?  What are their needs & solutions, buying criteria, decision process?
2. Keep the buyer engaged throughout the buyer’s journey – various tools help with this, including email marketing, content marketing, retargeting, etc

Types of B2B marketing strategies for software firms

These are just some of the key B2B technology marketing strategies that are important for software companies to consider:

• Content marketing
• Account-based marketing
• Inbound marketing
• Product marketing
• Email marketing
• Digital marketing

Content marketing

Content marketing is very important in the B2B space, where your buyers are doing online research and starting to evaluate solutions even before they have engaged with you. Content marketing involves having high quality web pages, blog posts, and social media content that addresses your target customers' needs and concerns, beyond just a sales pitch.

Account-based marketing

B2B marketers often forget their most important target prospects: existing clients! Account-based marketing involves building strategies to upsell and broaden engagement within your established customer base.

Inbound marketing

B2B inbound marketing (particularly important is B2B SaaS inbound marketing) involves having content and SEO strategies that will pull customers to engage with your website, social media presence, blog, etc without you having to actively reach out to them.

Product marketing

Having a strong product marketing strategy before you bring your software to the market is particularly important in the B2B space: make sure your pricing, positioning and B2B marketing channels are in place before executing your go-to-market strategy.

Email marketing

Email marketing might involve nurturing a newsletter subscriber list, or sending individual target emails to prospects. But either way, your emails must focus on things that matter to your target buyer (not overt selling): provide solutions, and help them understand how you can help their business grow or solve their problem.

B2B digital marketing

In B2B software marketing a professional web presence is a must-have, as is a strong presence in whatever social media your buyers use (often LinkedIn for B2B, but it doesn’t have to be).  B2B internet marketing should be a key component of your go-to-market strategy.

B2B SaaS marketing

Software-as-a-service companies require very specific B2B SaaS marketing strategies. This is because the customer value is spread over the lifetime of the customer, rather than as a larger up-front license fee. As a result, SaaS firms need to keep a close eye on customer acquisition costs in order to remain profitable. One way to do this is to carefully track your B2B SaaS metrics. Our SaaS business planning package can help you do that, or read more about SaaS marketing here.

Resources for B2B software marketing

Here are some other articles to help with planning your B2B software marketing:

• Tips for B2B Internet Marketing
• Effective B2B Marketing Strategies
• Offering Business Software Services
• Selling Software to Businesses
• The Changing Software Sales Cycle

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