B2B marketing strategies are slowly but surely becoming a lifeline for brands aiming for resilience and growth in 2024. According to Statista, the expenditure on B2B advertising and marketing is expected to reach 37.7 billion dollars in the United States in the subsequent year.
For clarification, B2B marketing and research pertain to promoting brands and companies among business entities like manufacturers, suppliers, and retailers. It’s challenging to get it right. Unless you keep the audience in mind, it’s ineffective, and no other group of people is as fickle as the wind; business customers are constantly changing or undecided.
Organizations that conduct B2B market research get access to new perspectives and customer pain points, competitor activity, and new revenue growth opportunities, to name a few. You, too, can benefit from understanding the needs, preferences, and behaviors of your potential and existing buyers, not to mention the challenges and opportunities in your niche. If you want to build authority, credibility, and trust, make your company the go-to option by humanizing your brand because there are still humans creating connections and making transactions happen. This article discusses often underappreciated and overlooked B2B market research methods.
Analyze the Search Terms That Your Target Audience Uses
Selecting the right keywords to target can help attract more qualified traffic and generate more leads from your content. The insight into the search terms also helps inform your overall marketing strategy. Effective keyword research enables you to understand your target audience’s needs, preferences, and behavior, ultimately increasing the chances of attaining your goals, whether driving sales or generating more online visibility. B2B buyers are exploring more avenues outside vendors, particularly third-party resources, to make a purchase decision. You can analyze the popularity of search terms using real-time data from Answer the Public, Google Trends, or Ahrefs Keyword Explorer.
B2B keyword research acts as the connective link between your business and prospective clients or partners actively seeking your solutions or displaying a sense of urgency in their communication. Finding out how businesses search the Internet (say, sharing their situations, goals, needs, or challenges) helps you develop a holistic growth strategy; you will improve your brand visibility and get more marketing-qualified leads for your business. B2B keyword research is nothing like your typical keyword research because it involves keywords with low search volume catering to specialized and technical industries. In the wealth & luxury sector, for instance, low search volume indicates search appeal, while keyword difficulty touches on the competition level.
Find Out How People Feel About Your Brand
Companies across industries rely on the products, services, and capabilities of other organizations to accomplish more tasks and be efficient. Every corporation wants to reach an audience on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and so on to generate more leads and grow their business. Listening doesn’t mean tuning into mindless chatter or small talk. It means paying attention to each and every word a person is saying, deriving insights and developing impactful strategies. Social media is a goldmine for information, so monitor and analyze conversations related to your brand, products/services, and industry. You’ll get contextualized data with an emotional resonance. To maximize the impacts, turn insights into actionable strategies for growth.
There’s a fundamental difference between social media monitoring and listening, even if the terms are used interchangeably. The aim of social media monitoring is to respond promptly to people’s questions and concerns, while social media listening seeks to generate meaningful findings that can help in driving decisions and achieving desirable outcomes. The former is more focused and reactive, while the latter is more far-reaching and proactive. Understanding the conversation surrounding your brand promotes clarity as far as what marketing strategies to develop and what adjustments are necessary as far as your products and services are concerned. There are several tools you can use to inform your campaigns, like Hootsuite Insights.
Experience Your Business from A Customer Point of View
Take a deep dive into the world of your customers to get a better understanding of their needs and challenges. In other words, let clients spend time talking to you and ask questions in a controlled environment. The actual form of immersion differs from company to company. For example, some organizations ask managers to spend more time on the sales floor talking to and assisting customers. As the world of B2B operations continues to undergo change, B2B markets must reinvent conventional approaches in both research and experience. Consumer-like experiences have become a demand of business buyers, who are becoming even more influential.
Scrutinize Ratings and Reviews to Understand Overall Satisfaction
The problem with traditional B2B market research methods, notably focus groups and customer surveys, is they take a lot of time and fail to capture real-time data. For this reason, you should analyze the ratings and reviews left by your customers. Going beyond typical metrics such as star ratings and net promoter scores allows you to obtain qualitative data regarding persistent issues with your products or services that can inconvenience customers and their businesses. Not only will this build trust, but it will also encourage engagement and increase brand recall for target segments. In a digital world, ratings and reviews are indispensable sales and marketing tools.
Ratings and reviews, which have been collected from various sources, can be used to assist decision-making and release better products and services. Be certain to examine data on forums like Reddit or Capterra to gain an accurate and deep understanding of user satisfaction, features, price, and so forth. Dissatisfied clients will complain by sharing negative feedback, so analyze the insights shown to you; after all, people stay loyal to brands that get them. Without feedback, answering pressing questions will involve a certain amount of guesswork.
Closing Remarks
No matter if you’re facing a competitive threat or want to leverage a new market opportunity, clarity is of the essence. The only constant of business is change. Firms that undertake structured market research grow faster and are more profitable compared to those that don’t, so stay focused, relevant, and informed.
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