What does an online marketing agency do for B2B?
An online marketing agency makes sure your company gets found online, builds trust and brings in enquiries. Think of SEO, ads on Google and LinkedIn, content, your website and marketing automation.
In B2B, that work only has value when it connects to your sales. An enquiry from a company that does not fit you takes up sales time and delivers nothing. The goal is not as many leads as possible, but getting the right companies into a conversation with your sales team at the right moment.
Why a B2B market needs its own approach
The channels in B2B and B2C are largely the same. The difference lies in how people buy.
Several decision makers
According to Gartner, a complex B2B purchase involves six to ten decision makers. A technical manager wants to know whether it works, a director looks at the return and a buyer compares suppliers. Your marketing has to offer something to each of them.
A long sales cycle
There are often months between a first introduction and a signed quote. During that period, a buyer does most of the research on their own. Gartner reports that buyers spend only 17 percent of their time meeting with potential suppliers. The rest of the time they read, compare and discuss things internally.
A small, well-defined audience
Where a web shop has thousands of potential customers, B2B is sometimes about a few hundred companies. That makes every campaign more targeted, but also more vulnerable. Without a sharp ideal customer profile, you spend budget on companies that will never become customers.
How an agency understands your market
Plenty of agencies call themselves B2B specialists. You notice the difference in the questions they ask and in what they steer on.
It starts with your customer, not with a channel
An agency that understands your market first asks about your best customers, your sales process and the reasons deals do or do not go through. Only then does the question of which channels fit come up. If the conversation starts with LinkedIn ads or a new website, chances are you will get a standard package.
Marketing and sales work with the same information
In B2B, revenue comes from conversations, not from a shopping cart. A good agency therefore wants to know what happens to an enquiry once it reaches sales. Did it become a quote? A customer? Or did the company turn out to be too small? That information decides which campaigns you continue and which you stop.
There is attention for the whole buying journey
A B2B buyer is not always ready to buy. That is why you combine two kinds of marketing. With demand generation you build awareness among companies that are not looking yet, and with demand capture you make sure you are found when they are. An agency that only steers on the second misses the buyers who have yet to start.
Reports are about pipeline, not clicks
Clicks, impressions and visitors say little about revenue. Ask an agency which figures it reports. In B2B you want to see how many enquiries come from your audience, how many of those lead to a sales conversation and what that pipeline is worth.
How we approach this at Art of Advertising
We only work for B2B companies with a high order value, a long customer journey and an intensive sales process. Our approach is built around that: first the foundation with your ideal customer and positioning, then demand generation, demand capture and sales intelligence. What that looks like in practice when we take care of all your online marketing is explained on our page on outsourcing online marketing.
One example is Partnify. There we linked the sales results in HubSpot back to the campaigns in Meta. Every deal in HubSpot is sent back to Meta, so the campaigns learn from real sales and not just from completed forms. That way the leads keep getting better.
every deal in HubSpot feeds back to Meta, so the campaigns learn which leads become customers
Want to know where the biggest opportunities for your company are? Our page on demand generation explains how we build that.
A good B2B agency steers on customers, not clicks
An online marketing agency that understands your B2B market knows your customers, works together with sales and judges campaigns by what they bring into the pipeline. The channels are a means, not a starting point. When choosing an agency, look mainly at the questions it asks and at the figures it wants to be measured on.
