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Developing robust B2B PR strategies requires effort and time. Marketers must balance creative freedom with budget constraints and platform requirements while planning. However, all this must be done while keeping the target audience in mind. Having a buyer persona helps businesses to identify their target audience.
Selling to businesses is different and more complex than selling to customers. Developing a B2B PR strategy requires a lot more effort.
What is B2B?
B2B is business-to-business. In this model, one business sells its products or services to other businesses. Marketing this approach can be tricky. Moving forward with other concepts of B2B PR, let’s learn about B2B marketing.
The lifecycle of B2B customers has seen drastic changes over the years. The traditional funnel used to look like this:
B2B marketing à Lead gen à sales à close process
Now, businesses have many tactics. To get results from B2B efforts, the focus should be shifted to generating market demand and engaging with companies on the available platforms.
B2B PR Strategies vs Tactics
People, even PR experts, often need clarification on strategies and tactics. But there is a significant difference between both:
- The plan is called strategy
- Turning the plan into a reality is called the tactic
A B2B marketing strategy sets the goals of a PR campaign and includes the following:
- Metrics to measures
- Target audience
- Platforms they are using
On the other hand, the tactic is how all the strategies will come together.
7 Steps to Develop a B2B PR Strategy
B2B PR strategies are developed by keeping the target audience in mind. Businesses need to consider the following:
- Positioning
- Unique selling point
- Financial resources
Answering all these pointers takes work; here are the seven steps.
Step 1: Comprehend the B2B Buyer Journey
Businesses do not buy impulsively because they have limited budgets, metrics to reach, reports to send, and, most importantly, a lot to lose. Understanding the buyer journey helps create and implement marketing strategies for every step of the funnel.
B2B products or services are usually in high demand, so their sales cycles are longer than B2C. Creating demand for these products or services also requires a lot of time. To bridge the gap between this waiting time, tactics are used during every funnel stage to bring businesses to request a demo call or make the purchase decision easier.
On the other hand, B2B marketing is not just setting up the fb ads manager, integrating the pixel, or running the Instagram ads. The B2B buyer journey consists of three phases:
Awareness phase
In this phase, businesses become aware of a problem and start gaining knowledge about it.
Consideration phase
After educating them, businesses start looking for the solution.
Decision phase
During this phase, businesses are regulating their budgets to make purchases.
Step 2: Define the Target Market and Audience
Developing a PR distribution plan is useless without defining the market and the target audience. Firstly, identify the companies based on the following:
- Company size
- Location or region
- No. of employees
- Market share
After identifying the companies, the next step is to identify the audience. To do so, create a user persona:
- Demographics
- Psychographic data
Step 3: 4 P’s of Marketing
After identifying the market and the audience, it is time to create a B2B marketing strategy. Here, businesses need to work on the 4P’s:
- Product – product business needs to sell
- Price – decide on the pricing
- Place – where the product will be sold
- Promotion – how companies will know about the product
Defining these 4Ps will help a B2B PR agency create an elaborate marketing strategy. This step will require all the information from the above steps to develop a comprehensive plan.
Step 4: Cover all aspects of B2B Marketing
Once the strategy has been created, it is time to integrate the tactics. These tactics include:
- Develop and launch a website
- Create and maintain social media profiles
- Start a newsletter
- Going to industry-related events and conferences
- Content marketing
- SEO practices
- Paid marketing
- Lead generation
- Email marketing
Step 5: Competitive Analysis
It is always necessary to monitor competitors’ marketing strategies by doing the competitor’s analysis. This will help businesses to understand what strategies and tactics they are using. SWOT analysis is the best way to get the analysis done.
Step 6: Brand Positioning
In this step, businesses must answer the 5W’s to position themselves in the market.
- Who
- What
- When
- Why
- How
This will help to develop a consistent brand image, tone, and voice across platforms.
Step 8: Marketing Platforms
After the competitor analysis, businesses will understand which platforms their competitors use and which they neglect. This will help companies develop their marketing strategies using different platforms.
Conclusion
Overall, developing a B2B PR strategy requires extensive research and time. However, once the strategy combined with tactics yields results, all this effort is justified. The PR team can analyze the metrics and make data-driven decisions for future campaigns.
