16 Proven B2B Marketing Strategies That Get Results

This is a list of 16 B2B marketing strategies that are working great right now.

Thanks to the techniques in this post, Backlinko brings in over 451K unique visitors every month:

Below, I’ll go through these strategies in detail, so you can understand EXACTLY how to apply them to your own B2B marketing efforts.

But first, let’s talk about what makes these strategies different from B2C marketing.

What Makes B2B Marketing Strategies Different?

B2B marketing strategies differ from B2C marketing strategies in a few key ways:

• More than one person is typically involved in the purchase decision
• B2B involves longer sales cycles than B2C
• Your customer is focused on ROI, rather than being driven by emotion

While you can use some of the same marketing strategies for B2B as you would for B2C, the differences outlined above mean you typically need to modify your approach.

For example, you might use content marketing to encourage customers to buy your brand’s coffee machine. With snappy copywriting and high-res images.

But if you’re promoting a B2B product via content marketing, you need to focus on the features and benefits. Making it clear to the reader how your solution will help their business.

The key difference between B2B and B2C marketing lies in the fact that B2B customers are turning to your brand as a solution to a problem. And it’s often the case that they expect to use your product or service to actively grow their business.

This is quite unlike the average B2C transaction. These are driven by emotion, and could be purchases purely for entertainment.

With these differences in mind, let’s go through the top B2B marketing strategies that are working right now.

1. Write Comparison Blog Posts

Comparison blog posts—the kind of posts where you have “Brand 1 vs. Brand 2”— are a GREAT way to get in front of B2B buyers.

Not only that: they allow you to get in front of potential customers when they’re far down the marketing funnel.

For example, check out this post from email marketing software provider Klaviyo:

As you can probably guess, this post is optimized around the keyword “Klaviyo vs Mailchimp.”

A keyword that 1.7K people search for every month:

Mailchimp is one of Klaviyo’s main competitors in the email marketing software space.

And they realized that people searching for “Klaviyo vs Mailchimp” were far along the buyer’s journey.

Specifically, these potential customers knew they wanted email marketing software. But they weren’t sure which one was the best option for them.

So they created a post designed to rank for that term and help those almost-buyers make a decision.

A post that outlined the pros and cons of each tool.

Obviously, this post is biased in favor of Klaviyo.

Despite that, it still ranks in the top 3 of Google for its target keyword.

This helps Klaviyo get in front of people deciding between the two tools.

That said:

You don’t need to write a post that compares you with a direct competitor.

You can also publish content that compares and contrasts two different concepts, approaches, or popular tools in your industry.

Here’s a real-life example of this type of “vs” comparison post from Backlinko.

According to Google Analytics, that single page brings in 3,421 visitors per month.

(Mostly from people searching for “SEO vs “SEM” in Google.)

In short: I recommend sprinkling in some “vs” posts as part of your B2B content strategy.

2. Create a Weekly Newsletter

A weekly email newsletter is GREAT for:

• Growing brand awareness
• Driving targeted traffic to specific places
• Generating leads
• Launching and selling new products

In fact, I can draw a straight line between the growth of my other B2B company (Exploding Topics) and our weekly newsletter.

The trick is to create a format that allows you to easily send a newsletter each week.

At the same time. On the same day.

From sending millions of emails, I’ve learned that sending at the same day and time each week is huge.

That way, subscribers start to expect your emails. Which leads to more opens and more engagement.

For example, our weekly Exploding Topics emails covered four different companies and products each week:

This was great because we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel every week.

Just plug in the topics. Write about them. And hit “send.”

And subscribers loved it because they knew what they were getting. This is why our open rates were well above the industry average.

Our newsletter even got a shout-out from Wired founder Kevin Kelly.

And that wouldn’t have been possible if we didn’t stick to a regular, weekly schedule for our newsletter.

We apply the same practices here at Backlinko too, with our free newsletter. Each email focuses on one proven digital marketing strategy a week.

3. Produce Data-Driven Content Pieces

Anyone can write a blog post.

Anyone can make a video.

And pretty much anyone can record a podcast.

That’s why all of those formats are SUPER competitive.

But there’s still one content format that’s largely untapped: data-driven content pieces.

Here’s an example from yours truly from a few years ago: How Google Ranks Google Lens Results.

We looked at the factors that Google might use in its Google Lens algorithm. And wrote about our results.

To be clear: this piece was 10-20x harder to create than a list post, case study, or guide.

But this post was “original content” in the truest sense of the word. This is why it got lots of shares on social media.

And the post generated plenty of links from influential blogs in the digital marketing space.

Here are some ideas for data-driven content pieces that work great in B2B:

• Surveys of people in your niche, like IT department heads, CFOs, or other B2B marketers
• Rankings of top companies or tools based on revenue, net promoter score, or website traffic
• Data analysis of average salaries, industry growth, or pricing

4. Create a Useful Tool

Offering a useful tool to your B2B audience is a great idea for two reasons:

• It helps convince them that you are the solution to their problem
• It’s an excellent way to pick up some backlinks to your website

Let’s take a look at an example from the B2B world:

This shipping calculator by Parcel Monkey.

According to Semrush, this single page brings in 18K visitors from Google each month. And it has gathered 342 backlinks too.

Not bad for a relatively simple tool.

5. Repurpose Existing Content

B2B marketers allocate an average of 28% of their marketing budget towards content marketing.

And the vast majority of that content is only used once.

Which is a giant waste of resources.

That’s why more and more B2B businesses are repurposing their content.

In other words, they’re turning blog posts into videos. Videos into podcasts episodes. And podcasts into Instagram Stories.

In short: content repurposing can give you a better ROI on the content you create.

We do this a lot with our blog posts, turning them into LinkedIn carousels:

As a B2B business, you have a lot of options for content repurposing beyond social media as well.

For example, Shopify takes their how-to articles:

And turns them into YouTube videos:

Or do what Zendesk has done by repurposing original data and reporting into a blog post:

6. Review (and Improve) Your Site’s SEO Performance

Google search is one of the most important traffic sources for B2B businesses. And to maximize that traffic, you need good SEO.

In my experience, most B2B brands tend to overly-focus on things like keywords, content, and backlinks.

Yes, those things ARE important.

But it’s ALSO important to regularly evaluate your site’s technical SEO.

In other words: perform an SEO site audit.

Here’s how:

First, head over to Google Search Console and click on the “Pages” report.

Scroll down to the “Why pages aren’t indexed” section and analyze any errors.

You’ll want to fix these issues, as they’re preventing Google from indexing your pages. And if your pages aren’t indexed, they can’t rank. So you won’t see any organic traffic to them.

You also want to look at the “Indexed pages” report.

This shows you how many pages from your site Google has indexed.

If you’re like most site owners, you’ll probably find pages on this list that shouldn’t be indexed. And if this happens to lots of pages, it can lead to site bloat and thin content issues. Which can hurt your overall Google rankings.

For example, I noticed that a lot of our “almost done” pages were getting indexed.

These are pages that people see when they sign up for our newsletter. There’s no reason that they should be indexed. So we quickly added the “noindex” tag to those pages.

Once you’re done with Search Console, I recommend using an SEO audit tool to dig deeper into your site’s technical SEO health.

For example, Semrush has a very helpful SEO audit feature. Aptly named Site Audit.

It’ll check your site for more than 140 technical SEO issues. This makes performing your own audit super easy (and quick).

7. Post Engaging Content on LinkedIn

It’s no secret that LinkedIn is THE B2B social network.

And the platform now has more than 1 billion users.

Question is:

How can you get targeted traffic from LinkedIn?

By posting super engaging content.

Specifically, posts from employees at your company.

People want to engage with people on social media.

Not brands.

For example, HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah posts company updates on his LinkedIn.

And as you can see, his posts get a decent number of comments and likes.

MUCH more than the same post would get if it was posted from the official HubSpot brand account.

In my case, I share anecdotes, stories and business lessons on my LinkedIn.

And my LinkedIn posts get way more engagement than Facebook, X/Twitter, or pretty much any other social network that I’m active on.

When sharing content on LinkedIn, keep it fairly simple, and use an eye-catching visual. Like our head of SEO, Leigh McKenzie, does when sharing insights from our Backlinko posts:

8. Partner Up With Other Businesses

Partnerships are one of the most underrated B2B marketing tactics. And it’s easy to immediately overlook it thinking, “why would I want to team up with potential competitors?”

But in my experience, the right partnership can lead to:

• More B2B leads and referrals
• Increased brand awareness
• Strategic relationships
• Reduced marketing costs

A B2B partnership can take many forms. It could be as simple as interviewing an SME from another business and using their insights to enhance your content.

Then, they can share that content with their audience, boosting your reach and brand awareness while also letting them get featured in front of yours.

It’s a win-win.

Or perhaps you could work directly with another brand as a supplier, and they might share some of the work you do with their audience.

For example, Rand Fishkin shared on LinkedIn how Datos helps improve the features of his own tool SparkToro:

This partnership helps Rand’s team improve their own product, while also getting some exposure for Datos as a supplier.

Or it could be on a larger scale, like WPP and IBM partnering to create a new AI-driven platform for marketers:

Getting both brands some nice media exposure in the process:

9. Launch a YouTube Channel

87% of marketers say that video has helped them get more leads.

87%!

And if you’re serious about video marketing for your B2B business, you definitely want to focus on YouTube.

That’s because YouTube has almost 2.5 billion users.

Yes, people visit YouTube to watch cute cat videos, live streams, and sports highlights.

But YouTube is also the place that decision-makers go to learn about topics like supply chains, digital marketing, invoicing, and lots of other “boring” B2B topics.

Why?

Because videos can make these topics WAY more interesting and engaging. And you can take advantage of this as a B2B marketer.

So if you want to launch your own YouTube channel, here are two resources to get you started.

(Both of which are designed to help B2B-focused channels.)

First, you’ve got this video from my channel called “How to Start (And Grow) a YouTube Channel”:

(It’s from a few years ago now, but the main ideas still work today.)

Second, you can check out the YouTube Marketing Hub.

It’s a free collection of resources that cover topics like video editing, YouTube SEO, and more.

10. Try Referral Marketing to Get More Customers

Referral marketing is when you use your existing customers to get more leads and sales.

How?

By incentivizing them to do the hard work for you.

Here’s an example from Hotjar:

When you refer customers to their service, you can earn a revenue share of up to 25%.

This is an attractive offer, and a great way to encourage existing customers to promote your product for you.

It’s a win-win.

11. Coin Your Own Industry Terms

Buyer personas.

Sales funnels.

Webinars.

Marketing automation.

These are all terms that somebody made up.

And the companies that coined these terms increased their brand awareness every time someone mentioned their term.

For example, HubSpot is largely credited for coining the term “Inbound Marketing.”

According to Semrush, this phrase gets searched for in Google 12K times per month in the US alone (and over 78K times globally).

And who do you think ranks #1 for that keyword?

You guessed it: HubSpot.

I’ve done this myself on a much smaller scale.

In 2013 I outlined a link building strategy called The Skyscraper Technique.

The approach eventually caught on. Which has landed me literally hundreds of links and mentions in authoritative blogs in my space.

And the post where I first talked about The Skyscraper Technique continues to drive traffic to my site.

(Even though that post is 10+ years old.)

Obviously, coining your own terms that actually mean something isn’t easy. Or we’d all be doing it all the time.

And you’re not guaranteed to get lots of links or traffic even if you do.

But consider how you could coin your own (meaningful) term that could help boost your B2B business’s brand awareness.

12. Split Test Key Landing Pages

Split testing is still one of the most effective B2B marketing strategies out there.

(If you do it right, that is.)

For example, a while ago, we tested two different variations of my headshots on the Backlinko homepage.

Everything else was exactly the same.

And this minor change got us… a relatively minor result.

Basically, a tiny potential .23% conversion rate boost for version B.

But on Exploding Topics, we tested two VERY different pages for this newsletter sign-up page.

One page was short. The other was long. One page used a benefit-focused headline. The other headline was more aspirational.

And because we tested two VERY different pages, the winning page performed 30% better than the other.

Now that we have a winner, we can test smaller variations of that page.

(For example, different button copy or colors.)

But it would have taken us months to get a 30% lift if we kept testing tiny little differences.

That’s why you want to start with significant changes. Then test smaller elements, like button color, copy, and page layout.

So yeah, A/B testing still works.

But if you want to get GREAT results from split testing, make sure to test meaningful differences at first.

13. Target High Buyer-Intent Keywords

The hardest part of keyword research for SEO isn’t finding keywords.

It’s choosing them.

I see a lot of B2B businesses choosing keywords based almost solely on monthly search volume.

Search volume is an important metric for B2C marketing.

After all, B2C companies usually target a large group of potential customers.

But in B2B, you usually have a TINY group of buyers that you need to get in front of. At least compared to some B2C markets.

This is why you want to focus on keywords that have high buyer intent. Even if those keywords may only get 10-50 searches per month.

For example, check out this B2B keyword:

At first glance, this keyword might not seem so great. It only gets 30 searches per month in the US.

But the CPC on that keyword is $14.75.

Which shows that there’s serious buyer intent there. Otherwise, people wouldn’t be bidding on that term in Google Ads.

Never mind paying upwards of $26 every time someone clicks on their ad.

So if you sell a CRM tool, this is a keyword that’s probably worth targeting.

14. Keep Your Blog Content Up to Date

Many B2B websites have old content collecting dust on their blog.

Needless to say, outdated content isn’t usually going to rank well in Google.

And if people DO find that content, it’s not going to make them want to sign up as a lead.

The solution?

Regularly update your existing blog content.

Now:

Depending on how many posts you have on your blog, this can take a while.

But in my experience, it’s well worth the effort.

For example, I update this guide to SEO every year.

I add new strategies. Remove things that no longer work. Update the examples. And try to cover the major changes in the search engine optimization world.

Which is one of the main reasons that this guide continues to bring in a solid pipeline of visits each month.

If you want to take this approach to the next level, you can update, improve, and re-post your older content as a new post.

So instead of quietly updating a post, you relaunch it like it’s brand new.

(And if you make enough significant changes, the post should be basically new.)

For example, I first published this post on SEO copywriting way back in 2015.

As time went on, traffic to that page steadily dropped.

And that was mainly because the post was straight up outdated.

So I decided to give that post a complete overhaul. Specifically, I changed it from a list post into a guide.

A lot of the content was the same as the original post. But I added some new strategies too.

And this “new” post was well received by my audience. Most of which hadn’t ever read the original post.

For B2B businesses, regularly updating your content is a must. Whether it’s a full relaunch or not.

Why?

Because your products or services likely change all the time. Either in subtle or major ways.

And if your content refers to outdated features or doesn’t discuss important features you recently added, that can have a big impact on sales.

So, make it a habit to revisit your content regularly, but especially when you roll out new products or features.

15. Bring Warm Leads Back with Retargeting

Retargeting is a great way to get your ads in front of a SUPER targeted audience.

(Specifically, people who have already visited one of your important landing pages.)

For example, for Exploding Topics, we use Facebook ad retargeting to drive visitors back to our pro newsletter landing page.

Specifically, we advertise to anyone that visited our landing page within the last 30 days.

I know you can do complicated retargeting (for example, you can tailor ads to reflect the specific page someone visited).

But I like to keep things simple.

To be clear: retargeting usually hasn’t been a game-changer for us.

But it does lead to a trickle of conversions that we probably wouldn’t get without aggressive retargeting.

16. Create Visual Content

When most people hear the term “visual content” they think of infographics.

And yes, infographics can still work in certain cases.

But infographics are just one of many visual content formats out there.

There are also:

• Animated GIFs
• Charts
• Visualizations
• Drawings and sketches
• Flowcharts

And visual content is PERFECT for B2B.

Why?

Because many B2B topics are complicated. Boring. Or both.

And visual content can help spice things up, and it can make hard concepts easier to understand.

For example, I tend to use quite a few charts in our industry studies:

Charts make our content straight-up better. And they give our audience something that they can share on social media.

And even use in their blog content:

So, if you find yourself creating content about a topic that’s typically complex or boring, consider adding visuals to make it easier to digest (and more shareable).

Put These B2B Marketing Strategies into Action

All of these B2B marketing strategies can help you grow your brand.

But only if you know how to implement them properly.

Here are three useful resources to help you get the most out of your B2B marketing campaigns:

• B2B Content Distribution: Learn how to distribute your B2B content to get maximum results.
• B2B SEO Strategy: Discover exactly how you can use SEO tactics to grow your organic traffic and drive more sales.
• B2B Social Media Strategy: Find out how to develop your own B2B social media strategy to boost brand awareness and engagement.