How to Build an Effective B2B Product Marketing Strategy

Is your B2B Product Marketing strategy working for you? Brand positioning, demonstrating your value proposition to other businesses, and making channel decisions; B2B product marketing can become a complex process.

B2B marketing is especially complex as your target audience consists of other businesses rather than individuals which means you must reach the decision-makers of these businesses.

By the end of this article, you’ll better understand B2B marketing, the marketing strategies, and tactics available to you, as well as, how to implement a B2B marketing strategy.

TL;DR

• A B2B marketing strategy is any marketing activity aimed at turning other companies into customers.
• To create an effective B2B marketing strategy, you should first identify your target audience and then work on positioning your product to reach potential buyers.
• Next, you need to formulate your key message using your customers’ pain points and their resolvent with your product.
• Finally, set SMART goals and KPIs or OKRs for tracking your marketing performance.

There are multiple marketing strategies available to product marketers, including:

• Using content marketing and SEO strategies to drive online visibility and conversion.
• Learn about your customers’ delights and friction points in your application through in-app data and customer feedback collection.
• Host webinars and deploy interactive product demos to boost customers’ knowledge of your product and how it aids their JTBD.
• Userpilot provides the tools required to turn your product into a powerful marketing tool. Book a demo today to learn how!

What is B2B Product Marketing?

B2B product marketing refers to any marketing strategies or techniques that make other businesses familiar with your brand name and product value and convert them into customers.

B2B product marketing vs. traditional marketing

Traditional marketing strategies help create market demand and acquire marketing qualified leads (MQLs) for a business. They help generate leads who demonstrate a clear interest in your product and engage with your business.

B2B product marketing, on the other hand, involves everything you do after that to drive customers’ interest in your product and boost product engagement. Product marketers use the product’s features and functions to demonstrate value to users and build trust.

So, where traditional marketing stops at lead/customer acquisition, product marketing drives product growth through the different customer journey stages.

How to create an effective B2B product marketing strategy

Before we look more closely at potential product marketing strategies you could implement, let us consider the steps you must follow to create an effective B2B product marketing strategy.

Step 1: Define your target audience

Defining your target audience helps you reach your potential customers with the right channels. You can create one or several user personas to specify your ideal buyer.

Your user persona should paint a clear picture of your target audience. Who are they? Where do they work? What are their main pain points and goals? What are their jobs to be done using your product?

When you create multiple user personas to capture different segments of your target audience, each persona will have its pain points, goals, and demographics.

Step 2: Successfully position your product

Product positioning refers to everything you do to determine where and how your product or service is situated in the market. It involves a series of actions that define your product’s niche and differentiates it favorably from the competition.

The goal of conscious product positioning is to ensure every customer segment sees your product in good light. As such, it’s a need-driven process that communicates how the product satisfies the needs of the potential buyer.

Successfully positioning your product is key to finding market success. It creates/boosts your product value and sets the tone for a successful product launch.

Step 3: Decide on your key messaging

Your key message is the specific idea you want your audience to remember. It explains the value you provide through your product or service and how that product/service addresses the primary pain point of your target buyer.

A good key message is simple and sticky. It combines the user’s pain points and your product value into a short, memorable statement that’s easy to understand and remember.

Step 4: Define your pricing and sales strategies

SaaS companies often adopt one of two broad pricing strategies: sales-led or product-led pricing.

The product-led strategy depends on the product as the driver of business growth. It employs self-serve measures like free trials, demos, or freemium to get users hooked on the product.

However, the sales-led strategy uses traditional sales processes to drive sales. It’s a more hands-on approach, with the sales team providing direct guidance to qualified leads.

Note that your pricing and sales strategies are crucial to the success of your product marketing efforts as they directly impact the buying process. As a result, they must be selected carefully with your customer demographics in mind.

Step 5: Choose specific and relevant marketing channels

Where are your customers located? How can you reach them?

With your audience, messaging, and pricing determined, you’re finally ready to answer this question.

Align your marketing channels to your ideal audience. Diversify your B2B product marketing portfolio (social media marketing, content marketing, etc.) to reach your various customer segments.

You should also optimize your channel selection to reach customers as they progress through the customer journey.

Step 6: Set specific goals to track your marketing efforts

Goals help ensure your efforts as a product marketer are productive. They align your team and inspire them behind common objectives. They drive you to deliver value according to a focused plan and help you prioritize properly and measure success.

Make sure your goals are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound). Think about your overall objective (or the ‘why’ behind your goal), how you can meet that objective, and what outcomes you’re going to deliver.

Then, as you begin implementing your product marketing strategy, track the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) associated with your target goals to ensure you’re on track for success.

Product marketing strategies and tactics for B2B SaaS product marketing

Product marketers have multiple potential strategies in their toolkits. However, not all of these will apply to every product or service or every stage of the product lifecycle. So, make sure to select the best approach for your goals and strategy.

Use growth loops to reach potential customers

One surefire way to ensure sustainable growth is through growth loops. Growth loops embed marketing activities into product development so that user outputs continue to feed into product marketing as new inputs.

Much like individual consumers, businesses trust other businesses. Thus, growth loops take advantage of user-generated content, referral programs, and branding embeds to build trust in their product by demonstrating social proof.

Use search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing strategies

In today’s digital marketplace, your company’s website and social media channels are critical marketing assets. Your website should provide visibility, helping potential clients find you and learn what you do.

Your website and landing pages should provide potential buyers with all they need to know to make a favorable purchasing decision. Pair carefully targeted offers and CTAs (call-to-action) with robust educational content to demonstrate your expertise and drive buyers further up the sales funnel.

To ensure your website content reaches your target market, invest in technical SEO, off-page SEO, and content marketing strategies that help search engines properly rank your website and increase your visibility.

Personalize the user journey for different customer segments

Every SaaS product has multiple potential use cases and, as a result, multiple customer segments. Personalization ensures you cater to the needs of these different market segments and ensure customer success.

Use welcome surveys to learn more about your users. What kind of company do they work in? What are their roles in their company? And, what are their goals with your product?

Segment your customers to capture the different kinds of users of your product. Then, use the information to personalize their onboarding experience to direct them to the features necessary for their role and goals.

Implement a sales enablement program

A sales enablement program is anything you do to help your sales team close more deals faster. It is an iterative process of providing your sales teams with the training and resources they need to effectively sell your product.

Sales enablement is a collaborative process between the product marketing and sales teams. Product marketers are to provide the content, knowledge, and information to help align the sales team with the product roadmap.

Connect your enablement program and customer data with a CRM for clearer reporting and impact assessment. This makes it easier to review your sales process and identify areas for improvement.

Survey your customer base to collect actionable feedback

Customer feedback collection is a great way to ensure customers are happy and satisfied with your product. In-app surveys help you measure customer satisfaction and identify both happy and unhappy customers.

To get the most survey respondents, keep your surveys short and to the point. Use a mix of open-ended and multiple-choice questions to collect actionable data that you can use to improve your product. You can also vary your survey template to match your purpose.

For instance, if you’ve just added a new feature, you can create a survey that appears immediately after a user uses the feature. This would differ from other surveys like the NPS, CES, or CSAT surveys that measure customer satisfaction or customer success.

Analyze user interactions and improve customer experience

Regularly observe and analyze user interactions to ensure they’re getting the most out of your product. Which features do they use the most? How well do different user segments complete predefined goals? Where do users get stuck?

Analyzing user interactions helps you identify friction points within your application, giving you a chance to address them and improve the customer experience.

You can set up and track in-app goals with Userpilot. Then, you can compare results across user segments and take action on the insights you find to better the user experience.

Empower your customer with self-service portals

Time is a scarce commodity for most businesses. Empower product users to troubleshoot and solve their problems independently, instead of contacting your customer support or sales department and waiting long hours for a response.

Create a knowledge base for your users, a self-serve information repository about your company’s products and services. A self-serve portal guides users to the resources they need to solve their problems.

Knowledge base content may include everything from written content to video tutorials, user guides, product use cases, infographics, etc.

Create interactive product demos to enhance product education

An interactive product demo is an engaging way to familiarize users with your product, its key functionalities, and how it solves their problems.

As part of your product marketing toolkit, interactive demos aim to drive up product sign-ups, boost customer success, and improve the customer experience. You can also embed them in your Resource Center so they serve as reference points for users who are stuck.

Host educational webinars to drive customer success

What challenges are your customers facing? What solutions are out there for them? How does your product improve the situation?

Host a detailed webinar with industry experts discussing user pain points and how your SaaS helps their cause.

Webinars shorten the distance between users and the company and can help you engage them in real-time conversations. This effectively drives retention among basic, power, and advanced users, while nudging those who are slipping away closer to activation.

Ask your loyal customers to leave positive reviews

Customer advocates are a cheap but effective product marketing tool. Adopt the word-of-mouth marketing strategy to encourage users to share their experiences.

Use a modal to ask users to leave reviews on third-party websites. You can identify loyal customers using NPS surveys and trigger the modals to appear for these ones.

Localize your in-app messaging

Adapt the product to the culture and location of your target users to ensure they get the most out of it. You may choose to localize your entire product or only your in-app messaging.

Thankfully, multiple tools exist to make translation and localization a hassle-free process. For example, the message in the tooltip below was auto-translated into German using Userpilot’s localization features.

How to measure the success of your B2B product marketing strategy?

Whatever strategy you employ, it’s important that you’re able to objectively measure its impact. Product marketing OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) help you do just that.

OKRs capture the overall objectives and business goals of your product marketing activities as well as the key results you expect from your activities.

Set clear marketing OKRs to establish solid product marketing foundations, bring clarity on how you’ll achieve company goals, motivate your marketing team, and provide a measure of control to your process.

Be sure to regularly measure marketing performance with your stated key results. Should results fall short, be prepared to adjust or completely change strategies to improve them.

Improve your B2B SaaS product marketing strategy with Userpilot

Userpilot provides product marketers with the tools for implementing all of the strategies above. It has an impressive list of features to aid product marketing strategy implementation, including:

• Customer segmentation: Userpilot offers advanced segmentation attributes for segmenting users on multiple criteria, including use case, lifecycle stages, in-app behavior, user activity, NPS responses, location or technographic data, etc.

• Create goals and track OKRs: You can create matching goals and OKRs in Userpilot to automatically measure progress. Track OKR trends to identify what’s working (or not working) and adjust your product marketing accordingly.

• Create in-app surveys: With Userpilot, you can create and customize in-app surveys. Choose where and when it makes sense to launch the survey and experiment with positioning to find what works for you.

Conclusion

Product marketing plays a critical role in the success of your product. To remain competitive, your company must constantly assess and improve upon your marketing strategy. Your chosen B2B marketing strategy should also account for the different stages of the sales cycle.

Userpilot provides product marketing teams with plenty of data to track performance and improve the customer experience. Book a demo today to learn more!