What is B2B business? B2B is a familiar industry term used in business and is growing strongly with e-commerce. Today let’s discover the definition of B2B and what marketing trends of B2B business models in 2024.
What is B2B?
B2B stands for Business To Business, which is a commercial business model in which transactions occur directly between business-to-business. Different from individual customers, businesses using the B2B model always have a unique buying process that saves time and money. Moreover, the order is requested in huge quantities and differentiating prices. This often explains why when purchasing, businesses often focus on logical factors while consumers are often influenced by emotional factors.
When marketing to big customers, marketers need to focus on product logic by focusing more on functional features. Emotional factors in decision-making often do not play an important role. You also need to understand the persona of customers. Who are they? Which department are they in? What role do they play in the purchasing process of the business?
Due to the need to find out information about a large and rigorous group of corporate customers, your marketing materials need to be in-depth, analyze strengths, and bring good benefits. The most effective marketing messages will focus on analyzing how much the product or service you offer can save customers time, money, and resources.
3 common B2B business models
Understanding what the essence of B2B is, based on how it operates, businesses in the B2B group can be divided into 4 popular business models as follows:
- Customer-Centric Model
This is the model that is most easily encountered in small and developing markets because of its popularity, as well as the convenience it brings to business owners. This is a B2B sales model where this will be a distribution center for third-party businesses in terms of goods, services, and products. The form for distribution is by an e-commerce site or a website that can be convenient for partners to conduct transactions on it. This B2B sales model provides a large number of products to other businesses. - Buyer Centric Model
This type of sales will be less common than B2B sales, which are mainly seller-oriented. This buy-side model is one in which the buyer-owned side is still quite active, and often the need to sell their products to partners will be more common with businesses. Therefore, this is the reason why the B2B product model is mainly biased toward the "disgraced" buyer. Business units will play the main role in importing products and goods from the manufacturer. Then other sellers will access the website to quote and distribute products.
- Intermediary Centric Model
This is also a relatively common type of B2B business in the market, which will act as an intermediary between buyers and sellers. To make it easy to imagine, e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, Woocommerce, and Bigcommerce... are e-commerce sites operating under this B2B model. Accordingly, the common form of operation will be that any business wishing to sell will send products and services to this intermediary channel for promotion and distribution. Organizations and individuals wishing to purchase.
This is pretty much the same as where the intermediary-biased B2B model is working. However, the biggest difference that this type of business brings is the centralized nature and ownership of many other businesses. Understanding what B2B is will be very easy and this type includes the following electronic platform:
- E-market
- E-marketplaces
- Internet exchange
- Trading exchange
- Trading communities
In 2024, what are the B2B Marketing trends?
Marketing automation
Marketing Automation - Marketing automation refers to a type of software that helps large, medium, and small businesses optimize their marketing efforts. This is achieved by combining several separate tools in one “big roof”. These tools include a website builder, bulk mailer, and CRM. It has always been embedded with a complex software platform for analysis, tagging, grouping, and statistics.
Marketing automation is more about nurturing leads than directly selling products. It helps you streamline the content in your Inbound Marketing strategy and increase interaction with your audience by providing useful information at exactly the right time.
Automation in marketing with apps can be a good choice for touching customers
Content Marketing
Content still is King. In recent years, Content Marketing has become a popular method to nurture and collect leads in a B2B marketing strategy. The more complex the customer journey, the more businesses need to invest in researching each stage of the customer lifecycle.
Throughout this process, Content Marketing will help B2B Marketers educate customers on industry best practices. According to Content Marketing Institute 2017, although more than 90% of B2B marketers use Content Marketing as a key element of their Online Marketing strategy, only 37% of them have a complete Content Marketing strategy.
After customers have demand and go to your website, you also need some funnel to collect all your leads. That is how large companies do with the CPQ (configure - price - quote) system.
Personalized content for B2B
While content personalization is gradually being optimized on B2C Marketing websites, B2B is still "stagnant". This is quite surprising because email marketing is a fairly common way to personalize content in marketing in general. However, a study by Seismic and Demand Metric that analyzed the B2B marketing system model showed that B2B marketing has not been effective in content personalization due to a lack of resources, technology, and data. And businesses that meet these requirements have a content personalization strategy that works remarkably well.
Therefore, Content Marketing continues to grow in 2024, and for your content to "breakthrough" this year, you need to dig deep and provide fresh and updated information for your website.
Marketing via LinkedIn
Marketing via social networks is often considered the main channel for the B2C marketing model, but today more and more marketers have turned their focus to social networks to orient and interact with potential business customers.
After being acquired by Microsoft in 2016, LinkedIn has integrated a host of features to make it an efficient and cost-effective platform to reach B2B customers. For example, a recent feature, InMail Analytics, helps you get more feedback and improve your team's efficiency. B2B Marketers are being influenced more by data obtained on LinkedIn, and this trend is predicted to continue to get stronger in 2024.
Delve deeper into emerging technology and industry trends to say competitive in 2024
Know your business scope
Summarily, we hope you probably have the answer to the question of what is the B2B model and have updated the B2B marketing trends in 2024. Hope you will be satisfied with the answer to the question of what is B2B and hope that the above sharing will help you in your business as well as in marketing e-business products for your business.
