In the marketing world, many businesses are focused on ensuring their message is put in front of the right target audience, and for good reason! But if you focus only on this group you could be missing out on positioning yourself as a trusted source for other businesses. Tangible growth and return on investment (ROI) pressures are nothing new when it comes to B2B marketing, but, innovation is a word that is becoming more common and is without a doubt applicable in the B2B marketing sphere.

So, how do you market your businesses to other businesses and at what point do growth, ROI and innovation all reach an apex and what concepts can you apply for B2B success? While there is certainly variation in small business marketing strategy there are four specific areas of focus that can become the foundation for growth and leave plenty of opportunity for innovation. Spoiler alert, social media is one of them.

Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is critical to your business. As consumers move to mobile search, and new developments make mobile sites faster, mobile marketing has become less of a trending topic and more of a necessity

However, like so many things in the marketing world, mobile marketing is now facing changes that could impact B2B marketing. For example, Google rolled out an algorithmic change that essentially impacted the performance of pages that serve intrusive mobile pop-ups.

How do algorithmic shifts like this apply to B2B marketing? While at one time companies could assume their customers were doing research from a desktop device, mobile accounts for over half of web traffic.. There is a new breed of business owner that lives and breaths on their mobile devices.

So, being relevant on mobile and being aware of changes to mobile platforms is important for marketing businesses to other businesses.

Content Marketing

Content marketing has been growing in popularity in recent years, and there is a great deal of conversation around that content turning long-form articles into shorter articles with visual appeal.

However, in the B2B world, research supports that longer content is more effective in B2B blog posts. For this format to be effective, it requires the content to be relevant and educational. Remember, content marketing is defined as the process of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to stimulate interest in a brand’s products or services.

Longer-format content marketing is successful when targeting other businesses because it shows true value. For those businesses engaged in content marketing, they’re looking to share related content with their audiences that shows value and establishes them as industry leaders. Content marketing is one of the best marketing ideas for small businesses. This strategy allows you to position your business as an industry leader by generating content that is sharable, both by your customers and leads and also by other businesses for their customers and leads.

Visual Content Marketing

As the drive to create engaging, shareable and captivating content continues, constantly ask yourself how you can create visual content. Remember, businesses love to share visual content with their customers to generate engagement. If you want to know how to market your business to other businesses, generating visual content may be the golden ticket; it is highly shareable and it generates high engagement.

Video is also a tremendously important marketing strategy. However, this doesn’t mean you need full studio quality production when creating high quality video. Video that is raw and real feels more genuine and less like a commercial or salesy, which users prefer.

Maybe you’re an expert in your field or maybe you’re opening a new location. Sharing this information with your target audience in the form of a video is valuable to your business. Think about the possibilities of combining it with social media promotion and you could expect to see tremendous reach!

Social Media

While social media is a part of content marketing, it is big enough to be talked about in its own right. Just remember that how you market your business to other businesses using social media will be determined by where the audience engages and shares content.

B2B businesses seem to find LinkedIn and Twitter the most effective social networks. From the standpoint of your business audience this makes sense; many businesses are sharing content on Twitter, and posting relevant industry trends on LinkedIn to generate interest.

Just because LinkedIn and Twitter are the favorites doesn’t doesn’t mean you should skip out on Facebook or Instagram if in your industry these are the preferred platforms. Remember to always focus your marketing efforts on your audience, not your business.

A best practice to always keep in mind with social media is to focus on quality, not quantity. As with the content you are producing, businesses are looking for industry leaders that share helpful information. Be sure that the information you choose to share online is high-quality, relevant, helpful, and informative, even if it isn’t coming directly from you. Begin by honing in on whichever single platform you think is important for your business and focusing all your efforts there. Don’t make a profile on every platform just to be there.

How do You Market Your Business to Other Businesses: Next Steps

The list of possibilities for marketing your business to other businesses only grows to include native advertising,influence marketing, PPC, and more. However, if you focus on the four strategies above you will set your business up with a marketing strategy that is not only a great foundation but also a huge opportunity for reaching your audience, growing your business, and gauging ROI. Embracing these modern marketing techniques also puts you at the forefront of innovative and modern marketing techniques.

What other techniques for marketing to businesses do you have? Share them below in the comments so we can begin this conversation.