topic How to market a B2B service company that only works with huge businesses in Tips, Tricks & Best Practices

How to market a B2B service company that only works with huge businesses

migreen06 — Wed, 29 Dec 2021 18:17:27 GMT

I started marketing for a B2B service only company. The company has been very successful with out ANY marketing for 15 years because they worked with the same few really big companies that continued to need services over the years. They decided they wanted to incorporate some new clients and hired me to figure out how to do that. The services provided are for very large, expensive projects that usually take a year or even a few years to complete and for VERY large companies, mostly related to internet, network, telecom, and data type services. I don't know how to make a buyer's journey or how to generate leads for a company like this. If anyone has any ideas or knows some best practices on how to start doing this, I would greatly appreciate it!

Re: How to market a B2B service company that only works with huge businesses

karstenkoehler — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 06:11:46 GMT

Hi @migreen06,

This is a tough one for sure. In general, I'd recommend looking into account-based marketing strategies and tactics. HubSpot has published an entry-level blog post on this: "Account-based marketing (ABM) is a focused growth strategy in which Marketing and Sales collaborate to create personalized buying experiences for a mutually-identified set of high-value accounts."

On the flipside, my advice would be not to open the funnel up too wide at the top. This is a common mistake I see. If your company has a more or less defined list of potential customers, it doesn't make sense to spread your marketing efforts thinly. In other companies you might have an understanding of your persona and there are potentially thousands of people who match the criteria. In your company, you can probably make a list of the people you want to talk to, so why run broad awareness ads, attempting to qualify unqualified contacts.

The same goes for marketing channels that are otherwise considered must: Figure out which channels your target account list is using (likely LinkedIn) and make sure you're leaving a good impression by posting on a regular basis. Keep a very close eye on conversion rates from social. My experience is that with high-tier companies like your customers, decision makers do not engage with LinkedIn content consistently. Pace your efforts accordingly and don't try to scale up LinkedIn for vanity metrics if you're not seeing the expected results. (If however LinkedIn proves as consistent touchpoint and entry-point, figure out the cost-per-lead and start throwing money at it.)

As a general tip, I'd focus on producing success stories or – if it's not possible to get approval from the client to be named – anonymized case studies. I assume that you're company's services are considered hard-to-explain and complex. Breaking them down into easily understandable case studies (this is what we started with, this is what we did, this was the outcome) will make it easier for your prospects to engage with you. Also sales will love these and and be more open to marketing activities as these pieces of content have a clear purpose.

Best regards!

Re: How to market a B2B service company that only works with huge businesses

DavidDennison — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 17:01:50 GMT

Solid advice Karsten! Love it!

Re: How to market a B2B service company that only works with huge businesses

DavidDennison — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 17:18:12 GMT

If you're going to try traditional marketing here, really the only kind of marketing you should be starting with is brand awareness, especially since they haven't done marketing before. They'll need to get their name out there and establish themselves as credible and reliable. This does take time and could be expensive.

There is another option which is: https://www.zoominfo.com/

This is probably the most in-depth sales intelligence and B2B marketing tool I've ever come across. You'll be amazed at all the things it can do and the data that it will provide you with. You could even narrow down the data to literally companies who have spent $400,000 in the past year on IT - and it will give you the name of the company, contact details of the decision-maker, and what they have been searching for in recent months due to their web browsing history based off their IP address which ultimately it will tell you what part of the buying and decision-making process they are in. It's basically your own SDR person all wrapped into one platform. I will warn you however, it is NOT cheap. You will be looking at about $40K/year for this software. But it sounds like that's the kind of high-level data and marketing that you need. I would definitely look into it. Let me know if you have any questions!

Re: How to market a B2B service company that only works with huge businesses

migreen06 — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 18:29:29 GMT

Thank you so much for the indepth response!

We defintely have a lot of case studies and testimonials. I am currently working on getting those on our website.

Our clients provide our services to other businesses by sending us, acting as them. Therefore, we can't actually say we have worked with those businesses, our clients won't allow it. I guess they want people to think they did the work themselves.

We only have a few customers if the business coming from our main clients isn't counted. They have all been acquired using cold calling. I would really like to create an inbound strategy but I don't know how to make people come to us. For instance, I have the case studies, but how do I get that in front of the person who makes the decisions for a company and how do I know they will be looking for the services we have.

Using social media, particularly linkedIn, is a good suggestion but as you mentioned, the people who make those decisions are not really engaged on linkedIn. The hypothetical company has a page probably but it is managed by their marketing team not the decision maker. Even if the decision maker is engaged on linkedIn, they don't go to LinkedIn to look for a service provider.

Also, as you mentioned, the services we provide are things that are very technical and complex. A normal person wouldn't understand most of what we do and probably have never even heard of it. Therefore, companies don't know what they need or know that we offer what we need. If theu don't know what they need how can they begin to find us?