Developing a high-quality product is only one aspect of many in the process of managing an ecommerce business. Once your product is ready for market, you’re quickly faced with figuring out how to actually sell that product.
That’s where business marketing comes in. Marketing is about more than promoting products; it’s about building relationships. With an effective business marketing strategy, you’ll find opportunities to cultivate an ongoing emotional connection between your brand and your target audience.
This guide covers the basics and best practices of business marketing. Discover what marketing in business is all about, learn tips from marketing strategy experts, and get inspired by examples from fellow ecommerce businesses in the trenches.
What is business marketing?
Business marketing is the series of tactics a company uses to build awareness of its brand and grow its audience.
Five elements of business marketing are:
- Researching and understanding your target audience
- Educating your target audience about your brand and what you sell
- Offering value that gets them interested in your products or services
- Using a variety of tactics that influence them to make a purchase
- Nurturing ongoing relationships to strengthen your customer base
Paid vs. organic business marketing
The more you learn about marketing, the more you’ll hear the terms “paid” and “organic” thrown around. These terms refer to the types of channels or tactics your business uses to market to your audience.
Paid marketing is essentially another term for paid advertising. With paid marketing channels, you have to pay an advertising platform for access to a specific audience. For example, Facebook Ads is an example of a paid marketing channel that helps you target your ideal customers.
Organic marketing lets you communicate with your audience without paying for access to reach that audience. In an organic marketing strategy, potential customers discover your brand not through targeted ads, but through channels like search engines and social media algorithms. Blogging and search engine optimization (SEO) are both examples of organic marketing channels.
Marketing, sales, and the buyer’s journey
Business marketing and sales teams both have the ultimate goal of persuading people to purchase a company’s product or service. However, in order to reach that goal, their paths must diverge.
To understand this divergence, it’s important to first have a grasp on what’s called the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey refers to the three-stage process that people go through from a customer perspective.
Here are the three stages of the buyer’s journey, alongside how business marketing and sales teams typically engage with each stage:
1. Awareness: At this stage, the customer has a problem (often referred to as a “pain point” in marketing), but they’re not sure yet how to define the problem or its solution.
From a business perspective, the awareness stage is home base for marketing teams. That’s because marketers take a long-term approach to the selling process. They work to create awareness, trust, and ongoing relationships with potential customers.
2. Consideration: At this stage, the customer has figured out what their problem entails, and they’re searching for potential solutions and learning more about each one.
From a business perspective, the consideration stage is where the responsibility to nurture customer relationships starts to get handed off from the business marketing team to the sales team. As marketers attract potential customers (also known as leads), they make the sales team aware of those leads, while also continuing to market to those potential leads through content geared toward the consideration stage.
3. Decision: At this stage, the customer has narrowed down solutions for their problem and is now looking to purchase a specific product or service to resolve that problem.
From a business perspective, the decision stage tends to be the focus of sales teams because it’s ultimately their job to convert leads into customers. In other words: They make the sale.
How does business marketing work?
The business marketing process typically works like this:
- Set goals and develop a marketing strategy to boost brand awareness, attract leads, and drive sales.
- Execute on that business marketing strategy and track your progress. This marketing strategy should include tactics like launching marketing campaigns and testing new marketing channels.
- Analyze the results of your marketing efforts and draw insights from patterns in customer behavior and sales numbers so you can adjust your efforts based on the data.
Make sure you have resources like an ad budget, content production costs, and website hosting and platform fees. Most businesses also know that the most valuable resources they need are time and talent. You can consult with agencies or freelancers or even hire a full-time staff to develop, execute, and analyze your marketing efforts.
The 4 Ps of Marketing
During this business marketing process, every marketer should keep in mind the fundamentals of marketing, otherwise known as the Four Ps of Marketing:
- Product. What is the product you’re selling? What’s its target market, and why do they need this product? Who are your competitors?
- Price. What is the amount that customers would be willing to pay to get your product? What other factors should you consider when setting your prices? What about discounts?
- Place. Where do you want people to find your product? Online or at a brick-and-mortar? What technology and logistics do you need to consider?
- Promotion. How do you communicate your product’s value to your target audience? What are your business marketing and sales strategies?
Popular types of business marketing
Before creating your business marketing strategy, you should understand the types of marketing you can potentially use for your business.
As you consider the following options, keep in mind:
- Not every type of marketing is right for your industry or specific business. Don’t let yourself be distracted or intimidated by all the different ways to market a business—hone in on what will work best for you.
- Different types of marketing help you reach different goals. For example, content marketing and experiential marketing are better for long-term branding, not necessarily for making quick sales.
Business-to-consumer marketing (B2C)
B2C marketing is when a company markets and sells directly to consumers. If you’re a retail business that markets its products and offers them for sale through an online or physical store, you’re a B2C business.
Business-to-business marketing (B2B)
B2B marketing is a type of marketing specifically for companies that provide a product or service for other companies. For example, B2B business CiboWares uses Shopify to sell disposable takeout containers and commercial kitchen storage to restaurants. Because B2B companies serve a niche audience, targeting a relevant audience with the right messaging is more important than reaching the most people. For example, it wouldn’t make sense for CiboWares to market bulk orders of disposable containers to individual people since they don’t have a need for it the way restaurants do.
Some companies practice both B2C and B2B marketing. For example, Coca-Cola promotes its beverages to consumers, as well as to stores and restaurants—who then mark up the drinks’ prices and sell them to consumers. Companies pursuing both B2C and B2B marketing need multiple business marketing strategies for each marketing category.
Field marketing
Field marketing takes your message directly to the market by engaging in person with customers. If you’ve gone door to door in your area with marketing flyers, you’ve participated in field marketing. Another example is booking a booth at a community event or trade show, or handing out coupons or samples in high-traffic areas.
Experiential marketing
Like field marketing, experiential marketing takes place in person, where customers are. Experiential marketing is a strategic approach that creates immersive, memorable experiences for people. Examples include interactive product demonstrations or pop-up experiences with art and music to engage the senses.
This type of marketing aims to create a memorable emotional connection that people will associate with your brand in the long term, rather than focusing on an immediate transaction.
Service marketing
When you sell intangible goods instead of products, you need to take a different approach to marketing than those who sell tangible products. Marketing a service business emphasizes the entire customer experience and the person-to-person aspects of your business. An effective service marketing strategy prioritizes personalizing your brand, offering quality services, nurturing ongoing customer relationships, and using tactics like customer testimonials and reviews to appeal to new customers.
Account-based marketing
In account-based marketing (ABM), sales and marketing collaborate to focus their time on the companies or individuals with the highest potential revenue, rather than spreading their efforts equally across leads. With ABM, you can use personalized messaging and multichannel engagement to target high-value accounts, create meaningful interactions, and build relationships.
Small business marketing
With limited resources and budgets, small businesses need a different kind of marketing strategy. Small business marketing typically often prioritizes customer relationships over polished marketing campaigns, but that doesn’t mean you can’t compete in the market. Small business marketing tends to be at its best when it can leverage authenticity and local engagement to earn customer loyalty.
Content marketing
Unlike a paid advertisement, which promotes a product or service for the purpose of selling in the short-term, content marketing shares educational or entertaining content with the purpose of building a loyal and engaged audience of leads and customers over time. Content marketing can take various forms, including videos, articles, or interactive content.
While creating and distributing that content, all content marketers should keep in mind Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines. These are a set of quality assurance rules that dictate how content should be optimized. Google looks for content that demonstrates the four qualities of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust. When you check your content against E-E-A-T, your content will have a better chance of serving quality to your target audience and ranking higher in search results.
Influencer marketing
The voice of a customer is far more powerful than the voice of a company telling you to buy something. Influencer marketing is when companies partner with a recognizable person or brand that has a public platform, such as an online creator, celebrity, or organization. The influencer works with the company to create content about the company’s product or service, then the influencer leverages their influence by promoting that content to their own loyal followers. It’s best practice for companies to compensate influencers for content partnerships with a flat fee or revenue-sharing model.
Affiliate marketing
Like influencer marketing, affiliate marketing involves a company partnering with a third party to promote their brand. This can be with an individual, like a blogger, or another business like a media company. Affiliates earn commission alone for every sale made through the promotion, so the cost reflects the impact. An example would be a review site that posts an article like “Top 10 Father’s Day Gifts” and earns a commission based on sales through the review page.
Again, each of these types of marketing have their own benefits and disadvantages, and it’s best to use a mix. Now let’s dive into how to be effective with your business marketing strategy.
4 steps to creating an effective business marketing strategy
Before developing a business marketing strategy, you should first set up the following:
- Business website: You’ll need to launch a business website so you can direct interested customers there via your marketing channels.
- Sales strategy: Establishing at least one sales channel will help your sales and marketing efforts work together more seamlessly.
Once you’re set with these must-haves, get started with your first step.
1. Get to know your target audience
The core goal of business marketing is to build a bridge to potential buyers. In order to send the right message at the right time to the right audience, you need a crystal-clear vision of who your target audience is and what problem you’re solving for them.
Learn everything you can about your audience: Explore their pain points, motivations, and goals when making specific purchases. (Remember the buyer’s journey from earlier?) From there, you can build a profile of your ideal customer—also known as a buyer persona.
A buyer persona is a profile you assemble of the type of person (or company, if B2B) who’s most likely to buy from you.
Common buyer persona data points include:
- Demographics, including age, gender, and location
- How customers make purchasing decisions (e.g., whether they like to purchase in person or online)
- Their top challenge or concern, their pain point
- What and who influences them in making decisions
- How much research they do before buying
You can gather this buyer persona data through:
You need this information to make marketing decisions, like where to invest your budget and which messaging will resonate best with your target audience. If you choose the wrong messaging or advertise to the wrong audience, you risk wasting an expensive campaign with no results. Research carefully, then speak directly to your ideal customer and their pain points.
As you do your research on these data points, you might find that you have more than one ideal customer. In that case, it will be helpful to put together buyer personas for each of your target types of customer. Typically, businesses create only around one to three buyer personas to target. Depending on the diversity of your industry or product lines, it may be wise to create more profiles as needed.
Once assembled, these buyer persona profiles become a useful resource for everyone in your business to reference and internalize as the core features of your target audience.
2. Choose the right marketing channels for your business
You don’t need to master all of the possible marketing channels out there—that’s a quick road to burnout. Instead, start small.
Social media strategist Jasmine Partida recommends that businesses start with just three channels, then re-evaluate and scale up.
When deciding on your marketing channels, consider:
- Visibility. Look for a platform like TikTok, Pinterest, or YouTube where you have the potential for a high number of views quickly.
- Community. Look for a channel that’s more community-based to interact with potential customers, like Facebook, Discord, or LinkedIn.
- Ownership. Look for a channel where you have a high degree of ownership over the platform, like email marketing or a rewards program.
“Your audience is on all of these platforms. Pick one to start with where you are the most comfortable,” advises Jasmine. “Usually, that will be Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. You’ve likely already started a small community there.”
You also want to consider which channels will give you the highest returns for your time and financial investment. “For ecommerce stores, these are typically social channels with influencer marketing, paid ads, YouTube video sponsorships, and consistent organic content marketing," shares Deb.
Now, let’s take a look at some marketing channels you should consider adding to your marketing mix.
Email marketing
Research shows that building relationships with customers and potential customers via email marketing is profitable. According to HubSpot, 50% of people buy from marketing emails at least once a month.
A successful email campaign includes:
- A quality subject line that attracts email recipients
- Emails that offer promotions, information, exclusive previews, or other value propositions
- Calls to action (CTAs), which invite your reader to do something like purchase an item or read content on your site
Test out different subject lines, CTAs, or types of emails over time to learn which versions of your split-tests yield better results for your marketing goals. The great thing about email marketing is you largely own the asset. You can’t be “throttled” or forced to increase your ad spend like you might be on social media platforms.
Social media marketing
No matter who your target customer is, chances are they’re on social media. One study shows that 4.95 billion people currently use social media worldwide, more than double its user base from 2015. That amounts to about 93.5% of internet users globally.
Small businesses may want to focus their efforts on a limited number of social media platforms, so they have more bandwidth to focus on quality over quantity in their content creation and customer engagements.
Some tactics to make social media marketing work for you include:
- Post consistently and consider using a social media scheduler that allows you to post at strategic times to capture the most eyeballs.
- Monitor activity carefully and engage with other users on social media platforms.
- Use influencer marketing to promote your product to your target audience.
A common mistake businesses often make is treating their social media pages like a sales page. “We don’t want to be sold to. We want authenticity and connection,” explains Jasmine. “Instead of a sales approach, use social media to connect and build awareness and trust about your product.”
Video and audio content
Content marketing takes many forms, including written, audio, and video content. Video and audio marketing like podcasts provide an immersive, engaging way to connect with people.
- Videos: From TikTok to YouTube, video marketing has experienced a meteoric rise. According to YouTube internal data, there has been an 800% increase in global watch time of ad-supported and purchased video. If you want to double down on video marketing, influencer marketing can be powerful as well.
- Podcasts: Data shows 41% of the US population listens to a podcast in an average month. Companies can augment their online written content with video or podcasts (or both) to deliver information in ways that consumers want to receive it.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Investing in search engine optimization, or SEO, gives you a better chance of landing your web pages at the top of the search engine results pages (SERP). Why? Fifty-nine percent of shoppers say they use Google to research products before a purchase.
The elements of optimizing your website include:
- Blog content:Produce a blog that’s attached to your business website. Blog posts can include written text, insights, and multimedia like images and videos to engage readers.
- Keyword optimization: Brainstorm which keywords your customers are most likely to use when they search online for products or services like yours. Make sure those keywords appear throughout your website and blog.
- Google Shopping: Online stores can create a Google Merchant profile to publish their product catalog to Google Shopping. This ensures their product details and images populate in the “Shopping” section of Google search, which can help customers find those products more easily.
You’ll know if the strategies you employ are working by using analytics tools to track clicks, leads, conversions, and sales for the optimized content you publish.
SMS marketing
When it comes to marketing via search engines and social media, it’s hard to stand out in the crowd; the competition is stiff and your visibility depends on algorithms. That’s why SMS marketing is so appealing: Your text message prompts a notification on some very valuable real estate—the recipient’s phone screen.
Research from Klaviyo found that 73% of consumers have made a purchase based on a text message they received from a business. But be cautious how often you send SMS marketing messages. Too many can be perceived as annoying or intrusive, but the right amount can help you stay on your customers’ radar. SMS marketing is particularly effective when used to offer subscribers a limited time deal or to announce a new product line.
With all of those options, how do you determine the best marketing channels for you?
"The biggest challenge that small to medium-sized ecommerce businesses struggle with is where to start,” notes Deb Mecca, fractional CMO and Shopify consultant at Causeway305. “It’s daunting to decide where to invest your time and money.”
It’s best to start simple by setting goals and building an audience on just a few marketing channels before scaling up. That gives you the chance to experiment and learn from trial and error without investing more time, money, or energy into your efforts than necessary.
3. Execute your marketing plan with quality content
Once you understand your target demographic and have mapped out your overall marketing strategy, it’s time to start executing your plan. Before publishing content, test your sales channels to make sure everything is optimized for conversion.
“Make sure that your online store is fully set up with your abandoned cart sequences, with your branding, and with tracking, because otherwise, there’s no point in sending traffic to your website,” advises Jasmine. “The traffic won’t matter if you can’t get it to convert—you will lose hundreds or thousands of dollars in sales.”
Beginning with your three starter channels, publish consistently, test early, and measure often. It’s wise to publish organic content and refine your content before investing in paid channels.
“Start with organic because anything that does well on organic will also do well on ads,” shares Jasmine. “Even if you get the views and get in front of people with ads, if the content itself doesn’t connect, it won’t matter how many people saw it. They still won’t buy. So, it’s better to start with organic tests and figure out what’s working.”
Send customers through your marketing funnel
To send your customers on a journey that ends with a purchase, refer to a marketing funnel when creating your content. (Remember the buyer’s journey from earlier? The marketing funnel is entwined with it.)
At the top of the marketing funnel, you distribute informational content that builds awareness of your brand or product, without the intent of landing an immediate sale. From there, you guide potential customers through middle and bottom points of the funnel with increasingly targeted marketing messaging that highlights the value of your product at each stage, and ultimately aims for making a sale. To shepherd customers along this journey, companies use a variety of marketing channels and content types.
The common types of content for each part of the marketing funnel include:
Awareness (top of the funnel)
- Blog posts
- Videos
- Newsletters
Consideration (middle of the funnel)
- Case studies
- Demo videos
- How-to articles
- Downloadable worksheets
Conversion and purchase (bottom of the funnel)
- Buyers’ guides
- Product videos
- Research reports
4. Evaluate your strategy and results
Once you’ve launched your business marketing strategy, continuously monitor and evaluate the results so you can adjust your tactics based on what’s working and what’s not. Use analytics to monitor common marketing in business key performance indicators (KPIs).
Typical KPIs include:
- Visibility metrics telling you how many impressions your content received and how many people viewed it
- Engagement metrics telling you how often people clicked, reacted to, or commented on your content
- Conversion metrics telling you how often someone visited your website, made a purchase, or completed another desired action
"There are two prongs here: you should optimize around channels performing well, adding more resources to scale them up at a lower cost,” advises Mecca. “Then, you also want to test new opportunities to expand your reach into other channels."
"Even if you tried something one time and it didn’t go according to plan, that doesn’t mean it won’t work. It could be the wrong approach, the wrong time, the wrong budget, or the wrong creative strategy. If you know a specific channel works industry-wide for your competitors, reevaluate and try again at a different time."
Although many marketing tactics can drive leads and sales quickly, business marketing is a long-term game. Market content consistently, monitor your performance, and adjust your strategy to improve results over time. As you keep practicing and experimenting, you’ll boost valuable brand awareness, build a loyal audience, and learn the best ways to grow your business, sale by sale.
Examples of business marketing
It can be motivating to see different marketing strategies in action. Take inspiration from the marketing approaches of successful ecommerce store owners who have been in your shoes.
B2B marketing example: Hero Packaging
Founders Anaita Sakar and Vik Davé noticed a problem in their ecommerce business: their orders were creating far too much plastic waste. This launched the idea for their next business—a compostable packaging solution for other businesses.
Bringing Hero Packaging to market required creative thinking. They built an email list prelaunch by mailing free samples to any business that wanted to try their packaging. In a week, they added 1,000 leads to their list.
Anaita and Vik also launched a targeted pay-per-click campaign for “sustainable packaging” searches and invested in content marketing. Today, their marketing strategy focuses on Facebook, Instagram, blog posts, and email marketing.
“It is critical that we are just pumping content—whether it’s educational or just product base—to every platform at any given point in time,” says Anaita.
B2C marketing example: Transformer Table
Transformer Table is a furniture brand that sells multifunctional, convertible furniture online. When Transformer Table hit the social media jackpot with an organic viral video in 2016, it knew it needed to follow up to capitalize on its gains.
Photos and videos are how the brand communicates the ways its unique furniture works to its audience. It has worked with social media influencers to share videos of its products in their home spaces. One Instagram video by Rachel Abdel Reda garnered 4.9 million likes, opening the doors to expand their business in the Middle East.
Instead of relying on retail partners to market its products, Transformer Table adapted its social media success for retail stores.
“We took the influencer program and we pushed it to Costco, meaning that we found Costco-specific influencers to work with,” says founder Artem Kuzmichev. The tactic drove new interest and membership at Costco, strengthening their relationship with the retailer.
Today, Transformer Table’s marketing mix includes email marketing, Facebook, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, where it has its largest following. Not everything it has tried has succeeded, but it has adapted and optimized along the way.
“It goes back to trial and error. Don’t be afraid to take those risks, even those crazy risks, because sometimes those crazy ideas work,” says Artem.
You can learn more about marketing wins and lessons from the Transformer Table team on the Shopify Masters podcast.
B2C marketing example: Intelligent Change
Serial entrepreneur Mimi Ikonn has founded multiple successful businesses, like Luxy Hair. Her latest Shopify business, Intelligent Change, sells mindfulness and productivity journals.
Rather than creating marketing content around the journals themselves, Intelligent Change has built a community around mindfulness practices and self-care. Its YouTube channel and blog (branded as a magazine) feature topics ranging from pleasure to spirituality. In addition to its YouTube and blog, Intelligent Weekly also leverages a weekly newsletter and multiple social media channels to reach potential customers on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.
Mimi’s content marketing strategy works because the brand emphasizes education and entertainment first before selling a product. As the audience gets reeled in by engaging branded content, it increases the chances of them sticking around to consume more content, which over time influences them to buy the product.
“It’s about being engaging and authentic, but also enjoying what you’re doing, because that resonates with the audience,” says Mimi. “People can feel it, they can read it through the camera.”
By creating authentic and actionable content around topics their audience cares about, Intelligent Change has created a loyal audience—and you can too.
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Business marketing FAQ
What is business marketing?
The purpose of marketing in business is to attract, retain, and sell to customers by promoting products or services, building relationships with target audiences, and differentiating from competitors to drive profitable customer action.
What is business-to-business marketing?
Business-to-business (B2B) marketing refers to the marketing of products or services by one business to another. This differs from business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, which is a relationship between a business and individual consumers.
What are the steps to building a business marketing strategy?
- Get to know your audience.
- Choose your marketing channels.
- Execute your strategy with quality content.
- Evaluate the results of your marketing efforts, and adjust as needed.
What are the best tools for business marketing?
Every company needs a marketing toolbox to help them execute their marketing strategy, and marketers often use a combination of tools for different needs.
The most critical tools for a business marketing strategy include:
- Publishing tools such as a social media management platform or a content management system for a website
- Email marketing and SMS platforms that allow brands to manage subscriber lists and distribute email and SMS content
- Analytics tools ranging from Google Analytics to sophisticated multichannel analytics suites
- Digital advertising platforms that allow businesses to launch and manage paid ad campaigns
