The Marketer’s Guide to B2B Customer Acquisition Strategy
Acquiring new customers is vital for sustainable business growth. For B2B businesses, the process of customer acquisition can be challenging; it often involves complex decision-making processes and extended sales cycles.
A well-crafted B2B customer acquisition strategy can help navigate these complex situations and drive success.
Below, we will offer a range of B2B acquisition strategies you can implement.
What is a B2B Customer Acquisition Strategy?
A B2B customer acquisition strategy aims to attract and convert other businesses into paying customers. It involves identifying target markets, understanding their needs, and developing effective marketing and sales tactics to reach them.
It is a long-term process that requires consistent effort and measurement. By implementing a well-crafted strategy, marketers can attract qualified leads, nurture them through the sales funnel, and convert them into loyal customers.
How to Create a B2B Customer Acquisition Strategy
To create a robust B2B customer acquisition strategy, you must first conduct thorough research to identify the specific types of businesses that would benefit from your products or services.
Follow these 8 steps to develop a customer acquisition strategy for your B2B business:
- Ideate buyer personas: Create detailed profiles of your ideal customers, including their roles, challenges, goals, and decision-making criteria.
- Analyze competition: Understand your competitors’ strategies, strengths, weaknesses, and market positioning.
- Develop your value proposition: Clearly articulate the unique benefits your product or service offers to potential customers.
- Choose marketing channels: Select the most effective marketing channels to reach your target audience.
- Create a content strategy: Develop a content strategy that provides valuable and informative content to attract and engage your target audience.
- Build a sales process: Outline the steps involved in converting leads, including prospecting, qualifying, presenting, negotiating, and closing.
- Set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Establish measurable metrics to track success. This could include lead generation, conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, and customer lifetime value.
- Allocate resources: Determine the budget and resources required to implement your strategy.
Choosing marketing channels and creating a content strategy is where things may seem confusing. But don’t worry — the next section will help you make a decision.
Top B2B Customer Acquisition Strategies in 2024
As a marketer, you have a range of strategies to choose from when working on customer acquisition. Any of the below strategies would work well but do some research to lock on methods that are popular in your industry. Consider a B2B marketing automation platform, too — it will simplify and streamline processes.
For example, email marketing for a SaaS product would work much better than social media.
You can opt for one of these 6 strategies to drive B2B customer acquisition:
- Email Marketing,
- Referral Marketing,
- Account Based Marketing,
- Social Media Marketing,
- SEO or Search Engine Optimization,
- Web Ads or PPC Ads.
Email Marketing Does Wonders for B2B Sales
Once you capture leads using B2B email lead generation methods, email marketing can be a powerful tool in guiding them toward conversion.
The direct and measurable nature of email marketing makes it a powerful tool for nurturing leads and turning them into customers. The key to effective email marketing lies in delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time.
The steps below demonstrate how to put together a great B2B email marketing strategy to acquire customers.
1. Build a High-Quality Email List
For your B2B email list, focus on gathering contacts who fit your ideal customer profile (ICP). Ensure all email recipients have opted in to receive emails. Do not buy email lists — they often result in lower email engagement and higher email bounce rates.
Use tools such as Hunter or Clearout to enrich your contact database with additional information like company size, industry, or role to improve segmentation.
2. Segment Your Email List
An email segmentation strategy is vital in ensuring content remains relevant. Group recipients by industry, vertical, or company size for more tailored messaging. Create a targeted email marketing plan purely for decision-makers like CEOs, CTOs, or heads of departments.
3. Craft the Right Content
B2B buyers are looking for ROI — make sure your email content focuses on how your product or service solves their business problems, increases efficiency, or boosts revenue. Use dynamic email content to send mass personalized emails.
Note that testimonial advertising works really well in B2B marketing; prospects trust evidence.
4. Email Design
B2B emails should follow email design best practices and use a clean and professional look.
Have a single, clear email CTA that encourages the next step, whether it’s booking a demo, downloading a guide, or visiting your website. Ensure all emails are suitable for mobile email marketing, as many decision-makers check emails on their phones.
5. Email Automation
Email marketing automation plays a key role in the B2B marketing funnel.
Use email sequences to nurture leads over time; a typical sequence might include:
- A welcome email,
- A follow-up email with educational content,
- A final push for a meeting or demo.
You can also use automation to send trigger emails based on user behavior, such as downloading content or visiting a pricing page. And don’t forget about re-engagement email campaigns; for leads that have gone cold, send special offers.
6. Focus on Email Deliverability
Your email marketing efforts will stall or fail if you don’t achieve consistent inbox placement.
To know how to nail it, read our detailed piece on email deliverability.
In short, it involves:
- Email sender reputation: You must follow best practices and maintain a great sender score.
- Email authentication: Ensure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records are set up correctly.
- Email list hygiene: Regularly remove inactive contacts to keep your list healthy.
- CAN-SPAM and GDPR: B2B emails must comply with privacy laws.
- A reputed ESP: You must use a trustworthy ESP with great email infrastructure.
7. Track Email Metrics
To know how your email marketing efforts are playing out, you must track email campaign metrics closely.
| Metric | What is it? |
|---|---|
| Open Rate | The percentage of recipients who opened your email. |
| Click-Through Rate (CTR) | The percentage of recipients who clicked on a link within your email. |
| Conversion Rate | The percentage of recipients who took a desired action such as making a purchase or scheduling a demo. |
| Bounce Rate | The percentage of emails that were undeliverable. |
| Unsubscribe Rate | The percentage of recipients who opted out of your email list. |
8. Enhance Your Email Technical Knowledge
The more you know about email technicalities, the better you can perform with email marketing.
The following resources can help you understand this marketing medium better:
Referral Marketing: Because Word-of-Mouth Works!
Referral marketing leverages the trust and satisfaction of your existing customers to attract new ones. This strategy is particularly powerful because decision-makers often rely on peer recommendations when selecting vendors. A well-executed referral program can generate high-quality leads.
To implement referral marketing effectively, you must:
- Offer incentives: Provide rewards or discounts to customers who refer new business.
- Make it easy to refer: Create a simple and accessible referral process.
- Publicly acknowledge referrals: Showcase positive referrals on social media or your website.
- Provide exceptional customer service: Satisfied customers are more likely to refer others.
Start by identifying your most satisfied customers. Offer them an incentive to refer new business to you. Ensure you create a simple, user-friendly platform for them to direct others your way and track rewards.
Remember — timing matters. Ask for referrals after a customer has had a positive experience with your brand. Alongside referral marketing, you should also consider channel marketing to acquire high-quality B2B customers.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM): Personalized Customer Acquisition
Account-Based Marketing or ABM is a highly targeted approach where marketing and sales work together to focus on specific high-value accounts or companies rather than casting a wide net. Instead of generating leads from broad campaigns, the goal is to nurture and convert specific key accounts by tailoring messaging to their needs.
In ABM, everything from content to outreach is personalized for each account to demonstrate a deep understanding of their business challenges.
The Benefits of ABM
- Higher ROI: ABM delivers a higher ROI because of its focused nature; you invest resources into accounts that are more likely to convert.
- Aligned sales and marketing: ABM ensures close collaboration between sales and marketing, which leads to better communication and faster decision-making.
- Improved customer retention: Since ABM focuses on long-term relationships, it helps with both acquisition and retention.
- Shortened sales cycle: ABM reduces the time taken to convert high-value prospects because your communication is highly relevant to specific business needs.
How ABM Works
Begin by creating an ICP that outlines the characteristics of your most valuable customers.
Use tools such as Hunter or LinkedIn Sales Navigator to identify potential accounts that match your ICP.
Leverage intent data to find accounts showing interest in your product or service by tracking behavior.
For each account, create a detailed plan that outlines their challenges and how your product fits into their needs. Next, create content tailored to each account, while sales engages directly with decision-makers. Assess the effectiveness of your strategy by measuring engagement metrics at the account level.
ABM isn’t just for acquisition — you can apply the same principles to customer retention by focusing on key clients and offering upsell, downsell, or cross-sell opportunities.
Social Media Marketing: Reaching B2B Prospects via Social Platforms
Establishing a strong online presence on social media platforms relevant to your target audience can be beneficial. You can increase brand visibility and build relationships with potential clients simultaneously. This can lead to more qualified leads and conversions when done right.
You can also combine social media and email marketing for maximum punch.
Let’s explore the steps involved in using social media for B2B customer acquisition.
1. Identify Platforms
Below are the prominent social media platforms you can choose from.
| Platform | Why it’s a good choice |
|---|---|
| LinkedIn allows you to connect directly with decision-makers, showcase thought leadership, and run highly targeted ads. | |
| X (formerly Twitter) | X is best for real-time industry insights, conversations, and showcasing thought leadership. |
| Facebook can be effective for B2B marketing via targeted ads and industry groups. | |
| Using Instagram can humanize your brand and build relationships. It’s good for visually-oriented businesses, showcasing culture, events, or creative work. | |
| YouTube | YouTube is an excellent option for sharing webinars, product demos, and educational videos. |
2. Content Strategy
On social media, you can share snippets or links to articles, whitepapers, research reports, case studies, and blogs to establish your brand as an industry expert. Platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter are great for this. Consider asking employees to share your content.
You can harness the popularity of video platforms to share webinars, tutorials, and customer testimonials that demonstrate how your product solves business challenges.
Don’t just post content — engage with your audience. Comment on trending topics within your industry to show that you’re in tune with what matters most to your target audience.
You can then contribute to discussions where your expertise can shine. Additionally, track your competitors’ social media accounts to learn what types of campaigns resonate with the shared target audience.
3. Utilize Social Media Ads
You don’t have to keep things organic; consider paid social media advertising.
For example, LinkedIn allows you to run targeted ads based on job title, company size, industry, and more. Use Sponsored Content to share blog posts, reports, or lead magnets. Even on Facebook or Instagram, you can run successful campaigns with audience targeting based on interest, job roles, and behavior.
Use retargeting ads on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook to re-engage website visitors and warm leads. This keeps your brand top-of-mind.
4. Track Performance
For any marketing activity, you have to track performance consistently to assess performance.
- Analyze likes, comments, shares, and direct messages to track engagement.
- Track the number of leads from social media, particularly from gated content.
- Monitor the conversion rate of social media leads through the sales funnel. This helps evaluate which platforms are driving the most qualified leads.
- Examine the CTR of your ads, posts, and promoted content to see how effective they are.
- Use analytics tools to attribute leads and sales to specific social media channels.
Search Engine Optimization or SEO: Inbound Leads Ripe for Conversion
Using SEO for B2B customer acquisition is a long-term strategy.
By optimizing your website content and technical aspects, you rank higher in search engine results. This helps increase your visibility to potential customers searching for relevant products or services. With SEO, you can drive organic traffic to your website, generate leads, and help you build a customer base.
B2B buyers seek detailed, informative content to make informed decisions. Your SEO strategy should focus on creating content that addresses each stage of this buyer’s journey.
Below, we share steps outlining how to make a great SEO strategy.
1. Do Keyword Research for Your Industry
Begin by identifying keywords that reflect business intent rather than consumer-level searches.
Use phrases such as:
- “solutions for XYZ problem”,
- “B2B software”,
- “enterprise product or service”.
Focus on long-tail keywords that are more specific to your product or service and have less competition. B2B customers will typically search for detailed, industry-specific queries.
SEO tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Google Keyword Planner can be a huge help with this task. They can help you identify relevant keywords, assess search volume, and track your competition.
2. Formulate Your Content Strategy
Create blogs, case studies, and blog posts that address the specific needs of your B2B audience. Focus on thought leadership and problem-solving. You can also pair email and SEO marketing efforts for a more aggressive plan of action.
Your content must address the entire sales funnel:
| Funnel stages | What content should you create? |
|---|---|
| Top of the Funnel (TOFU) | Create content that educates prospects and answers broad questions. Blog posts, guides, and videos on industry trends work well here. |
| Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) | Offer more in-depth, product-focused content like case studies, comparison guides, and whitepapers. |
| Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) | Create decision-making content, such as product demos, pricing pages, and customer testimonials. |
Ensure every piece of content is optimized for relevant keywords — more on this in the next section.
3. On-Page and Technical SEO
You have to be disciplined with your on-page and technical SEO if you want your content to rank well.
These 9 steps are critical when publishing SEO content:
- Title tags and meta descriptions: Use relevant keywords in your title tags and meta descriptions, making them compelling to encourage higher CTR from search results.
- URL structure: Keep URLs short, descriptive, and keyword-optimized.
- Headings: Properly structure your content with clear headings.
- Internal linking: Use internal links to guide users to related content on your site.
- Structured Data Markup: Implement schema markup (structured data) to help search engines understand your content.
- Crawlability and indexing: Make sure your site is easily crawlable by search engines. Create an XML sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console to ensure all pages are indexed.
- HTTPS security: Ensure your site uses HTTPS. Google rewards secure sites with better rankings, and this is also important for building trust with B2B customers.
- Fix broken links: Regularly check for broken links and either fix or remove them. Broken links harm user experience and negatively impact your SEO.
- Page speed and mobile optimization: Ensure your website loads quickly and is mobile-friendly.
4. Backlinking
Building authoritative backlinks is essential for improving domain authority and ranking.
Focus on getting backlinks from:
- Industry publications,
- Guest blogs on reputable websites,
- Partnerships with influencers or thought leaders in your industry.
Additionally, ensure your company is listed in relevant industry directories, business listings, and review sites. This can help build credibility and drive referral traffic.
5. Utilize Data and Analytics
Monitor your analytics closely to better understand how your SEO strategy is performing. Follow these 6 steps:
- Track keywords and rankings: Use tools like Google Analytics and Search Console to track keyword rankings and organic traffic.
- Monitor user behavior: Analyze user behavior on your site, including bounce rates, session duration, and page views.
- Note the top converters: Understand which pages are best at converting visitors into leads.
- Optimize conversion: Ensure content designed for lead generation (whitepapers, webinars) is optimized to capture user information.
- Refine: Continuously refine your SEO strategy based on performance metrics.
Web Ads or PPC Ads: Target B2B Clients with Relevants Ads
Web ads, or PPC advertising, offer you a powerful and targeted approach to B2B customer acquisition.
By strategically targeting specific keywords and demographics, you can reach your ideal audience at the precise moment they’re searching for relevant products or services. This can drive qualified traffic to your website.
Putting your B2B acquisition strategy together involves the 4 steps below.
1. Choose the Right Network
Choose an ad network to display ads on; here are your top options:
| Ad networks | Why it’s a good choice |
|---|---|
| LinkedIn Ads | LinkedIn is the most effective platform for targeting B2B audiences. You can target users based on job title, company size, industry, and even specific companies. |
| Google Display Ads | Google Ads is ideal for targeting high-intent keywords, as users searching for solutions often have a clear intent to buy. |
| Facebook Ads (Meta) | You can use Google’s Display Network to run banner ads across a vast network of websites to increase brand awareness. |
| Twitter Ads (now known as X) | Facebook can be useful for B2B by targeting users based on interests, job roles, or company-related behaviors. |
| Bing Ads (now called Microsoft Advertising) | X is Ideal for reaching professionals and participating in industry conversations. You can use Promoted Tweets and Ads. |
| Bing Ads (now called Microsoft Advertising) | Bing Ads can be effective in niche B2B industries where competition is lower and costs per click are more affordable. |
2. Target Your Audience
For ad targeting, focus on B2B-relevant demographics.
This table shares examples of criteria you can use for targeting:
| Criteria | Examples |
|---|---|
| Job titles | Marketing Managers, Purchase manager, CTO |
| Industries | SaaS, Real estate, Construction |
| Company size | 500+ employees, <50 staff |
| Specific companies | Tesla, Apple |
With specific criteria, you can use, say, Google Ads to target users searching for specific solutions related to your product or service, using keywords such as “pneumatic valve vendor” or “B2B email marketing tools.”
Don’t forget — B2B buyers are often data-driven. Include stats, percentages, or measurable outcomes in your ad copy to grab attention. Ensure your ad sends users to a relevant landing page that matches the intent of your ad.
Platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook let you upload a list of target accounts to serve personalized ads to high-value prospects in your ABM strategy. You can combine PPC and email marketing for maximum impact.
3. Performance Analysis
For tracking, you will have to use tracking pixels and conversion tags. These will help you measure the number of customers generated from your ads. Track spending carefully; calculate the ROI by comparing your ad spend to the revenue generated.
Analyze metrics such as:
- Cost per lead (CPL),
- Cost per acquisition (CPA),
- Lead quality.
These will help you assess whether your PPC campaigns are driving not just traffic, but the right kind of leads.
Campaign Refinery: The Best Email Partner
Email marketing should be a mandatory part of any robust B2B customer acquisition strategy. But what should you look for in an email marketing platform?
- Top-notch email deliverability,
- Powerful automation tools,
- Simple user interface,
- Built-in email validation,
- Unique engagement-boosting tools,
- Affordable and transparent pricing.
Campaign Refinery checks all these boxes!
Campaign Refinery’s inbox placement rates are the best in the industry; we offer potent tools to help you execute email campaigns, control customer journeys, and track email performance.
By partnering with us, you can see your B2B customer acquisition strategy bloom — apply here to become a customer!
