Business-to-business (B2B) product marketing comes with its own unique set of challenges. Unlike consumer products which are relatively easy to grasp, B2B products and services are often complex, tailor-made solutions aimed at helping other businesses address specific needs and pain points.
This complexity makes B2B product marketing incredibly difficult. In fact, according to Harvard Business Review, 75% of product launches fail. For experts, the number one reason behind these failures is inadequate pre-launch planning and execution.
So what does effective B2B product marketing entail? And what core strategies can you employ to set your B2B product up for success?
This comprehensive guide tackles these questions and more. Read on to learn:
- What B2B product marketing is and why it matters
- 5 major challenges B2B product marketers face
- 5 proven strategies for overcoming these obstacles
- 1 bonus idea to effectively implement B2B product marketing best practices
Let‘s dive in.
What is B2B Product Marketing?
B2B product marketing refers to the strategies and processes companies use to promote and sell products and services to other businesses, rather than individual consumers.
The goal is to drive demand and revenue by positioning your offering as the best solution for meeting the target market‘s specific needs.
This involves deep market research to identify customer pain points, detailed competitive analysis to pinpoint product differentiators, and tailored go-to-market plans to convey why your solution stands out.
Additionally, B2B product marketing may include:
- Crafting messaging and value propositions
- Creating sales enablement collateral like brochures, one pagers, case studies and product demos
- Generating leads through channels like content, events, referrals and outbound campaigns
- Analyzing campaign performance and optimizing based on insights
Now that we‘ve defined B2B product marketing, let‘s explore why it‘s so vital—yet so challenging—for B2B companies.
Why B2B Product Marketing Matters
For B2B companies, product marketing directly impacts revenue growth and overall success. After all, your product is the core solution you provide to customers. Position and sell it effectively through robust marketing, and you drive business growth. Fail at product marketing, and you miss huge opportunities waiting to be captured.
Consider that:
- On average, B2B buyers go through a 5.4 step buying journey before ever contacting sales, heavily influenced by content and digital touchpoints. This makes early-stage marketing vital.
- 92% of B2B buyers leverage online reviews across an average 10.4 different websites before deciding to purchase. Solid product marketing ensures you deliver the assets and experiences to not just garner but manage such reviews.
- The majority of potential customers now deeply research solutions online before engaging reps. One survey found that B2B buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content on average before ever connecting with sales. Product marketing generates this critical awareness and education content.
Yet while indispensable, B2B product marketing also poses major obstacles. Let‘s break down the top challenges next.
5 Challenges in B2B Product Marketing
B2B product marketing comes with a variety of hurdles, spanning target audience education to setting yourself apart from rivals. Common struggles include:
1. Understanding the Target Audience and Buyer Journey
To craft messaging that resonates and experiences that convert, you need an intimate grasp of your customers and what makes them tick. This includes mapping their:
- Demographics – Industry, title, company size and so on
- Business goals and challenges
- Specific needs and pain points
- Typical buying journey and decision team
- Content consumption habits
The problem? B2B buyers tend to come from multifaceted organizations and follow lengthy research and approval cycles. This diversity makes buyer analysis tricky. Get it wrong, and you waste time and money targeting the wrong stakeholders with irrelevant information.
For example, a VP of Operations will care more about efficiency and scalability when researching solutions. However CFOs prioritize cost, compliance and ROI. Speak to the former about financial impacts instead of operational gains, and you‘ll quickly lose their interest.
2. Positioning Your Product in a Crowded Market
Today‘s B2B landscape is fiercely competitive. And companies often pack products with complex feature sets full of industry buzzwords like AI, machine learning, blockchain and more.
The resulting challenge product marketers face? Cutting through noise to craft messaging that uniquely positions their offering by speaking directly to the target audience‘s needs.
Generic, self-aggrandizing claims about being "the best" or "most advanced" no longer work. You must back up your positioning with tangible details on precisely how you solve core customer challenges better than alternatives. This level of differentiation is far from simple, but it‘s essential your product doesn‘t blend into the sea of competition.
3. Generating Immediate, Quantifiable Demand
Driving interest quickly is another pain point, especially for new products seeking fast traction. The long decision cycles and detailed vetting processes inherent to B2B buying make this difficult.
Unlike consumer products shoppers might impulse buy at the shelf, B2B solutions often involve long sales cycles spanning weeks, months or years. This length shrinks budgets quickly, making early and sustained pipeline vital.
The trick is not just driving clicks from campaigns but quantifiably converting engagement into tangible sales meetings and opportunities. Too often awareness efforts fall short here, failing to tie marketing and CRM together to fully capitalize on demand gen spends.
4. Differentiating from Established Competitors
New companies also face extreme difficulty standing out versus entrenched providers boasting years more industry presence, reviews and social proof.
Take trying to disrupt project management giant Asana as a startup, for example. Beyond building a product that beats theirs, how do you market against thousands of positive reviews, case studies from Fortune 500 logos, and thought leadership stemming from their decade in business?
Overcoming such traction and trust requires truly groundbreaking positioning plus flawless execution across all elements of product marketing and sales. Far easier said than done.
5. Creating Marketing Campaigns That Work
Top to bottom, executing effective product marketing also remains complex and resource intensive for B2B brands. Companies must ace numerous moving parts to drive awareness, educate buyers, generate interest and enable sales channel success in a metrics-driven way.
This includes orchestrating people, processes and platforms across areas like:
- Public and media relations
- Paid digital and social advertising
- Conference and tradeshow promotion
- Integrated multi-channel campaigns with tailored messaging
- Sales enablement content like presentations, demos and battlecards
- Leads, pipeline and customer growth analysis
Connecting these elements into campaigns that deliver quantifiable results requires substantial skill. Yet according to Forrester, a full 77% of marketers feel overwhelmed by the breadth of required marketing technology alone.
When combined, these 5 obstacles leave even the savviest marketers struggling to effectively launch and promote B2B products. Luckily, the right strategies can help tackle these challenges head on.
5 Core Strategies for B2B Product Marketing Success
So how exactly can B2B brands overcome the product marketing obstacles above? Although every company and product differs, core best practices include:
1. Conduct In-Depth Market Research
To deeply grasp B2B buyer journeys as discussed in challenge #1, comprehensive research is invaluable.
This includes running surveys, interviews and focus groups for market sizing, trends analysis, uncovering pain points and mapping purchase influencers.
Such primary research should blend with thorough analysis of existing secondary research from analyst firms like Gartner and IDC who interview thousands of customers annually.
These inputs arm product marketers to identify addressable segments, build detailed customer persona and outline precise journeys that messaging and experiences can then be tailored to.
Conducting research is a fundamental product marketing best practice tips from experts stress again and again. In fact, when asked what the #1 product marketing challenge for 2020 was, Gartner VP Analyst Jake Sorofman stressed "establishing empathy and understanding with respect to prospects and customers." Get the research right, and you‘ve uncovered the insights to do precisely that.
2. Develop a Strong, Differentiated Value Proposition
Next, research learnings empower product marketers to develop concise yet compelling value propositions fulfilling challenge #2.
These messaging frameworks prove you truly understand a customer’s struggles better than alternatives and can therefore solve them more effectively.
For example, leading project management tool Asana positions itself as enabling:
Clarity amidst chaos. Asana creates order so teams have clarity on priorities & goals, remain focused on the work that matters, and end the day fulfilled by accomplishments.
This crisp positioning quickly conveys 3 unique benefits only Asana delivers vis-à-vis alternatives:
- Helping teams better prioritize tasks so they focus time on what matters most
- Reducing chaos by giving structure to work across people and departments
- Driving greater fulfillment by letting teams better track progress towards goals
In one short, memorable statement grounded in customer needs, Asana thus sets themselves apart versus rivals.
This is the true power of value proposition driven marketing. Work to uncover and express your own.
3. Implement a Metrics-Focused Demand Generation Engine
Demand generation remains imperative to tackle challenge #3 fast and cost effectively.
The key is tightly integrating marketing and sales technologies into a CX-focused engine. This unified approach lets you quickly drive interest while still tracking engagement to closed revenue.
Critical elements include:
- Intent monitoring with tech like Bombora or G2 Leads to identify companies actively researching related solutions for immediate outreach
- Account-based advertising across platforms like LinkedIn, Google and more to surround key targets with relevant messages
- Chatbots onsite to capture leads from high-funnel visitors
- CRM platforms like Salesforce for managing pipeline processes
- Marketing automation with email nurturing flows to educate at scale
- Reporting to analyze multi-touch attribution across activities on opportunities created
Align these elements, and product marketing can rapidly deliver marketing qualified leads to sales while still optimizing spend via measured performance.
4. Build a Product Differentiation Strategy
Combining research-backed messaging with the leading tactics above also drives effective differentiation outlined in challenge #4.
But companies shouldn‘t stop there. Additional unique proof points to leverage include:
- Reviews and case studies from current customers and industry influencers
- Competitive comparisons highlighting weaknesses in competitor offerings
- Product capability demos tailored to each buyer persona and their priorities
- Analyst research on your product’s strengths
Layer these authenticated third party perspectives across your product marketing execution using challenge #1 research learnings on where audiences discover information. Doing so bolsters credibility and shapes perception.
5. Orchestrate Targeted Multichannel Campaigns
Finally, coordinating programs tailored to reach different targets across multiple channels helps tackle challenge #5.
For example, cast a wide net to capture broad interest with:
- Public relations article pitches
- Organic and paid search content
- Targeted ads on Google and social networks
- Syndicated guest columns
Then nurture engaged segments via:
- Segment-specific email drip campaigns covering use cases they care about
- Invites to tailored webinars aligned to their roles
- Direct mail collateral speaking to their purchasing criteria
- Sales re-targeting if they frequent your site
Accelerating sales cycles further requires one-to-one account-focused plays like:
- Phone, email and LinkedIn outreach from SDRs
- Custom collateral offers for key decision makers
- Private virtual workshops bringing together buying groups and product experts
- In-person visits and white glove onboarding
This blend of broad general outreach with highly tailored nurturing and concierge account treatment lets you influence purchase influencers throughout their journey.
Bonus Idea: Work with Partners to Enhance Execution Capacity
While these core strategies outline “what” to do, product marketing leaders must still determine “how” to operationalize so much orchestration and execution successfully.
Many lean on external help from specialized agencies and consultants focused exclusively on B2B product marketing. These valued partners offer workflow efficiencies, execution experience and added headcount bandwidth to implement the steps above faster and more effectively.
Specific ways such collaborative third party engagements may advance product marketing success include:
Go-to-Market Strategy & Launch Planning
Before investment in broad tactics, high level guidance is invaluable. Partners provide launch readiness assessments, advise positioning and messaging foundations then map targeted programs to reach the right audiences with the right content. This strategic groundwork gives traction campaigns the best springboard for optimal impact.
Campaign Execution
Once plans are set, rolling out ambitious multichannel programs still demands considerable effort. Partners serve as trusted extensions of internal teams to ease workload. Take leveraging staff to ghostwrite and pitch articles to press, build tailored campaign assets from email sequences to custom sales collateral or manage a sponsored conference presence. Such specialized implementation assistance is indispensable.
Continuous Performance Optimization
Product launches mark just the beginning. Partners help systematically track campaign analytics to guide ongoing refinement. This allows for regular testing into what creative, offers and channels resonate best with customer segments to continually improve conversion. They also capture operational efficiencies from launch to synthesize into future planning best practices.
While not mandatory, martech consultants, product marketing agencies and integrated growth partners provide invaluable augmentation. Tackling extensive execution typically involved in B2B product marketing alone rarely brings holistic success.
Instead, consider adding such specialists as force multipliers. They reduce workload, optimize ongoing efforts faster through expertise and deliver expanded marketing horsepower fueled by technology and resources. This makes achieving the strategies above at scale far more tenable.
So in summary, which tips will you leverage to win at B2B product marketing in 2024 and beyond? Let‘s recap the key insights one last time:
- Invest in target audience research – Ground product positioning and messaging in customer needs learnings
- Differentiate with value propositions – Concisely convey understanding of buyer pain better than competitors
- Architect an integrated demand engine – Unite marketing and sales with metrics focus to accelerate opportunities
- Establish authentic differentiation pillars – Leverage third party proof points like reviews for unique credibility
- Orchestrate targeted multichannel campaigns – Tailor initiatives across channels and buyer groups for relevance
- Consider strategic partnerships – Specialized help structures strategy and adds horsepower achieving success faster
While never easy, B2B product marketing done right delivers tremendous rewards. Follow these guides to set your business’ offering up for transformative market leadership now and continually build from there.