4 B2B Digital Marketing Misconceptions and the Truth Behind Them

Vu Khoi

Author at Wotech Electronics Blog

If B2C marketing gives you plenty of room to perform and play clever tricks, then when it comes to strategies for B2B customers, you have to be truly skillful, smart, and engaging. Many digital marketing practitioners hold preconceptions about B2B marketing — that it is dry and "hard to digest," that search keywords are too specific, and so on. But those are only misconceptions. Right or not? Let's explore the truth with the digital marketing experts at Markdao Vietnam!

An overview of B2B marketing — the digital marketing playground for agencies

Before embarking on a marketing strategy for B2B, we need to understand its roots. B2B marketing is marketing activity — including digital marketing — aimed at customers that are businesses producing and supplying products or services to other businesses. In a B2B marketing strategy, you can no longer "perform" with the same ease as you would with consumers (customers); you need to focus on the logic of the product and place greater emphasis on functional characteristics. That is why B2B marketing is considered drier and more difficult than B2C.

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When developing a digital marketing strategy for a business, you need to know exactly who makes up the customer's purchasing department and what role each member plays in the buying process. Business customers have an enormous appetite for information, so the key is to provide information with real depth. What they truly care about are the product's features, detailed specifications, how to use it, and its advantages. The most effective marketing message digs deep into analyzing how much time, money, and resources your product or service can save the customer.

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Digital marketing for businesses: 4 myths and the naked truth

B2B marketing demands a great deal to satisfy the buying side, and this is precisely why so many mistaken myths have grown up around this digital marketing activity. In reality, however, what goes on "behind the scenes" is quite different — and only insiders in this field know it.

The myth about search keyword lists in digital marketing campaigns

According to the buying decision process, before paying for a product, customers typically go through several steps, the most important of which is researching supply sources. The same is true in B2B digital marketing: before taking a conversion action (placing an order, making a call, filling in a form), the customer has already been researching for quite some time. Marketers can get their hands into this process, reaching out to and stimulating customer demand. Understanding exactly what customers have been researching during this period is crucial for determining which keywords to use for SEO or Google Ads campaigns.

Marketers commonly assume that B2B customers, when searching, focus only on a small group of specific keywords. Unfortunately, that assumption is completely "off the rails" compared to the truth: 71% of B2B customers start their search with broad, generic keywords, and only the remaining 29% search directly for the product or service.

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Searching on Google plays a decisive role in shaping buying behavior: 90% of B2B customers begin researching and evaluating suppliers by searching on Google. This comes as no surprise, which is why owning a website and optimizing it is a prerequisite of digital marketing. The search frequency of buying businesses (clients) has increased enormously — the average B2B customer performs 12 searches before making a decision.

In short, a digital agency should not focus only on a specific set of keywords directly naming the products and services it offers. Expand your keyword set to cover the entire product category so you can reach and persuade customers from the very moment they begin their research.

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Digital marketing agencies get it wrong about how business customers make decisions

Many agencies doing digital marketing for business customers make wrong assumptions about the clients' age, and this leads them astray in their strategy. In the past, B2B customers were mostly middle-aged or older, with needs and behaviors that differed from those of younger age groups. But times keep changing: today it is the Millennial generation (born 1980–1994) who are truly your clients, making up more than half of surveyed B2B customers. Changes in the workforce composition of the industry have brought changes in the needs, behaviors, and decision-making patterns of B2B customers when searching for suppliers.

Millennials were born at the moment of technological transition — the first generation to grow up with technology. They are more proactive, more influenced by digital information, and less bound by the confines of business relationships as they once were. Millennials were also the pioneers of digital marketing. Therefore, when building a strategy, agencies need to redefine their target customer profile and find the content and marketing approaches that will attract them.

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The target of B2B digital marketing isn't really "the person at the top"

Must the person making the buying decision be a senior executive, the head of the company? It is because of this assumption that B2B digital marketing activities often target managers and directors. But is that really the case?

Behind "the wings," behind the decision of the person who signs, lie the opinions and countless discussions of the staff below them. Junior staff have enormous influence over the decision-making process. In fact, we live in a flat, multi-dimensional world of information where specialization within the company is highly valued — it is precisely the departments and individuals who directly manage the work that influence the company's decision-making process.

In B2B digital marketing, we cannot ignore the employees who directly manage purchasing. Surveys show that while in 64% of cases a manager or director is the final "sign-off," as many as 24% of final sign-offs come from someone who is neither a manager nor a director. Lower-level departments carry as much as 81% of the influence in a company's decision-making process.

Underestimating video is a mistake in B2B digital marketing

Many people mistakenly believe that video only raises brand awareness in B2B digital marketing. In fact, video plays a highly significant role in the decision journey of B2B customers. With the rise of video content marketing, many businesses now turn to YouTube to help make purchasing decisions. 70% of B2B customers watch video during their buying journey, and customers' video watching time keeps growing.

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What customers care about is no longer confined to websites and written text — now they seek out real videos about products. The most searched and most watched types of video are: videos about product and service features, followed by how-to tutorials and comparison/review videos. For that reason, marketers cannot afford to ignore video. With the advantage of conveying information quickly and clearly, video content creates a powerful wave of influence on customers at the moment of purchase. So what's the takeaway? Businesses need to start producing video as soon as possible — for the sake of liberating their digital marketing campaigns.

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