Identify A Relevant B2B Segment

The first step founders should take before diving into B2B is figuring out the most relevant B2B audience segment for their brand. Do salons or spas make the most sense or are doctors’ offices the best route? Next, it’s important to identify the decision makers within those companies, says Bjoern Sjut, the managing director of B2B services for Front Row. LinkedIn is a good place to turn to for this information in addition to companies’ websites. Sjut notes that the owner isn’t always the right person to contact.

Sjut recommends brands investigate the status and goals of the outlets they’re pursuing. An upscale international cosmetics brand that Front Row works with targeted pharmacies for distribution because, at the time, pharmacies were hunting for high-margin products that met rigorous testing and ingredient quality standards and didn’t fall into the over-the-counter category. Front Row helped the brand build a digital marketing funnel that highlighted its portfolio selection and the efficacy of its products.

While established brands have a strong foothold in the B2B space, newer brands can gain traction by zeroing in on new or forthcoming businesses and providing them compelling reasons to switch. One effective approach is to stay up to date on business registrations in target markets. Front Row uses APIs, Google maps and Yelp data to keep track of such opportunities.

Figure Out The Channels And Tactics Work Best

When beauty brand founders wanted to connect with salons, spas and doctors’ offices in the past, they had to cold-call them or visit them in person. Sjut remembers when sending faxes to clients was an essential way to reach them. The methods were time-consuming and cost brands money—and money and time are exactly what a lot of small beauty brands don’t have.

In the digital age, beauty brands have a powerful arsenal of tools to connect with professional accounts. Platforms like Instagram, Google and LinkedIn offer sophisticated targeting capabilities, allowing brands to get in front of broad groups of the right decision makers efficiently. Sjut says, “It allows you to qualify leads in a much more elegant way than to try and call and drive up to everybody.”

Effective lead generation is not about a large audience, it’s about connecting with the right audience. Utilize the targeting capabilities of each platform to hone in on decision-makers most likely to be interested in your brand.

On the Google front, Sjut suggests starting out with demand capturing, which can pertain to businesses that might be searching if a certain brand offers B2B services. He says, “You want to be discoverable for the businesses that want to buy from you.”

Demand generation involves targeting salon owners, for instance, in a particular geographical area. The same type of targeting can be done on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook. Discussing Front Row’s capabilities, Sjut says, “We often can target the management on LinkedIn or through account-based marketing based on IP ranges.”

Sjut elaborates, “There’s no one size fits all, but typically you start with demand capturing and first try to understand, is there already B2B demand for my product? And then think about target audience segments, where those profiles are, and on what channels can I reach them at scale?”

Come Up With Core Content Messaging

Once brands have identified their target audience segment and figure out tactics to reach it, the subsequent step is educating the audience about them. If the brands have content created for training people in field sales, it can work for B2B. Sjut says, “We try to basically push that up the funnel so that it reaches more people, not only the clients that they already have and work with, but it also becomes part of the customer journey, part of the discovery process.”

If a brand’s products serve a functional purpose, focusing on educational content is usually best, advises Sjut. Brands have to demonstrate and prove to accounts that the products work. Video is generally crucial to make the case. “Video is tantamount because you can show the application of the products,” sys Shut. “Or do you have an explanatory topic that you need to visualize? Then, you probably need video as well.”

Other content angles revolve around highlighting a discount or a product’s popularity among celebrities or on social media. “It might not be about education, but showcasing that this is the fastest-growing brand on TikTok or Instagram now available in the salon version,” says Sjut. “It’s more about taking that brand and associating the business with it.”

Front Row partnered with a leading European tea brand to expand its distribution into hotels and cafés traditionally dominated by coffee. By positioning the tea as a premium offering with high-profit margins and emphasizing its versatility in presentation, the agency helped the brand resonate with hotels and cafés seeking unique and profitable beverages. The approach opened a new revenue stream for the brand and situated it as a sophisticated alternative to coffee.

“We showed them you can actually drive real margin here because it’s tea, but you sell for $6 or $7 because it looks high-end, plus in the way that you can present it,” says Sjut. “That also really resonated with the audience because if people don’t like coffee, you can’t sell coffee to them, so what do you do? And this offered a really nice margin path in that case.”

Sjut points out brands often overlook B2B-specific landing pages, but they can be a beneficial magnet for potential accounts. They should have simple information outlining how clients can get in touch. Some content can live on the pages, too.

“Any B2B landing page should basically help the brand give for the salon owner or whatever your audience segment is a relevant promise,” says Sjut. “Why should they sign up to work with your brand? And at the same time help the business to qualify the potential customer lifetime value here.”

Brands typically have distinct sales and marketing teams, but Sjut encourages them to come together for B2B outreach. The content and targeting done by the marketing team can whittle down leads the sales team reaches out to. Sjut says, “You really need the capability of both trades to succeed.”

Iterating content is as crucial in the B2B space as it is in the DTC space. Brands should be consistently optimizing content to deduce what resonates the most. AB testing is pivotal in informing ongoing strategies. “That way you have a testing backlog,” says Sjut. “You tweak it over the years, weeks and months, and then you move along and you can say, OK, in this case, there was a great cost per lead through the optimization by 20%.”

Determine The Best Way To Measure Success

B2B journeys aren’t as straightforward as DTC journeys. “If people search for your product category on Google or Amazon, you put the product in front of them, they look at it, they think it’s great, it looks great, there are great reviews, they buy it. The customer journey takes a day for a lot of these products if they are not super expensive,” says Sjut. “Businesses carefully weigh which partner they want to work with.”

Measuring success can be complex. To assist brands, Sjut lists tools for collecting data and tracking like Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, Hubspot, Salesforce, Funnel and Pipedrive, and hiring an agency like Front Row can come in handy. Its in-house team develops custom B2B reporting based on a brand’s CRM and implement measurement and attribution methodology for short- and long-term sales cycles.

“We look at it more in cohort analysis and longer time frames to understand what kind of marketing initiatives make a difference,” says Sjut. “We are typically the partner to help them scale the process and enable them to do it themselves if they want to.”