By Anastasia Gusentsova
Some communication steps that are widely common among B2B-companies waste both time and money. Anastasia Gusentsova, the head of LiFT agency, explores how companies can establish a strong market presence that ensures their target audience recognizes the brand.
Creating and launching a B2B product isn’t enough if you’re aiming for long-term results. But taking chaotic steps like “let’s post 10 Reels a day, everyone else does” won’t work either; it simply wastes both time and money.
What matters is making your presence felt in the market and building public communications in a way that ensures your target audience knows who you are, trusts the brand, the product and the team, and is open to working with you. This applies to B2B businesses in any niche. How to adapt this principle to your own context and avoid the most common mistakes is what this article is about.
Don’t confuse B2B with B2C
When a business starts doing public communications, B2B is often conflated with B2C. We know these have different aims and tasks, but in practice it can be hard to build a strategy. For example, a restaurant may operate as a B2C business for years, filling every seat. Then it can start selling franchises and try to use the same approach simply because it used to work.
What’s the difference? B2C communication is driven by emotion. You need to stand out in a stream of news, memes, celebrities and cat videos. The stronger you grab the user’s attention with creativity, humour, famous faces, or other triggers, the higher the likelihood of a purchase.
B2B is different. There aren’t huge information flows and there’s no need to entertain. Purchase decisions are usually part of someone’s job – whether a CEO or a product manager. Above all, they want to do their job well: hit KPIs, strengthen their relationship with leadership and, as a result, secure their role or even advance their career.
Accordingly, the primary need of a B2B audience is safety. No one will risk their job, budget, or reputation for your product. You must repeatedly and convincingly demonstrate – from multiple angles – that you can be trusted.
Where to start: a step-by-step plan
Effective public communications in B2B are impossible without a solid foundation. Here’s what you need to do:
Step No. 1. Set your goals
Why do you want to make a B2B statement? Which metrics will guide your public communications work – revenue, profit, sales, conversion, LTV, or something else? Does your company have a broader mission, such as “transforming the culture of B2B services in real estate”?
It’s important to remember that “making the business recognisable” or “gaining 10,000 followers” are not goals in themselves, they’re tools. We don’t engage in public communications for its own sake. Every decision must be backed by well-founded and realistic business objectives.
Step No. 2. Define and study your target audience
Which people do you need to influence in order to achieve your goals? Be specific. Not just “IT managers”, but for example “C-level executives at Fortune 500 companies currently focused on digitalising business processes”, or “product managers at IT companies with a gross revenue of at least $100 million”.
Once your audience is defined, you need to study it. Who are these people? What do they do? Which projects are they involved in? What do they post on social media? What interests them? This information will help you understand how best to build relationships, and what to emphasise or avoid.
A common mistake at this stage is thinking in stereotypes. You might imagine a B2B audience as robots in three-piece suits, ties, and briefcases. In reality, you’ll be communicating with real people who wear jeans and hoodies, scroll on social media, and drink coffee. They may be more expert or successful than you in certain areas, but they aren’t aliens, and they don’t expect only press-release-style, polished content from you.
Step No 3. Choose platforms for public communications
Two guiding questions can help:
- Which platforms already have your target audience in sufficient numbers? In B2B, consider Facebook, LinkedIn, trade media, podcasts, newsletters, industry events, business clubs, and specialised platforms such as Substack or Medium. The final selection should be tailored to your specific situation.
- What happens on these platforms? Which topics perform well or poorly, how do the algorithms work (if they exist at all), how does content reach people, what formats are allowed, and so on. If you fail to meet the audience’s expectations, your public communications won’t deliver results.
Sometimes B2B companies focus exclusively on their own website, directing all traffic there and trying to deliver all information in one place. This is an outdated approach. It’s far more effective to communicate with your target audience where they already are, using your website as a supplement and reinforcement.
How to meet the needs of your target audience
Once all the preparatory work is complete, you need to engage with your target audience on the chosen platforms, which means creating content – whether social media posts, presentation materials, or media articles. Fundamentally, B2B content can be divided into three blocks:
- Expertise. What do you do best, day in and day out? In what areas are you №1 in the industry? What is your perspective on market trends? How do you build your team, refine processes, and use technology and AI?
- Information about the product. What problems does your product solve for your target audience? What are its advantages? In which situations do people come to you? You can talk about a single product or an entire product line, depending on your objectives.
- Experience and case studies. Where and how has your product already delivered results? Which figures and facts can you showcase? It’s best to present a case in sequence: challenge, solution process, obstacles, results. But if information is limited or restricted by an NDA, share whatever you can.
The main task is to consistently present the company from multiple angles through zero-click content. This addresses the B2B audience’s need for safety. People come to trust you because they encounter your brand repeatedly, grow accustomed to you as experts in your field, find answers to their questions, explore case studies, and also understand the company’s philosophy and values. And all of this happens on familiar platforms, in full, without the need to click through links.
Despite the structured three-block approach, B2B communication must remain human. People trust people and buy from people. Ideally, communication should be developed both from the company’s voice and from top managers or founders. This allows the audience to engage with your expertise, products, and case studies in different tones and formats, building deeper loyalty and stronger differentiation from competitors.
When done properly, content becomes a lead-generation tool. The chain works like this: you run public communications; accumulate touchpoints with potential clients; these contacts convert into sales, both direct and referral-based.
It’s important to understand that this doesn’t happen instantly. Before making a purchase, a client typically needs 8–9 touchpoints – and varied ones – to build trust and eventually reach the trigger moment. In the long term, the system becomes increasingly effective, especially if you continue to expand your audience reach and invest in promotion.
Does this approach really work?
Let’s move from theory to practice and look at some case studies from my own experience and that of LiFT agency.
The first case is a SaaS solution for an ML platform for telecom operators. The company’s goal was to enter the international market. Our role was to work on brand awareness, reputation, and attracting the target audience to establish beneficial business contacts.
We chose LinkedIn as the main platform for B2B communications. There, we shared information about the product, highlighted the company’s values and social agenda, showcased results of collaborations with B2B partners, and provided practical advice such as “how mobile operators can monetise subscriber data.”
Results: the company’s LinkedIn followers grew by 2,947%, impressions rose from 2,091 to 1,576,957, and reactions increased from 69 to 4,692. Importantly, these were not random users or bots, but representatives of the target B2B audience.
The second case involved attracting corporate clients to an international conglomerate in IT, finance, and banking. The goal was to change the brand’s public perception, increase awareness, and attract more clients – in this case, entrepreneurs, particularly in the small business sector. It was crucial to demonstrate modernity, flexibility, and user-friendliness of the company’s products.
The project followed the familiar approach, but with a focus on creating and distributing case studies of existing corporate clients. We shared what these entrepreneurs do, how they grow their businesses, the challenges they face, and how they solve them, including using the company’s products. Over the course of a year, we produced around 150 such stories.
Key results: client traffic increased 34 times, and the ROI of social media content was twice as high as that of traditional performance marketing.
