Is community the future of B2B marketing?

n my attempts to get more regular sales one of my businesses JOAGO.com, I’m looking at using influencers to promote our watches. Since our watches are made entirely from recycled materials, it is crucial to select the right influencer - someone who aligns with our values and target community.

While searching for an influential figure who had the right community, it got me think about B2B marketing. This approach has been effective in B2C for a long time, so why isn't it utilised in B2B? As I delved deeper into it and considered its application in B2B, I believe it will be immensely important in the future. In fact, I think it will become a core element in B2B sales and marketing.

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Traditional sales practices has become overused and less effective

We have all received outreach emails that we immediately delete, along with follow-ups like "just bumped this to the top of your inbox" (which doesn't work that way).

These tactics are overused and ineffective. We don't appreciate being aggressively sold to, as we can make our own decisions about which products to purchase. Sales processes work better further down the buying funnel, where we are already aware of the product, have received recommendations, and possibly even had a demo or used the product itself. That's when sales becomes crucial as the finishing touch.

Now imagine imagine having all of that done via a leader in the community or it done by community led marketing. You're getting rid of that annoying, effective, cold outsells each outreach and replacing it with warm relevant community marketing.

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ISPs have changed the threshold for what is classified as marketing email

Starting in February 2024, Gmail will change the threshold for marketing emails to 5000 emails per month. This means that SaaS outreach emails will be subject to the same rules as marketing emails, making it harder to go unnoticed.

Google and Yahoo will require bulk email senders to confirm their emails, provide easy ways to unsubscribe, and keep their emails below a specified spam threshold.

So it's harder to go under the radar. So it means you're going to have to be really, really great with your email when it comes to cold outreach. So what that threshold means is that you're now, you can have more stringent rules. You need to make sure that you've got your spam complaints below a certain level.

You've got all your technical elements set up from a deliverability point of view and you're sending good email, right? Which is hard to do when it's cold. People have written a lot about this. You can check out the posts. So What that means is the B2B founder or sales leader, you can add value to your, to your industry.

You can read more about these changes here in this great post from Jimmy Kim @ SendLane and Lemlist Blog.

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So what can you do?

As a B2B founder or sales leader, you can add value in your industry by genuinely offering help and building trust with potential buyers and customers. While this may seem obvious, it is not commonly seen in B2B. Often, there is a lot of self-promotion and content focused solely on promoting products.

This is happening some what today via third-party content sites and knowledge areas. For example, in email marketing, sites like emaillove.com or expert content platforms like emailvendorselection.com are already doing this effectively for B2B.

However, where this approach is not as prevalent is in founders or leaders actively building a community. In other words, they are not thinking in this way.

I have been following Greg Isenberg, the CEO of Latecheck, where they focus on building or acquiring companies that are community-oriented.

And with the B2B businesses that my company intends to buy and grows, we're going to take a community led first approach. What that means is that we're going to offer value to our potential customers and to anyone in the sector. We are going to offer value via content and things that are going to help them improve their marketing. But we also offer product as well if they're interested in, in using that.

Sales is still massively important, and going to use sales to close deals. We're going to use sales to take potential customers from “oh this is really interesting, I know I need this product and your product looks really great” to signing up and becoming a customer.