What Is B2B Market Research?

When you look at business-to-business (B2B) transactions, it comprises one organization selling products or a service to another one. Still, behind consumer products, you find strings of B2B transactions that involve multiple products to services.

Example Of B2B Transaction:

To Help Explain B2B Better, We Will Use Selling A Chocolate Bar As An Example:

• The supplier of raw materials to ingredients to the manufacturer of the chocolate bar is the B2B organization.
• The chocolate bar you can find is manufactured at a co-packing facility, not the brand owner making the co-packaging facility the B2B association.
• Then you have the chocolate brand owner receiving advice from an expert service like a marketing agency, making them all B2B organizations.
• The chocolate brand owner might sell to consumers and businesses, making themselves a B2B association.

Hence, B2B market research is huge, and each market differs from one consumer market to another in different ways:

• First, you have who is being sold to, and you find gaps between the highest and lowest spending customer trends with higher decision-making units that are also more volatile.
• Then you have the term differences of what and where it is sold as the spend on a product is higher in the B2B market, and customizing products is complex and sold through multiple distribution channels.
• The same applies to B2B purchases and how it is made.

Hence, you have B2B marketing research to explore the B2B buyer’s motivations, behaviors, and attitudes. The knowledge helps inform sales and marketing to create strategies for B2B organizations.

Why Should You Conduct B2B Marketing Research?

When You Do B2B Research, You Can Achieve The Different Business Objectives:

• First, it helps to build market segmentations to develop buyer personas and customer market segments and create competitor-to-marketplace maps.
• Secondly, you can better understand your buying process to see what influences the market and for decision-making to create interpersonal dynamics.
• You can use it to develop your brand by understanding the perceptions of a brand, what makes the brand unique, what makes customers return, your target audience, etc.
• Then you can use it to track perceptions of a business from brand equity, customer satisfaction, decisions making from price, etc.
• Furthermore, it allows you to develop products and services and helps you to build content with thought leadership.

The Key B2B Research Methods

Regarding B2B research, companies like PMGCO can use mixed methods. Some of these are in-depth and exploratory techniques using primary qualitative research. Or they use structured methods to do preliminary quantitative analysis. Lastly, they can also use publicly available data to answer questions about decision-makers behavior to attitudes in a business, known as secondary research. Again, these help you to achieve specific objectives.

How Do You Get Started?

To do B2B research, we recommend seeking the help of an outside research partner. With an outsider, they can interview clients and prospects to minimize bias, convincing people that the survey they are doing is confidential. It helps to look at a firm that knows your industry and be prepared to provide them with a list of your clients and prospects.