In the United States, two thirds of business-to-business (B2B) buyers look for products online before purchasing them, a 2023 survey revealed. Regardless of where the purchase is finalized, online channels are key in the product discovery phase. 50 percent of surveyed B2B buyers browsed online marketplaces like Amazon while over one-third of respondents checked online adverts.

According to a study executed in late 2021, content development was the leading business-to-business marketing strategy for 2022, as 44 percent of responding B2B companies placed it among their top three marketing areas to invest in over the following year. Mentioned by 30 percent and 29 percent of companies respectively, website/SEO marketing and digital media advertising followed in second and third position. In contrast, four percent of respondents planned to make traditional media advertising one of their main investments.

Digitalization of the selling process was the area most heavily invested in by B2B companies in Germany in the first quarter of 2023. Around 30 percent of companies invested in content marketing.
Importance of B2B investments
E-commerce is a fast-paced market, so companies must constantly invest to maximize their profits. Around 93 percent of B2B companies in Germany expected their online revenue to either stay stable or increase in the upcoming months. Therefore, it is logical that these companies are investing heavily in the digitalization of the selling process and social media, since a smoother customer experience often results in higher revenues. The main points of focus for B2B businesses when it came to investing in their online stores were SEO/SEA, relaunching/ replatforming, and product data maintenance. SEO and SEA are different methods of ensuring that a website scores higher in search engine results, so the customers easily find it. This is an important investment because more traffic on the website increases the chances of purchases being made, which, of course, leads to higher revenues.
Are marketplaces a must?
Traditionally, marketplaces were used to describe a square or area in which a market was held. Vendors would come and sell their merchandise together in different towns each day, providing the residents a one-stop shop to buy various necessities. Nowadays, marketplaces typically refer to online sites such as Amazon or eBay. The principle, however, is very similar to that of the traditional marketplace, with small and large companies all selling their products on the same site. Many people turn to websites such as these to find products they need, which means that companies who only sell products on their own site are missing out on this consumer base

During a 2024 survey among marketers worldwide, around 86 percent reported using Facebook for marketing purposes. Instagram and LinkedIn followed, respectively mentioned by 79 and 65 percent of the respondents. The global social media marketing segment According to the same study, 59 percent of responding marketers intended to increase their organic use of YouTube for marketing purposes throughout that year. LinkedIn and Instagram followed with similar shares, rounding up the top three social media platforms attracting a planned growth in organic use among global marketers in 2024. Their main driver is increasing brand exposure and traffic, which led the ranking of benefits of social media marketing worldwide. Social media for B2B marketing Social media platform adoption rates among business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) marketers vary according to each subsegment's focus. While B2C professionals prioritize Facebook and Instagram – both run by Meta, Inc. – due to their popularity among online audiences, B2B marketers concentrate their endeavors on Microsoft-owned LinkedIn due to its goal to connect people and companies in a corporate context.