How Can Marketing Improve B2B?
Increased sales of B2B is not simply a matter of putting out your shingle and hoping that more customers will make their way. Businesses who buy from you want to believe that they have the right seller at the right time for the right price. Because there are more people involved and there are higher price points, it may take months to close a B2B sale.
Focus on these five areas of B2B marketing for fast results:
- Develop Buyer Personas
Before investing any more money in your marketing, take a step back and do some research into who your buyer really is. Buyer people are like an avatar, made up of as many buyers as possible in direct interviews. And their actions at events , social media, etc.
Other characters that influence the decision-making process of the buyer will emerge from this research: procurement people, bosses, rivals, etc. It is important to remember that this buyer is not necessarily your customer. Developing a person helps you to see the difference between who you THINK your customer is and who your real customer is. Flowing from that is a wealth of strategic insights not only about who your customer is, but also about how to talk to them.
- Create Remarkable Content
One of the few things that your prospects might find of interest to you while they’re looking for a purchase is your content. But there’s a catch in there. Your content must be remarkable, educational, entertaining or otherwise useful. (Hint: don’t write about your company, write about how to solve the problems of your prospects.)
Blogging is one of the most powerful B2B marketing tactics a company can adopt. Each blog post is one more ticket to the search engine lottery for your prospective customers to find when they’re looking for a solution to their problem.
- Use Email Marketing
Social media is getting a lot of attention these days, but email marketing is still a tactic with more firepower. It’s just about the best way to develop a relationship with your prospects as they get to know, like and trust your company.
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to communicate with your prospects, as they will have agreed to receive emails from you, and each of them should receive a message.
- Use Marketing Automation Software
Marketing automation software can help B2B companies to bridge the gap between marketing and sales by seamlessly and consistently nurturing prospects with relevant information at every stage of the sales cycle.
In addition, this software helps to automate repetitive marketing tasks, build and maintain a database of potential and current customers, integrate with the Customer Relationship Management ( CRM) program and more.
- Measure Your Marketing
With Internet marketing, there are a number of key metrics that can be monitored to help you quickly determine which lead generation tactics are working and which are not. Armed with that information, you can do more about what’s going on and less about what’s not working.
Most importantly, with marketing automation software, you can link sales back to specific marketing activities to calculate your ROI.
