B2B marketing is not the same as it was before. The expectations are a lot higher now. The significant changes in buying behavior, coupled with the introduction of new marketing technologies only scratch the surface of the modern B2B landscape.
As a business owner, then, how would you utilize your marketing budget to derive the most value from your investment?
Simple answer: try and adjust to the latest B2B trends as soon as possible.
What are they?
To get a significant ROI, you need to focus on our list of B2B marketing strategies tailored for 2019. So, let’s begin.
1. Conversational Selling
Traditional B2B involved buyers and sellers engaged in conversation with one another. The merchants would understand the needs of the buyer and then provide a solution.
While that may have been useful back in the day, it is not so much right now. It is partly due to the level of competition and is rather costly.
If the traditional method does not work, how will you interact with the customers?
Live chat and social media messaging applications (WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger) provide a scalable solution for customer interaction. As a business, you can easily integrate conversational selling strategies thanks to the ecosystem of the applications. Additionally, with the efficient utilization of such technologies, you won't be incurring the costs of hiring a sales team.
Conversational selling helps you interact with customers more diligently, identify and convert possible leads, keep a log of customer interaction, and create brand awareness through targeted content.
So, how will you go about creating productive conversations?
The key to conversational selling, as with any other marketing strategy, is never to try to oversell your product. Providing customers with relevant and contextual information, all in real-time is the best approach towards conversational selling.
Having a CRM platform, therefore, is very useful in storing customer data and ensuring that the conversations are as personalized as possible. Through the centralization of customer data, such as purchase history and preferences, you can deliver significant value to each unique buyer in real-time.
2. Word-Of-Mouth Marketing
The modern B2B landscape relies heavily on word of mouth marketing. Peer reviews, recommendations, and social media engagement for your site can help users make informed decisions before making a purchase.
The first step in creating brand awareness through word of mouth marketing is by creating a customer review section for your product pages. After purchase, you encourage the customer to leave a review.
Now, a review could range from anything between a detailed survey, a one to five-star rating, or even a simple text field.
Additionally, you can also utilize the power of established e-commerce sites as a third-party reviews strategy to drive more traffic and customers to your site.
Backed by an efficient sales team, you can also create brand loyalty through relationship building and advocacy. Examples of nurturing brand loyalty can be through delivering value-added discounts, coupons, or referral programs.
Lastly, you can use a social media strategy to drive traffic to your website, utilize content marketing strategies, and effectively engage with your audiences.
In the case of B2B businesses, you can use LinkedIn, which is very resourceful when it comes to connecting with the right prospects.
3. SEO (the 2019 Way)
Besides word-of-mouth marketing, you need a solid base from where you get your customers. Since 89% of B2B customers begin their research process from the internet, it should not come as a surprise that you would have to rank for search engines to attract those buyers. To rank for the top, however, you need to conduct SEO the 2019 way.
The SEO landscape is moving so quickly that you cannot even rely on a strategy that worked a year ago. Even with such an evolution, user-friendly, and relevant content creation is still the key to winning the SEO game.
As a business, you might want to hire a digital marketing services company to help you rank at the top of the SERPs. Being a costly process, it is essential to understand the basics beforehand. Let us look at some of the most popular SEO tactics:
· Local SEO:
If you want to rank your business for a particular geographical location, you need to invest in local SEO. Local SEO helps you rank for keywords that are targeted for searches conducted in a specific location.
· Mobile-first website:
Optimizing for mobile devices is a crucial step in ranking your business since Google has now prioritized mobile searches over desktop searches. Since everyone, including B2B buyers, are now using smartphones for conducting business, having a B2B site optimized for mobile devices can help you gain more customers.
· Visual content and videos:
While written content helps engage customers, video content can help you gain a customer base that is not too inclined on reading the content.
4. Big Data, AI, and Hyper-Personalization
Before AI and Big Data, marketers had been trying to decipher the massive amounts of data coming from business operations to help them make data-driven business decisions. All to no avail.
With the introduction of AI and Big Data analytics, marketers can now utilize big data to understand customer buying behaviors. It also helps them develop tailored content to increase conversions.
The future of AI in marketing seems like a bright one. Future uses of it can range from inbound marketing, marketing based on accounting reports, marketing customized content focused on preferences, to tracking business results, and converting prospects.
5. Conversion Rate Optimization
Converting website traffic into buyers is the central role of a B2B website. Your marketing budget is all for naught if you cannot do that.
Optimizing conversion rates provides you the benefit of an increased ROI and helps you generate substantial revenues. Let us look at some of how you can optimize your B2B site for customers.
- Through writing detailed and unique product descriptions, high-quality imagery, and optionally; video content, you can optimize your site's product pages to deliver the most value to your customers. Decreasing customer bounce rates, as a result.
- With heatmaps, you can look at the places where your users are interacting the most. This helps you tailor the user experience.
- You can streamline your checkout flow to make it more seamless, decreasing cart abandonment in the process.
- Utilize retargeting strategies through content and newsletters to drive traffic back to your website.
Conclusion
From the article, you could have surmised that the modern B2B landscape is very demanding. Customers are now demanding a relevant, helpful, streamlined, and overall human experience.
As a marketer or business owner, you need to provide that experience to stand out from the crowd. Hopefully, these tips will provide you with a starting point.
Author Bio:
Shawn Mike has been working with writing challenging clients for over five years. His educational background in the technical field and business studies has given him the edge to write on many topics. He occasionally writes blog articles for Dynamologic Solutions.