The most prominent success stories in business are usually associated with B2C firms. This is simply because there are a lot more consumers in the world than there are business owners! There aren’t too many B2B success stories going around, true.
However, these kinds of businesses can still achieve a massive amount of growth in a short space of time. This is what you’ve been dreaming of, right?
There are many great tactics utilised by B2B businesspeople, which can turn unknown firms into giants in a short space of time. Here are some brilliant tips for marketing your B2B business.
Share useful and quality content your audience will find educative
First of all, make sure you’re releasing useful and sharable content. This is pretty important for a B2C firm as well. The difference is you’re dealing with other industry professionals. Here, displaying a good amount of knowledge is essential.
When you demonstrate the knowledge and experience you have relating to your specific industry, the leads will start springing up like you wouldn’t believe!
E-books, webinars, whitepapers and so forth should be your tools for attracting new customers and partners.
Of course, this content can’t be your standard marketing spiel. You’ll need to make sure this content is aimed at educating your audience, rather than getting them to sign up for a particular deal. Make sure your customer base can see that you know what you’re talking about.
From then, a lot of the remaining work will do itself. For the very best content, you’ll need to do some research into your target audience. With the information already available to you, try to pin down something which your customer base is dying to know.
There are countless blogs out there all saying the same thing, so this may take some time. Start with one article, and do everything you can to gauge the reaction from it.
Another great marketing tactic is offering a free trial for your product or service.
If what your business is offering is expensive, or has some other high barrier for entry, then it’s going to turn away a lot of potential customers.
If your target market needs to invest a lot of time and resources to be able to try your product or service, it will really harm your marketing drive. Rather than spend all that money to try something new and emerging, they’ll be likely to stay with their usual solution.
It’s your job to convince them otherwise! “Try before you buy” and “freemium” models are sometimes associated with tacky, B2C businesses. However, there are still a range of advantages they can offer to B2B businesses. There’s a great post on this on LinkedIn.
When planning this out, offer the bare minimum in terms of features. However, don’t make the experience too constricted. Let your customers understand how your product or service works, and what they can offer for their business.
The trick is finding a balance between tempting the customer in, and making sure there’s enough of an incentive to upgrade to the full version. It may feel like a waste of resources to offer services for free. However, if you set up a successful agreement with another firm, it will pay for itself in no time!
My next tip is to integrate some kind of unique tool in your product or service.
You want to get to a point where your firm is offering something valuable to your customers which they can’t find in your competitor’s services.
Look at Adeptia Inc for example. This is a tool designed for B2B businesses. It streamlines all your connections and organises shared data in a simple, usable interface. If you emphasise a feature like this on your company website, it can do a lot to set your company aside from the competition.
Just make sure any services you take on are well-suited to your target audience. Don’t make a big point about some kind of tech you use for your business if it isn’t all that helpful to your customers. Then, it will just seem like a useless gimmick.
If you have the resources, or you’re a programmer yourself, you can go for the best results by creating your own unique tool. This will take up a lot of money and time, true. However, when you’re creating this feature, you’ll have the freedom to customise each feature to suit the needs of your customer.
If you pull it off well, and stomp down any kinks as soon as they arise, your customer base won’t be able to stop talking about you! You may even want to offer a free trial for this special feature, but make sure to plan in advance. You don’t want to launch something amazing and realise you’re just hurting yourself!
Don’t compromise on user interface and experience
Finally, make sure your UX and UI design is up to scratch. These stand for “User Experience” and “User Interface”. If you want your business to grow as much as possible, you need to make your products or services as accessible as possible.
As I mentioned before, if your product is hard to use, or your service is hard to understand, your customers aren’t going to bother with them. Obviously, as a B2B operation, your business will have a little more leeway when it comes to simplifying your customer experience.
However, you should try your best to release a product or service which even non-technical users can pick up and use straight away. These days, dozens of business owners are looking for tech and tools which they can use without a support team!
Your UX and UI design should have all the features a user could possibly need, but be laid out in a way which is accessible to anyone. This way, you won’t have to sacrifice any demographic of customers.
There you have some of the best marketing tips for any B2B operation. As a final piece of advice; stop waiting around! Start drafting ideas, doing market research and exporting more content. You may not see the conversion figures you want straight away. However, knowing what your next move should be will become easier with time.