In recent years, we’ve seen B2B companies embrace the digital revolution, modernizing IT architectures and digitizing back-office workflows.
Great news except these efforts focus on making internal processes efficient and less on innovating around marketing, which is where growth comes from. Because before you can think about maximizing sales outreach, you’ll need to find prospects.
B2B marketing is about pursuing timely connections between brands and audiences to foster trusting relationships that lead to partnerships and sales.
With online engagements now taking center stage, B2B digital marketing enables brands to connect with wider audiences and showcase expertise through thought leadership content, ultimately driving more sales.
To that end, let’s dig into five digital strategies that may help drive B2B sales.
1. Identify Your Target Audience
Newsflash. Your target audience influences the strategies you come up with. And each strategy must have audiences it targets otherwise you’ll be shooting in the dark.
Besides, your target audiences aren’t just prospects that are ideal for your organization, but that your solutions are ideal for them, too.
To determine who your target audiences are, consider the following factors
- Needs. The solutions you offer should fulfill your target audience’s needs. The buyers should see value in your solutions otherwise you’ll end up with unhappy customers and many headaches.
- Decision-making power. You’ll want to target two groups of people—-decision influencers and decision-makers. Decision influencers are typically subject matter experts who can educate the people making decisions. Decision-makers are the guys who give the nod and sign deals.
- Budget. You’ll encounter businesses that recognize their need for your products/services but can’t afford them. You can choose to tier your offerings or eliminate businesses that can’t afford you. If you choose the latter be like Rolls Royce, turn it into a competitive advantage, and own it.
2. Leverage Data-Based Marketing
With ever-growing competition, providing awesome solutions is no longer enough.
Besides these awesome solutions, you need to formulate strategies that will reach target customers and convince them as much.
Data-driven marketing brings together first and third-party data surrounding your customers’ preferences, trends, and propensities. The info is then analyzed to help you handcraft spot-on campaigns.
Summarily, the strategy
- Clarifies your target audiences, behavioral tendencies as well as preferences so you can speak to them effectively
- Makes use of predictive analytics to foresee future drifts in your consumer bases
- Helps you determine the best channels to focus your marketing efforts on
The main and obvious benefit of including data insights in your marketing is the improvement of your campaigns for greater success. When accuracy and speed come together, your marketing campaigns become more effective and attain better results.
3. Utilize Marketing Automation
Every prospect’s action is a data point that tells you what they are looking for. Manually tracking this information edges on impossible and you’re likely to miss something.
Marketing automation takes over this task with ease, collecting information across multiple channels to help you understand your customer’s needs.
With a clearer understanding, you can segment leads appropriately and personalize communication through their preferred channels to increase conversions.
Marketing automation applications include
- Email marketing. In addition to emailing people at opportune times, you can also segment audiences, schedule campaigns, and track performance better.
- Social media management. From managing your accounts to scheduling posts, monitoring trends, conversing with followers, and analyzing data, marketing automation can help you optimize your presence on social.
- Landing pages. Through marketing automation, you can build and deploy landing pages to give prospects helpful information
- Live chat. This automation aspect facilitates interactions with website visitors the moment they land on your site. This translates to quicker responses to the queries people raise, smoother interactions, and personalized follow-ups.
4. Make Cold Calls
As far as long-standing approaches go, cold calling has been around for a while. It facilitates relationship-building with potential customers so you can gain leads and increase sales. Although people it difficult (and it can be) lead generation firms and companies of all sizes still use it to secure meetings with potential buyers.
How do they do it?
Consider the following
- Create an outline of what you want to cover. It will help steer the conversation toward your goal and you’ll feel a lot calmer. Personalize calls based off your research (a recent post, press release, achievement, etc) to break barriers.
- Choose your words wisely. Words like “sign the contract” or “discount” lower your chances for continued engagement and close rates. Naturally, since people are suspicious of new callers. Use words like “help you” as opposed to “sell you” and “challenges” in place of “problems.”
- Don’t fall for the “send me an email” trick. Chances are that the email you send may never get read and the next time you call, the person won’t answer. Agree to drop an email but ask what specific info the prospect would like. It might get them talking, helping you know more about them.
- Expect objections and plan for them. What common and industry-specific objections do you and your team encounter? Supposes the prospect says they are already working with a competitor. Offer to share a case study about a company similar to theirs to showcase the success that the company derived from your solutions.
5. A/B Test Your Lead Capture Forms
There are plenty of things you can test, right from design to CTA placement, images and colors, and even landing pages.
But we’re focusing on lead capture forms because it’s possible to capture high lead volume only to find their quality poor.
Most marketing advice will tell you to keep lead capture forms brief because longer ones put off prospects. But asking for a name and email address means you have no way of knowing what exactly the lead is looking for. Sure, brevity draws volumes at the expense of quality.
We recommend testing with more fields (job function, company name, etc), words you use in the descriptions, and the forms’ headlines. The goal will be to find the form that provides adequate information for better lead qualification.
It’s only when your lead qualification is on point, that you can tailor useful follow-up conversations. It will save your team the hassle of wasting time researching contacts that will probably never convert into sales.
