7 Clever Ways to Spice up Your B2B Marketing Tactics

B2B Marketing Tactics

Marketing to a B2B target audience is quite unlike marketing to a B2C target audience in countless ways. While both groups can be reached with similar tactics and strategies, dealing with B2B customers and potential B2B customers often requires unique methods. If you are looking to expand your reach and garner more B2B clientele, there are always new things you can try. In this post, we will take a look at seven effective B2B marketing tactics to help you attract new customers and continue to appeal to your current ones.

1. Use Exceptional Content to Tell a Compelling Story: 

Talk to any successful business and they won’t have much of a problem telling you what it is they do. But so many businesses have yet to perfect the art of conveying the story of how they started, who they are, and what they have to offer through high-quality content. Customers, both B2B and B2C, need to be engaged and informed in an entertaining way. Create a story about your company in a way that intrigues your customers. And create that story with compelling content through formats like a blog or video clips. The purpose of crafting these stories is to provide your potential customers with value and educational resources that are relevant to their needs. Once they get to know you better and who you are, they’ll be more inclined to choose you for your services or products. As a general rule of thumb, the story first, products or services second.

2. Have a Sturdy Plan For Follow Through: 

A potential customer has discovered you! That’s a great start, but if a B2B customer finds you, shows up at your physical business location or visits your website and leaves, you’ve just wasted your time. Develop a strategy to ensure there is follow-through. A potential customer discovering that your business exists just isn’t enough. You need a plan of action in order to peak their interest, fulfill their need, and retain them as a loyal customer. Use several different methods to build commitment. For social media platforms, make it easy for them to like your Facebook page or follow your Instagram account. Create a subscribe button that can easily be seen and enticing for them to click on. And once you have a potential customer as a subscriber, make sure you are able to deliver. Don’t spam them with sub-par, irrelevant content. Provide them with emails that truly benefit them and appeal to them enough to eventually become a paying customer.

3. Do Some Thorough Customer Research: 

Don’t do yourself the great disservice of under-utilizing or not utilizing at all the tremendous benefit of customer feedback. You might not always like what your customers have to say, but their criticism should always be welcomed. Do enough research to know what customers would like tweaked and plan actionable steps to making those changes realistic. In addition to hearing the criticism of your customers, ask for other insights and opinions on your product, services, branding, and customer relations. When they tell you what you are doing right and what they like the most, you can use those things to enhance your B2B marketing efforts and build stronger, lasting relationships with your customers.

4. Don’t Overlook The Power of Video: 

We touched briefly above on the importance and influence of compelling story-telling through content tools. As effective and relevant as text content is (such as website copy, blogs, and other written materials), video will really give your B2B company an edge. Humans are very visual creatures and respond well to seeing something explained to them. Investing in an “explainer” video is a wise move. Within the video, you can give your website visitors and potential customers a thorough yet basic description of what your product or service is and how it can benefit their lives. Take advantage of this video marketing opportunity by not just highlighting what you and the service or product you provide can do, but also infusing some of your company branding, great background music, engaging narration, B2B marketing, and other creative aspects that can make the video even more appealing.

5. Ditch The “Spray And Pray” Method: 

When trying to appeal to either B2C customers or B2B customers, far too many businesses make the mistake of just “spraying” a marketing strategy over as many potential customers as possible and hoping something will bite. Instead of using this extremely ineffective method that requires inordinate amounts of energy and time and few results, come up with a strategy to target more specifically. Really dig deep on your ideal client and gather as much information as possible about them. Instead of spending thousands or even millions of dollars on a “one-size-fits-all” B2B marketing strategy that doesn’t secure as many customers as you could, focus on hyper-targeting and even coming up with personas for your ideal client. This way it will be easier to identify which people will be more likely to become your B2B clients and discover what methods and tools will need to be used to reach them.

6. Focus on Generating Leads And Managing Leads: 

All the lead generating in the world won’t mean anything if you aren’t able to manage those leads and eventually secure as many as possible as paying customers. Generate leads with methods such as promotional offers, calls-to-action, and lead capture forms on your website and across your social media platforms. Once you have generated your leads, in order to manage them, you’ll have to put in place some more sophisticated measures. You’ll need to gather as much intelligence on your leads as possible. Once this is done, you will want to “score” your leads or determine which leads should be your priority and are worth focusing most of your attention on. After scoring your leads, segment them according to different categories and begin to focus on nurturing your leads. To effectively nurture your leads and convert them into loyal, paying customers, you can’t just send them the occasional spammy email or casually call them. Prove to them that you care about their needs and put in the effort necessary to make them your B2B client. Beyond showing them you want them to be your customer and not a competitor’s, make it a priority to show them how worthwhile your service or product is and why it would be so valuable to them.

7. Prioritize Personal Relationships: 

As stated briefly in the above point, nurturing your leads is such an important part of actually securing them as customers. Once you have a B2B customer, obviously you want to keep them. And to do this, you have to treat your customer as a person and not just a customer. Show your interest in their needs and work with them one-on-one to fulfill their product or service needs. Actively listen to them and always go above and beyond. Make them feel special. Show them they are valued. Adding that personal touch will make it easier to build a strong brand while maintaining valuable relationships with your loyal B2B customers.

Need more tips on effectively marketing to your B2B target audience? Keep reading our other blog posts for some inspiration or get a hold of us today with any tech or B2B marketing needs you have.