ith the rise of the internet, social media, and search engines, the world of B2B is constantly evolving. The digital revolution has encouraged more and more businesses to enter the B2B market. Because of this change and growth, a stand-out B2B promotional strategy is vital to differentiate from your competitors.
We've put together these four key ingredients that should be part of any successful B2B promotions strategy.
Develop a Customer-Focussed Strategy
Far too often B2B business owners, marketers, and executives fall into the trap of devising their promotional strategy based on what their competitors are doing. While it's essential to keep tabs on your competitors, they should not be the sole basis of your strategy. Instead, your strategy should revolve around the customer. Think about your sales process through the eyes of your ideal prospect. Go beyond demographic data - dig into the psyche of the decision-makers who will be directly interacting with each stage of your promotional process. It's vital to understand how they make their decisions, and the factors they weigh up before they decide to make a purchase.Start your new sales process in this way, and you'll be operating from a much stronger foundation.
Create a “Walled Garden” of Top-Tier Content
We often see B2B businesses find success by creating valuable content for potential prospects. However, far too often, we find that businesses aren't able to capitalise on this content as an asset. You can't afford to let that happen in today's competitive business environment.
Content marketing is a significant component of B2B promotion in the modern era. In fact, creating compelling, top-tier content for your prospects is one of the best ways to generate leads.
High quality gated content is one effective way to leverage content marketing material as an asset. These assets can be reused and reconfigured to fit any part of your sales or marketing process. It's important to remember, though, the importance of creating free content that customers would otherwise happily pay a premium for. It's even better if this free content is similar to what your competitors are selling at a premium.
You do not want these lead generation pieces to feel low value or unimportant. You won't be able to move the needle of your B2B prospects with that approach.
Leverage Multi-Step and Multi-Channel Marketing Efforts
Another core component of the ultimate B2B promotion guide has to be a move away from “one-off” advertising and marketing campaigns or sales approaches to multi-step and multi-channel approaches.
Today's B2B customers are more sceptical than ever before, and less willing to make purchasing decisions based off of a single advertisement from or interaction with a company. The internet has left us all inundated with more marketing messages and advertising than ever before. One study suggests that the average person is inundated with more than 3000 individual advertisements every day. Because of this deluge, the average consumer has learned to tune out anything that isn't highly relevant to our interests.
Repetition, combined with targeted multi-step marketing efforts, is the key to getting through this natural B2B sales resistance.
Multi-step marketing campaigns where you stretch out the sales process are a fantastic approach to capture customers you wouldn't have connected with before. On top of that, multi-channel marketing – moving prospects from one medium to another throughout these multi-step marketing campaigns and sales funnels – has a higher conversion rate.
Use Targeted Advertising
The last B2B promotions tactic we want to highlight is the use of targeted advertising. Successful marketers create targeted advertising campaigns to ensure they reach only their ideal prospects.
Targeted advertising is particularly effective in the digital space, especially on social media. Many B2B businesses try to cast too wide a net, looking to capture as many leads as possible without considering their quality. It isn't hard to figure out why these kinds of campaigns aren't as successful.
Your marketing messages should be so focussed on your ideal prospect that they discourage non-prospects as much as they attract those you'd like to do business with. Leverage this tactic (and others we have highlighted throughout this article) and your B2B promotions strategy will set you on the road to success.
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