With B2B being one of the most lucrative forms of business in this digital age, it makes sense that more and more businesses are trying to get into this market. So, someone new trying to get into this field needs to know the ins and outs of it to make the most of their business. For any business to be successful, it needs to generate leads and put effort into maintaining previous leads and customers.
This is especially more important for a B2B company since lead generation and sustaining them is far more complex and in-depth. Old B2B marketing strategies prior to the digitalization of the market, like cold calls, direct mails and trade shows are not enough to generate meaningful leads.
Let us look at the current B2B market trends and how the customers and market have changed in the present age.
The B2B Market in today’s time:
With the coming of the new digital age, the B2B marketplace has changed significantly. With changing trends, a B2B company faces the following challenges:
- Skeptical buyers: Modern-day buys are very skeptical about sales and marketing pitch. Most buyers tend to do their own independent personal research instead of a sales rep, for the sales rep will always provide a biased opinion that is more favorable towards their own products. Thus, companies that employ social selling, through social media and engage with new prospects tend to perform better than those who do not.
- Peer Recommendations: With social media taking over our lives more and more, anyone can find an opinion about anything online. This has led to prospective customers researching on social media, forums and other channels to go through reviews of the products they plan on buying, before actually buying. More importantly, word of mouth has become a much bigger influencer when it comes to making purchasing decisions.
- Risk Reduction: Customers today want to feel secure and confident about their purchases so that they don’t suffer from post-purchase dissatisfaction. Making the sales process a very time-taking procedure, time in which the customer may find an alternate product or merchant.
Successful B2B Marketing – The CheatCode
Now that we know how the present B2B market operates let us see how we can become successful in a B2B market. To become successful, a B2B company needs to do the following:
Robust Website
Creating a modern and elegant website that clearly represents the brand of the company goes a long way in standing out from the others and makes the business be a potential option to buy from, for the customers during the research process. The design of the website needs to be clean, simple to navigate and should contain professional content that is error-free; the message and branding should be clear and obvious for the clients and must contain a focused call-to-action on the website.
Target Demography
Targeting the right client demographic is also essential. Carefully select the perfect client spectrum that the company can cater to – this helps to narrow down the marketing efforts to the most relevant customer categories. Determining the 5 W’s of the client, i.e. the Who, What, When, Where and Why, helps in identifying the primary customers and helps plan out the most cost-effective ways to market to them.
Social Media Interaction
As we have already discussed, interacting with the customers through social media has a big impact on generating leads. Professional social media channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Medium, etc. can be a great place to search and find potential new business leads. These channels allow professionals to connect with other industry experts and also get in contact with possible clients.
Streamlined B2B Training
Giving proper training and hands-on knowledge of how to use the product to the salesperson is crucial so that they can act as the spokesperson for the brand, offering a very effective marketing strategy. Making the salesperson the spokesperson helps the skeptical buyers to interact with someone who can not only hear their pain-points are needs but also provide them with actual relevant information
The Sales and Marketing Connection
Sales and Marketing teams not working in coordination can cause long term problems for the company. Lack of communication between these two departments can lead to marketing delivering wrong or invalid leads to the sales team. A lack of proper content in the hands of the sales team can also lead to the sales team being unable to send content assets to prospective customers.
The Conclusion:
The B2B market has changed significantly over the years. Companies can no longer simply sit idle and wait for prospects to come to them. They have to take a more active process of engaging with the customers and share relevant material with them that addresses the customers’ needs and pain points. The sales and marketing teams also need to work in close coordination to properly contact leads and close sales as well.
Another effective way to increase the efficiency of a B2B company is to have an integration platform that integrates all the business software applications to reduce manpower and redundancies. For that, InSync brings to you APPSeCONNECT, a smart and robust Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) that seamlessly connects various business applications with each other to help streamline and facilitate the free flow of data across various platforms.
InSync Commerce offers a smart Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) solution which connects multiple applications together and streamlines complex business processes. It also provides integrated B2B eCommerce solutions for platforms like Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, etc. to help organizations delight their business buyers with robust B2B features.
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