Are you experiencing lower than usual revenue levels? Have you been sifting through your key performance indicators, trying to figure out where effort is being wasted and which processes aren’t giving you the return on investment that you need to see for sustainable growth?
One thing that small to medium-sized businesses often overlook, especially during their early years, is marketing. When it’s a daily battle just to establish efficient processes, hire top notch people, and keep product (or services) moving out the door to your customers, it can often seem like marketing is an expense you just can’t afford. If you’re a B2B business, however, we’d argue that you can’t afford NOT to invest in marketing. Doing so is often the difference between a company that flourishes and a company that’s struggling with a lack of working capital.
Here at The Commercial Finance Group in Los Angeles, we’ve helped hundreds of businesses, all around the country, find solutions to financial problems that threatened to close their doors forever. Our asset-based lending and other custom financial solutions have provided an alternative for companies that were told they were “unbankable” and thought they had nowhere else to turn.
Investing in high quality marketing strategies early on in your B2B business can help prevent things from getting to this point, however. To assist you in your quest for steady, sustainable growth, we’ve put together a few of the marketing strategies that experts say have the most reliable, positive impact for those involved with B2B commerce.
How Does B2B Marketing Differ From B2C Marketing?
When most people hear the word “marketing” they envision the usual suspects: tv and radio commercials, direct mail tactics, email campaigns, and perhaps even community outreach. But what about when your audience is actually other business owners instead of individual consumers? B2B marketing must be executed differently than B2C in order to generate trust, engagement, and ultimately SALES.
“B2B marketing strategies are just what they sound like – specific tactics that businesses use to target and reach other businesses. Like with any kind of marketing, you want to make sure you are speaking to an appropriate audience with the right tone and voice. Thus, the tactics you use to reach other businesses are going to be a little different than those you would use to reach consumers,” explains OZContent.com.
Though they may employ the same tactics, B2B marketing strategy differs from B2C in execution. For example, while B2C marketing content may be very simplistic, written in words that any consumer could understand, B2B marketing employes technical language and “jargon” that business owners will understand (and be impressed by). B2B marketing collateral will also go into greater detail, be lengthier, and facilitate a much longer sales funnel than B2C.
Proven B2B Marketing Strategies
Marketing Automation – Have you ever wished that you could just set your company on auto-pilot, and that bills would get paid, employees would be reviewed, and customers would be handled–all without you having to really think about it? While “total business automation” has yet to be invented, marketing automation has already become a reality.
“Marketing automation can combine multiple types of data, such as pages visited, items downloaded, form submissions, etc. and assign scores to various leads. This is incredibly helpful to B2B marketers because it not only automates tedious processes, it allows you to offer thoughtful, personalized messages to potential customers based on exactly where they are in the funnel,” continues OZContent.
Check out: Marketing automation tools like MailChimp, Unbounce, and Zapier
Explainer Videos – If you’re not using video as part of your marketing strategy, you should know that your competitors are, and are likely stealing sales that could have been yours as a result. “Seventy-two percent of B2B buyers and researchers are watching videos to help them make their buying decisions. And not just a few snippets and clips of video here and there: nearly half of them watch at least 30 minutes of content, according to Google research” cited by Vidyard.
Check out: Video creation/editing tools for marketing like Nutshell, Magisto, and Animoto
CRM Tools – If you don’t know what this acronym stands for, then it’s a fair bet you’re not using this proven B2B marketing strategy. CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management” and in today’s world of tweeting, posting, sharing, constant reviewing across multiple platforms, it’s an absolutely vital way of managing and analyzing customer interactions with your brand and products.
Check out: CRM tools like Pipedrive, Insightly, Freshsales, and ProsperWorks CRM
SEO – While paid digital advertising strategies produce fast and often very satisfying results, it’s important to balance them out with long-term, organic strategies that will help you show up higher in the search results for a multitude of search terms. SEO content, especially when it’s of a longer length and interactive, has been shown to produce highly desirable results for B2B commerce businesses.
Check out: SEO resources like Moz Blog, Search Engine Land, and firms that can provide SEO services like Marketing360
Social Media – In addition to being increasingly mobile oriented, B2B marketers are learning that their customers are also very social, meaning active on social media. In fact, “Social media is the number one content marketing tactic used by B2B marketers as measured by the 2014 B2B Content Marketing Trends-North America: Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs study.” This includes Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube (for those videos you’re going to be creating, right?) and even Snapchat for reaching, engaging, and ultimately converting your target customer.
Check out: Social media marketing tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, TweetDeck, and Sprout Social
Marketing Tactics Taking Too Long To Work? Asset-Based Lending Is The Solution
If you haven’t yet started a marketing strategy for your B2B enterprise, we hope this list has give you some things to think about and maybe even a starting point. If you’re already in a sticky situation, lacking the working capital you need to grow as well as the ability to qualify for commercial loans, The Commercial Finance Group in Los Angeles can help. Contact us to learn more about asset-based lending or fill out our online application to get started today.
