Enhance B2B Digital Sales with These Key Strategies

The digital age has transformed the B2B landscape, especially when it comes to effective communication. As we already know, most B2B tech businesses must continually evolve to account for the changing needs of their customers, as well as keep pace with their competitors. This has become imperative, especially since there's a high risk of losing market share, even if their products and services are high-quality and innovative

This is the reason why B2B tech companies must up their game to know what their customers are up to, what they need, and how they interact - after all, this is the stepping stone to significant opportunities.

Unlike earlier, customer journeys are complex, and B2B journeys are even more since there are multiple touchpoints. 61% of all B2B transactions start online, and 51% of customers turn to social media to do initial research. Today, customers have multiple opportunities, be it online or offline. While personalization of experiences has always been regarded as the domain of B2C businesses, B2B companies have followed suit in the current scenario.

Since the tech buyer has evolved, they expect companies to have a digital presence. The best way is for companies to understand this and adapt to fulfill their needs; this makes the implementation of a digital strategy extremely crucial. In today's competitive business to business (B2B) technology environment, accumulating prospect names and contact information and sending out generic marketing collateral is simply not enough.

Digital marketing strategies for B2B businesses

Here are a few successful strategies that tech companies can adopt to reach the right audience:

An engaging website

Of course, you might have a functional website, but that's not enough. B2B research is generally a much longer process, so there's quite a bit of emotion involved. With changing trends, it is crucial to showcase your expertise to potential and existing clients through your website. Ideally, it should be a great industry resource that engages effectively with clients and provides them with useful, relevant information. It should also provide you with a tool that collects data, including sales leads.

Since the typical B2B sales cycle involves several players, websites serve as easy ways for influencers to share information about a product or service.

Strong SEO

We all the significance of SEO and how it is of utmost importance; without this practice, you can't get any new visitors to your site and grow your business. Besides, it helps search engines find you and takes your rankings higher. SEO enables you to apply the most effective keywords so that search engines can find your site easily!

There are other equally helpful ways - you can create a blog on your website. This not only helps in improving SEO but also positions you as a thought leader in your niche. If you can bring back clients to your website for relevant content, then most of the battle has been won! Sometimes, guest posts and other such similar opportunities can also help - they will link back to your blog and websites.

Video Marketing

In the last few years, video content is an important marketing tool and is increasingly becoming an integral part of the brand strategy. While someone might not have the time to go through a product or company datasheet, almost everyone has the time to watch an entertaining, engaging two or three-minute video about a solution that might interest them. It is important for your videos not just to be entertaining; they must also be useful and impart information. It could be anything from tutorials on how to use a particular solution, product demos, webinars, and best practices. Webinars work well, especially since it requires people to share their contact information. This serves as an excellent tool for marketers to build their customer database and engage with the same people in the future.

Integrating online and offline marketing

It is essential to integrate your online and offline marketing efforts to provide customers with a high-quality experience. While it's great to offer solutions online through your website, social media, or landing pages through print ads, or television, one must also step up efforts to reach them through offline support.

Social media

You might think this can be given a miss for B2B companies, but NO - it is equally critical. It keeps your visitors engaged and also offers value. For B2B, Instagram is a great platform, and Facebook adds value too. One of the best ways to use social media is to leverage your blog content. You can also cross-promote across platforms and up your marketing efforts!

Influencer Marketing

One of the most important marketing strategies today has to be roping in influencers! Business leaders and decision-makers often look to others, especially domain experts, when they want to evaluate new technologies to purchase and implement. That's why technology companies are increasingly partnering with influencers to up their credibility and social media reach.

Amidst the clutter, it is crucial to have a strong influencer strategy that leverages the power of experts with a credible and loyal following within the industry.

Live Event Integration

While influencer marketing and high-value content are essential, so is live event integration. In today's world, there is a greater need for face-to-face interactions. Several tech buyers lay great emphasis on knowing their partners in person.

It builds brand awareness and brings you visibility in case you are a new entrant in the market. If not, it allows you to showcase the unique selling points of your brand and speak about the vision of your company, etc. If you've been around for a while, it helps you generate sales leads face-to-face. Planning is critical, so make sure to reach out to key prospects well in advance to drive attendance to the event (and your booth). Also, it would help if you were equipped to collect contacts, qualify leads, and set up follow-up sales appointments either during or after the event.

It is the best way to drive customer engagement - you can meet and greet customers in a more fun and interesting environment. This will help you to know them on a personal level and later provide requisite solutions.

Besides, live events also help disseminate educational content (even in the form of workshops). This is especially helpful in drawing both current customers and new prospects, especially decision-makers on the technical side. Again, you'll want to collect contact info upfront before any training session and follow up to see what they got out of it and if they're potentially a sales-qualified lead.

Marketing automation and lead nurturing

It is also significant to deploy a process that monitors, tracks, and drives leads through a system developed to address their needs at every point of the buying cycle. A critical part of staying on top of, contacting, and nurturing leads for enterprise tech companies is the employment of a marketing automation tool. It is important for collecting leads, building a marketing pipeline, segmenting contacts, and marketing to them on a consistent (and intelligent) basis.

Existing Customer Remarketing

This is something that most marketers neglect, but it proves to be helpful in increasing revenue through marketing efforts. Leveraging the existing customer base is essential, but systems, processes, and programs must be in place. This way, one can build an infrastructure that facilitates consistent retention, upsell, and cross-sell of additional products, features, and services.

Here's how you can remarket:

1. Customer Portals -If your customers are having great success with your solution, they're probably logging in daily, if not more. That's why proper design and maintenance of your customer portal helps with ongoing marketing efforts.
2. Nurturing Programs - Again, adding new customers to your marketing automation program does not mean you remove old ones. It would be best if you designed separate nurturing programs for existing customers - these can include things like webinars, customer success workshops, and live events in their area.
3. Customer Communities - Building customer forums and communities is another great way to keep current customers engaged with your brand consistently. In general, people engage in communities to disseminate new information about their industry, "talk shop" with their peers, or to collaborate with other professionals. Besides, if you have a new whitepaper or eBook on the cards, you can always use this platform to reach out to your customers.

The bottomline

All these strategies are helpful to engage customers - existing and prospects - but must be deployed in the right manner. Video marketing, deploying influencers, high-value content, live events, and leveraging existing customer base are all crucial tools. The approach must be right, and the results will follow!