Businesses today are working overtime to tap into new markets, innovate solutions that will keep them competitive, and ward off competitors.
They understand that a sizable market share won’t appear magically and employ solid digital marketing strategies to support their efforts and generate positive outcomes.
If you want to keep your business afloat and thriving, you’ll need to join the winning team.
The team that’s leveraging smart strategies to strengthen its reputation, showcase leadership and expertise, and build trusting relationships with potential customers. Here are several options worth considering.
1. Tell Your Brand Story
We like to associate B2B purchases with rationale, logic, and facts. To a great extent, this is so, since buyers need to justify the acquisition, especially when a significant amount of money is involved.
However, Think with Google research revealed something interesting. B2B buyers have a considerable emotional connection to their vendors than consumers. With sales cycles taking a longer time, vendors and buyers work together to customize solutions and, in that time, emotional forces play out.
Brand storytelling contributes to positive outcomes by encompassing feelings among the facts. The kind of feelings that inspire emotional reactions to get your customers to act.
Top tips for putting together your brand story include:
- Show, don’t tell. Bring your solutions to life using specific success stories about your customers that show prospects why they need them. Use compelling narratives, behind-the-scenes shots, customer testimonials, statistics, and revenue numbers to tell your story.
- Use employee-curated stories to humanize your brand. In-depth employee profiles help build relatability with customers in addition to creating transparency and authenticity. It can also serve to showcase your company’s culture.
- Align your brand story with customer goals. You’re already familiar with the challenges your customers face. Make your customers your focal point by creating a story that revolves around their objections and goals.
2. Create B2B Videos
Did you know that over 67 percent of marketers are generating videos on a weekly or monthly basis?
What does that tell you?
Video has moved beyond entertainment to become a vital tool for breaking barriers and biases within buying committees, driving brand awareness, and encouraging sales. It’s perfect for impatient audiences who skim through text-heavy content to find value.
Consider the following as you formulate your video strategy:
- Find your target niche. People are creating videos all around—identifying specific areas where your target customers struggle allows you to know where to focus. You can then conduct in-depth research and create video content that will entice and help them find success.
- Aim to educate. Leverage your expertise to offer genuine reviews of your prospects’ current solutions, make recommendation videos, or put together several explainer videos. It will help attract new clients, retarget cold leads, and even get you buy-in from the purchasing committee.
- User customer testimonials to strengthen brand credibility. Testimonials are pretty much your current customers talking to prospective customers and telling them that your solutions are worth it. They humanize your marketing collateral and inject relatability into it.
3. Make Cold Calls
As long as there are businesses under the sun, cold calling will have its place.
This direct approach is devoid of illusions, allowing reps and prospects to have real conversations and gauge each other’s motivations.
For the sales rep, it’s a fine opportunity to understand your target market, learn their drivers, and position themselves as useful potential partners.
How do the experts do it?
- Get your timing right. Research shows that late afternoons are the best times to engage decision-makers. Mornings are busy and they might not be receptive to cold calls. Things begin to quiet down in the late afternoon and they may have time to talk without much distraction.
- Master your solutions. Know the ins and outs of your solutions including the alternatives available. Study your prospect’s industry and familiarize yourself with typical phrases to build the “I’m an insider” perception.
- Avoid over-relying on scripts. Calling scripts are super important for guiding the conversation and keeping key points, statistics, and intelligent questions on hand. We recommend practicing, internalizing so you speak naturally and inject some personality too.
- Learn to mirror your prospect. Make yourself relatable by mirroring your prospect. Practice adopting your prospect’s speech patterns, attitude, and tone. It helps increase familiarity and the likelihood of securing your goal.
4. Go for OmniChannel Marketing
This strategy thinks holistically about customer experiences and interactions. It focuses on being relevant, available, and responsive in the places your audiences expect to find you.
Omni-channel works towards ensuring all touchpoints interconnect to minimize redundant (not to mention annoying) back-and-forth communication between your team and customers.
Best practices include:
- Understanding customer preferences. Analyze data to know how prospects and customers prefer communicating with you. How do they contact you—do they prefer LinkedIn interactions, chatbots, website forms, or customer-initiated communications?
- Determine the top channels. While you want to be where your consumers are, being everywhere isn’t very practical. So, determine the top channels to use for targeted marketing campaigns. Check that your campaigns align with the channel’s conditions and functionality.
- Invest in appropriate omnichannel tech. The idea here is to build a seamless buying experience irrespective of the channel they use. Identify tech that properly analyzes and stores valuable information about the customer. This will help your team pick up conversations with them and guide them on their path to buying.
5. Showcase Your Differentiator
What characteristics give your brand a perceived advantage over the competition?
These characteristics must be true. They need to matter to prospective clients and you must be able to prove them.
How can you build differentiating factors?
- Offer superior services. Up to 86 percent of buyers will pay more for great customer experiences. That tells you something. So go on and find areas where your processes or products/services need improvement and work on them to improve customer satisfaction.
- Focus on solving specific business challenges. What nature of business challenges can you solve? Are these challenges easily recognizable and require specialized skills to solve? Ask yourself why the customer should invest money in your solutions.
- What can you do that key competitors aren’t doing? Research how your competitors work. List your similarities and differences, check how they advertise their brands, what they highlight, and what they ignore. Find areas you can capitalize on to strengthen your offerings.
