The digital marketing landscape provides leveled opportunities for businesses to market their wares in front of potential customers and win them over.
You don’t need a hefty budget to build awareness, pull in leads or drive up sales—just the right digital marketing strategies. Our handy guide explores five tactics you can follow to increase B2B Sales.
1. Work with Data
By 2025, up to 60 percent of B2B sales will transition to data-driven selling. I didn’t come up with that stat, a report by Gartner did.
“Spray and pray” methods are far too unreliable for the cutthroat environment that is today’s market. Businesses no longer want to waste resources reaching masses who don’t need their products/services.
What they need is precision targeting.
They want to channel their efforts and resources into tactics that pay off and leveraging internal and third-party data can offer that.
Working with data goes beyond collecting a bunch of disjointed data. It’s about connecting the dots and analyzing the information to harness insights that will drive your campaigns.
How do you do this?
- Get all stakeholders on board. From top executives to customer-facing teams and back-end staff, all members must understand the importance of making data-backed decisions. Come up with clear projections that show how data-driven sales may help generate higher revenues.
- Collect high-quality data. Inaccurate data is about your worst nightmare and may lead to revenue loss rather than gain. Companies merge, diversify, change locations, and even close down. Manage data quality by investing in data analysis software or working with a data provider.
- Integrate your tech stack. Invest in a tech stack that integrates with each other painlessly. If the tech can’t “talk to each other” you’ll have trouble sharing data across platforms and may even lose track of critical information.
- Analyze and apply data. If you don’t know how to read it, data will just be a bunch of numbers. Figure out what needs to be measured, how you want it presented so it makes sense to users, analyze, and implement.
2. Keep Customers Happy
According to McKinsey & Company, businesses that transform their processes to make customer experiences better, enjoy a 10 to 15 percent revenue growth.
Such experiences should start at the initial point of contact, during the purchase, and long after the sale has been completed.
Happy customers appreciate your brand. They trust in the products/services you offer and believe your organization will support them as they work on their goals. If you thrill them, they will come back for more and possibly refer others.
Here are tactics to help keep customers happy:
- Choose the right customers. Even as customers self-research business, the onus of verifying whether they are a good fit falls on you. Will your solutions work for their business? Can they afford your solutions? Can you adequately and sufficiently meet their needs?
- Don’t just sell, seek to educate. Teams experience tremendous pressure to generate sales and they, in turn, push prospects into buying. Buyers want to learn about your offers before committing. Be a sales advisor—ask about their needs, address their questions, and expound on their options.
- Follow up after the deal is complete. It takes effort to build relationships with customers. Don’t let it fall away once the sale is completed. Check in two to three weeks after purchase, to see how things are going.
3. Maximize Landing Pages
Landing pages are great for both lead generation and driving conversions.
As visitors come to your website through ads, social platforms, or email campaigns, they land on a page that tells them what to do next.
Here are some ways to leverage landing pages for sales:
- Let every campaign have its own landing page. When a person clicks on an ad, sending them to your home page will probably confuse them and result in page abandonment. Design landing pages around specific offers to help drive action.Design landing pages around specific offers to help drive action. And if you promote your campaign through email, do a DMARC report to prevent your domain from fishing.
- Emphasize your value proposition. A landing page is a strategic opportunity to differentiate your brand and offerings from the competition. Emphasize the outstanding benefits with factual observations e.g. “grow your revenues 3X faster”
- Validate your solutions with testimonials or awards. Can brands trust you? Positive reviews, testimonials, or awards say your business is reliable and buyers can depend on you to deliver quality. Add them to your landing pages.
4. Make Cold Calls
Sales wins start with conversations. What is it about these conversations that influence the prospect’s purchase decision?
According to a study by RAIN Group, up to 96 percent of buyers indicated that sellers who focused on the value they could offer impacted buying decisions.
If you can spell out the value your solutions can add to a prospect’s business, to help them thrive, they will listen. That conversation starts with a cold call.
Best practices include:
- Research. Use your buyer personas and marketing intelligence to identify brands in your target market that need your solutions. Zero in on who they are, their motivations, challenges, and how effectively your solutions can work for them.
- Know your offering. You’ll need to if you want to appeal to the different stakeholders in a company. The technical aspects of your solutions will probably appeal to low-level contacts while those in finance or C suite will appreciate info on how these solutions will affect their bottom line.
- Prepare for objections. Most objections are actually ‘gray’ areas where a prospect has little or misguided information. Round up common objections, answer them as factually as possible and keep them handy for quick reference.
5. Video Marketing
According to a study by Wyzowl, 78 percent of the interviewees revealed that watching a video convinced them to make purchases or download software or apps.
Video is a versatile tool that marketers engage to meet a wide range of functions including lead generation, product awareness, answering questions, and driving sales.
Here are top video formats for increasing sales:
- Product demos. These demos introduce products/services to audiences and demonstrate how they work. They are perfect for showcasing your competitive advantage.
- Customer testimonials. Testimonial videos validate your solutions and prove you’re worth your salt. They showcase the experiences past users had while using your products/services.
- Influential interviews. Run interviews with industry experts and influencers where they talk about their experiences, standard industry practices, and trends. Structure the interviews to provide information while subtly linking to the solution your company provides.