Menu

All posts in B2B Marketing

10 e-commerce marketing strategies for your business

Without a clear e-commerce marketing strategy, organizations could face significant challenges as consumer behaviors change.

E-commerce sales boomed in 2020 and beyond due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, online shopping has continued to grow, as have competitors and changing demands from customers. If organizations invest time and resources into e-commerce marketing strategies, they can help establish, increase and retain their customer bases.

E-commerce marketing strategies involve promotional tactics to drive traffic to an online store. A well-thought-out marketing plan, coupled with an engaging website, can convert visitors into paying customers, help businesses retain them and increase their overall customer lifetime value (CLV). If marketing teams stay up to date on the latest trends, they can help the organization reach and retain new customers.

These 10 e-commerce marketing strategies can help set an organization apart from its competition, strengthen the brand, attract new customers and increase sales over time.

  1. Search engine optimization
    Launching a website is a win for any e-commerce company, but websites aren’t enough for consumers to easily find the brand. To improve visibility, marketing teams must optimize websites for search engines. Positive search engine optimization (SEO) requires marketing teams to continually update websites with rich and relevant content that provides useful information for customers.

An SEO strategy can help organizations ensure their content shows up on search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant queries and deliver positive CX when customers find the information they need. Marketing teams should use SEO keywords and phrases organically within content to alert search engines to the site’s relevance for those queries.

Read more: 10 e-commerce marketing strategies for your business

What B2B marketers must know in the face of a potential recession

Talking about a recession isn’t always enjoyable. But it’s a situation that inevitably requires a shift in strategy and mindset to continue finding success in the face of economic headwinds.

Defined technically as a period of a significant decline in economic activity, a recession (and the looming potential for one) directly affects marketing.

In particular, B2B marketers face a unique challenge in identifying a downturn – with sales cycles expanding beyond 6, 12 or more months into the future and lacking evident shifts. Whereas, B2C and D2C marketers can feel it more quickly when complete verticals go south.

In this article, we’ll unpack how a looming recession impacts B2B marketers and the key factors to consider to successfully navigate this landscape.

What did B2B marketers do last time?
You must know the past to understand your present and future. There have been plenty of recessions – some fairly recently.

In 2007–2009, we experienced the Great Recession in which the mortgage crisis led to the collapse of the housing market bubble. While it may have ended for the U.S. in 2009, the ripple effects were felt in some European countries for years.

Countries defaulted on their national debt and had to be bailed out by the European Union, resulting in those countries enacting austerity measures to repay their debts, according to History.

Hindsight is 20/20. And when it comes to learning from past mistakes, there’s a clear connection to be made between:

Those who increase (or at least maintain) advertising budgets.
And those who cut or stop marketing efforts altogether.
When faced with a potential downturn, brands that committed to advertising and marketing efforts rebounded faster and recovered quicker than those that opted to pull back.

During the 1990-1991 recession, McDonald’s decreased its advertising and promotion budget, while Pizza Hut and Taco Bell did the complete opposite, according to Pathfind.

This allowed Pizza Hut and Taco Bell to increase sales by 61% and 40%, respectively, while McDonald’s saw 28% fewer sales.

What do B2B buyers want now?
COVID-19 is one key element that differentiates this potential recession from the others.

We just experienced a global pandemic that permanently altered the entire spectrum of consumer and business decisions.

As a result, we will need to navigate key shifts in the B2B buyer behavior and landscape.

Read more: What B2B marketers must know in the face of a potential recession

Four Things B2B Marketing Can Learn From B2C

“At the end of the day, it’s all about value delivered to the customer.” That’s how my marketing club meeting ended last month. Today, marketing goes far beyond “the performance of business activities that direct the flow of goods and services from producers to consumers.” That’s how it was described by the American Marketing Association in 1935.

Now, the AMA defines it as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

Through the years, marketing has been divided into B2B and B2C. And there’s a reason for it. We act differently when choosing a software vendor (partner, in fact) for the next five years to support digital transformation projects than we do when choosing sneakers to support our exercise.

Anyhow, there is much more we, as B2B marketers, can learn from B2C to create special bonds with our customers and help them make their business more sustainable and efficient.

Typically B2B services are hard to communicate. There are so many services we provide and industries we serve. This leads to generalization or hard-to-understand concepts and deeply professional words. It creates barriers for customers. The harder it is to understand what we are talking about, the fewer chances we have to make a deal. So, let’s make our language simple. A good litmus test could be an elevator speech to a friend of yours who is not a part of the industry you work in.

A Frictionless Experience
A frictionless and transparent checkout process is the key to success for any consumer business today. Customers want to have full control of the process and be sure of any additional charges that may occur.

Read more: Four Things B2B Marketing Can Learn From B2C

B2B Email Marketing 101

If you’re in the B2B space, you must already understand how important email marketing is, but why isn’t it working out for most marketers?
As email marketers and copywriters, you want to craft emails that people love to read. You can’t create emails for the heck of it, and in case you do, your audience will only learn to treat it as white noise and tune it out.

It’s time to harness the power of email, and this blog post will help you achieve that! We’ll show you how to write compelling emails that inspire your audience to take action. Let’s dive in!

Email Marketing: The Dos and Don’ts

“Most B2B brands have an email marketing strategy, but often get stuck when it comes to writing email copies that stop the readers in their tracks and grab their attention.”

Direct email is a marketer’s biggest blessing. The one-to-one communication it offers gives you a chance to make an impact and form robust relationships with your readers. Emails provide the best ROI for marketers and flexibility and control for the readers. Only the consumers decide when to open and read an email. The first to-do on the list is consent. As a business, ensure you have an opt-in list of subscribers and follow all the data regulation laws such as CCPA, GDPR, CASL, and CAN-SPAM. If your readers wish to unsubscribe, make sure the opt-out process is smooth and easy.

Most consumers check their emails multiple times a day. You can create email marketing campaigns to educate, entertain, and inform your audience. But most importantly, to build rapport and make them trust your brand even before your ads or salespeople reach out to them. Personalization is the key. Your customers don’t want to feel they’re just another name on your list. They want to feel it’s personal. They want to feel like you’re directly talking to them.

Email marketing’s goal is to help your customers get to know your brand better and take the intended action. Before you start writing your email, you may want to ask yourself why you want to create this email in the first place. It helps you set an intention for your email marketing practice and design an inviting subject line. If you do not write a good subject line, most people would not even bother to open the email, and all the efforts you put in to create the email body go in vain. Make sure the subject line is clear and specific.
Email marketing has the potential to grow your business rapidly, no matter in which industry or niche you operate. Segment your email lists as per the audience categories and preferences. You shouldn’t be sending the same email to everyone. Marketing only works when you send the right message to the right audience at the right time. Communicate with your audience consistently- time is of the essence here! We recommend once a week for most B2B brands.
Make your emails readable- write short sentences and give enough whitespace; so it doesn’t look tedious to read to your customers. One-sentence email paragraphs make your emails scannable and prompt you to be clear and concise. Simplicity is the key!
In the B2B world, avoid sending emails early in the morning. When selecting days in the week, go for Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday since Mondays are busy with meetings and calls, and on Fridays, people often wrap up work early. Try to think about your reader’s schedule and time your emails accordingly.

In the end!
Emails shouldn’t be about you. They have to be about your customers because your readers aren’t interested in how great you think your business is- they want to know what you can do for them. Be bold and straightforward with your emails but don’t come off as too salesy or aggressive. Subtle marketing is the way to go!

Read more: B2B Email Marketing 101

How And Why To Adapt Your B2B Sales Strategy For Future Success

We’re in the midst of a significant B2B sales and marketing revolution. The pandemic forced companies to move from traditional sales to a more hybrid experience. Gone are the days of pitch decks in a conference room and “inside” sales—the future of B2B includes more channels, more convenience, and a more personalized experience for customers. Enterprise companies need to invest in this shift if they want to see success in the future.

Companies that refuse to evolve with the changing landscape will see a decrease in revenue as they compete against competitors adopting new strategies. In McKinsey’s latest B2B Pulse survey, “more than 90 percent of enterprises plan to sustain the changes made to their sales force structure over the past year.”

Here are seven ways to update and adapt your sales strategy to be more effective and capture future sales.

  1. Solve your customers’ problems anytime, anywhere.

Your customers want a complete solution. Companies need to enable touchpoints in multiple channels to ensure you’re serving customers when and where they want to buy. An omnichannel presence is critical. And a true omnichannel experience, which looks very different from five years ago, is now at least a 10-channel strategy. McKinsey data shows that “customers want—and expect—to engage seamlessly across ten or more. And the businesses that have been quick to meet that demand have profited: 72 percent of B2B companies that sell via seven or more channels grew their market share.”

More and more B2B customers are happy learning and buying through online and digital channels, making the traditional, in-person sales pitch less necessary.

  1. Work higher in the funnel.

At any given time, about 95% of B2B buyers aren’t in the market for your product. This simple yet monumental fact changes the B2B advertising and marketing game quite a bit. It means you need to spend advertising dollars on people who aren’t going to buy right now, but need to be familiar with your brand or product when they are in the market.

The most effective way to do this is focusing messaging and advertising dollars on creating brand-positive memories for your customers so when the time comes to purchase, your company is top of mind. As LinkedIn’s B2B Business Institute accurately captures, “Advertising impressions, accumulated over time, affect our memories. So, your advertising has to be designed to create distinct impressions about your brand in people’s minds — to be activated later.”

  1. Constantly invest in your brand awareness.

Invest at least 50% of your advertising dollars in awareness. With research showing that only 16% of B2B marketers rank building brand awareness as a major marketing objective, it appears most companies, particularly large ones, are taking their awareness for granted.

Small companies see the immediate value in spending money to increase brand visibility, but bigger, more established brands sometimes skip it. What keeps the brands with the most awareness top of mind is their ongoing and deliberate dedication to weaving their brand into their customer’s thoughts and lifestyles. Never skip or skimp on your brand awareness budget.

  1. Base every conversation on value.

Regularly remind your customers—both current and future—about the value you bring to the relationship. Provide end-to-end insights about your business and industry. Suggesting ways to help your customers navigate regulatory change or demonstrating how potential customers measure up in their industry are just a couple of ways you can help increase your value to customers.

Read more: How—And Why—To Adapt Your B2B Sales Strategy For Future Success

The role of B2B marketing in sales enablement

The digital world and the proliferation of channels have created an opportunity for PR to perform more cohesively across the organisation. From internal communications, reputation management, stakeholder engagement and sales enablement, the demand for collaboration and creativity across all business outputs is only increasing.

As a result, we’re seeing a real coming of age for B2B PR. More than ever, clients want to know how this can benefit the sales function.

B2B sales don’t come overnight
It’s important to acknowledge the B2B buying process when putting together a communications strategy. According to research by Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, only 5% of B2B buyers are in-market to buy right now. That means 95% of buyers are out of market and won’t buy for months or maybe even years. The chances are they’ve already got what you are selling, so you can’t make them go in-market at will.

It therefore makes no sense to direct all your marketing budget to generating leads for the 5% of customers that are ready to buy today. Instead, make it your purpose to more effectively influence the 95% of potential future customers who will generate future cash flow.

This is where B2B communications strategy comes in. Because success in the form of sales rarely happens overnight, there is more of a requirement to think long-term. How can you do this?

1 Go where your target audience is
The digital landscape provides more platforms and channels for brands to be visible across than ever before. That responsibility can feel overwhelming at times and as the saying goes, companies are now ‘needing to do more with less’. Successful B2B PR strategies rely on a focused approach that starts with understanding where your target audience most commonly resides. This will allow you to direct more of the marketing budget to the channels that are going to be most valuable to the organisation.

2 Stand out for the right reasons
To effectively target people that aren’t actively in the market now, brand awareness is super important if they are to remember you when they are in the market. This is less about timely press releases to announce your latest product updates and more about delivering a compelling message that resonates with your audience – and doing so on a consistent basis.

Therefore, it’s not just a case of being known, your ‘why’ needs to be heard louder than ever before, especially if you operate in a crowded marketplace. Your ‘why’ is what sets you apart from the competition.

Become a thought leader on the topics that reflect your ‘why’, provide your perspective and be an authoritative voice on the issues that matter to your target audience with a consistent and targeted content marketing strategy.

3 Earn third-party validation
This is a key component for building brand awareness and trust. It can take the form of a product reviews campaign or a case study approach. Letting a third party do all the talking for you provides credibility.

This strategy is so effective for building trust that Google is also getting in on the act. It now puts the focus on useful and relevant content from third parties rather than from brands themselves. As a result, brands are finding that news articles appear top in search results rather than their own website content. This further emphasises the importance of a content marketing strategy.

4 Reflect your audience’s vision
To be relevant today, an organisation needs to demonstrate that it understands – and acts upon – the same issues and concerns as its audience.

The greatest example of this is the rise of environmental, social and governance (ESG) communications in the B2B sector, a broadening of the focus on the environment against the backdrop of the social justice movement. It centres on the belief that organisations can no longer ignore their own accountability and requires total transparency in delivering on their ESG values and vision.

As a result, ESG is increasingly becoming the centre of an organisation’s communications. Failure to be transparent and communicate creates an assumption that the organisation is failing to act at all; this can result in lost leads.

Read more: The role of B2B marketing in sales enablement

Why Companies Turn To Digital Marketing To Survive COVID-19

In the coming months, businesses are going to become more reliant than ever on their digital strategy. Without wanting to sound too alarmist, in many cases it will be the deciding factor in whether they make it through the tough times ahead.

The unprecedented, almost-total disappearance of all channels related to live events and conferences, and the increasing barriers on face-to-face business, pose an enormous challenge. Key to resilience is the development of ongoing contingencies to mitigate against this loss.

B2B companies in particular rely on the annual circuit of trade shows and exhibitions to network and build customer relations. In industries that are not digital-native, they may also be less sophisticated in their digital growth and customer relations strategies. For smaller businesses especially, used to getting new customers through word-of-mouth referrals or on the strength of a hard-won reputation, their loss is coming as a shock.

Larger companies are also now finding themselves in the position of having potentially lost millions through cancelled events. They won’t claw back the hours of time and expense spent on preparations for this year, but insurance and flexible cancellation policies will leave them with marketing budget to reassign. Digital is likely to be the clear winner here, and companies – including ones that may not so much as had a Facebook page before – will need to move into social marketing, content marketing, SEO and influencer-led campaigns.

Of course, this means there’s opportunities out there for the taking, if you are a B2B supplier in an industry that has been slow to adapt to digital marketing. A key factor in resilience is adaptability. If it’s standard in your industry to go out and meet new customers face-to-face before you do business, adapting may mean opening new channels over web or social media platforms where introductions can be made and relationships fostered. In the coming months, your prospective clients are going to be less open to the idea of letting you walk through the door and shake their hand – and no-one really has any idea how long this will last and whether this will lead to longer-term change.

As Scott Jones, CEO of 123 Internet Group, told me “We are in uncertain times, but with the increase of remote working and a collaborative approach, companies are turning to digital channels and embracing the transformation. We have seen a real spike during the last few weeks from companies wishing to create or update websites, launch new e-commerce channels and create social media campaigns focused on home-workers and a real focus on using influencers and SEO to reach new audiences.”

Being confined to the office – or even the home – rather than on the road on sales visits or at events, means marketers have more time to develop digital strategies. This means researching where your customers can be found online, and how different approaches and tactics might impact your success. If your organization previously put token efforts into digital channels – because like a lot of other businesses, you had built your networks offline and that had always seemed to work – now is the time to revisit them. That could be as simple as giving your website and social pages a refresh, or a more innovative approach.

Ratnesh Singh, head of global business at events technology agency Buzznation told me that he found out quickly that clients did not want to lose the networking opportunities provided by the conference circuit. On top of this, they are looking for new ways to spend their remaining marketing budgets. He said, “With our corporate clients, events often consume 50 to 60 per cent of their marketing budgets. They still want to spend that money and they are open to trying something new.

“There’s a window of opportunity here – when things are back to normal budgets will be going back into live events and that’s what they will be spending their time on.

“But if they see the benefits and opportunities that digital channels can offer, this will become part of their long-term marketing contingency plans.”

As well as offering immersive 3D virtual events, Buzznation has also found that businesses wanting to become more sophisticated in their use of live social platforms. Singh said “Clients are turning to Facebook or LinkedIn Live. Often these are platforms they have dabbled with in the past but never fully integrated into their marketing strategy. Now they see value in partnering with companies like us that know how to help them make the most of these channels, to achieve better production values and more targeted campaigns.”

It’s certainly true that the coming weeks, or months – or however long this situation lasts – will be a challenging time for any company that isn’t ready to think about how they will replace the opportunities that have been lost.

As long as businesses approach the shift to digital marketing strategically, there’s no reason why it should just serve as an emergency fill-in, but could carry on providing long-term value when the world eventually gets back to normal. And of course, it would make companies more resilient to deal with any future pandemics.

The Influencer Marketing Statistics You Need to Know [Infographic]

As influencer marketing evolves, it seems that there’s a new survey or report released every other week, highlighting the various best practices to locate, reach out and connect with relevant digital identities – and why you need to do so.

It can be hard to keep up, so with this infographic, the Vamp team sought to collect all the most significant findings of the year so far.

The stats here underline just how much growth there’s been in influencer marketing – highlighted by a 1500% increase in searches for ‘influencer marketing’ over the past three years. And it’s little wonder that people want to learn more, when the process has proved its worth so competently. Some 87% of shoppers admit that they’ve been prompted to make a purchase by an influencer, and almost the same amount of marketers believe it’s an effective marketing solution (84%).

Looking to get a better handle on the rise of influencer marketing, and why it’s so effective? Check out the graphic below.

Read more: The Influencer Marketing Statistics You Need to Know [Infographic]

 

The Real Truth About B2B Marketing And The Social Media Platforms You Need

I’ve read a few articles about social media and B2B Marketing lately that have blown my mind. You won’t believe number three…OK, there is no number three. And this is not a listicle. However, I read an article recently that got me thinking, and there are a few things that need to be said about it’s validity. But in answer to your question about which platform is the best one for B2B marketing? It depends.

B2B social media platformsIt is unsatisfying, I know — but there is certainly no shortage of opinions on the matter. For example, that article I mentioned was called Facebook ranks ahead of Twitter and LinkedIn for B2B decision makers, and the title alone was enough to surprise me. It details the results of a study by United Kingdom PR agency Hotwire called The Changing Face of Influence, and there is a lot of interesting information there. The statistic that hooked me? “…when asked which one channel they’d turn to for information on a purchasing decision, 1 in 4 (24%) decision makers said Facebook would be their social channel of choice.”

Why Facebook over Twitter and LinkedIn, you may ask? “Because we use it more – our study reveals the average decision maker uses Facebook 18 days a month, compared to 13 for LinkedIn. Decision makers look to the channels they’re using as part of their daily routine – we don’t want to check whole new sources of information if we don’t have to.”

Read more: The Real Truth About B2B Marketing And The Social Media Platforms You Need

How Data Analytics is Transforming B2B Marketing

How data analytics is transforming B2B marketing.

Consumer marketing might have grabbed many of the headlines around data-driven marketing, but B2B marketing is also going through a revolution thanks to digital change with all the hype that has accompanied the digitisation of consumer marketing, it is easy to forget that another important field of marketing has been going through its own digital revolution.

While it might not boast the same massive data sets as those wielded by consumer marketers, business-to-business marketing (B2B) has been making steady strides in improving how it captures and utilises data to fine-tune the sales process.

Read more… 

TotalWeb Partners Hear about our latest news and updates before anyone else.
Dismiss
Allow Notifications