Business customers require a unique approach compared to consumers, and B2B marketers must adapt their approach accordingly. For example, the B2B buying cycle can be much longer than consumer buying cycles, and to make matters more complicated, in the B2B buying process the decision to purchase may touch multiple decision makers in an enterprise. This necessitates marketing savvy, creativity and skill.
Using email to improve conversion rates for B2B marketing
Email can be a powerful player in conversion rates and lead generation for B2B marketing. Ideally email marketing can be built into the workflows and behavior segmentation practices of an organization's automation marketing, which will help deliver more targeted communications to leads and reduce the number of quality leads that fall through the cracks.
Define your customer lifecycle and improve marketing weaknesses
Simplify & codify your organization's marketing to sales lifecycle to make it more useable. This includes the entire customer lifecycle--not just your initial marketing and sales period. Remember that the marketing and sales period never ends. Improve retention and build customer happiness by exploring the entire lifecycle and making improvements to the customer experience throughout.
Create great content for B2B marketing
Don't take short-cuts with marketing. Create great content that is memorable, useful, interesting, relevant or entertaining. ...Yes, even entertaining. B2B buyers and prospects will feel more loyal and interested in organizations that have great content. Also, Google rewards websites that create fresh content that is shared and liked by others. Remember to install social sharing tools on your B2B blog. Sometimes content DOES market itself.
Measure the performance of your B2B website
The old slogan "if you build it they will come" is not true. You must build a great website, and you must iterate, iterate, iterate to improve it's relevancy to your prospects, leads and customers. One of the most critical parts of iteration is measurement. Make sure you have great website analytics installed--like Google Analytics or Hubspot. Study your web analytics carefully to find gaps, weaknesses and opportunities that you cannot see with the naked eye. Remember that the longer sales cycles of B2B websites should give you more reason to measure conversion and website performance.
Optimize your ads and keywords to improve brand awareness and lead generation
Sure, web and PPC ads do not impart the exact same trust or traffic as organic search listings, but they should not be neglected. PPC can be a powerful referrer of leads for B2B websites. With careful optimization, planning and the use of analytics to measure the performance of all marketing channels, online advertising can help provide timely leads and is very scalable for an enterprise. The benefits of online advertising for B2B include scalability, timeliness and immediacy, branding, lead generation and can also be great to test run new marketing promotions and concepts.
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