B2B: How to improve your brand awareness?

As the web has taken an important place in the daily life of customers, B-to-B companies are obliged to use digital marketing to improve their sales and reach their business objectives. In fact, the recent years have been marked by a significant decrease of direct commercial actions in favor of online actions. In this context, digital marketing is now a real opportunity for B-to-B companies to increase their sales, build customer loyalty and also stand out from the competition.

Why is it important to integrate digital marketing into your B-to-B business?

E-commerce, through omnichannel sales, increases the brand awareness and reach of a company in a significant way. In fact, B-to-B buyers behave like B-to-C buyers and expect the same level of quality in terms of offers, services, reactivity and want to have a smooth buyer experience. In general, they use digital platforms to make purchases either via a website, a mobile application or even via social media channels. In 2019, analysts from CEB, stated that 60% of B-to-B purchases were made without needing to contact the supplier, they were based solely on digital content and therefore did not require the buyer to visit the company’s physical point of sale.

To respond to this change in buyer behavior, B-to-B companies need to adapt and convince their customers without meeting them – and that’s is where digital marketing comes in. B-to-B e-commerce offers new growth opportunities for companies that integrate it into their marketing strategy in order to reach customers who are familiar with online shopping and browsing digital catalogs. Visitors use it to get as much information about products as possible, compare prices, choose delivery options as well as for other features that are offered exclusively via online shopping and that they don’t find when buying in a store. According to Fevad, the Federation of e-commerce and distance selling, online sales in B-to-B continues to evolve considerably.

The B-to-B e-commerce industry alone reached 19% of the total turnover of French companies in 2020, with a record revenue of 150 billion euros. This is why integrating B-to-B e-commerce has become so essential for companies that seek to increase their return on investment and their sales. 

How to you implement a B-to-B marketing strategy to improve your online visibility? 

In order to have an efficient B-to-B digital strategy, it is essential to follow these 7 steps:

1. Make an overview of your market sector and your company, in order to identify its strengths and weaknesses. During this analysis, it is important to be realistic and to take into account your current situation as well as what goals you want to achieve before investing in digital tools. To do so, it is important to answer these key questions:

All these questions will help you to evaluate your current situation and to make the necessary improvements to reach your objectives. It is also a way to know more about your audience and what they are looking for. Don’t hesitate to call on our experts at Eminence to help you to conduct a full audit your website and your online presence.

2. Identify your target audience: Like every marketing strategy, defining your target audience is a crucial step that will impact all your actions afterwards. Understanding your target audience means identifying their socio-demographic characteristics, determining their expectations and their decision-making processes. To do this, you must define your lCP (Ideal Customer Profile) which will enable you to determine which types of prospects are the most profitable for your company, in order to focus your efforts on those with the highest potential. The information gathered on your B-to-B social media platforms is a gold mine of information that can help you determine your ICP by drawing up a socio-demographic profile based on the type of company, sector, size of the company, skills and interests, etc.

Besides defining your ICP, it is also important to determine your buyer personas, which are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer. Personas can be based on customer questionnaires, data collected on social media channels and via your sales team who are in direct contact with your company’s prospects and current customers. They know their behavior and can therefore help you to build these persona profiles.

3. Setting S.M.A.R.T. objectives. This method lists the 5 criteria to take into consideration when setting relevant and achievable B-to-B objectives, in order to increase your chances of success in your digital marketing strategy:

It is really important to be as precise as possible when setting goals. For example, choose to set a specific goal like this: “we aim to reach more than 30,000 visitors on our website in 6 months” rather than a more general objective, like this: “we aim to increase the number of visitors on our website”. Once you have defined your objectives, you can move on to choosing the channels that will help you reach your goals. 

4. Identify the digital channels best suited to your business. To determine how you will communicate online, you must keep in mind the profile of your ideal buyer persona. Taking into consideration their needs, profile and expectations when developing your media plan. Several communication methods exist to improve your B-to-B presence, including: 

B-to-B customer acquisition methods

1.Social media platforms, namely LinkedIn:

With more than 22 million registered users and more than 10 million monthly active members in 2021, LinkedIn is the leading professional social media platform in the world. Among the many interesting features, LinkedIn offers: job search, publication of job offers, training recommendations adapted to each profile and targeted advertising solutions that can help generate business opportunities in the B-to-B sector. Depending on the type of message you wish to convey as well as your needs and your objectives, you can select a different type of ad format to contact your audience and attract relevant prospects. The following ad formats are available on LinkedIn:

2.Use SEO tactics to get on the first page of Google

By using SEO, you can increase your website traffic and generate leads with a high conversion potential. How can you do this? By positioning pages optimized for conversion on strategic queries. This will help you to increase your chances of generating quality B-to-B leads and to stand out from your competitors. To do this, you need to identify the keywords on which you want to position yourself. These keywords must be chosen carefully to ensure that they correspond to the search queries your potential customers are likely to perform. Once you have identified these keywords, you will need to integrate them intelligently into your website, blog posts, case studies and other digital content. It should be noted that, content marketing and SEO are closely related. Other factors must also be taken into account in order to improve your SEO performance such as, the technical performance of the website, mobile compatibility as well as the website’s ergonomics and content quality. Backlinks also play a key role in the SEO of your B-to-B business. These are external links present on other websites and that redirect to your website. Indeed, the more qualitative your content is, the more likely other sites are to quote you and thus offer you backlinks. Search engine optimization is a rather complex field. However, if it is well mastered, it can become a powerful strategy to acquire new customers in the long term. Do not hesitate to contact our SEO experts at Eminence if you need support for your organic referencing strategy. 

3. Use SEA for instant lead generation

Unlike organic referencing, SEA, also known as Search Engine Advertising, allows you to precisely target your audience according to the keywords they are looking for in order to ensure that you generate qualified leads. SEA is based on the principle of Cost Per Click (CPC), which means that you only pay when a user clicks on your ad. This allows you to control of your budget. However, getting one click is not enough to automatically acquire a customer in the B-to-B sector. For your SEA campaign to be successful, the landing page to which your ad is linked must be particularly engaging, in order to give you the highest chance to convert a maximum number of visitors. The advantages of SEA:

Immediate results:  

Thanks to SEA, your website is directly pushed via search engines. The results are immediate, even if you have not yet worked on the optimization of the content. Paid search is ideal to advertise or to launch a new website and quickly generate qualified traffic. This method is the most advantageous because of its simplicity and rapidity. Indeed, you will not have to wait several months to see the first results as it is the case with organic referencing, which can take up to 6 months before you start to see your website ranking improve. However, an in-depth study is necessary before launching a SEA campaign. This will allow you to define the most relevant keywords, ad texts, distribution and bidding strategies to use.

An excellent match for SEO:  

While SEO is a time-consuming process, paid search ads are ideal for launching a campaign quickly. It can be included periodically in your strategy to support your SEO strategy.

Stay in control of your cost at all times: 

Your paid search campaigns can be modified and controlled in real time. For best results, you can analyze your results on a daily or weekly basis and improve your ad copy, keyword, bidding and delivery strategies when necessary.

Use Webinars to create educational and engaging content  

Webinars are ideal for generating leads, they allow you to attract new customers by animating your community. Indeed, it is always interesting to engage with your audience via events and qualitative content. It’s a great way to move your B-to-B prospects through your conversion tunnel. Opting for the webinar as an educational content can be an effective way to improve your brand image. For example, by offering tips and tricks on how to use your products or services, you can build audience loyalty and highlight your positioning as an expert in your industry. A good webinar is engaging and interactive. It encourages people to ask questions about your products and services. This in turn can help you understand how your services are perceived, and draw on people’s ideas and thoughts to improve them. This kind of interaction helps build a relationship based on trust and exchange between the brand and its audience.

How to retain your B-to-B customers? 

Optimize your CRM solution

The interest of a CRM is to centralize the information related to your customers; which is extremely important, especially in the B-to-B industry. It is imperative that your CRM is constantly updated and well organized in order to be efficient in your approach to customer satisfaction. Indeed, a CRM facilitates and streamlines what actions need to be taken by a company in order to manage different requests and offers. Once transactions are concluded, an adapted CRM automatically offers an after-sales service and customer service, as needed. For example, this could include handling complaints, providing information about the correct use of the company’s products. Indeed, satisfied customers who feel taken care of, even after a transaction has been completed, are more likely to return and recommend a company.

Monitor your KPIs

There are many metrics that allow you to gauge where your customer loyalty stands. This analysis is fundamental in order to know when to take action and to assess which steps of the customer journey need to be improved. For example, the NPS (Net Promoter Score) is one an essential KPIs used to evaluate customer satisfaction. It consists of asking your customers a simple question: “From 1 to 10, to what extent would you recommend our products to another company?”.

You can also integrate the following KPIs into your analysis, in order to have more accurate data on your customer loyalty:

Transform your customers into brand ambassadors 

In B2B, a quality relationship with your customers can turn them into “business advocates”. Indeed, a satisfied customer will be more inclined to naturally promote the benefits of the company, especially through word of mouth, which remains the cheapest way to gain new customers. You can strengthen this relationship through a “referral” program, which consists in inviting your best customers to recommend you to other leads. To thank them for introducing you to new leads, you can offer them preferential conditions for example. This technique will help you increase your notoriety and help you to generate more qualified leads. 

Create a loyalty program

A loyalty program in B-to-B is an effective technique to retain customers by giving them a special status. It consists in setting up a reward system according to the services or products you offer. Rewards in B-to-B can take different forms such as: 

How to choose a digital marketing agency for your B-to-B business? 

In the business sector, it is essential to choose a digital marketing agency specialized in B-to-B that has experience working with B-to-B clients specifically. Indeed, converting a company is not comparable to converting an individual; the means, strategy and techniques used are very different. At Eminence, we have been helping companies grow digitally for over 10 years. We help them to expand into their national and international markets. Eminence helps businesses to stand out from their competitors. Thanks to our proven experience and our many successes, B-to-B digital marketing one of Eminence’s key strengths today.