Every year more B2B companies invest in building an eCommerce. With an online store, your business customers have an always up-to-date online catalog where they can buy whenever they want, quickly and conveniently. If you want to build an online store for your B2B company, TLG Commerce can help.
In B2C (Business to Consumer) companies, customers are the end consumers of the product or service, so marketing strategies aim to win them over through the media they consume (social media, Google ads, press, TV, etc.) and messages conveying the benefits or feelings these products bring. B2B companies (Business to Business), on the other hand, are suppliers, wholesalers or distributors, and need to win over other companies that will sell to the end consumer.
B2B online marketing strategies
Although the buyers in B2B are other companies, we mustn’t forget these companies are made up of people. These people also use social media, search on search engines and see ads across different media. The key is to choose the right media and segment correctly. The TLG Commerce eMarketing department recommends the best digital marketing strategies to boost your B2B eCommerce:
Good web design and structure
An online store is your calling card for customers, and in B2B, for businesses. With a web design in line with current trends and well-explained, well-structured information, we’ll project the image of a serious, trustworthy company. Don’t be afraid to use highly technical language: business customers understand it and know what they’re looking for.
This step is key to success and sales because, however much traffic and leads the other strategies bring to our eCommerce, if our site makes them distrustful, they won’t buy. The corporate branding we convey will directly affect our customers’ final decisions.
Quality content marketing
Following on from the previous point, we highlight content marketing as one of the main B2B branding strategies. If we offer content that interests businesses, we’ll attract more quality traffic. To do so, we need to pay special attention to the information in:
– Category and product pages (text and images) of our eCommerce. Every section of the online store must contain the necessary product information. Companies’ buying processes and decisions are slower and less impulsive than those of end consumers, so we need to keep them well informed.
– Corporate blog with weekly posts (at least 1 article a week). The blog should feature content aimed at the businesses that buy from us (not only end consumers). Some of these articles could cover marketing tips for businesses, technical product explanations so they can distribute or use them, etc. You can publish content in different formats: posts, infographics, videos, webinars or SlideShare presentations, among many others. The more variety, the better!
Besides attracting an audience interested in our products, content marketing will also improve the eCommerce’s search engine rankings (SEO).
Email marketing
According to an Ascend2 survey of industry professionals, Email Marketing is one of the most effective B2B marketing strategies, along with content marketing.
Email Marketing is a communication channel with customers or prospects that lets you personalize messages to tell them about offers, new products or any other content. This generates engagement, improves branding and, as a result, drives more sales in the medium term. Note that the content must ALWAYS be high quality; otherwise the strategy can even harm the brand.
With this technique you can also measure results and calculate ROI to know whether sending emails actually leads to sales in the online store.
Search engine presence
Let’s imagine a scenario: we want to open a fashion accessories business in a physical store. How will we find a supplier? Most likely, the first step will be searching Google for “fashion accessories suppliers”.
“ 98% of companies search online to choose their supplier “
For potential customers to visit our store, we need to appear in the top search results, and we can achieve that through SEO and SEM.
– SEO: Search Engine Optimization, or organic search rankings. Appearing among the top results on Google or other search engines takes time and content optimization expertise, but the results in terms of quality traffic are excellent.
– SEM: Search Engine Marketing. To get our website into the top search results quickly and effectively, we can use Google AdWords search ads. The ads appear on Google’s first two pages based on the keywords users search for, which also brings quality traffic (potential customers) to our eCommerce.
Social media
The business social network par excellence is LinkedIn, used by 94% of B2B businesses with 66% effectiveness. The key to success on LinkedIn for B2B is sharing quality content: blog articles, infographics, SlideShare… in a very professional tone. It doesn’t always have to be your own content; you can share industry news and other information of interest to potential B2B customers.
Even so, as we said at the start, let’s not forget that companies are made up of people, and they also use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Pinterest, among other social networks. You need to analyze the sector thoroughly and identify where professionals in each type of business are likely to be. For example, managers at a fashion company probably use Instagram to browse fashion looks or find influencers, so an Instagram Ads campaign wouldn’t be a bad option.
Special mention: video marketing
2017 has been “dubbed” the year of video, with forecasts of 69% of online traffic coming from this format. Most brands have seen website visits from videos grow by more than 150%. To boost your B2B sales, you can create corporate videos, product manufacturing videos, catalog videos, runway shows… and promote them through your online store, YouTube channel or online advertising.
These are some of the recommended strategies for B2B in 2017. Remember that the TLG Commerce eMarketing department can carry out a consulting review of your eCommerce to optimize your online strategy.
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