When considering digital marketing and commerce, most immediately think about consumer sales. Intuitively, our minds rush to marketplaces like Amazon, but while consumer sales are a chief function of online commerce, the world of business to business marketing is just as nuanced and detail-oriented.
Business to business marketing is wholly different from consumer marketing because the target audience is different. Where consumers are looking for specific products to fit their immediate needs, businesses are shopping based on long-term projections and plans. They are concerned about things like per unit cost, inventory costs, and delivery lead times; all function unimportant to the average consumer.
These factors alone make business to business marketing a specialty in and of itself and often requires the help of a professional marketing agency to master.
How to Market to B2B Customers
To understand how to successfully execute business to business marketing, marketers need to put themselves in the mind of a business customer. Members of a business’ purchasing team are operating under different circumstances than typical consumers. As a marketer, you will need to adjust your marketing messaging to meet the needs of a buyer.
Take for instance a manufacturing facility. A buyer will scour the internet for the best pricing and terms for components their company will use to manufacture products. Knowing this, marketers for the components company need to address these needs in their advertising.
Marketers also need to know where to place their advertisements. While Facebook and Instagram are excellent platforms for advertising to consumers, it is unlikely that a member of a purchasing team is using their personal social media accounts for business. A better platform is performing paid media marketing on Google.
Paid media on Google includes Google ads, which are advertisements that appear atop search engine results pages when users search for specific keywords. For example, if your company mass produces power supplies, you can pay to have your ads and product information appear when buyers search for “power supplies”.
But of all the best business to business marketing practices, SEO is your best bet.
How can SEO Help My B2B Sales
Because traditional consumer marketing techniques are ineffective in B2B sales, marketers need to focus their efforts on two major areas: their website and search engines. Essentially, optimizing these areas are the fundamentals of SEO, or search engine optimization.
In business to business marketing, your website is king. A potential B2B customer who comes across your product offering is going to immediately check your website for details. The presentation, navigability, and content on your site are paramount to your sales success. Since large volume B2B sales typically do not happen over the internet, your website will need to be tailored to promoting product information and encouraging the customer to contact your sales team.
Make sure you have all the information you believe your customers would need to know, such as shipping terms, product features, pricing, and more.
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