Any person who works in the B2B section is familiar with how the industry comes with its continuous challenges. In the B2C industry, marketing to clients, the sales cycles are usually a bit shorter, while the sales cycle may be prolonged in B2B, and particularly if you are targeting smaller groups and your product is priced higher.
Before you sell or make a profit, you are supposed to generate leads and get competent prospects, which might be become, future clients. This is what makes the transactions of B2B to be very challenging.
This article analyzes several of the most common sales and marketing challenges which you can come across in B2B and helpful tips on how you can solve them.
Lead generation
Quality leads generation is still the leading challenge facing B2B marketers today. To capture website guests is no longer as much as necessary. These days, marketing and sales teams require offering content which attracts the users and which makes them fill out the opt-in landing page forms.
Marketers require not just to developing inspirational content but they also require convincing B2B customers to take major actions which will help you to accomplish your business goals. Here are several approaches you can employ to generate more leads:
Develop diverse content
If you want to connect with a larger target audience, you should be familiar with the ways to cover a wide variety of prospects. With this, you may do research on the brand new keywords used by your customers when they search online.
Enlarge Your Market
For you to be successful in an international B2B marketplace, you should understand much about developing content for global markets.
A/B Test your Content
Through testing using your content narrative, featured images or headlines, you will gather a significant amount of data regarding what kind of content is getting a good number of clicks and where users click or where they leave their content information.
Setting your brand apart
Brand differentiation is another biggest challenge in B2B sales and marketing. How you are setting your company separately from the others. Actually, almost every business is employing email blasts as well as their websites at each turn since they are perfect with reaching everybody regardless of which section of the sales process that they are in.
The hitch is that your business is just extending to only those who you already know. In order to get brand differentiation, you should get in the presence of the audience everywhere they might be. Nowadays, you may most likely get them online, and chances are that they are already out there searching for somebody to assist them, and it could be you.
The solution is to be an active contributor in social media platforms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter because these can be the path to assist you in reaching your audience. Remember that you might not find them on these platforms. At times those you are searching for might mostly meet on Twitter or just a certain Facebook community. Just do some research will help you determine that.
Increasing Website Traffic
Result of too much online competition, increasing traffic on your website is not simple work, and particularly for B2B businesses. This is because B2B companies typically market and vend to other companies. This means that they do not invest in inbound marketing, which may increase their website traffic.
If you would like a continuous flow on your website traffic, you need to cement SEO services to rank you high on search engines. Use relevant keywords for better optimization on search engines. You will get a good Google ranking that will increase your website traffic.
However, inbound marketing might also be among the most effectual ways of growing a B2B company online as well as increasing web traffic.
Measuring ROI
Return on Investment (ROI) is a big challenge in B2B marketing. According to the survey done by HubSpot, 40% of marketers stated that proving the Return on Investment of their efforts is a big B2B challenge. However, increasing the Return on Investment isn’t something that can just take place all of a sudden.
It requires an accurate organization as well as planning to ensure that the ROI is visible from the starting of the sales and marketing efforts.
To measure and also increase ROI, you require focusing most on determining goals and KPIs. It is better to set goals that are measurable. The best way is to measure the content website performance as well as other marketing activities. After this is done, choose KPI that are required to be measured like:
- Website visits
- Number of New Leads
- Website Bounce Rate
- Click-Through Rate
- User Acquisition Cost
- Time on Page
- Customer Lifetime Value
Indecisive Buyers
During sales, the process may not be complete if there aren’t any obstacles. When Potential buyers come with obstacles doesn’t mean that communication wasn’t proper. It may mean that the client is only making lame excuses not to make any purchase or the product or service doesn’t provide any value to them at that moment.
These things are normal when it comes to sales. There are times that you may reach out to a potential client who requires the product, but when it comes making a decision of whether they want to buy it, they withdraw. This is not exciting at all, and at this juncture, you require changing your focus to another thing that many people love to hear about themselves.
Every time prospects are indecisive, and you should give them your ears. You can also ask open-ended questions. That makes them rethink on how they need and the problems they are facing at the moment. The client, on the other side, may feel better if they know what to say is vital to you. You can evaluate their concerns on whatever they tell you as you do follow-ups in your conversations later on.
Keeping Pace with Mobile Marketing
Nowadays, it is vital to learn more skills, and this involves mobile marketing. This is vital to adopt technology so as to keep them with the latest trends. This involves marketing teams to focus on the keywords on SEO that helps the team to be on the top during the search engine.
Smartphone has become a vital tool for marketing strategy, and B2B isn’t an exception. Customers use mobile devices, desktops as well as laptops and always expect the same information on all the devices. So as to keep up with the latest technology and trends, it is advisable to optimize the website mobile design.
Always make sure that the website fits on the mobile devices that are on Smartphone, tablets as well as laptops and desktops. Make a point of learning the latest trend so as to keep you on the current product and service being offered and to promote locally.
Recording metrics
This is one of the vital and key points when it comes to marketing teams. Marketing may be made much easier; you one can know the exact amount you can reach out at any given time. Unfortunately, this isn’t possible. It is very difficult to determine how much you can spend during your marketing activities.
To do this, you can try to determine the goals and objectives of your marketing initiatives. For instance, does the website generate lead or create brand awareness? Getting the exact goal will greatly help you to understand the metrics that you will pay attention to.
If you start to display advertise campaigns for your brand awareness, measuring rates would not be suitable. However, measuring your website, traffic can bring about a better understanding of your brand awareness program and if this is working or not.
Long Sales Cycles
When you are working in B2B, a long sales cycle can’t be avoided, but you can make the process much smoother. This may be done by getting to know what the prospects do on your website so as to know the best strategy to use in the sales cycle at the present moment.
The best approach to control the B2B sales cycle is to employ a CRM system. This is the most powerful tool that can gather all the required information on your and also clients in just one section. This includes all the information that has been signed in and also includes all the meetings, notes and emails that you have exchanged, all in one section.
If you are working with B2B customers and marketing your Services, It is most probable that you have come across some of the impediments above. This industry is continuously changing; it is no longer easy to convince all your prospects to do business with you. Always be proactive in your marketing strategy and sales as you all find the channels whereby you can be share relevant information and also where you can get the best business leads.
Conclusion
Your digital marketing experts have to work closely to improve business relationships so that you can bring more prospects and clients into your sales strategy. To overcome marketing and sales challenges, you have to develop B2B digital marketing strategies and relationships with your client as you gain trust.
This is the foundation for success and customer retention in B2B marketing.
About the Author!
Chatwalee is a full-time SEO specialist at Noria Digital, an SEO firm in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Entrepreneurship, lifestyle travel writing, and the practice of self-care are currently her main interests. Connect with her on Linkedin.
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