Posted 08.03.2022
In the highly competitive online marketplace, it can be incredibly challenging for start-ups to get off the ground. That goal becomes even more difficult when you’re looking to operate within the B2B ecommerce market.
Difficult, but not impossible.
The biggest tool you can have in your arsenal to increase your chances of establishing your brand and getting your business off the ground is through an effective B2B marketing strategy.
In this post, we’re going to delve into what exactly that means and suggest a few marketing strategies you could try.
B2B marketing strategies refer to the plans you action to help your business meet its monthly and annual goals. The main difference between this and B2C marketing is that you’re arguably operating within a smaller market, making things more difficult.
Each strategy you implement will have its own set of KPIs (key performance indicators) attached to them to help you measure the effectiveness of your plans and allow you to change things if it doesn’t look like you’re going to meet your wider goals.
The details of any B2B ecommerce marketing strategy will differ from business to business, but here’s an outline of some methods that will likely be of use:
When up against fierce competition, a marketing decision has the power to make or break a start-up company. Before you implement any major changes to your B2B ecommerce marketing strategies, you should carry out an A/B test (also known as split testing) to ascertain the impact it may have on your sales, revenue and brand visibility.
An example of an A/B test would be when marketing via social media channels. You can set up tests within a social platform like Facebook where 50% of your target audience is shown one ad, and the other 50% a different ad.
Once you’ve run the test for a specific time frame (a minimum of a month may be a good starting point) and gathered enough data (ensuring enough people have seen the ads to make the information quantifiable), you can get an idea of the impact even the smallest change can have on your return on investment.
Not only does this help you run smaller tests more often to really hone in on which strategies work and which don’t, but it can also prevent costly mistakes.
An additional benefit is that it provides additional data to help back up your decisions, this is particularly helpful if you run your business with other partners or stakeholders.
Many B2B ecommerce marketing strategies focus on attracting more customers to your brand. This is an important strategy, however, it is considered more cost-effective to generate repeat customers than find new ones.
If your B2B ecommerce business has considerable competition to contend with, implementing a referrals policy – whereby a customer gets a percentage off their next purchase if they refer their friends to your brand (and they invest) – is an easy way to not only increase customer retention but also introduce new people to the buying process.
That’s a win-win-win situation if ever there was one.
Martech cited a 2020 report noting that B2B customers consumed 13 pieces of content before choosing a vendor. This was typically comprised of five pieces of content created by third parties and eight created by the vendor themselves.
The report also confirmed that the B2B purchasing process took two to six weeks to complete and involved three or four internal decision-makers. Here’s the breakdown:
This shows that it’s not enough to rely on just one marketing channel to convince someone to invest in your brand.
You could consider regularly creating helpful, educational and interesting pieces of content that are highly shareable. This will increase the chances of third parties picking your articles up and publishing them on their websites.
Your content marketing plan could also incorporate writing highly-valued and useful content on third-party websites that are relevant to your brand as another entry point for customers.
These statistics also show that it’s important to be visible on social platforms and to invest in email marketing.
According to Orbitmedia’s latest blogging survey:
When you consider that each buyer reads around eight articles published on a vendor’s website before reaching an investment decision, that could mean up to 48 hours’ worth of content creation time.
Another option that could save you considerable time is to review your historic content and update evergreen pieces (posts that will always be relevant, interesting and helpful) with fresh information or statistics.
This can give your content a new lease of life, be optimised to increase its visibility and be updated (using historic data to guide decisions) to potentially improve your ecommerce conversion rate.
Carrying out content audits also allows you to archive outdated articles that no longer serve enough of a purpose to stay active on your website. Removing pieces that have become low-quality but aren’t worth the time required to bring them up to standard means that you’ll only be hosting premium content that serves a purpose and helps its readers.
Note: This strategy doesn’t replace creating new original content, but is a great way to keep older content fresh and performing well, making the best use of your content marketing time.
In point three of this article, we mentioned that potential customers engage with numerous platforms when choosing a B2B vendor. However, this doesn’t mean that you need to invest considerable funds into building a brand presence on as many platforms as possible.
Rather, it’s worth reviewing the platforms you currently use for your B2B marketing efforts to ascertain:
If you find that you’re not seeing the results you need after trialling numerous email marketing strategies, for example, it may be worth using your time to concentrate on those that deliver.
With that in mind, before you decide to cut the budget from any platform, be sure to review your Google Analytics to ensure that platform isn’t playing a considerable role in driving ‘assisted’ conversions rather than ‘last click’ conversions. Removing budget from platforms that are performing, just not directly, can negatively impact your overall performance.
By condensing your marketing efforts into fewer platforms with a greater volume of engaged potential customers, you may see more payoff that’s less time-consuming.
Unbiased, user-generated content requires very little time from you or your marketing team but is incredibly valuable. Reading about previous customers’ experience from the customers themselves is a significant trust signal and could be just what’s needed to get a customer over the line and ready to invest.
If you do opt for this strategy, remember that your response to any reviews (good and bad) is also being seen. A negative review can often be a great marketing tool if you can showcase excellent customer service and solve the customer’s problem, resulting in the previous, negative review turning into a great one.
Reviews of any nature can be useful as a B2B ecommerce marketing strategy.
Similar to reviews, case studies that include testimonials from previous customers can be a highly effective strategy. Showcasing how you ascertained and solved pain points that are similar to ones new customers might experience is a great way of advertising the unique selling points and benefits of investing in your brand.
These can be created either as written content with visuals, via videos of interviews with current customers, or something else.
These can also be shared via your social platforms or through an email marketing campaign to increase their visibility and boost performance.
Note: If you do choose to turn a case study into a video, be sure to include subtitles for those travelling, watching via their phone, where English isn’t their first language or people with hearing impairments.
Going back to how much consideration goes into investing in a B2B product, it’s clear that there are a lot of questions that need answering before a decision can be reached on which vendor to invest in.
Historically, the only way to find answers to these questions is to spend a significant amount of time carrying out further research, calling or emailing the vendor or visiting their base of operations.
While there is a nice social element to this, most people are exceptionally busy and would rather have a way to get answers to their questions quickly.
That’s where FAQs come in.
Your customer service team or sales team will undoubtedly be asked hundreds of questions regularly, and often the same ones crop up again and again.
You can save your team and your potential customers valuable time by collating the most commonly asked questions and answering via content published on your ecommerce store.
In addition to being a huge time-saver, it also helps speed up the buyer journey, getting potential customers closer to crossing that line and investing.
Upselling and cross-selling are excellent methods of increasing average order value when a customer is about to checkout and purchase your products.
Cross-selling involves ‘asking’ a customer if they’d like to purchase something related to what’s in their basket that’s relatively low-cost. If a customer was purchasing PPE from your site, for example, you may cross-sell hand sanitiser, too. It’s the ecommerce equivalent of placing last-minute products near the checkout counter in a physical store.
Upselling is slightly different, it’s where you present the customer with a higher quality product for a higher price and give them the option of swapping the item in their basket for that one.
There are tools out there that allow you to automate this, however, we advise that you use these with extreme caution. Cross-selling and upselling are only effective if it’s highly relevant to ensure you don’t put customers off. The last thing you want is for your brand to look greedy.
With that in mind, a good rule of thumb is to only cross-sell products if they are at least 60% cheaper than what’s already in the customer’s cart.
A potential option for upselling, rather than pushing a more expensive product, is to recommend a bundle that’s slightly cheaper than if they came back to repurchase further down the line but still provides a good return on investment.
One significant difference between B2B and B2C marketing strategies is generally the lifetime value of existing customers (although there does seem to be a slight shift in this due to the rise in popularity of B2C subscription services).
If your brand relies on long customer lifecycles where they return again and again to reinvest in your brand, a loyalty program may be a worthwhile strategy to pursue.
Loyalty programs mean that when a customer invests in your products they earn points which can then be used to lower the cost of their next purchase.
This isn’t the only loyalty program, but it is a popular one.
Finally, and perhaps the most expensive of the B2B ecommerce marketing strategies we’ve mentioned in this post (but incredibly valuable), is the optimisation of your website pages. Many make the mistake of thinking that once a website has been created and products uploaded, the hard work is done and updates don’t need to be made.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case. In fact, websites need updating regularly to ensure they rank well in search engines like Google and continue communicating with site visitors in the ways they want to be communicated with.
Over recent years, Google has made changes to its algorithm to ensure websites are:
Having a team of talented developers and search engine optimisation (SEO) specialists is more than worth the investment to ensure your website continues serving current customers and is as visible to new customers as possible.
We’ve highlighted several B2B marketing strategies that you may want to try, however, it’s worth remembering that every business is different, with different goals and ways of working. It’s important to find a path that suits you and your brand. Through trialling different approaches, you’ll eventually find a method that works for you, whether that be content marketing, loyalty programs, email marketing or something else.
That doesn’t mean you can’t try new approaches along the way, but staying true to your brand and your customer is of the utmost importance when implementing targeted marketing campaigns to build your start-up into a highly competitive business.
