It’s no secret that the growth of online spaces has reshaped the foundation of advertising. It’s tough enough for a B2C (business-to-consumer) business to succeed in a space filled to the brim with endless competitors, so how does one do well in the even more niche area of B2B (business-to-business) marketing?
Have no fear, Baker Street Digital is here to walk you through the process of creating a successful presence in an ocean of overlapping voices.
The first step to a successful campaign is to delve deep and learn exactly to whom you should be marketing your business. You may have a general idea of the people that buy your product or service, but that broad brush just won’t cut it when you’re painting a precision ad system. What you really need is a detailed persona of your average customer. You obviously want to know what they do for a living, but you also need to know what they do in their free time, what type of sites they browse, what their end-goal with your product is, etc. Crafting this type of client identity will make it possible for you to tailor an experience that actually speaks to potential customers.
Now that you know who you’re going for, how do you reach them? It’s really easy to THINK you’re targeting the right people while in reality you’re missing completely. For example, say your business is selling book binding tools to major publishing houses. It seems like a no-brainer to use words like ‘saddle-stitch,’ ‘bookbinding tools,’ etc., and you may see hundreds or thousands of people clicking through due to them. The conversion rate, however, will not match up well with those numbers. When keywords are that broad, you’ll find yourself bringing in everyone from DIY people working on their next YouTube video to design students rushing to craft a project.
Instead of pre-determining what your clients want, let your clients determine what you should run. Look at previous leads that you have brought in. What did they search for? Is there a specific term, maybe a niche to your industry? Hone in on it. Divert funds that direction and boost what you know works. As more leads come in, keep optimizing. Add new words that work, remove those that aren’t bringing in actual conversions. Through this method, you can refine and improve your targeting system in order to ensure that the people seeing your ads are the ones to whom they’re most relevant.
Your clients are here; now you gotta convince them to stay. Every competitor can list off features, and many will likely have similar services to you. It’s not enough to give your clients a spec sheet, you have to give them answers. Why should they pick your product or service? What problem do you address and how do you address it? Someone looking for your hypothetical bookbinding tool maker likely knows what each item does, but what they don’t know is what they can mean to them. Sure, this piece can perfect bind your product. You know what else it can do? Increase production by 75% and lower the man hours necessary to meet a deadline. That’s what matters to your buyer, not that your machine uses the latest technical jargon.
This step is simple, but you’d be surprised how many people overlook it. Make sure that everything your brand does is CONSISTENT in both aesthetic and messaging. Your ads should match your landing page, your landing page should match your site, your site should match your shop, and on and on. Your brand needs to be a cohesive whole. Incompatible pieces will do wonders to drive away potential leads.
Track EVERYTHING. Sure, it’s nice to know how many people visit your site, and it’s even better to know how many of them are buying, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you notice a spike in sales or traffic, you need to be able to reproduce and build on that. To do so, you’re going to want to know who’s visiting your site, where they’re visiting from, what browser they’re using, which pages they went to, how long they stayed on those pages, and anything else you can reasonably track. You can’t optimize your campaign if you can’t see what’s working, how it’s working, and who it’s working on. Analytics are the foundation to the success of any ad campaign. Using them to their fullest extent isn’t optional if you want to do well.
At Baker Street Digital Media, we take B2B success very seriously. We even have our own trademarked system, The Molecule of Awesome™, that has been built up and improved over years of trial and error. To see our approach first hand and let the numbers speak for themselves, check out this case study.
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