It isn’t easy to get online marketing right. Marketers have their hands full, dealing with budget limits, creative demands, and difficult decisions. However, the best way to get started on the right path is to know your audience.
If you can’t appropriately target your buyer persona, your ads and promotions are likely to fall on deaf ears, meaning you’re better off ceasing all your marketing efforts.
While target audiences differ in various ways, perhaps the most notable differences are found between businesses and individual consumers. Some companies are created to serve organizations and companies, while others serve personal shoppers.
Some ways of targeting the audience also include live chat outsourcing. If you run an e-commerce website and want to make a difference that could help you scale significantly in all areas you should consider Live Chat Outsourcing.
As you might imagine, marketing to companies is vastly different than marketing directly to consumers. In fact, there’s an entirely different marketing method for it, named B2B marketing. This guide will deal with this type of marketing, specifically its online subsection.
Once you’re done reading this post, you should have a clearer understanding of how B2B differs from B2C and the most effective B2B online marketing strategies.
Differences in B2B and B2C Marketing Approach
There are many differences between B2C and B2B marketing, but they differ primarily in their communication to their audiences and their strategies.
B2C marketing focuses on the interests and needs of individuals making purchases for themselves or their families. This makes the individual the customer of a B2C-oriented company. Here are a few examples:
- Video and music streaming subscription platforms
- Clothing ecommerce stores
- Online tech stores
B2B marketing, on the other hand, deals with the interests and needs of individuals who make purchases for their organizations. This makes organizations or businesses their target audience. Here are a few real-life examples of B2B companies:
- Software company selling lead generation software, social media management tools, and other marketing tools for organizations and businesses
- Coworking space for freelancers and remote teams
- An agency dealing with branding identity services
Despite all their differences, B2C and B2B do have plenty of things in common. A tech store that sells consumer electronics like microwaves and TVs to individuals will also sell laptops and office electronics to businesses, for example.
As much as these two approaches differ, B2B marketers can learn a lot from B2C campaigns and vice-versa.
B2B Online Marketing Tips
Every business needs a robust digital presence in 2021, regardless of its target audience. Digital marketing takes many forms, consisting of a social media presence, a website, search engine optimization (SEO), and paid ads.
Let’s take a look at a few tactics you can use to improve your B2B online marketing strategy.
Create a Customer Persona
As we mentioned in the intro, any strong digital marketing strategy should begin by defining your target audience. Not every B2B company will have the same marketing approach.
You will use this information to inform most of your marketing activity and to ensure that your online content is seen by the right eyes and heard by the right ears.
Build a Website
If you don’t have an engaging and informative website, you’re going to find it very difficult to establish an online presence of any kind.
More than 80% of customers prefer to visit a company’s website before purchasing something from it.
Considering that a typical B2B sales cycle includes more than one person approving the transaction, your website will serve as an excellent way for influencers to share information about your service or product to their respective decision-makers and gatekeepers.
Make Your Brand Easy to Find Online
If your site is not discoverable, you won’t benefit much from it, regardless of how well-designed it is. The best way to get more traffic to your site and social media profiles is SEO. This includes technical, on-page and off-page SEO strategies.
You’ll have to think about everything from meta descriptions and image alt text to site speed and structured data. There is also the question of social sharing and external linking strategies. You’d do well to hire experts to take care of this aspect of the process.
Use Pay-Per-Click Advertising
PPC ads allow you to get your brand and content seen by new audiences through various platforms, including social networks and search engines.
A great way to get the most out of your PPC investment is to advertise your social media content, blog, and brand personality, rather than just specific products or services.
You can’t throw money into some ads and start seeing results immediately after. The best way to get more traffic from paid ads is to incorporate the customer persona data you collected earlier and focusing on the content your audience can relate to.
A person who has never heard of your company is not very likely to search for your product or brand by name. Depending on your niche, they may use location-based search terms or type in a problem they need solving.
Paying to target your specific buyer persona within your brand will help you reach more prospects than simply painting various platforms with a broad brush soaked with your products and services.
Create High-Quality Content
B2B customers are not only interested in making a purchase, but they generally also want to be educated about the ins and outs of the products they buy. This provides an excellent opportunity to up your online B2B game by creating interesting and educational content related to your niche.
Instead of interrupting your customers with promotional material when they’re trying to go about their business, include a link to your website within an informative article that your B2B customers will be happy to read.
Content marketing goes hand in hand with the SEO practices we mentioned earlier. If you can anticipate what your target audience wants to see, you can help them discover your content and website, potentially converting them into customers.
Focus on Social Media
You could easily make the mistake of thinking that B2C companies are the only ones that benefit from social media marketing campaigns. In fact, 3/4 of B2B buyers consult social media before making a purchase.
Because of the long chain of command and the lengthier sales cycle we mentioned above, it can be hard for B2B companies to use social media marketing effectively. You might not even convert too many leads through your social media profiles, but it will be a major player at the beginning of your buyers’ journeys.
When it comes to building an online personality, humanizing your business, and building brand awareness, very few tools are as powerful as social media.
It all comes down to connecting with your customers on a human level — remember, even though you’re marketing to companies, humans are still the ones making the decisions.
Social media is also a great channel to promote your industry expertise, and it’s a great platform that enables you to get your content in front of as many prospects as possible.
Author bio:- Tomas is a digital marketing specialist and a freelance blogger. He is focused on new web tech trends and digital voice distribution across different channels.
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