Last updated on June 16th, 2023 at 03:27 pm
Selling in B2B is difficult. This is especially true for startups, niche companies, and business areas where the team makes the purchasing decision. To reach such a buyer, you must carefully segment the audience and develop an individual approach. You can read here about B2B and B2C sales, and in our article, we will talk about the promotion of complex products and why the future of personalization belongs to messengers.
Table of Contents
What’s Wrong with B2B Sales
Promoting products for business, you will face several difficulties:
- Head-on promotion does not work. It is not enough to create a landing page and run ads on it for queries from Google Ads and Facebook Ads. The result of such promotion is empty applications and 0 sales.
- A long transaction cycle. From “catching” a client to buying, whole months pass sometimes. The question arises: how to keep a client for a long time and increase a business lead list and not go broke on remarketing.
- Incorrect display of advertisements. Unlike B2C, B2B marketing is more complicated and requires a point hit, and this is not always feasible for cold traffic – you can not configure advertising without taking into account the interests of a specific target audience and demographics.
- The value of personal connections. When it comes to responsibility, preference is given to the recommendations of colleagues.
- Expensive promotion. Advertising for a specific audience requires costs, and payback does not come soon.
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5 steps to build an effective strategy in B2B
- Castdev – check-up for business
Customer Development (Custdev) is called the insight prospecting stage. You interview customers or potential users of the product, analyze the needs of the target audience. To create an ideal business lead list, you can use lead generator service like Belkins.
- Identify the target audience and create a value proposition for each group
Custdev helps to collect key audience data. However, analyzing the answers, you will notice significant differences between the respondents. The fact is that the buyer and the user of the product are different people. When making a decision to purchase a product in B2B, 3 categories of persons are most often involved: the user, the technical specialist, and the business customer.
Working with such different clients, you will distinguish people – groups with common values and motives, but with different tasks. It is important to adapt the value proposition to each group and show that our offer covers exactly its needs.
- Build a Customer Journey Map – the buyer’s route from awareness of needs to the purchase of a product
One interaction with advertising in B2B is not enough. To proceed successfully with B2B lead generation you need a detailed strategy designed for long-term warming up. EverView offers a customer journey solutions suite to help businesses like yours engage more effectively with customers and fill gaps in your marketing strategy.
How to anticipate the client’s path and interact with him at each stage?
The Customer Journey Map will help – a schematic route of the buyer from the awareness of needs to the purchase of the target product. It consists of four general steps.
- Awareness of the problem. How to implement: advertisements with an interrogative formulation of the problem. For example: “High turnover? Does it take a lot of time to put an employee in a position?”. Offer solutions to the problem with the help of the product, and substantiate its advantages.
- Set up retargeting and show advertisements to an audience with an already formed need – how to solve the problem: invite you to a webinar on a topic of interest to a potential customer.
- Onboarding. Introduce the product in more detail. Provide information on how to use the application in order to close the needs and solve the tasks.
- Help the client with the choice of product integrations in his business. With the help of useful materials and involving the client in a convenient communication channel for him – for example, in messengers, we “warm up” the client to make a purchase decision.
- Use not only sales “head-on” but connect messengers to work
What to do instead of promoting directly?
Understand that the path to B2B is non-linear. In companies, there are regular rollbacks, approvals, and doubts about the correctness of the choice.
Contact the potential buyer at every stage of decision-making in a convenient communication channel for him – in emails (but always remember to check email deliverability), or, what is more convenient, in messengers. Let’s give information that will close the objections and give benefits.
To do this, use lead magnets:
- send checklists, guides, and memos tailored to individual persons to messengers;
- conduct consultations, webinars, and presentations with feedback;
- offer a trial version of the product.
Why messengers?
A survey from the Nielsen agency showed that more than half of users prefer personal correspondence to make purchases:
- 63% reported that they began to correspond with brands more often;
- 56% prefer correspondence with the support service to phone calls;
- 61% are satisfied with the messages coming from companies;
- 50% will prefer brands that you can correspond with.
How are messengers useful in B2B?
It is not easy to apply an individual approach in B2B:
- It is problematic to divide the audience;
- A lot of touches are needed – when using one remarketing, it becomes costly. No one buys the first time. At least 3 touches — from the dating stage to brand awareness;
- It is difficult to achieve constant contact and high readability.
Messenger marketing helps to solve this problem. It is enough to “catch” the client with the help of advertising and send them to correspondence – from this moment the interaction becomes free and personalized. And thanks to Push notifications, the readability of messages is 80% or more.
- Formulate a value proposition
The value proposition is the key advantage of your product. The right offer creates value for the client and motivates them to purchase. To form it, follow these principles:
- Track the buyer’s path. Study what the user is guided by at each stage. It is important to offer what is valuable at a particular moment.
- Analyze the problems. What difficulties does the audience go through before making a decision? By answering this question, you will select an offer for each segment.
- Be brief. Offer the user only what is important to know. Remember that a value proposition is about the value to the consumer, not about the number of items in your presentation.
Start using messenger marketing now: it will help attract a new audience, automate processes, increase conversion and stay ahead of competitors and start your way to a successful b2b lead generation company.
