Making a sale is tricky and delicate business even if you’re just a vendor at a street corner, and you’re selling hot dogs to passers-by.
That said, managing to convince an entire company that you’re products are good enough for their standards can be a tad trickier, so pulling it off requires its fair deal of creativity, hard work, and an open-minded approach when it comes to concocting your marketing campaign.
The thing is, attracting new customers is all about marketing, so if you can do an excellent job of it, you can rest assured you will have brought yourself in an excellent position when it comes to sealing the deal.
In this article, we’ll talk about B2B sales and what means you can use them to increase their number. As you will see, the strategies you can use to increase your B2B sales differ considerably between each other, so the more of them you can learn to utilize effectively, the better chance you will have of securing more sales.
Tactics to Increase B2B Sales
Here’s the deal.
• Leverage Your Website Visitor Numbers
While it may seem far-fetched that you can get some viable leads from your website visitors, this is possible, if you’re using the right tools.
Nowadays, there are a couple of interesting tools you can use for extracting company profiles from the rest of your visitors, so you can see exactly what companies and their representatives we’re visiting your website.
Although it’s a slim chance all of these visitors are those who are potential buyers, too, many of them are, so creating a list of these businesses and their contacts would be the first step to getting their attention back to your website.
Once you’ve compiled this information, you can start contacting them.
As you start exchanging messages with these people back and forth, you will start learning about what it is that they need, and then you can get a clearer idea of what it is your business can help them with.
• Utilize E-mails for Enhancing Automation
… and we’re speaking here of marketing automation, of course.
As prominent as social media platforms are nowadays, it is also true that e-mails still remain and are seen as some of the more official channels of communications. This is what makes them so perfect for marketing – because people already regard anyone who reaches them through e-mail in a more official light.
One of the ways of using e-mails to enhance your sales would be to gather all the e-mails you have of your potential customers and even relevant business-owning visitors and then tailor special messages to each of these interest groups.
Of course, you can’t be expected to send everyone a customized e-mail, but at least putting in some effort to split these folks who are interested in your website and products or services in suitable groups can have a massive effect on how they respond to you reaching out to them.
• Set Up Live Chat for Your Website
Letting your potential as well as existing customers know you are always available to resolve any problems they may be having with any of your products can be a great way to build trust and lasting relationships with them.
The thing is since nowadays there are many companies who flood the market with botched, poorly-made products, buying from a business that can have some idea about what they’re doing and that is willing to stand behind their products is a refreshing prospect for a buyer – especially if they’re buying online.
Live chats aren’t that difficult to set up and can make a world of difference for your business, so if you don’t have one already built in your website, so to speak, try to get one as soon as you can, as this will make communication with your customers way easier.
• Add Different Formats to Your Content Roster
The great thing about optimizing content for lead-generation online is that there are so many types of content out there that you can quickly expand your influence and attract more people if you only know how to use them.
For example, possibly the most common ‘weapon of choice’ for many digital marketers out there would be the written word. This is not that much of surprise when you think of how easy it is to upload written content, format it so that it looks. However, you want it to look, and then enrich it with SEO for good measure.
That said, while written content is an excellent way to present what you want to your audience, as well as add useful links to the whole deal, there’s no reason why you couldn’t use other channels of communication for this purpose, too.
Creating Youtube videos, for example, springs to mind as an excellent way to attract new customers, as well as present to your audience what you’re all about as a business in an advanced manner, so to speak.
• Enrich Your Content with SEO
Content, in whatever shape or form it comes, needs to be thoroughly optimized for search engines – otherwise, you’re wasting a massive opportunity to find new leads.
The thing is, no matter how well-written or produced your content is, if the search engines can’t pick it up immediately, you run the risk of becoming practically invisible online, which can have a number of negative implications, the worst of which is – poor lead generation.
So, to prevent this horrible turn of events, what you want to do is enrich both your written and video content with keywords and other points of interest, the search engines can pick up easily.
• Be Active on Q&A Sessions
Going hand in hand with the aforementioned live chat you can organize for your website, there’s also the Q&A sessions that you may want to become a part of in order to help out the members of your audience troubleshoot some problem they’re dealing with involving your product or service.
Also, you can release some pressure on the live chat this way, too, because most of the common problems will have already been addressed in the Q&A section, so the folks who do visit the live chat will probably be either your customers with some specific problem they can’t otherwise resolve or people interesting in setting up some sort of cooperation with your company.
Other than setting up a Q&A section on your website, you can also use other platforms to attract more people to your online premises. Quora, for example, can be a great place you can communicate with the folks who are asking questions about your business.
If someone is asking a question on Quora about some detail or the other about your business, chances are – they’re looking for confirmation that you’re a trustworthy business because they either want to make a purchase or set up a B2B relationship with you. Of course, not all potential customers on Quora or other online platforms are like this, but you can certainly find some valuable leads this way.
• Make Precise Landing Pages
As you probably already know, arguably, the most important thing about SEO (if we exclude the keywords) is utilizing proper links that lead to relevant landing pages.
The precision with which you assign various landing pages to different links reflects directly how successful your SEO effort is going to be, so if you can do this well, you can rest assured that many of the visitors who end up on the landing page of your design will eventually make a purchase.
The thing is if what your customer is looking for is a specific product or a piece of information about your business and the link they click on leads them to a different page, no matter how similar that page is to the one you should have linked out to – your visitor is going to get frustrated and annoyed and likely even abandon your online premises altogether.
• Create More Online Reviews
… but don’t venture to write some good ones for your business on your own.
That can have negative effects on your business as a whole because people will think that you are untrustworthy.
What we mean by “creating” online reviews is encouraging your customers to write a review of your products or services. The thing is, most people who are interested in buying something will first check how the reviews are of that thing on the Internet. If these are favorable, the interested party is more likely to proceed with the purchase.
So, if you can get the customers who are already satisfied with your products (it’s always better to have more positive reviews out there than negative, of course) to write some reviews about you on the Internet, your lead generation campaign would be facilitated to a large degree.
All in all, securing more sales for your B2B company requires you to mount a complex initiative that encompasses a wide array of different techniques and tools. The bottom line, as long as you commit to improving your SEO, the landing pages of your website, and creating online reviews, you’ll be in an excellent position to slowly but surely increase the number of your B2B sales.
