Guest post by Nina Petrov.
If your B2B business has plateaued and you’re struggling with new ideas to generate leads and grow sales, here’s good news. There are established, effective eCommerce marketing tactics you can use to increase base revenue and upsell opportunities in a very short period of time.
Check out these six practical tips and strategies you can incorporate in your business strategy today. Some you may not be using, while others are part of your current strategy, but the execution has grown stale and could use refreshing.
This list includes tactics from SEO optimization to social media accounts, and more, that can realistically produce a return on your budget and efforts.
What are B2B eCommerce Marketing Tactics?
While consumer ecommerce sites like Amazon, Etsy, and eBay get more media coverage, B2B e-commerce—the direct online marketing and selling of products or services between two companies, such as a wholesale supplier and retailer—is three and half times larger than B2C. For B2B companies, the final goal is very simple: increase customer reach while decreasing cost-to-serve in order to increase margin and income.
B2B e-commerce tactics are designed to make the digital purchasing experience as engaging and efficient as possible. These practices can help you expand your online business while providing your customers with more control of their buying experience.
1. Improve Your Site SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most basic and widely used online marketing tactics, and yet is commonly underutilized or just plain done wrong. When done right, B2B SEO increases the visibility of your site in search engines for your most relevant and high-value keyword terms, attracting more traffic from your target audience and ultimately leading to sales.
Strong organic insight through each step of the purchasing cycle is a proven method for growth. Getting SEO right requires a combination of technical practices, on-page SEO, strong content development (don’t rely on ChatGPT), and link development.
To optimize your website structure and content for organic search, you can use certain tools for keyword searching and other elements of SEO, like Semrush, WordStream, Serpstat, or Ahrefs.
2. Leverage Advocate Marketing
Advocate marketing is one of the best ways to grow your audience and attract new buyers. This strategy involves your current customers becoming walking ads to attract more consumers to your website.
This form of marketing focuses on getting existing consumers to talk about your brand, products, or services by providing feedback, reviews, and/or social references. To prove your credibility and value to new customers and increase your revenue, a highly effective tactic is to leverage advocate marketing.
3. Provide an Engaging Website Experience
Once you succeed in attracting your audience to your website, the goal is to make them stay there as long as they need to purchase your product/service. You can have great SEO, referrals, and reviews, but if your site is not engaging, there is a high chance the visitor will leave the site before thoroughly evaluating what you have to offer.
On the other hand, a shareable, engaging, interesting, yet simple website will attract prospective B2B customers. You’ll keep people on your site if you create valuable content and an interesting website design. To achieve that result, it is best to hire a website designer.
Your site should be fast and responsive, with all the needed information. For instance, you can use prebid to reach the highest quality for your website. With an engaing site experience, visitors will come, remain, investigate, connect, explore, and make purchases more often.
4. Use Video Content on Your Site
More visuals and less text is the latest trend in marketing, especially in B2B. Videos are great for search, immersive, and help you reach new users and leave a long-lasting impression.
A video fills the static information on a website to provide a more engaging experience for the customer; they are also an excellent method for helping visitors make their decision. You can provide different types of videos, from background videos on the front page to product demos.
Another way to attract your audience is by utilizing video marketing for B2B. Video marketing is a marketing approach that focuses on organizing, producing, and sharing video material with your B2B audience. This approach can result in:
- Producing a higher retention rate
- Providing a better website experience
- Enabling customers to see the product at a 360° angle
- Helping customers get to know the product/service through demo videos.
5. Make Use of LinkedIn
LinkedIn is an essential tool for B2B marketers, as it is one of the best brands for generating B2B leads. Again, LinkedIn won’t be new for any B2B marketing professional, but B2B brands too often misuse or under-utilize the platform. They are checking the box, “doing LinkedIn marketing,” but not getting the results possible.
LinkedIn is where business professionals make new connections, post jobs, learn new information, and make deals. It’s by far the top B2B social advertising platform, content marketing medium for B2B advertisers, and B2B social network. (Twitter is still the second-best social media platform for B2B marketing…at least for now.) LinkedIn is a great place to build relationships, connect with other businesses, propose collaborations, and eventually drive sales.
6. Seek Out Potential Collaborations and Partnerships
Partner marketing can increase the reach of your work in various ways, and it is among the least exploited yet most popular B2B eCommerce marketing trends.
B2B partnerships enable your business to grow into new markets, often resulting in higher revenue and reduced churn rates. Partnerships indicate confidence, resulting in increased sales reach and brand loyalty.
B2B collaborations help you share resources with other businesses, enabling you to work more efficiently and share risks, all while providing more value to your consumers.
The advantage here is that both parties profit from reaching out to the other’s audience, so the payoff of your marketing efforts is effectively doubled. Consider who it might make sense to collaborate with, then reach out and promote the advantages.
In Conclusion
B2B eCommerce marketing tactics attract your target audience to your website landing pages, increasing exposure and conversions. These six tactics have tremendous potential to boost your leads, increase traffic, and eventually lead to sales!
Nina Petrov is a content marketing specialist, passionate about graphic design, content marketing, and the new generation of green and social businesses. She starts the day scrolling her digest on new digital trends while sipping a cup of coffee with milk and sugar. Her little white bunny tends to reply to your emails when she is on vacation.