While consumer brands are often the beneficiary of digital marketing, business-to-business companies (B2B) can gain tremendously from online marketing. B2B companies can use digital marketing to promote new products to their target markets across the world that’s difficult to reach with traditional advertising mediums and generate quality leads.
Here are five major reasons why B2B companies should use digital marketing:
- Senior executives rely more on mobile devices. According to Forbes Insights, 7 out of 10 senior executives use mobile devices to look up product or service information after they first hear of it. 57% use mobile devices to perform deeper research, and 1/3 reference information from their smart phones during decision-making. 73% of executives in the survey say a poor mobile experience will make them less likely to do business with the company.What does this information mean? It means that companies need ensure that their websites are responsive and mobile-friendly!
- B2B customers are self-educating. Business buyer now prefer to do their own research before speaking to a business development executive. Studies have shown that corporate decision-makers reach as far as 67% of the way through their buying cycle before agreeing to talk to any vendors. In other words, decision-makers are spending more time acquiring specific knowledge to solve their most urgent challenges and delaying sales conversations until they’re confident your company can provided the desired results.
- Digital marketing makes follow-up significantly easier. Sales professionals say it takes 7 to 12 contacts before clients are ready to talk to you. Digital marketing makes follow-up easier by being less intrusive and more cost-effective. Digital marketing approaches such as pre-scheduled emails, AdWords retargeting ads, or personalized offers to Twitter accounts can warm up leads and help them advance through the beginning stages of the buying cycle. Well-crafted digital touch points solidify trust, increase credibility, and create an online familiarity.
- Digital lets you customize content based on ‘online body language’. Sales has always been about reading different messages, depending on where a customer is in the buying stage and their role within the company, and responding to the messages accordingly. If you talk about your services and pricing too early, you could be viewed as a commodity supplier instead of a trusted partner. If you address problems and challenges but can’t provide proof points, you could miss the shortlist. With digital marketing, you can prepare content for each stage of the buying journey. For example, you can write articles illustrating major benefits of your product for prospects in the evaluation stage who are looking for the business impact for your product.
- Measure and optimize your results. This is what I love most about digital marketing: almost everything is measurable. You can track every email view, whitepaper download, and click. You can even track curser movements!
By measuring the results for your marketing campaigns, you can find out the effective of the campaigns and identify areas for optimization!
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