If you’ve either launched a website for your B2B e-commerce venture (Congrats! We know how overwhelming that must’ve been) or if you’re looking forward to launch a B2B e-commerce website for your firm, this article is for you.
Firstly, to develop your e-commerce firm, you would have to consume a lot of online content to come up with innovative ideas and work your way up – e-books, articles, podcasts, and videos. You might even like reality shows featuring investors and entrepreneurs.
Here’s another piece to add to your list – ‘Keeping Up With Online Marketing Trends’.
One can simply agree that online marketing is one of the best things to have happened since sliced bread. With emerging trends in the B2B sector, it is no longer restricted to big brands or firms. B2B firms of all sizes are now turning towards online marketing since it has a proven record of increasing sales by increasing brand awareness, and eventually the revenue.
Most importantly, your customers are bound to do an online research before purchasing, which makes online marketing a necessity rather than an option.
Ways to market your B2B e-commerce website
Here are some proven ways to market your B2B e-commerce website:
Create and maintain an uber-cool website
On a scale of 1-10, how important is it to have a good B2B e-commerce website? Honestly, we’d say 11. Your website holds the door to your conversion funnel. It’s the source of your business’ exposure, so you should always be thinking about increasing your website’s visibility.
On average, B2B buyers are now performing 12 searches before engaging on any specific brand’s site.
Let’s view the buying experience from your customer’s perspective. Say you own a business that sells servers. Your customer is from an IT firm, and they have been instructed to buy servers with certain specifications (16 GB, 32x CPU core) and they’ve been handed a price limit of $600 per server.
Naturally, they’ll start by looking up servers on the internet. They’d compare the specifications, benefits, and prices before they zero in on a brand and model. Before finalizing their decision, they’ll look up recommendations from industry bloggers or influencers, read articles on how to choose the right server, or check peer reviews. They can do all this homework themselves and then click ‘Buy’ on your B2B e-commerce website, with absolutely no communication with your sales team.
Most of the time, your customers make up their minds before they communicate with you, and it’s solely based on what your website had to offer or what your recommendations like your past customers and other third-parties had to say about you.
How do I mould my website to attract more buyers?
Having a good B2B e-commerce website can be your best asset. It helps you showcase the features and functionalities of your products or services, and educate your potential customers on how they could benefit from what you’re offering. This is why you should be able to offer a seamless customer experience right from your home page to the checkout process.
Your website should help your customers understand your product or service without much effort, navigate smoothly, search for specific products and services from your list, and get in touch with your sales or support team if they have any questions.
According to a study, 84% of millennial B2B buyers believe their mobile device is essential for their work. So most importantly, make your website mobile-friendly.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is basically optimizing your content to rank better amongst all of the search engine results for a particular keyword. If you’re not familiar with how SEO works, it’s worth taking the time to do a little research or watch a few tutorials. In a nutshell, it’s about ranking better than other websites and getting to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).
You’ve probably noticed how much marketing experts stress SEO for better results. It’s mainly because SEO gives you a head start. If you have two other competitors selling the same products, you’re likely to be ahead in the competition if your B2B e-commerce website is better optimized than the others.
What are some basic SEO tips I can use to increase traffic?
To rank better, you can try link building and using the right keywords in the right place to attract prospects.
In most instances, your customers will probably search for products or services using generic terms before they land on the right B2B e-commerce website. Use keyword search tools to find out the right terms to communicate with your target audience.
To truly know how effective your website is, dive deep into analytics by measuring important website metrics like the time a customer has spent on your site, and the bounce rate of your website so that you can optimize it. If you offer gated content like downloadable PDFs or business guides, measure the download rates as well.
Advertising
When was the last time you browsed for hours without seeing a single ad? It’s all right if you can’t remember, because online ads have become an omnipresent part of our lives. They’re effective, and when done right, they can do wonders for your business.
There are many different types of advertising you can engage in – Search ads, Pay-per-click (PPC) ads, social media ads, in-app ads, and so much more!
Try to find the options that work best for your target audience and get you the best click-through rates and conversion rates.
How do I make ads that work?
Bland ads that simply state features don’t work anymore. Write good ad copy with keywords and efficient calls-to-action (skip the usual ‘Buy now’ and come up with a better alternative).
Next, tailor your ads to speak to specific customers. For instance, if you offer the same product or service to corporate buyers, wholesalers, and retailers, then use related keywords in your ad copy to target each group individually. You should include price points if it gives you an edge over your competitors.
Think creatively about what channels you can use, and if your website is mobile-friendly, you can try mobile ads too. Monitor your page stats to see what channels are bringing in good results.
Know when to run your ads. Look at your stats before you post your ads, to see when your website is getting the most traffic, and also keep an eye on external data about when people are likely to browse or click. For instance, if you’re not getting good numbers on holidays or weekends, then turn your ads off on those days to save funds.
Give retargeting (or re-marketing) a try! It’s a type of online advertising that can help you reclaim potential customers after they’ve left your website. Retargeting basically enables websites to display the targeted ads to customers who have bounced off your website. The visitors of your website will see these ads while they’re browsing the internet or scrolling through social media sites.
Landing pages
Landing pages boost your lead generation by converting visitors to leads. There are two main reasons to create landing pages. First, the transition from an ad to a related landing page is smoother for your customer. Secondly, if you want to rank higher for certain keywords related to your products or services, you can create landing pages focused on those keywords to improve rankings.
How do I create good landing pages?
A good landing page would contain a video, a customer success story, and relevant FAQs along with your persuasive page copy.
When you’re writing your page copy, emphasize the outcomes and offer to solve your customers’ problems instead of just listing your features. To turn interest into clicks, include calls-to-action (CTAs) wherever possible.
If you have multiple target audiences, you can tailor individual landing pages to suit each of them. This lets you offer content for each audience without trying to fit it all into your main website, which would get messy and confusing.
Also, make sure your ads and landing pages go hand-in-hand to increase the number of engaged prospects. When a potential customer clicks on your ad, they should be redirected to a landing page that holds their interest.
Content marketing
Content marketing and e-commerce are closely connected. For example, providing informative ‘how-to’ articles and buyer guides can help your customer in picking the right product or service and influence their purchasing behaviour.
How do I come up with an effective content marketing strategy?
Your content marketing strategy should help your customers look up information related to your domain. They’re likely to return to your website and buy again in future if they can access quality content within your website instead of searching for it elsewhere.
Also, providing quality content will help you showcase your expertise in the industry which will help convince your customers to purchase from your website.
To build customers’ trust, consistently provide valuable content like blog posts, videos, infographics, essential articles, business tips and tricks, webinars, and how-to content.
Add more videos to your content plan! The number of customers checking video content has surged recently. According to a 2018 market survey, 70% of B2B buyers and researchers watch videos before purchasing, and 73% of B2B marketers have reported that video content positively impacts the marketing ROI.
Tip: Before publishing a video, make sure your video is downloadable, shareable, and contains calls-to-action (CTAs).
Customer reviews and testimonials
You should make customer service one of your strongest areas, because happy customers are a marketing opportunity. When customers are treated with respect and helped to solve their problems, they’re more likely to generate referrals and word-of-mouth marketing for you.
How do I get started?
Encourage customer feedback, which can later be converted into case-studies or testimonials and added to your social media channels.
If you have a good number of customers giving you positive reviews, you can launch a referral program to offer incentives or discounts to customers who refer your product or service to others.
Customer feedback and reviews can be leveraged for your benefit, because most customers prefer to trust peer reviews over your own blog posts. If they read the testimonials of other customers from their industry, they’re more likely to consider purchasing from your site.
Here’s your takeaway!
To set up your B2B business for success, you need to find the right mix of marketing strategies. SEO, advertising, landing pages, content marketing, and customer reviews are all great ways to drive more traffic to your B2B e-commerce website. With little work, they can also help you improve the quality of that traffic and attract visitors who are more likely to become customers. Before you try to finalize that perfect marketing plan, spend some time trying out these strategies, watching the results, and finding what works the best for your business.