How Digital Marketing Can Drive Your B2B Company Results
I suspect that two types of people will read this article. The first group consists of those who are fairly new to digital marketing. They need to understand how they can benefit and a few tips to get started. The second group consists of those who are participating in digital marketing, but need to improve their results. This may require a bit of tweaking or a major re-work of their strategy.
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So, what can digital marketing do for you and why is it worth spending your precious time and budget? Assuming you do it right, digital marketing can:
- Build your company credibility. In most B2B industries, prospects check out a company online before engaging, let alone buying. You have a chance to establish the online presence that either adds to, or subtracts from, the strength of your brand. And if things get off track, you can use reputation management techniques to help restore your brand value. One important point about an online presence: If you are going to go, go BIG. There is a lot of “me-too” out there and you need some compelling differentiation to cut through the clutter.
- Generate leads and revenue at low cost. If you are going to compete with larger players, you need to play the digital marketing game as well as they do. This means capturing the email addresses of your prospects and customers, or getting them to follow you on Facebook, LinkedIn or one of the other interactive social media platforms.
- Shorten the sales cycle. B2B companies that have complex and/or long sales cycles have found digital marketing to be enormously helpful in saving the time of their reps and improving sales conversion rates. For more on this topic, read my article about Six Ways to Shorten the Sales Cycle. More good news: The same techniques that shorten the sales cycle can give you the added benefit of lowering your customer acquisition cost (CaC).
- Create awareness. You can’t win business from those that don’t know you exist. The cyber world is vast, amorphous, chaotic and constantly changing. You have to grab—and hold—your share of the attention to succeed. Many successful online companies started out as local firms with a very limited market reach. And many small- to mid-size companies have grabbed market share from larger competitors because of their aggressive and effective use of digital marketing.
- Provide anywhere and anytime access. Just a few years ago, mobile access was something of an afterthought. You built your website for desktop and laptop viewers and then figured out how to make it mobile-friendly. However, we are now seeing prospects and customers utilizing mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.) at the rate of 1/3 to 1/2 of total views in some industries. The key to making this work for you is to provide a website that is both mobile-responsive and full of the type of information necessary to move prospects closer to a buying decision.
- Give you a great testing platform. Want to test a new message, product viability or landing page? Digital marketing techniques like SEO, pay-per-click or online advertising can quickly test your marketplace receptivity. The idea is to test quickly, abandon what doesn’t work and scale what does work.
The reality every B2B company faces is that consumer and business expectations are increasing. It is easier than ever for prospects to find your competitors if you don’t offer them a productive and pleasant online experience. For our clients, we complete something called a website and social media analysis to find out what digital marketing actions they need to take to surpass competitors. This type of analysis can be a good jumping off point to get you on the right path to digital marketing success.
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