Educating B2B Buyers About Your B2B Services In New Era

Educating B2B Buyers

Selling to B2B buyers is not a child’s play.

At times, marketers feel it’s nearly impossible to reach buyers in this elusive market and they feel like throwing in the towel.

But before giving up, it’s essential to remember that selling has never been like a walk in the park. We believe the challenges have been amplified by the deadly virus that broke out last year. To survive and thrive in such conditions, it’s necessary you think out-the-box and adopt new approaches and strategies.

After all, the more the effort you will put in, the sweeter the final reward will be. 

In today’s B2B marketing world, the buyer is actually the in-charge of the whole buying process not the seller. The market has become customer-centric. As per statistics, buyers these days prefer to conduct research and then pick what they should buy without being influenced by sellers’ suggestions. 

Only 29% of B2B buyers prefer to contact a salesperson when they want to know more about the service/product. Around 57% of buyer decisions are taken before buyers contact marketers(sellers).

But that doesn’t mean that there’s no longer the need to market your B2B business to your B2B consumers.

To run a B2B business successfully in such bizarre conditions and keep your buyers involved in this whole process, you first need to understand what modern B2B marketing is

To sum up, buyers are now more informed and too much information can be pretty overwhelming for them, in such circumstances making buying decisions can be quite stressful. 

Therefore, taking an educational or prescriptive approach will not only bring in more sales but life-time customers too. Hence, find new tactics or ways to properly educate your buyers about B2B products/services and how your offered solutions can solve their pain points to build a stable and strong relationship with them.

Today in this article, we’ll discuss some of the practical and modern marketing strategies that you can adopt to keep the modern B2B buyers interested in your products/services.

B2B Marketing tips to keep your modern buyers engaged

B2B email marketing

B2B email marketing

As we have just mentioned above, B2B customers prefer to conduct research on their own before making a purchase decision. Therefore, make this process easier for them by providing enough information they require to make informed buying decisions. 

We believe newsletters are one of the best ways of sharing relevant information with B2B buyers. A few years ago, marketers were predicting the extinction of email marketing. However, it remains as one of the most effective and important marketing tactics till date. 

Email marketing is about establishing a connection with customers. That’s why around 73% of digital marketers believe email marketing is fundamental to their business. 

Also email marketing is much more than ‘typing in a few words’ and ‘hitting send’

It’s more about building your email lists, finding a striking email template, crafting engaging content to target the right audience, and optimizing for responsiveness, deliverability, measuring, testing, and much more. 

Building effective marketing calls for planning and uniformity. While developing an email marketing plan you need to take the things mentioned below in to consideration,

Building your email list

There are plenty of ways to build email lists. One of the most common and popular one is to offer them your newsletter or something more valuable like e-book or promotions, and in exchange ask for their contact details, especially email addresses

You can also ask for their business cards when you’re at a trade show or simply buy a list of prospective buyers contacts. No matter which tactic you prefer to choose, just make sure you have a way to collect email addresses of potential buyers to keep your list growing. 

Designing an email marketing calendar

Consistency is the ultimate key to success in this industry. Same goes for email marketing. You first need to decide whether you should be sending newsletters to buyers weekly,fortnightly, or monthly. You should select a schedule that works for your businesses and then stick to it till death. 

Buyers prefer to purchase from those brands who’re highly consistent, as it signifies the credibility of your business. 

Planning your email content

Opening your laptop and writing anything that  comes to your mind and sending it to your buyers as a newsletter is not what you’re supposed to do.

 Put some thoughts and come up with some creative content that your buyers find useful and engaging. Offer them high-quality content that they can share with your potential prospects. Remember to add more value in your content as buyers demand for quality and reliable content.

Using email marketing tools

Using email marketing tools

If you visit the market, you’ll find plenty of quality email marketing tools like, Constant Contact, Mailchimp, and ConvertKit, to name a few. Using a good email automation tool that can help you to be consistent and follow your email marketing plan.

Social media marketing

Social media marketing

According to a study of Content Marketing Institute and MarketingPros, around 92% of B2B organizations use social media marketing strategy. Being available on social media is essential if you want to build brand awareness and credibility.

As per Hinge Marketing statistics, 60% buyers search new B2B sellers on social media networks to know their credibility before engaging with them. This is why social media is one of the most commonly and popularly used resources to acquire relevant information.

Using this marketing strategy to educate buyers will help you to build your brand’s credibility and reach the right audience to generate more leads. Moreover, it’s an amazing platform to connect with industry experts and digital influencers.

Unfortunately, not every social media platform is effective for your brand. Before you quickly dive into B2B social media marketing, a word of caution : choose your platform wisely.

To help you out, we have listed below a few B2B social media platforms. Let’s have a look at them.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn

Certainly, LinkedIn is the best platform ever developed in the market for B2B companies, especially if you want to position yourself as a thought leader in this industry. Use LinkedIn to connect with your buyers and audience to offer them quality content regarding your brand, services, products, and industry. 

Take the example of Salesforce. They distribute quality content on LinkedIn that resonates with their target audience and users (sales and marketing teams).

Facebook

Facebook

Undoubtedly, Facebook is an ideal platform to show the human side of your business. Producing and posting quality content gives insight of your brand’s values and personality.  

Cisco Networking Academy, a popular brand who uses Facebook to give its buyers and audience a glimpse of their inclusive goals. 

Twitter

Twitter

People use Twitter to acquire the latest news updates. It is a great source to provide updates and news to customers. It’s a stellar platform if you want to have one-on-one and direct conversions with buyers. 

Keyhole use twitter to find relevant conversations, and join them before their competitors to demonstrate their services/products benefits. 

Before choosing your platform, it’s essential to understand the value of each platform and what it brings to the table. 

You can use social media content like stats, videos, and product sneak peeks to educate your B2B buyers. We suggest you to use social media monitoring tools as well to measure the performance of your content. 

Competitor analysis

Beware of your competitors!

Competitor analysis

If you want to survive in this cut-throat competitive industry, it’s essential to track and monitor your competitors. By doing so, you’ll be able to figure out what’s your position in the market and where you stand. 

We believe that you don’t want to fall behind in this competition, so monitoring what everyone else is doing is necessary. 

A B2B competitor analysis is inarguably one of the most activities you can perform. We believe we can learn alot from our competitors. You can learn what they’ve been unsuccessful or successful in, and what actions you need to take to flourish in the industry. 

The process of analyzing competitors isn’t scientific in nature. In fact, it’s more about the trial and error, however you need to gather as much information you can and use various analytics tools to analyze the performance of your competition. 

The SWOT analysis method can be used in this case. The SWOT analysis method is basically a process that helps to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of a company. You can use it for not your own organization but competitors too.

It’s basically an analytical framework that determines what a company can and cannot do and what are its potential challenges and opportunities. 

It further helps you to find the strengths and weaknesses of your product or service offering. You can take fullest advantage of it and use your findings to connect with more potential customers. You can also gain more industry knowledge to stay ahead of the competition. 

You can use various competitive marketing analysis tools to analyze your competitors accurately and efficiently. Some of the popular ones include, Monitor Backlinks,Moz, Website Grader, SEMrush, Keyhole etc. 

Using case studies

Have you ever stopped by food sample stalls outside or in grocery stores? It’s certainly an outstanding marketing tactic for supermarkets as it helps in boosting the sales from 600% to 2000%. That’s Insane. 

Aside from offering free newsletter and eBooks, B2B eCommerce organizations can provide buyers a better understanding of their services and products using case studies.

The purpose behind using case studies is to highlight the positive aspects of your business and demonstrate how  buyers benefitting from your products and services. 

 As per Demand Gen survey report, around 73% buyers use case studies while researching before engaging with the brand. 

Case studies are basically those measurable proofs that talk about what your company has to offer. Case studies increase your brand’s credibility. 

Just think, before purchasing a product from Amazon, why do you read the customer reviews?

Well, to find out if it is credible enough to purchase a product from it. Same goes for B2B marketing. 

Case studies can help you in multiple ways including, 

  • Position your brand as an industry kingpin
  • Educate your prospects on the value of your solutions and what benefits they offer
  • Provide powerful and influential social proof

While creating case studies, determine how your customers are using your services and products, what benefits they offer them etc. Include quotes and stories acquired from your buyers and use reliable statistics if possible. 

There are numerous ways to educate your buyers via case studies. Some of them are listed below,

Showcasing case studies on your site’s homepage

Showcasing case studies on your site’s homepage

We believe case studies help in driving more click-throughs and conversions on a site. Your site homepage is usually the first page that your visitors view when they land on your website. Use this opportunity to entice visitors and make them stay on your website longer via case studies. 

Here’s an outclass example from Poynt who knows very well how to feature their case studies on their site’s homepage.

Designate a page/place for case studies on your site

Designate a page/place for case studies on your site

Once you have created a library of case studies, showcasing them to buyers in a meaningful way is what you need. Create a specific section or page on your site for your case studies. 

Add your case studies to your site’s blog

Add your case studies to your site’s blog

Another excellent example of showcasing your case studies is to discuss your customer stories and reviews in your blog posts. We believe this will work effectively for awareness and inspiration for your top leads. 

Also don’t forget to add a CTA button at the end of your blog, asking readers to download case study for free or request a demo to check how they can benefit from your services. 

Moreover you can also turn your case studies into video content to make them more engaging. You can also showcase them on social media platforms to hook your audience. 

Final thoughts

Keeping modern buying engaged and educating them about your B2B services these days is quite challenging. We hope this article will help you in understanding why educating your modern B2B buyers is necessary and how you can use the above discussed tactics to sell your B2B services to your buyers smartly.

If you’re a WooCommerce B2B store owner and want to enhance your productivity, then B2BWoo is the best option for you. It’s a one-stop-shop for your every WooCommerce B2B eCommerce solutions.

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A writer by profession, Maria Ilyas is an eCommerce and digital marketing enthusiast and is always digging into the latest marketing trends, best practices, and growth strategies.