Business To Business Marketing: Attracting Business Customers Online

Posted on September 9, 2008
Filed Under Marketing

As a business to business marketer, many of the tactics that work in B2C marketing simply won’t cut it. Further more, the conversion event is less likely to happen there and then – especially if you’re selling services or angling towards a complex sale. This means that B2B marketers will often have to think about things differently. In this article we explore business to business marketing tactics that get results.

White Papers & Editorial

When you sell shoes, there are not too many things you can write about. Furthermore, customers aren’t really looking to see if you have lots of expertise in shoes. But, with more complicated sales, and larger volume transactions, customers often need to see that you know what you’re talking about. That’s where editorial can help.

Writing white papers, editorial, and case studies will give your clients something to read when they visit your website. This will help to position your company as an expert in your field – if done right – and will also give you an opportunity to get the customer’s contact details. Many B2B marketers will get potential clients’ details in exchange for allowing then to download their materials.

Buy Leads

B2B marketers will often choose to buy warm leads from lead generation firms. You can also pay an affiliate marketing network to recruit publishers who will drive leads to your business in return for a fixed cost-per-lead. Another, less-known, tactic can be to use a white paper distribution service. This allows you to only pay the company for a lead when someone downloads your white paper and gives away all of their contact details. All of these strategies can work well, and you could have your sales team handle a sample of the data and look at the conversion rates. When you are paying per lead, you can do extremely well when you have a streamlined, efficient and motivated sales team. Those who don’t will lose money – it’s that simple. Make sure you track effectively, and see what works.

Search Marketing

Business to business marketing teams will often experience problems in search because they struggle to get enough volume – this, of course, isn’t always the case. Some larger search marketing agencies will be looking for spend over $50,000 a month. If you work in a smaller online marketing, or don’t have this type of marketing budget, then you can still make online marketing work for you. There are also plenty of agencies that will be willing to work with much smaller budgets too.

If you do not want to commit too much to organic search engine optimisation at first, you can always spend some money on PPC and see what kind of conversions you are experiencing. If all goes well, you can start spending on SEO. When you have strong editorial on your website you will find that your website will naturally rank higher in search engines. The more quality content your website has, the more quality links it will get, and the higher your website will rank.

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