June 15th, 2021 – Weekly Marketing Tips to Elevate Your Marketing Skills
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For B2B Marketing, What Are The Top Ways to Market Yourself & Your Products/Services?
Business to Business marketing involves talking to your prospective customer a little differently. Since they’re professionals looking to another professional to help increase revenue (always the ultimate goal at the end of the day) they’re needing you to 1st solve a problem they have and 2nd to provide expertise outside of their in-house skillsets/workflows.
How do we get in front of these clients in their professional setting to engage them?
Here are 3 main ways:
1) Networking, Networking, Networking
Put yourself where they are. This could be conferences, niche social media groups, industry events, membership clubs, and societies, etc. A decent chunk of your marketing budget should be spent getting you in front of your ideal customers.
2) Position Yourself as an Expert
It’s one thing to get yourself to where they are, the next step is to get them to turn to you for information. Be helpful! Chime in on their questions to provide insight and help, speak at conferences on topics that they care about, post industry articles and content that provides news and progress, etc.
3) Build Your Network
It’s one thing to collect business cards or digital contacts when you meet these people, but it’s another thing to stay top-of-mind without personally emailing them all the time. If you set up your customer journey to allow them to opt-in to receive helpful information from you, they’ll get a little reminder of your value every time you post. This could be a blog they get alerts from, connecting personally on Linkedin, signing up for your email list, and so on.
Ask an Expert
For this question, we’re assuming that you’re talking about your overall marketing campaigns, instead of a specific platform’s ad campaign (like Google or Facebook). Though, the advice really would be mostly the same, minus some bid strategy and targeting advice.
- Make sure both your messages and call-to-actions are crystal clear and to the point.
- A/B Test both copy and creative to see which performs better
- Know your audience and which stage of the customer journey they are in. Make sure your asks and content align with the stage of the relationship you are in. Utilize retargeting to further the relationship after they complete each step in the journey.
- Separate out each campaign into its own little microenvironment to better track analytics. This could be setting up a special landing page, separate email list, contact forms, CRM tracking, conversion events, etc. This will give you the data to show you what is working and what isn’t working.
This week’s recommended tool is Later!
In the world of social media planning and scheduling tools, they are all pretty similar. Here at Desert Creative Group, we were always torn between using Later and Hootsuite. Later provides the most powerful Instagram integration, but didn’t support Linkedin. Hootsuite is solid, but not as streamlined, visual, and doesn’t do great with Instagram.
Later recently launched the ability to post to Linkedin business profiles and we are so excited! This is the platform that we prefer to utilize for our social media.
Sprout Social is also another great option but at a much higher price point 🤑.
MONTHLY CAREER DEVELOPMENT TRAINING
Don’t miss out on Janeale’s monthly leadership development workshop to elevate your marketing skills and career by shifting to big-picture thinking!
July 29th 10:30a MDT
Did you know that a customer is often anywhere between 50-90% of the way through their purchasing decision before they even reach out to you?
You heard that right!
By the time a customer reaches out to you through your website, phone, email, social DMs, etc – they have already been doing their own research into your company, your products and services, your competitors’ solutions, and whether or not you’ll solve their problem.
What does this mean?
Knowing this means you can tailor your customer journey (aka the way you lead a potential customer through awareness, education, and purchasing steps) to not only give pertinent information at key times but also develop digital journeys to help them along the way without them needing to reach out to you first.
Want more information on customer journeys to make sure yours will make the cut? Check out our customer journey blog post!
