B2B Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Service Business.

When service providers ponder about choices to make when doing B2B marketing, more often than most the technique applied is direct and outbound messages which are sent to leads or prospects identified. Primarily, the objective of this approach is to be compelling enough and get prospects to engage with their services. Although this approach has a place in your marketing toolbox, B2B marketing strategies has expanded and the behavior of service buyers has drastically changed. Buyers now are more likely to do a google search to evaluate a service provider than to check personal references.

In today’s hyper-competitive business environment, exploiting a wide range of strategies will help you stay ahead of the competition. No strategy is crafted independent of the competition because like it or not your competition will determine your market share, sales, and price among others. With competition in mind, being aware of the foundational marketing principles will help you craft an effective marketing strategy.

These marketing principles in no particular order are specialization, differentiation, segmentation and concentration. First is specialization which relates to a particular service, customer or market area you want to serve. Second, differentiation is about your competitive advantage. A feasible business strategy is a differentiation strategy. It speaks to how different you are from your competitors? I strongly believe identifying your competitive advantage and conveying it well to your market segment, will improve sales in a year than a lifetime without a clear competitive advantage.

Third is segmentation which is identifying specific customers in the market that value your area of differentiation and will pay premium prices for your area of specialization. Marketing today is segmented. Ask yourself, who are the customers that most appreciate your area of superiority? What are their demographics and psychographics? Are you able to describe your perfect customer without mentioning your service offering? Lastly is concentration. Basically, focusing all your marketing energy and efforts on the identified segment. Let’s now jump right ahead and look at effective B2B marketing strategies to consider for your service business.

So, which strategies are crucial to the success of your service business? Let us look at 9 fundamental B2B marketing strategies that will help your business grow.

Beyond the marketing principles are the marketing strategies which are also crucial to the success of your business. These are the 9 fundamental B2B marketing strategies that will help your business grow.

Research

Researching your market will help you make more informed decisions. It gives an objective basis for marketing and a baseline for measuring results. You could do surveys to understand the market better which will help you serve customers better. There are three kinds of research you could leverage to help your business grow. These types of research include: opportunity research, brand research and client research.

Niche-driven strategy

Research has frequently shown that the fastest growing service providers tend to be specialist in a targeted niche. A specialization is a differentiator that proves itself.

An efficient website

Your website is one of your crucial assets. In a digital era, your website is the hub of your firm’s online presence and information-rich projection of your expertise in the marketplace. It enhances your visibility, prospects search online for service providers, they should be able to find your business for you to have a chance of winning their business. 80% of customers check out the website when looking for a service provider- most commonly used source of information by far.

Content and targeted offers drive a lead closer and closer to engagements, new visitors are converted into qualified leads through a process of attracting prospects, building engagements and converting those opportunities to clients.

Design is an important component to consider in building websites. Graphic design can influence perceptions, aid recall and intuitively differentiate a business.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization comes in to enhance the performance of your website by helping target audiences find you. High growth service providers list SEO as the most effective online marketing technique available to them.

SEO is complex and an evolving discipline. It primarily consists of two components that is on-site SEO and off-site SEO.

Social media

Research confirms that 60% buyers check out service providers on social media making it more commonly used source of information than recommendations and referrals. Even the nature of referrals has changed in this social media age. 17% of expertise-based referrals are made on the basis of interactions on social media.

Advertising

The most efficient platforms for you to advertise effectively are:

·??????Industry publications and websites

·??????Social media

·??????Search engine marketing (SEM)- Google ads

·??????Retargeting- cookie based technology that helps you anonymously follow your audience across the web and serve relevant ads

Apart from just promoting services, advertising can help you drive up content downloads increasing your visibility and expertise.

Referral marketing

Earlier we saw that the nature of referrals has change causing implications to service providers B2B marketing strategies. Research reveals a new interesting insight- over 81.5% of providers received a referral from someone who was not a client. The majority was based on a firm’s reputation for specific expertise.

A combination of the above tactics with robust content marketing has the potential to built a brand with a wide spread reputation for specialty in your area.

Marketing automation, CRM and Lead nurturing

Marketing automation uses technological solutions to replace manual and repetitive marketing processes and tasks with automated ones. Make sure you select the right software depending on your firm needs.

Use customer relationship management system (CRM) to organize client information and opportunities. This will help you organize a database of information you collect about opportunities and client information including interactions with them.

E-mail marketing helps in lead-nurturing. By leveraging on targeted, analytics email campaigns, service providers are able to deliver hard and soft offers for specific buyer roles tailored to the prospects place in the customer journey maps.

Testing and Optimization

In this approach testing helps you iterate your marketing efforts and make choices based on data rather than intuition. You should never stop testing your campaigns and adjusting them accordingly depending on the outcomes.

Conclusion

In business continuous improvement is important as opposed to stagnant growth. To remain competitive service providers, need to constantly assess their B2B marketing strategies and enhance them.

Service providers that utilize data across their marketing efforts are set-up to win.?