SUSTAINABLE MARKETING FOR B2B SELLING

SUMMARY

The world is changing, and marketing is now the core activity for most businesses.

The traditional approach of short-term one-off campaigns are no longer effective. You need to build an engaged audience who have regular contact with your brand so that when the next time they need something arises then, you are the first people they turn to.

This article is about how to build sustainable marketing into your overall marketing strategy so that it becomes the cornerstone to generating enquiries and leads for your business.

TRADITIONAL SHORT-TERM ONE-OFF CAMPAIGNS

In the past, if you wanted to get prospects in a room for a seminar you could get away with short one-off campaigns such as a letter or email shot followed up by a telephone call. It was a tried and trusted method of getting bums on seats for a workshop. I have done it with LinkedIn in the past and successfully filled many workshops with business owners and CEOs of larger organisations. This was a few years ago when there was less marketing noise than there is today.

However, there is only a limited number of people in a particular target market, and so any business development does need to be done with care so as not to burn through your prospective customers.

The problem with the short term marketing approach is that there is no relationship developed and very little brand development unless you were running workshops on a regular basis such as UKFast in Manchester who have a whole programme of educational events. However, they do this by building a relevant and engaged audience.

I would also say that from my experiences at premier peer to peer group organisation that the traditional approach was not effective and they employed by some experts to support them.

BUSINESS TO BUSINESS SUSTAINABLE MARKETING

We, therefore, need a new approach.

We need an approach that both reaches out to find new prospects and also allows you to be found when a prospect needs a solution to a problem or fulfil a desire.

We need an approach that builds up:

• Database of emails for a monthly newsletter to either promote expertise or offers (timing of offers needs to in-sync with the buying cycle of the prospect).
• Engaged Audience on a relevant social media platform (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google for Business) so that they get brand awareness from regular updates so that they remember you when the times comes.
• Website prominence in the search engines so that you can be found.

This means we need marketing devices that help you collect relevant email addresses, have a relevant social media presence where prospects will see your regular updates and build up the presence of your website.

For this approach to work, the following are required:

• Regular content marketing (weekly works well at the moment).
• A search engine friendly website where the content can reside.
• Social media presence with regular updates (ideally daily but weekly can work).
• LinkedIn lead generation which builds connections and starts a conversation.
• Regular email marketing using an email management system.

BENEFITS

This approach achieves the following benefits:

• Audience Development: Builds an audience who are interested in what you do
• Brand Awareness: Salespeople are getting later and later into the sales cycle, keeping your name in front of your audience is becoming increasingly important so that your information on your products and services are included in their evaluation.
• Engagement: Get likes, comments and shares from your prospects when you share something of relevance to them.
• Increased Influence: Lift your LinkedIn Social Selling Index & get to more people when you need to.
• Market Research: Conversational marketing allows you to research your market because you are talking directly to your prospects in a way that will enable you to find out their real pain points
• Be Found On Google: Fresh content on the website means that the search engines will come back on a regular basis to rescan the site. Correctly formatted this content should help the chances you being found through search.
• Be Found On Social Media: Increasingly social media is being used as a research tool.
• Relevant Enquiries: If you are using conversational marketing to get to the customer pain points then you will then be better placed to prescribe solutions that will be relevant to them
• Higher Conversion Rates: Using open sales funnel questions in the conversational marketing means that your conversation rates will improve because you will be suggesting appropriate solutions.
• Support High-Value Sales: With high-value selling, you need to engage with all the buying personas in the organisation you are pitching to with wrecking the relationship with your key contact.

The diagram shows how digital marketing is interconnected and how you need to get all the components to work if you are to be successful.

FURTHER INFORMATION

For more information on how we can help you develop sustainable marketing in our business, please call 0345 053 7417 or email [email protected]