With B2B customer expectations mirroring those of consumers and the online world ever evolving, if you want your B2B ecommerce business to thrive you need to invest in the right digital marketing mix for your business.
Whilst trade shows, sales reps and traditional marketing tactics continue to play a role for many B2B companies, digital marketing can help you accelerate growth online and reach out to new layers of customers and drive growth for your online channel in a cost-efficient way.
Williams Commerce have almost a decade of experience working with wholesalers, manufacturers, importers and distributors helping them succeed and sustain growth year on year online. Our knowledge spans dozens of industries and verticals and we know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to digital marketing for B2B ecommerce companies, so read on if you’re ready to discover the latest trends and for ideas on where to invest your marketing budget.
Paid Search
When managed efficiently, Paid Search can prove to be one of the most lucrative digital marketing channels for B2B ecommerce companies. Not only are you able to be more visible online to your existing target audience, raising brand awareness about your company, services and products, but Paid Search can also be used to drive leads and incremental revenue for your ecommerce website.
For example, running dedicated campaigns targeted at encouraging potential new customers to register for a trade account, whilst Remarketing campaigns are able to target your website’s visitors or a specific subset of website users with new product information, cross-sells and upsells and much more.
SEO and Content Marketing
As an online business, it continues to be very important to appear as high as possible in the search results for queries which are relevant to your companies. For instance, if you’re a wholesaler specialised in selling wholesale toys, by ensuring that your website is well-positioned to rank on the first page of Google search results you can increase chances of users looking to buy wholesale toys to find your business organically. How you can achieve that? Ensuring that your B2B website is SEO friendly and well-optimised is a good place to start.
Learn more about the importance of SEO for ecommerce here.
Once your website has a strong technical SEO foundation, it’s important to build upon it with content marketing which can be used to turn your ecommerce store into a veritable online destination full of useful resources that will keep your clients engaged and coming back for more. By offering your B2B customers additional product information, as well as other industry-related resources you can gain a competitive advantage that will set you ahead of your competition.
Email marketing
Email marketing remains a popular and profitable digital marketing channel for B2B companies and an effective way of keeping your existing customers engaged with your brand regularly. Email marketing is now used by many B2B’s to promote new products and services, keeping customers aware of what’s new, offering useful advice and product data and offering exclusive access to special offers and clearance lines.
However, it’s worth keeping in mind, the days of ‘one size fits all’ email marketing are long gone, with clever segmentation and tailored email marketing campaigns being key for maximising ROI and engagement rates. Unlocking serious growth from email marketing needs a considered investment and strategy to take advantage of the fantastic tools available on the market today that will allow your email marketing to be truly personal.
Social media
Can social media deliver for B2B? It’s always a more controversial area for B2B to consider, however we’ve seen dedicated social strategies delivering brand awareness, referral traffic and incremental referral channel. However, for many B2Bs it may continue to be a lower priority for the short to medium term.
However, if you are wondering what Social Media can deliver for your business, the good news is, it’s low risk and low cost to experiment on relevant social channels.
Ensuring that your B2B company is active on social media can certainly assist in reaching new audiences and by choosing the right platforms for your industry, you can benefit from an additional marketing channel that can be used for raising brand awareness, customer service and even driving leads and sales. When it comes to B2B companies, LinkedIn is the go-to platform, followed by Twitter and Facebook, whilst social advertising is a good way for reaching your target audience and maximising brand exposure.
Data-driven marketing
With so many digital marketing strategies and channels available these days, it might seem like an overwhelming process implementing all of them or choosing the best ones for your business. This is where data-driven marketing comes in by allowing you to take decisions easier based on the data you have about your clients and industry.
Should you focus more on acquiring new clients or retaining existing ones? Are you reaching the right people or should you consider expanding to a new market? How can you improve conversion rates on your ecommerce website?
These are just a few questions that you can answer with the help of data-driven marketing strategies and then use the insights you get to transform your business and continue growing.
Contact the Williams Commerce Marketing team today on [email protected] and discover more about how we can help create and implement a digital marketing strategy for your B2B company.
