Starting or growing a B2B company can be quite a challenging process due to the sheer number of moving parts.
You not only have to think about product development and USPs, but branding, sales and marketing, after-sales services, government policies, employee management, etc. Taking all these into consideration, running a B2B business can be a nightmare if you don’t tread carefully.
In this article, we shall go over a few important B2B business development strategies that can be a great addition to your overall strategy. This is not by any means a comprehensive list, just some tips we think you might find useful. Check out our more comprehensive article on B2B marketing strategy.
Part 1 – Finding Your Customers
Strategy #1 – Try Inbound Marketing
This is possibly one of the best marketing strategies at your disposal as a B2B business. Most companies are using this type of marketing nowadays due to its astoundingly large success rate.
Inbound marketing is all about drawing customers in by giving them a free taste of what you have to offer. Either design a tool or build a piece of content that you can share with your future customer base. And make sure that the content is related to something your target demographic is interested in.
Think of things like webinars and e-books, what’s important is that these things contain genuine value because you don’t want to come off as purely trying to self-promote.
Once you’ve drawn people and businesses in, and have obtained their email addresses from them signing up or downloading your free content then you can follow up. The better your free content is, the more likely you are to obtain lead information.
Strategy #2 – Get on LinkedIn
Out of all the social media sites today, LinkedIn is the best one for B2B companies. B2C companies can get by on platforms like Twitter because their customer base is the average consumer, but the customer base for B2B companies is other businesses.
LinkedIn’s user base largely consists of business executives, owners, and key decision-makers, precisely the people you’d want to connect with.
Within LinkedIn, you can use many different strategies to attract potential customers to you. Some ideas would be to repost your content there, join relevant groups, or pick out individuals that you’d like to work with and try to build relationships with them directly. Check out our comprehensive guide on how to find clients on LinkedIn.
No matter what method you use, LinkedIn is one of the greatest social media tools you have as a B2B company.
Part 2 – Getting Those Customers To Stay
Strategy #3 – Improve the Experience
The best way that you can ensure that new customers will become consistent ones is to improve the user interface of your company, and therefore also the user experience. Some people refer to these two things as the UX/UI.
You want your customer to have an easy and smooth time while they work with you so they’re more likely to stay for the long haul.
There are many ways to make sure this happens, including paying attention to when customers tend to drop off and improving that part of the process, or asking customers directly for their constructive criticism.
Whenever you receive a negative review on any of your social media pages, don’t get defensive (even if the customer was the one on the wrong). Just apologize and promise to look into it.
And that shouldn’t be an empty promise, actually take the time to investigate what happened. Negative comments are a double-edged sword in the sense that they can hurt your company’s reputation, but also provide useful feedback on what areas you need to improve. So don’t be discouraged by them.
Strategy #4 – Make Sure They Feel Appreciated
If you want someone or something to stick around, making them feel like they matter is vital to that cause. So you’re going to want to make sure that your new customers, and your regular ones as well, feel appreciated.
You can do this by occasionally offering them a small and free service or discount, sending a quick thank you email every once in a while, or by taking what they say into account and always showing that you’re working on improving their experience with you.
And very importantly, always address them by their names (even if you’re sending bulk emails). Starting a message with “dear customer” or anything of the sort is incredibly impersonal.
Part 3 – Using Your Regular Customers to Get New Ones
Strategy #5 – Accumulate Some Testimonials
Hopefully, if you’ve applied all of the strategies above and established a consistent and loyal customer base even if it is small, then you can use that base to find more customers.
What you want to do is get some of your customers to make some testimonials for you. These could be written words, they could refer your business to their colleagues and friends. They could even make a testimonial video that you could share online and on social media for credibility and social proof.
When people see how well your current customers are being treated and hear their glowing reviews, they’ll want a piece of the action as well. Combining all of these strategies together creates a snowball effect.
The more customers you bring in, the more that they will bring in, the process repeats and you get the point. Current customers are some of your biggest allies for securing new ones for your B2B company.
So in conclusion…
There are many different ways you can go about growing your business, but these strategies used by B2B companies can help you do it a bit faster. It’s important to follow the examples of already successful companies in your field if you want to succeed as well.
And all of these strategies have been used by fellow B2B companies for a long time now, and they’re still being used to this day. Hopefully, after reading this article, you’re going to become another success story that can attest to them.
