B2B Marketing is often 180 degrees different to traditional marketing to consumers. When you don’t understand the differences, it creates problems that are invisible until 6 months down the road. In this clip, we break down the differences:
🔵 B2B buyers are typically making 5 – 7 figure decisions, so they need much more education before asking them to book a call. Otherwise, sales will struggle to get them on the phone and close.
🔵 B2B buyers are more focused. They’re on social media more to learn, less to be entertained. So the more content you can provide, the better.
🔵 Marketers tend to be obsessed with more leads, at cheaper cost. But in B2B, the highest leverage focus is usually to improve lead quality so sales can actually close deals and bring in real $$$.
🔵 And, when marketing to businesses, usually decisions are made by a committee. So your marketing needs to be focused on inspiring ALL of them – not just one clicker.
If you have lots of leads, but struggle to get them on the phone and convert them to real sales… this is why.
Learn plenty of different strategies for leveraging video in a B2B Marketing program. We talk about high level strategy as well as diving into the tactics that we use for our client-base today.
With “remarketing”, your audience is still in the marketing process, but now you’ve got a little bit of a digital relationship built with them.
So now it’s more appropriate for you to ask them to book a quick conversation with your sales team or maybe even a demo.
However, this is a significantly smaller audience than Layer 1.
So they’re going to see your ads a lot more often and often we see that they’ll need to see, say three to 12 or more ads before they’re ready to book a call!
So a couple of things here.
You need to make sure that your content is still really educational, giving lots of value, very inspirational and impactful and you also need to show a really big variety of content. So, long form articles, white papers, videos, long form social posts, for example.
You’ll find that most of your Market in B2B isn’t actually ready to buy, only about, say 3% to 5% of the B2B Market are actually ready to buy us.
So you want them to be seeing your content all the time, often getting educated and inspired so that when they’re ready to make that buying decision, you are the first person that comes to mind and they’re ready to book that call.
Once they’ve booked the call, then you can move them through into layer 3.
Sales cycles in B2B, they’re anywhere from 3 or 12 months or more, sometimes years.
So during that process, it’s so important that your prospects are being educated by your content, by your videos, by your thought leadership.
So on that initial sales call, your sales team would have explained your products and services, and they would have explained buying options.
So when it comes to your content, during layer 3, you want to be focused on testimonials and case studies from other clients, benefits of your service and even unique features that your competitors can’t compete with.
In a B2B company, often most of the customer lifetime value is earned AFTER that initial deal is signed. So it’s important you’re effectively marketing to CURRENT customers too.
But at this stage, you’re no longer “selling”. Now you want to use Digital Marketing to:
🔹Continually educate clients and users so they get the most value possible from your services
🔹Turn one-off customers into lifelong customers & evangelists
🔹Ensure they continually progress into the higher value services that you know will bring longer-term results
At Visionary, we call this “LAYER 4” marketing – check out the video.
The CRM, it will be one of the most powerful tools that you implement into your business.
So essentially it’s able to integrate all of your online marketing and all of your online sales initiatives, and then track and fine-tune each one in real time.
The CRM also allows you to run an online sales process.
It records and manages your contact with every single lead and prospect throughout their buyer’s journey, and really allows you to create an individual buyer’s journey for every contact where they feel like they’re getting the most possible value from your business before the sale.
Now, there’s plenty of really good CRM technology out there.
We’ve got Visionary clients that use HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, and there’s many other more niche versions.
For Visionary, our favourite is by far Hubspot.
And the reason is because it’s evolving the fastest and it scales with your business.
So with a CRM, every time they add a new feature or add a new evolution, that’s evolution to your entire online business.
You should choose what’s best for you, but it’s very, very important that you choose with a long-term perspective so that you choose the right CRM that will power your online sales process.
These are all the people that perhaps have the problems that you know you can help with.
However, they’ve never really heard of your brand. So to them, you’re just one of endless other brands trying to get into their attention space.
So since you haven’t built any trust with them yet there’s really no point in asking them to waste their precious time booking a call with you.
Instead, you want to show them layer one content here.
So content about their pain points. That could be videos, social media posts or articles that really help them clarify their pain points, perhaps show how other similar customers are dealing with those pain points.
But a really key Insight here – I see a lot of people getting this wrong.
You have to be very deep and very specific in the insight that you give them. So it can’t be the same content that your competitors are releasing, it can’t be the same points of view they can get everywhere else.
You have to really kind of dig deep in your expertise and experience, and give them insightful, impactful content.
And once they’ve consumed that content, as long as it’s been inspirational for them, then you’ve made an impact in their minds.
Now they know your brand.
And now you can use social media technology like LinkedIn ads, for example, to move them to Layer 2.
The Client Avatar documents your perfect customers.
It documents their psychology, like their pain points and their desires, the benefits they experience when working with you, why they should trust you, things like that.
And it’s documented very specifically in their words.
So we’ll do the research based on your interactions with those clients.
Perhaps we’ll interview some of your customers, or we can work through your sales notes or your emails, for example, but, Once we have that document that’s written in their words, then we really have a Source of Truth for the rest of your marketing.
So now anyone that works on your marketing produces very consistent content that speaks to the exact type of people that you want to work with.
Once we have that Client Avatar, we can move forward and start producing the rest of your marketing.
CLEAR MONTHLY REPORTING
Okay, next Monthly Reporting.
So before any long-term digital strategies are launched, it’s so important we understand exactly where you’re at.
So we’ll create a monthly dashboard with a few really key online marketing metrics and online sales metrics that then allows us month by month to monitor where you’re at and focus your limited attention, limited energy, limited budget on the right areas of your marketing that will create the most impact possible.
But if you’ve ever worked with a digital marketing company before, typically they deliver reams of digital marketing data, which makes no sense, right?
Awesome information for a marketer, but kind of extreme data overwhelm if you’re a director making business decisions.
So at Visionary we’ll keep our reports really clear, really simple, and will give you data-driven insights on your business.
Once we have that monthly reporting set up, then we’re in a really good position to advise on what the next strategy is that you should implement.
A great B2B website creates this emotional impact on everyone around the business.
So we’ll use the insights that we uncovered in the Client Avatar stage to make sure that the content crafted in that website speaks very specifically to your ideal customers.
We will leverage the videos from Step One into your website so that anyone that hits that website gets an immediate strategic explanation of what you do, so they’re primed to view the rest of the content.
It’s also really important that your website is built specifically for a B2B audience.
So you’ll find that in B2B decision makers they tend to be a little bit more sophisticated.
Often we’ll use longer form content, longer form articles, case studies, testimonials, and authority triggers to make sure that a decision maker feels that you can be trusted and you know what you’re doing.
And of course, you need to make sure that website is built for a B2B sales process.
There’s got to be content that will complement the sales process, and you also want to make sure that you can integrate the latest B2B tools as your online marketing evolves.
Once you have that website right, then we can start moving to your social presence.
Social Media Advertising is where you pay a platform like say, LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, Instagram, to show your content to the exact right people at the exact right time.
You can Leverage the insights from your Client Avatar to be very, very specific and very relevant in your advertising.
And then you can leverage the technology of the social platform to target very specifically.
LinkedIn, for example, allows you to target by job title, by industry, even by a revenue level, so you’re putting the exact right message in front of the exact right people at the exact right time.
Over time, it can optimise so that you start producing the best quality leads.
And you can start scaling the amount of ad spend to scale the amount of leads that come in.
Now, obviously that’s a very simplistic description.
Typically, to build and optimise this sort of system takes three to six months or more.
It’s very complex and there’s a lot of moving parts.
But with a social media advertising system, we can leverage everything else we’ve done in the Roadmap so far to create a really specific and powerful range of content to move your audience forward in that buyer’s journey.
Can AI explain a proven B2B sales strategy?
In this video, we let our trusty AI agent mates take full control, analysing Visionary’s expertise and breaking down our methodology for digitising a B2B sales process.
The result: insights every CEO and decision-maker needs.
🤖 “Team Visionary AI” analyses our expertise and explains the Visionary methodology for digitising a B2B sales process in an easy-to-understand way.
Fully AI-generated, we had no idea what to expect… but we let our AI agents do their thing. 🤖
Here’s a quick look at what they covered: