The B2B buying process has changed in the past few years and it's time for your business to adapt. In accommodating this change, it’s important to understand how the B2B buyer’s journey now functions as this market continues to be difficult to tap into. Often, a business decision on new suppliers can involve negotiations between six to 10 decision-makers. Each offers a variety of different information they’ve gathered on multiple suppliers and provide recommendations on it internally with the rest of the stakeholders.
This dynamic makes it difficult for business clients to buy products or services because the entire team might have input in the buying decision. It makes the entire decision-making process longer and more weary. According to Gartner, 77% of B2B customers affirm that their latest buying process was very complicated or difficult to complete.
If you want to stand out, make it easier for B2B customers to buy from your business by giving them the information they need to make you the strongest case in their internal deliberations.
Cater to the B2B market
An effective B2B marketing strategy has different components working together to attract your target audience members and convince them to buy. Leveraging these different tactics helps you to convert leads into paying customers by moving them effortlessly through the sales funnel.
Bring prospects to you by creating content that meets their needs at each stage of the buyer’s journey. Here at League, we have a tried-and-tested approach to achieving this, which includes:
- Running a workshop with our clients to better understand their business, identify their goals and gain an insight into their target market. A session typically lasts a few hours because it's an important meeting where we get all important decision-makers in one room. This leads to a better clarification on the appropriate marketing strategy to take. It also means that everyone is aware of the campaign and drives a smoother ship at the end of the day.
- Undertaking an in-depth analysis of our client’s target audience by building detailed persona documents. For instance for a telecoms client, we might identify a CEO, CTO, IT manager or COO as personas that we want to focus our attention on. Other examples could include a chief digital officer or chief human resources officer.
- Creating niche content that’s directed to every identified persona. Rich content that speaks their language is highly shareable and evergreen. As our focus is on attracting potential customers, the content we create must be compelling, informative, relevant and of a high quality.
- Incorporating the right keywords your prospects are using in a search engine so they can easily find the content.
- Lead nurturing to guide your buyer personas and help them move seamlessly through the sales funnel.
- Sharing the content on the right platforms where your prospects are likely to be active.
- Taking it a step further by placing this rich content right in front of your target audience instead of taking them on a journey to find it through intuitive paid media initiatives.
Why this works
When you have readily available quality information provided to your prospects through digital channels, it makes it easier for buyers to gather information independently. So essentially, we are helping prospects move through the funnel on their own with a little direction from our marketing team. We make use of well-thought out marketing material delivered at the right moment to give prospects what they need to get them closer to the buying stage.
This digital strategy works to break down silos between the sales and marketing teams. We show our clients what a good lead looks like and how to nurture them to drive the closure of a sale.
Your business customers are channel-agnostic individuals when it comes to seeking the information they need to get a job done. So sales reps are not the only channel speaking to customers. There needs to be alignment across in-person and digital channels to support the buying process.
In a nutshell: Improve your buyer enablement by provisioning information that supports the completion of critical activities necessary in the buyer’s journey. Provide prospects with prescriptive advice and practical support to make the buying process easier to navigate and complete.
Our job is to capture and keep the attention of your target audience – and we know how to do this. We enable business growth because we understand the digital space end to end and can unpack a client’s needs. We have a wealth of expertise across the board, making it easier to cater to clients who approach us with a full spectrum of requirements.
Take a look at our digital solutions range to understand how we can craft a sales strategy to place your business front and centre.
