Top 5 Budget-friendly Strategies B2B Companies can use to Optimize Sales and Marketing
Growing sales is a challenge every company faces. Optimizing the process helps ensure costs of marketing stay low. This can be a daunting task for small businesses that may lack the budget to hire an in-house team, or form a contract with a large agency.
There’s a lot of advice out there tailored to ecommerce and B2C companies, and suggestions such as, “get active on social media,” aren’t very helpful if you don’t understand your audience yet. I’ve faced this situation many times throughout my career; sometimes it seems you need the sales before you can invest more in marketing. So how does one get around this catch-22?
Here are my top 5 methods that B2B companies can use to optimize their sales and marketing to increase inbound lead flow and conversions.
Optimize Your Website
Your website can be the largest source of leads if you have it optimized correctly and formatted for lead conversion. However, if it’s slow to load, disorganized, and unhelpful, it can easily dissuade a potential customer from buying your product or service.
If you have a long buying cycle (as is common with B2B), your customer is going to have more hurdles to cross when making their decision. That means there’s also more opportunity for your prospect to change their mind and decide to go with your competitor. It’s important that your website loads quickly, is responsive on any screen size, and contains the answers and information your prospect is looking to find.
This is especially important if you are a new player in your industry. Your prospects have never heard of you, so they aren’t going to sit down and google your company. If your website doesn’t pop up in relevant searches, you might as well be invisible. That is why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the key to growing your sales and marketing.
The good news is you don’t have to be an expert to do some basic optimization – but it does pay to bring one in once it’s within budget. There are many free resources, blogs, and online courses created by industry experts that you can follow, such as Neil Patel’s What is SEO and Yoast’s SEO for Beginners.
Setting up a Google Analytics account for your website is also a good step toward optimization. Take the free Google Analytics Academy course for basic certification and lessons on how to set up analytics for your website.
The next thing you’ll want to do is complete an online SEO assessment. SEM Rush, Moz, and UberSuggest (which I personally use) are all excellent at this. They will identify SEO errors that you can fix and will specify the problems that have the most impact on your rankings. They also provide a variety of tools that will help you with keyword research, content ideas, competitor analysis, and more.
If you don’t already have a website, I cannot stress this enough, GET ONE. Immediately. You’re throwing away money when you invest in any other type of marketing and sales strategies if you don’t have a website to back them up. B2B buyers do their research. If they get a sales call, they are going to google your company to see if you’re “legit.” If all they find is a Facebook page with three posts, you’re not going to close that sale.
If you have the budget for a professional-looking website, that is going to be your best option by far. If you have more budgetary constraints, create a small website on Wix, Squarespace, BigCommerce, or grab a WordPress template from a site like Envato Elements and pop it onto the web host of your choice. You can purchase a custom domain for $10-$15 annually and can add it to any of the options above. Utilize the SEO plugins included to walk you through optimizing each page.
Blog
Blogging is the most frugal way to build up your SEO and showcase your expertise to prospective customers. It also allows you to build an audience and gain subscribers that can register to receive updates and alerts. You can boost the SEO benefits of each article by embedding a leadership video that is hosted on your site.
Blogging is also a great way to target long-chain key phrases that address the pain points (questions that they’ll google to solve the problem) of your target audience. You can write a well-optimized post on these topics, and have a much better chance of ranking high on Google.
Try to blog as frequently as you can too, but prioritize certain posts as pillar pages. Then create shorter, supportive articles that further expand on the ideas mentioned in your pillar post. Try one a month if you don’t have much time to invest in your blog. Start by writing one high authority article and two monthly blog posts a quarter. Aim to make each blog post at least 1500 words. Linking to relevant website sources and to other pages and articles on and off your website will also be helpful.
As the quality and quantity of your site visitors increases, convert customers into leads and contacts with a gated premium content that further expands on topics included within the blog post. This could be a white paper, ebook, case study, infographic, or even a quiz.
Not all contacts you create are going to be ready to buy when they subscribe to your email list. It’s common for B2B companies to have a product or service that is not proactively purchased (I’m looking at you outsourced IT services). If your customer is only ready to buy the fire extinguisher after the fire has started, email nurturing and consistent, high-quality content production is probably a better investment than, say, increasing your outbound sales efforts.
I’m not going to sugar coat this; consistently coming up with content ideas can be a challenge, especially if your background is not in content creation. If it is within your budget, the easiest thing you can do is bring in a content marketing consultant to craft your initial content strategy. Many consultants and agencies will offer stand-alone, strategic workshops. If working with an expert is not in the cards just yet, there are a lot of free resources with step by step instructions.
Don’t forget to promote your content. Share your work and share it often! Writing an article and sharing it once on LinkedIn is not enough. Promote your articles every month, and upload them to Quuu so that other companies can share your content.
Network with Current and Past Customers
Taking the time to reconnect with current or past customers is a great low-cost strategy for sales optimization. It provides the opportunity to up-sell additional features of your product or service. It’s not likely that your customer is going to remember everything you may have shown them in your initial demo, so a simple call to touch base can end up being incredibly beneficial to both you and your client.
If your customer is happy, ask if they would be willing to refer your company to other potential clients that would benefit from your offering. Referral-based sales tend to have a close rate between 50%-70%, so any that you receive are going to be piping hot leads. Similarly, you can reach out to your personal network and see if anyone has any referrals they can send your way.
Setting up a simple referral incentive is a good idea to make sure someone knows you genuinely appreciate and value their help. Touch base with your network at least once a year just to see how everyone is doing. That being said, reaching out only to ask for a favor, while somewhat expected, does not sit well with many people and may not reflect positively on you.
“Referral-based sales tend to have a close rate between 50%-70%, so any that you receive are going to be piping hot leads.”
During a call, ask if they would be willing to write a short review for your company. If they agree to one, follow up with an email that links directly to the places you’d like to host the review. Your Google My Business, Facebook, Yelp, BBB , or Amazon (for ecommerce) pages are all great places to start. I highly recommend gathering reviews for trade review sites such as G2 Crowd, Capterra, and PC Mag.
Video testimonials are also an effective marketing tool, and with the shift into video conferencing, much easier for your customers to complete. If your client has agreed to provide a testimonial, there are a number of ways it can be completed.
If you do not currently include some form of stewardship meeting, or scheduled 1-on-1 review with your clients, implementing one is a great way to stay connected and to ask for all of the strategies I’ve mentioned above. These can be held at any time, but usually after the first 90 days, annually, or every six months.
Contrary to weekly or monthly review calls, a stewardship meeting is a chance to bring in the higher-ups from both sides to review the progress and actions taken within the decided time frame. It’s a chance to receive honest feedback from your client, and give you the opportunity to address any of their concerns.
Add a Lot of Video
In addition to testimonials, adding video to your sales and marketing strategy is an easy and highly effective way to boost conversions.
Let’s start with the simple facts about using video in your sales and marketing strategy:
Reps that use video in their prospecting, relationship-building, and sales emails receive 5x the open rates and an 8x higher rate of reply.
60% of business respondents will watch a video before reading any text.
Adding the word ‘video’ to your email subject line increases open rates between 7% – 13%.
Emails with videos have been shown to have a 200% – 300% improvement in click-through
Prospects who view videos of a product are 85% more likely to buy. – Internet Retailer
75% of late-stage prospects that receive a personalized video closed. – SalesLoft
65% of executives have visited a vendor’s site after watching a video. – Forbes
51% of executives under 40 reported making a purchase decision after watching a video.
I can assure you that you DO NOT need professionally produced content to benefit from video incorporation. In fact, premium video content can negate the personable connection that is possible with potential prospects.
There are low cost, all inclusive, video production lighting and sound kits that you can purchase on Amazon that will provide everything you need to get started. One of my absolute favorite production tools is Loom, which allows you to easily bump-up follow-up emails by including a video rundown of everything you’ve covered. It integrates with Chrome and gmail, so you can easily record , embed, and send your video right away.
One of the easiest ways to build content strategy is to make a thought leadership video on a specific topic, then write a blog about the same topic. Have your company leadership record short, 30 second tips on their phones, and then post them on social media. You should also share them in your stories on Facebook or Instagram. Simple edits can usually be done via free apps, and sometimes on the platforms in which you post them.
Creating a video marketing strategy is one of the best ways to promote your brand, grow your web traffic, and show customers how to use your product. Hosting how-to-videos on your website is a great way to create leads. Include links to other forms of premium content within your video and text (such as ebooks, case studies, competitor analysis, templates, and guides). Also, consider gating (when site visitors must fill out a form to access a video) some content assets; this will also increase your lead flow and opted-in email list.
Use Free and Low-cost Tools Built to Scale
If you don’t have a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or Marketing Automation tool for lead and contact storage, then you should after reading this article. There is no valid reason for lacking this kind of valuable data at the early stages of your business. For newer companies without a strong field or SEO presence, regular interactions with your audience are critical in keeping your brand relevant.
In addition to contact storage and segmentation, having a CRM streamlines call and email cadence, and provides analytics to track your progress, all while gathering valuable insights about your different target audiences, sales cycle and messaging.
The easiest place to begin is with a freemium marketing automation platform. Hubspot and ActiveCampaign are two of the most robust offerings out there, and both offer free and low-cost plans. If your company is growing fast, you may benefit from paying for their enterprise versions, or buying juggernaut platforms like Salesforce and Marketo.
There is true value in a specialist consultant to handle the set up for you as well. A poor implementation of these tools will lead to frustration in the future as you grow and will limit the benefits to your business provided by each.