Your website is your most powerful salesperson
Gone are the days of the top salesperson, the storefront with great foot traffic, or the award winning TV advertisement jingle that kids sing the world over. Enter your website. Your website is now your most powerful asset and your best salesperson.
Spend the time, money, and care to make sure it is mobile friendly, has clear call to actions, and is generally top of the line. A great website can take much of the marketing effort out of human hands, attracting customers through search engines, facilitating their acquisition, and closing the sale with little effort at all.
All you have to do is turn around and deliver what the website is promising and your business will flourish.
Focus on analytics that matter, not all of them
The amount of analytics, statistics, and data that can be gathered and poured over is enormous. Unless you have an entire fleet of people assigned to the task, just compiling and understanding this data can take all of your time.
Instead, a better approach is to identify a few key pieces that you want to focus on before you start collecting data. The rest can be there if you need it, but these few key pieces allow you to easily and quickly understand how you are doing, what to improve or not, and if your strategy is working. The specific adjustments can take their genesis from the other data, if it fits, but try to avoid drowning yourself in data at first.
Businesses are on social media
As social media sites become more saturated and their users more sophisticated, a key component to any businesses' social media strategy is to blend genuine interaction and outreach with marketing themselves, and their product and services.
So why not provide them an easy way to perform this genuine interaction? Reach out to businesses in your industry or closely related to it. It doesn't matter whether they are customers, potential customers, suppliers, or competitors, any interaction and social media presence that is not your own personal marketing can help establish trust on that particular platform.
These efforts also can gather new business customers or at least build your brand so that when the business customer arrives at the beginning of your sales funnel they are slightly more familiar with your brand and the path to closing the sale is smooth.
Establish trust and rapport with content marketing
Case studies and other content marketing can not only help your SEO presence and get more customers to your site but can also help you build trust with potential business customers before you ever interact.
A case study about how you helped another business, the results and impact it had, and how you communicated and worked on a personal level with that business to understand their goals can have a positive influence on your corporate image and reputation.
A potential business or business owner can read that study and place himself or herself and their business in the shoes of the business featured in the case study. This instant connection can be utilized by the rest of your sales funnel by starting the process you described in the case study.
The customer will be more comfortable and let you take them along for the ride since they now know what to expect thanks to the case study. They now have a bit of trust and knowledge that their B2B experience with your organization will have positive results for all involved.