For anybody working in a B2B segment, it is a known fact that the industry has its own set of dedicated challenges. A B2C industry experiences shorter conversion cycles comparatively. B2B has more prolonged sales cycles not easy to adhere to, especially when you are targeting smaller, niche market sectors with higher price points.
A recent survey conducted with large businesses that serve the B2B market segment revealed that marketers could be more optimistic when it comes to business growth prospects. However, the challenges they face can become a likely hurdle in their growth.
B2B is an intense, holistic, and a complicated way of doing business. There is not a straightforward tactic that applies to two different sets of B2B market environment. Before you can engage in the equation of sales and profit, you should be qualified to generate leads and find potential clients that can turn into loyal and contractual customers. Reasons like these make B2B transactions more challenging because there is a whole team of experts sitting behind the decision-making process of doing business with you. One lose loop, and you can find yourself without any client starting from the very beginning.
Seven tips to overcome B2B marketing barriers
Let’s take a look at the bigger picture and analyze a more generic perspective of doing business in a B2B market segment. See if some of these tips can help you overcome challenging B2B barriers.
1. Generating profitable leads
Today, the top marketing objective for B2B marketers of the new decade is converting leads into customers. Technology might have played a vital role in increasing communication and enhancing the overall approaching experience. But even that could not nail the number one step of gaining a client. As much you can find potential clients through online forums, it is not easy to have them convinced for doing business with you. Therefore, even if it is one of the most talked-about challenges, generating profitable leads through any and every possible means is extremely necessary to get started.
2.Overcoming competition
Any trade or marketing experience can quickly become a nasty battlefield. Given the fact that being a top business owner and losing a profitable prospect to your competition can be very disappointing, companies have reliable strategies to counter the situation. On an average, a B2B researcher would conduct 12 searches before engaging on a brand’s site. Thus, don’t you think a strategy in place to at least nail one of those 12 searches can be beneficial? However, sometimes those strategies can make the process even more grueling because you might be offering better value than your competition. Still, they just happened to use a better tactic and score.
3. Creating quality content
AS per the B2B stats, digital marketing is the top marketing area, having taken in 56% of B2B market spending of 2020.with more than half of the budget dedicated to digital marketing means, it is understandable that content plays an essential role for breaking B2B barriers. Your client would require more thorough and educated content that quickly answers their questions before they can proceed with more formal business dealings. However, your content doesn’t need to be limited by research reports. Businesses are readily investing in more interactive tools and applications to lure in better prospects.
4. Scaling efficiency
Where more than half of the B2B marketers forecast no change in the marketing budget for the year 2020, the remaining 41% expect an increase. As the demand marketers achieve their KPIs and get to the return on investment of their B2B marketing activities, it is understandable that they expect an increased budget. As they get an increased budget, they can hire more staff, integrate more technological aspects, and even outsource their marketing activities like coursework writing service, to focus on more important things. Scaling efficiency is not as complicated if you balance out your needs and prioritize accordingly. While such a situation might not be new to B2B marketers, it still becomes challenging as the question of choosing and compromising arises.
5. Longer sales cycle
As we mentioned earlier, B2B marketing experiences longer sales conversion cycles compared to B2C. It is an unavoidable aspect of working in a B2B market segment, but it is not impossible to make it easier to comply. The solution is to keep tabs on your prospective customers as to what are their activities and engagement gestures on your website or other platforms, to know on which stage of the sales cycle they are. And to do that more formally, the best way is to incorporate a robust CRM system. Already a majority of B2B companies use one or more market automation platforms to help run smoother sales conversions. Therefore, better integrated CRM software would be great.
6. Maintaining quality & customer perspective
In a stable economic environment, customers have increased expectations as compared to when the economy is at its low. In addition to this, as marketers increase their budgets, integrate technology, and automate processes, persuading customers becomes radically smoother. In a competitive market, it can be a challenge to retain customers. Still, the one more significant advantage of B2B marketers is that they can bind their clients in unbreakable contracts for a considerable amount of time before the client can head on to experimenting with somebody else.
7. Innovation & improvement
Innovation and improvement is a constant struggle for B2B marketers. They don’t have enough space to experiment with the challenges they face and have to go through the traditional route of getting things done. However, technology has reformed many business attributes, helping automate processes and increasing market development over time.
Bottom line
All in all, B2B marketing is the gameplay of survival and scoring. The more you score, the better your chances of survival in the industry. Concurrent challenges are part of every business process. The key is finding what works best for you and just rolling with it!