Growth can be a tricky thing, especially in the B2B sphere. Once you’ve nailed your brand, audience, and product, one would expect that sales would just come flowing, wouldn’t you? However, it isn’t really that simple. A successful B2B business requires constant upkeep and modification of marketing strategy in the face of sales competition and market factors.
If these fears are on your mind, you’ll likely be considering taking out the business of a B2B marketing consultant. After all, it’s their livelihood to provide marketing strategies to external companies and dedicate their marketing efforts to ensure the success of their business partners.
However, if marketing strategy and growth are what your business is seeking, then your answer may lay directly in front of your eyes in the form of B2B loyalty programs. B2B businesses can capture the engagement and share of wallet of their channel partners, allowing growth and consistency of spend from their clients. This article will outline how a B2B marketing consultant can help your business, but there are definite similarities in the effect between the two!
A B2B Marketing Consultant is an external specialist in strategic marketing that companies can bring in to assist. B2B Marketing consultants will generally have a deep understanding of the target market and your target audience, which allows them to assist with content creation and competitive strategy for your sales team.
The benefit of bringing in B2B marketing consultants is that these are professional services dedicated to providing detailed assessments for improving your branding. They will enter without the preconceived biases that your team may carry and will be able to provide objective marketing expertise and skills that you, your competitors, and other businesses may not instinctively have.
Some other benefits that a B2B marketing consultant working with your team may deliver are:
These are all incredibly valuable traits that make it worth considering bringing a B2B marketing consultant in to meet with your firm. However, it is important to note that these benefits aren’t just exclusive to working with a consultant.
An effectively developed B2B loyalty and incentive program can also create efficiency, value, and passion for your brand. By utilising rewards and incentives directly tailored from knowledge of your target audience, both new opportunities and long-term relationships will find continued business with your brand at the front of their mind when it comes to purchases. 212F also provides ongoing strategy and development of your program throughout the life of the program, allowing your brand to experience the best possible sales enablement alongside this continued engagement.
While your brand may feel confident in the customer knowledge you have been developing throughout your company’s lifecycle, it’s important to ensure that awareness of the niches in your customer base is addressed. No two customers are identical – even though B2B marketing may allow you to feel confident in knowing your audience profiles, you may be neglecting specifics around your audience that competitors in your industries are taking advantage of, leaving your brand in the dust.
B2B marketing consultants can tailor their efforts into addressing these segments of your audience. Your consultant can help you gather the data required to first identify your target segments, and then provide analysis and identification of the most promising segments that your business can target. This can take place through creating compelling content and delivering it to existing customers via email marketing, digital SEO, or a rebrand in your social media presence.
This additional focus in your marketing creates a link between your customer and your product, feeling as though you can deliver on the specific needs that their industries need your product for. By using targeted messaging, you improve the chances of attracting the attention of your desired market, and an increased likelihood of converting leads into customers as you’re providing them with information that is relevant to their needs. This also leads to a greater likelihood of customer retention, as the B2B purchasing process takes longer, they are more likely to remain with a tried-and-true option – so hiring a marketing consultant can even be considered one of your B2B retention strategies!
Similarly, the data that you use with your B2B marketing consultant can assist with developing your brand within new or existing markets more aggressively. Being proactive with identification allows your company to stay ahead of other businesses.
While the idea of tailoring your marketing towards a specific subsection of your clients may present challenges, the implementation of these changes will drive results in sub-markets recognising the value that your product provides for their specific needs.
Additionally, the value that you can draw from the implementation of a B2B loyalty or incentive program that is segmented to your chosen sub-market can prompt customers to further connect with your brand. By tailoring your digital communications, content creation, and strategies around incentive rewards to serve either existing or new markets within your channel partners, you’ll see results quickly, as your new leads will respond in kind with a passion for your brand.
Now that you understand what expertise a B2B marketing consultant can bring, as well as the benefits that come from segmenting your audience into targeted sub-sections, it’s important to ensure that the marketing strategies you’d like to implement are correct to your specific audience. After all, you’ve gone to the trouble of hiring a professional and identifying your dream customers, why waste all that strategic marketing you’ve already put in?
Treating your B2B audience like a B2C audience is a big mistake. There are ways that the strategy between audiences will share an overlap, but the two markets are not identical.
With B2B customers, these purchases are far less impulsive. With a series of decisions to be made within the business chain, factors such as ROI, education around solving pain points leading to detailed content, and awareness of a far longer buying process are required. Applying early pressure will only turn off potential customers, even if you’re certain that your product or services can alleviate business troubles.
Knowing the way that businesses who will be using your product or services will initially uncover and consider doing business with you is integral for your strategic and digital marketing strategies. Ensuring that your online marketing and content marketing aligns with the preferred market will allow you to prepare educational and compelling content. This will turn lead generation much more likely into sales, as doing business with a company that understands both the solution and the cost of implementing change in an existing organization can put your audience’s mind at ease.
By understanding your audience and implementing these factors into your strategic and digital marketing campaigns, your business is much more likely to succeed in converting lead generation into sales than competing businesses in your industry. After all, by observing your audience through a range of digital and strategic lenses, you can effectively develop and implement tactics through the advertising process to ensure your customers feel confident that your brand understands their pain points and can effectively solve them.
And if you’re interested in exploring a way to enhance your digital marketing and lead generation through B2B loyalty program benefits, reach out to us today. We have the marketing strategy and marketing expertise to engage your customers through exciting B2B loyalty and incentive campaigns that your customer base will find irresistible. We’ve worked on reward programs Australia and New Zealand-wide – find out today what we can do for your brand!
Any marketing consultant worth their salt will be able to greatly assist your brand’s marketing through new technology. SEO, or search engine optimization, allows your brand to rank higher against competitors, and tailor a specific message. By creating a message direct to the segment of your market that you’re targeting, it should create an ease in terms of lead generation. In addition, they can assist with digital marketing such as social media campaigns, providing strategy to effectively meet your audience and address their pain points.
A B2B marketing consultant can assist with strategies for a variety of different aspects of your brand. They can create strategy for SEO, social media, audience segmentation, lead generation, and various others. As they are professionals in the industry, you can trust that they will be able to provide essential strategies to enhance your brand and connect with your audience.
Your B2B loyalty program won’t operate like a B2C program, such as card reward programs. You’ll encounter benefits specific to the B2B flow, such as customer retention, greater lifetime spend, greater amounts of data to analyse to better tailor your campaigns and segment your audiences for improved flow through the sales cycle.
