B2B marketing is often more complicated than B2C, and if you are running a B2B business you have the idea. It requires more initiative and resourcefulness, and the process of selling a service or a product to another company is often lengthy.
Because of that, many people give up before they can enjoy the fruits of their labor. You don’t have to be among them, because we’ve prepared strategies that will help you get B2B clients for your business in 2022.
How Do You Attract B2B Clients?
Learn how to get B2B clients in 2022!
Potential B2B clients are not some mysterious creatures that enjoy hiding from you. Opportunities for great B2B partnerships are everywhere, you just have to know where to look and how to attract them.
While it may seem that you are running in circles, that you’ve tried everything and that sales just won’t go up – that’s far from the truth. Whether you are selling a B2B product or a service – believe me there are some tricks you haven’t tried yet that are proven to be extremely profitable.
Before you go on with reading, remember this:
The company you are selling to takes into account how effective your offer is, your credibility, expertise, and what makes you stand out from competitors. The key is to convince the company that your offer will solve the problem they are experiencing, and ultimately produce a great ROI for them.
On the contrary, individual customers seek deals, pleasure, entertainment and their buying decisions are highly influenced by their emotions.
B2B marketing is all about providing the most logical, valuable and efficient reason for your dream B2B client to buy from YOU.
There are multiple people who are making the decision to buy from you. So how do you attract B2B clients? How do you make them go from realizing they have a problem to buying a solution from YOU?
Get Ahead Of Competition By Mastering These 5 Steps to Get B2B Leads
Awareness
Some C-level decision-maker somewhere is banging their head against the wall trying to figure out how to solve a specific problem their company has. You have the solution. They don’t know that, yet. What do you need to do?
Build awareness by constantly presenting yourself as an expert for that specific problem, using various channels, talking about the solution, and SHOW how you solved that problem time and time again.
The other scenario is that they don’t even know they have a problem. They haven’t conceptualized it in their head just yet, and if you want to be one step ahead, you are going to push them over the edge. By sharing your knowledge and expertise, you are building demand for a solution and helping them pinpoint their problem.
To do this, you need to master your offer and know exactly how your product or service is going to improve their business.
Problem
When a company has a problem, it’s usually not the only one. You are a business owner yourself, so you know that there are many problems along the way of running a business. What does that mean for you?
Decision-makers in the company prioritize problems and are trying to solve the most important one at that moment. By doing step 1, you are making the solution much more attractive, and it may push the problem you are solving to be their top priority. How?
By raising awareness about that problem, you are making the solution seem much closer and easier than they initially thought. Since it seems easier, they want badly to have a win and decide to prioritize that particular problem you are solving.
Research
Once a company decides to solve a problem, the decision-makers will take a serious amount of time and effort to do research and gather as much information as possible. It’s highly unlikely they’ll decide to buy immediately or from the first company they’ve come across. That’s why the next step is so important, so read on!
Education
Now that the problem is their top priority, everything you’ve done should lead them to your company as the ultimate solution. In the next section, we’ve covered the exact things you should do to establish your company as the authority and make it easier for companies to choose your business to help them. Eventually allowing you to grow and get B2B clients.
However, the most important thing you can do is to educate potential B2B clients on the solution they need badly. The solution can be your product or service, and we’ve also covered different strategies for product and service-based B2B businesses. Don’t miss out!
It may seem like you should promote your service or product here, but that’s not the case. Your main focus should always be EDUCATING potential clients on the SOLUTION. Without being salesy and pitching your product or service. Remember that you are speaking to highly knowledgeable people who can cut through the bullshit right away.
Solution
Who are they going to buy from? Once decision-makers have gathered all the needed information about the solution, they need to decide who is going to provide them with that solution. Of course, you’d love it to be your company, but in order to do that, you need to beat your competitors by offering the most practical, effective, and benefit-rich product or service.
Be honest with them. To get that sale, you need to justify the purchase and resolve their objections. Maybe you are more expensive than your competitors, but if you offer more value, it will be a no-brainer for them. As long as you can communicate that message to them.
Conclusion
Whoever has mastered these 5 steps will get B2B clients, but keep in mind it’s not as easy as it seems. All of the steps above require your company to work hard on content, positioning, branding, marketing strategy, credibility and mastering its own offer.
Implement These B2B Customer Acquisition Strategies to Get B2B Clients
B2B customers are looking for long-term partnerships and solutions, not a one-time deal. This means that the whole sales cycle is longer because there are multiple decision-makers involved. So how do you win B2B clients?
Start Writing Blogs
Blogs have a great purpose and won’t ever get old. The sooner you start writing and publishing a blog, the faster you’ll get first results. Why are blogs so important?
Blogs help your website to rank high for certain keywords in your industry and serve a great purpose of educating potential clients on the solution you can provide them with.
To start a blog, you need a content strategy in place. You can’t just randomly post whatever comes to your mind first. For best and fast results, use professional services of a company that specializes in content marketing. Shameless plug, it’s us! phraseit.rs
Write Case Studies
What’s a better way to influence potential clients to buy from you, than showing them a case study?
Case studies are extremely powerful tools that showcase how your product or service helped your previous clients go from Problem to Solution with your help. It’s undoubtedly the strongest proof you need to build authority in your industry.
People love to belong and identify with certain groups. By telling potential clients how you helped people who are similar to them, you drastically increase your chances of getting yourself a new B2B client.
What are you waiting for? Choose some of your most successful projects and have a copywriter write you a shiny case study showing your expertise in the field.
Start Newsletter
What better way to nurture your B2B clients and potential clients than utilizing a newsletter? Email marketing is the ultimate way to get more personal with your potential clients because whatever you have to tell them ends up directly in their inbox. And we all know how much everyone is dependent on reading emails first thing in the morning. Right?
Use a newsletter to form and fasten the relationships with both potential and current clients. 90% of the time you should write a newsletter that has tremendous value for everyone who reads it.
The other 10% is not for fluff, but for pitching your service or a product, while still offering great value.
If you haven’t yet, start using an email marketing tool such as MailerLite (we are currently using it and it’s great) and create a signup form to post on your website.
Write Sales Page
The sales page for a specific offer you have is a one-time investment that can bring you lots of cash and get you great B2B clients. What do you need for a high-converting B2B sales page?
- Professional copywriting services
- Professional design services
- Ads budget
- Wholesome marketing strategy for promoting your offer
We won’t go in-depth about the sales page, but rather keep it short and sweet. You need a mind-blowing offer, a copywriter who will present ins and outs of that offer, a designer to create a captivating design for the sales page, and a wholesome marketing strategy to promote it.
Of course, very little can be achieved without an Ads budget in place. Because your sales page can be the best sales page ever, it’s all in vain if nobody sees it. Where does your dream B2B client spend their time and educate themselves?
Run Google, Facebook, Instagram, or Youtube ads that will lead them to your sales page and introduce them to your offer.
Utilize LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the place where most B2B opportunities emerge and where most deals are sealed. Every serious C-level executive and business owner who is serious about their business is on LinkedIn.
Repurpose the content you already have and turn them into captivating and concise LinkedIn posts to create awareness for your company and attract more B2B clients.
Finding B2B customers online
All of the above content you create (case studies, blog posts, newsletter, sales pages) can be created once, but still, generate revenue months and years after they’ve been published. One blog post can be paid off time and time again, getting you more B2B clients. Because of that, investing in your content should be a no-brainer for you.
How Do Service Based Businesses Get B2B Clients?
Marketing, especially B2B has taken an unexpected turn from boring corporate talk to building meaningful relationships. What does that mean for you?
Starting conversations and contributing to already existing ones will get you a long way. These conversations have to be relevant, contextual and appealing to your ideal client. By helping them realize their problem, talking about a solution without expecting anything in return will make them ready to pay you for your services. Remember, don’t sell your service, sell your unique approach and solution to their problem.
But how do you do that, you are probably asking yourself right now. These 7 steps are the key to getting B2B clients and making them find you.
Show – don’t tell.
Case studies I’ve mentioned before are a way to go. However, you can show proof of your expertise in various formats. Whether it’s a LinkedIn post, Instagram Carousel, etc, get creative about proving to your potential clients you can help them.
What better way than to speak from experience and tell them about the clients who had similar problems, but they don’t have them anymore, thanks to you?
Build trust.
Humanize your brand. People trust people, but more importantly – people buy from people. Show your face, promote your employees, create a unique brand vision, and be recognizable among faceless businesses that are stuck in the professional corporate world.
Showcase your core values as a business, promote your brand’s culture, always know and follow your principles and prove that you are not just another service provider.
Credibility.
Believe it or not, websites are extremely important when it comes to credibility. If you don’t have one, you are missing out. B2B sales cycle involves multiple people and decision-makers. Rather than having to dig for information, they’ll go to your website and see everything they need to know.
You can show your credibility by getting yourself out there and constantly being available for conversations, comments, feedback, and by showing your business’ personality.
Awareness.
I know what you are telling yourself. “But my ideal client is a busy CEO, they don’t scroll for hours on Instagram”. Wrong.
Build meaningful relationships through social media. Raise awareness about your brand. It’s not just for B2C marketing, but also B2B. Maybe busy CEO is not scrolling through Instagram all day long, but they’ll take into account your social media presence. Sometimes, it can make all the difference.
Maybe you won’t have crazy conversion rates and great ROI, but over time strong social media presence will make somebody buy from you, and not from your competitors.
Even though the sales cycle is longer, you never know when an Instagram follower you’ve forgotten about may become your high-paying client.
Don’t obsess with likes, followers and comments, just use effective strategy to form meaningful connections with your community, however big or small it is.
How can your service make my business grow?
At the end of the day, it all comes to this question. How can your service help other businesses grow?
Use testimonials, reviews, and relevant content for your ideal client to help them make a buying decision.
Business owners use reason, common sense, logic and critical thinking when buying. That’s why it’s key to communicate on every channel how your business helps theirs.
Building relationships is the groundwork that will pay off in a long run, so start working on your relationships now. Take advantage of every channel to raise awareness, drive traffic, find leads and eventually get B2B clients.
Paid ads.
Get discovered by various businesses who don’t know about your services. Use your buyer persona and any data you have collected about your customers. To get discovered you need to make your business discoverable.
Boost content they can relate to – not only your services.
Education.
Business owners are hungry for information. Not just for any information, but information from experts and credible people in the industry. This cognition will differentiate you and skyrocket your business.
Provide them with valuable information to help them make informed decisions. Because those are the only decisions B2B clients make – informed.
By educating them on their problem, and telling them about the successful execution of a solution, you are halfway through their pockets.
Content marketing is a great way to do all of these things, but it’s also great for SEO and your overall visibility as a business, which will ultimately help you new find B2B customers.
How To Find B2B Clients to Your Product?
Once again, the single most important question here is “How can your product make my business grow?”
There are companies and decision-makers who are craving your product because it’s a solution to their problem. Make it easy for them to buy from you, by removing the friction between their problem and the solution your product provides them with.
What are the next steps you have to take to get B2B clients to buy your product?
Test various channels
Is it Youtube? LinkedIn?
What is your product? Show people how they can use it and how it can improve their business. You can do it on various channels, and see what works best.
Where do your competitors promote their products? Analyze their marketing strategy, and use this information to your advantage.
Analyze data you have
Use all the data you have – be it Instagram insights or Google analytics. Get to know your ideal client in-depth.
Test various content
What form of content does your ideal client prefer? How do they consume it? Do they prefer webinars, e-books, blogs, newsletter, social media posts, videos, demos, infographics?
This will also help you determine the channel that suits your product best.
You should combine these steps with the steps mentioned above for the best results. Some steps overlap when marketing B2B products and services. We hope this gave you a clearer picture of how to acquire B2B clients.
How to Promote Your Product or Service to B2B Clients?
Set your KPIs
Before you start anything, you need to set the right Key Performance Indicators. How are you going to know if something works, if you didn’t determine what “it works” means? What does success look like to you? Is it more leads, more meetings with potential clients, 100 demo requests?
Capture existing demand
Get familiar with your ideal client’s needs. What’s their current #1 problem you could solve? What is wrong with the solutions that already exist? Can you overcome that? If so, find a hole in your competitor’s strategy and fill it with a unique solution only you can bring to the table.
Plan your campaign
We’ve already talked about LinkedIn and Facebook & Instagram, so there is no point in repeating ourselves. Besides LN, FB and IG, Google Adwords is a strong tool that can help you get more B2B clients and reach your goals.
Webinars, podcasts and other demand & lead generation strategies can also help you a lot, but it all depends on your budget and experts you have at your disposal.
Prioritize
Analyze what you can do with what you have. Determine the budget, goals, KPIs, and the time you have to invest. Delegate tasks that don’t require your attention and don’t be afraid of risk. Spread the word about your business and utilize the channel(s) that have the highest ROI.
Execute
Don’t procrastinate. While you are out there thinking, someone else is doing it. Start now.
Analyze your performance and determine what’s working and what’s not. Once you see what’s working best for you, invest most of your energy and resources into that strategy.
How to Target New B2B Clients? B2B Targeting
You are wasting resources on marketing if you don’t know your audience. Target audience determines all of the aspects of B2B marketing we’ve mentioned above. While mentioning it briefly throughout this blog post, the audience definitely deserves the whole section.
You can set up the greatest ads, have stunning Instagram posts, be an expert, but if you don’t know who you are talking to – your business is as good as dead. Painful truth, I know.
Target Audience Fundamentals
There are multiple ways to determine your target audience – interviews with previous clients, surveys, analytics – you name it. You can also do thorough market research – it’s up to you and your budget.
The most important thing to remember is to always have in mind the needs your product or service can satisfy for your Target Audience.
Who?
Who are you talking to? What are they doing in their free time? What bothers them at work? What’s their background? Answer their questions and concerns. Create a character with all the data you can think of and use it as your strongest marketing tool.
Why?
Why would they buy from you or your competitors? What specific problem do you solve for them? When it comes to that problem – what’s their main objection for not solving it yet? Is it lack of money, time, or focus?
Where do they spend time?
There is no point in promoting when your target audience spends time elsewhere. Determine where they spend most of their time (online or offline) and promote there. Whether it’s social media or networking events – at least your efforts won’t go to waste.
How does that align with your efforts?
Analyze the distribution of your efforts and resources – does it align with the previously mentioned steps? If not, rethink it and try again. This time use real life data to back up your marketing strategy. Which channels could you add, and which channels are a waste of time?
Customer Journey
How does your target audience buy? Do they need weeks to seal the deal? What steps do they go through in order to make a buying decision? If you don’t know, you can always ask your previous clients how they made the decision to buy from you.
Are we doing what we have to do to get the results we want?
This is the step you need to repeat over and over again. Why? Goals, KPIs – they all change based on data we get. Don’t get stuck in the old ways just because you are afraid of change. Dive deep and trust the process. No one can know better than you. Just open your eyes.
While we know this may seem like a lot of data to gather, it’s of the utmost importance for you to do so! We strongly recommend you to read HubSpot’s blog about Buyer Persona before you decide to invest in any marketing at all.
