B2B

Sarah Worsham / Mar 25, 2014

Leveraging Social Networking for B2B Lead Generation

Banking District (Photo credit: bsterling)

Businesses that sell to other businesses (B2B) typically have much longer sales cycles than companies that sell to consumers (B2C). The products and services that are sold are usually much higher in cost, which requires more hand-holding during the sales process. Salespeople are invaluable to B2B companies because they nurture relationships throughout the sales process. B2B companies, even when they do use social media, tend to overlook it as a relationship builder and a lead generation channel.

B2B Relationships Online Matter Too

If you’re building relationships with a customer in-person, and they’re online, that’s another opportunity to listen to their concerns, learn about their needs and provide value to the relationship. If you’re also online and your customers are connected to you and you’re not listening and responding, that can impact in-person relationships as well. In lead generation, referrals are often the best source, and social networking provides an opportunity to build relationships with those in your customers’ networks.

Your Customer’s Customers Are Your Customers

In B2B relationships, your customer also has customers. Social networking provides an opportunity to connect directly to your customer’s customers. This will help you understand your customer’s needs and wants and can help you provide them with valuable information for their own marketing and sales. Needs often will trickle up the sales channel, and social networking can give you advanced notice of benefits and features you need to build into your own products. In some sales channels, knowing when your customer’s customers are looking for a product can generate a lead for you that a customer may need a product or service from you.

Building B2B Brand Preference

Because B2B is built on relationships and trust, brand preference can be a strong driver of sales. Using social networking can help you build your brand’s reputation by helping your customers with questions and problems, as well as their customers. Increasing your reputation will help generate referrals.

Provide B2B Lead Generation Opportunities

One of the most difficult aspects of lead generation is knowing when a customer or potential customer is interested in your products. It’s obvious when they call or use a contact form, but there often is interest well before those touchpoints. Providing lead generation opportunities online and with social networking can help you tap into those who are earlier in the sales cycle, allowing you to provide valuable information to move them closer to a sale. The easiest way to provide these opportunities is to build content that is valuable (hint: lose the marketing speak and opt for benefits and value instead) for those considering a sale and providing it through social channels, not only by posting on your online profiles, but by offering it directly to those who seem to have a question.

Closing the Sale

Just like in-person sales and marketing in B2B, social networking for B2B lead generation requires time and patience. It means listening and responding to customers in a timely manner. If social networking is treated as an extension of in-person networking, it can be an extremely valuable lead generation tool for B2B companies.

How do you use social networking for B2B lead generation?

Sarah Worsham / Aug 20, 2008

B2B Website

If you are a business-to-business (B2B) company, your website audience is quite a bit different than a company who targets consumers (B2C). To get the most of your business website, you’ll need to account for these differences in both your design and content.

Intent

Website visitors to a B2B website are people from other companies who are also trying to do business. Their intent with visiting your site is to help them make money – by purchasing your products or services, gathering information, etc. The B2B audience is usually online from their workplace, so time is valuable.

Small, targeted audience

The audience for B2B sites is usually much smaller than B2C, but is much more targeted. Keep your targeted audience in mind when designing the site and writing content. You have an opportunity to reach just the audience that you want – your customers.

Behavior

Because they are using your website for business decisions, the B2B audience will be focused on finding the information they need to make those decisions. If they can’t easily find it, they’ll quickly move elsewhere. However, B2B visitors are also looking to build relationships with companies and people they can trust. If you provide valuable information, products and services, there is an opportunity for long-term partnerships.

Expertise

Your B2B visitors are experts in their field and expect the same expertise in potential partners and vendors. They probably know your products or services better than you, so website content and layout needs to focus on this sophisticated audience.

Buying Process

The buying process in B2B is much longer and more involved than in B2C. B2B customers are making rational purchase decisions based on business value. They want products that will help their business be successful. B2C customers make emotional purchase decisions based on personal value. Information about your products and services needs to focus on business value and information necessary to make a rational purchase decision.

Value of Sale

Purchases made by B2B customers are typically much larger than B2C customers, so there is a great deal of value in the sale to your company. It is worthwhile to put the time and effort into providing your customers exactly what they need to succeed – they will reward you with sales.

Listen

Because your B2B customers are experts in their fields, they are a valuable resource to your company. Listen to what they have to say about your products, services and website. Since they are looking for long-term relationships, they are often more likely to spend the time to help you improve. Your B2B website should include opportunities to interact with your customers and for them to interact with each other. You’ll find valueable information that usually comes with the high costs of a customer research firm.

If you have a B2B website, how do you use your website to reach your B2B audience?

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Technorati Tags: B2B, b2b website, business to business, b2b web design, internet consulting, internet business strategy

Aaron Worsham / Apr 17, 2008

Client Communications 2.0 – LinkedIn

If Facebook had a dad that worked in accounting, drove a Taurus and considered the OpEd section of the Wall Street Journal a “weekend highpoint”, that dad would be LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is the social network we point to when we want to say that the internet is serious business. It is the one example people use when trying to make an argument for expecting more than flying sheep and Parker Brother games in online communities. LinkedIn is about making (and exploiting) business connections. They must be doing something right, they turned a profit in 2006 with 5 million users. They claim 4 times that many users today.

How you can personally benefit You know a few people in your industry. You are already part of a business network that exists through conferences and gatherings, mailing lists and bulletin boards. LinkedIn makes it ridiculously easy to interconnect those business contacts that you have to an online profile. The big idea is that you can benefit from your network connectivity as an industry expert or by being introduced to other people in your field. In theory this uber networking could translate to a better job or a consulting engagement. There are job search boards and expert Answers sections that facilitate some of this for you, though it is possible to arrange things independently.

How LinkedIn makes money The business model that seems to work best for social networks relates to critical mass. Once something has grown large enough to generate its own buzz around a community, it can usually maintain a perpetual inflow of new users. It is the users, their connections and their self-identified business skills and responsibilities that LinkedIn monetizes in its business plan. LinkedIn sells introductions and InMail messages as premiere services, a easy sell for an HR department looking for new talent to recruit.

How your company can use LinkedIn This depends on how large your company is and how technical your customer base is. Most of LinkedIn’s professionals work in white collar management, tech sector or professional industries such as law and medicine. A large company working in any of these markets should consider looking at the Enterprise options for connecting with clients If you’re smaller, then the professional accounts are tiered to meet your needs. LinkedIn does support targeted advertising though their rate card is on the high end for online advertising. This likely reflects their belief in a unique audience of professionals, though an ad in a trade publication may be a better value for a comparable audience. Mostly, you want your sales people to have LinkedIn accounts and to start making connections. Sales leads that come through a recommendation network like this are worth the price of a professional account.

My take I don’t use LinkedIn personally. I have an account that I maintain modestly for my professional friends to connect to. I’m not in sales and my current professional engagements keeps me too busy to fish for work. So from the outside looking in, I see LinkedIn as just another place to keep your contact information. The likelihood that I will look here first for a business recommendation, professional recommendation, job or product offering is small. There are other places that do those things better. A deep user of the LinkedIn networking function may find unique opportunities that a surface user like me never will. My time just doesn’t lend itself to that level of involvement.

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