20 Digital Marketing Tactics to Drive Your B2B Ecommerce Business.

Just like any other type of business, B2B eCommerce websites are also heavily dependent on proper marketing strategies and implementations. According to the statistics, as much as 57% of customers are willing to make a purchase online, which is why driving customers to your website is more important than ever before.

There is an enormous number of different tactics and strategies out there that can be implemented for the betterment of your website’s conversion rates. However, before getting into those, you will have to make sure that your B2B marketing strategy is executed correctly. Having your marketing strategy in order, you will surely be on the right track to improve and grow your business.

My gig at the leading SMS marketing agency, SendSMS.Global has taught me a thing or two about effective marketing tactics. Here I’m sharing all those learnings & insights into constructive B2B strategies. 

1. Content and Inbound Marketing

The quality control of the content on your website is the first step towards ensuring your B2B eCommerce success. High-quality educational content and product/feature related blogs can draw more prospects to the website.

Quality content also contains topic-specific/related keywords that help your website rank high in the search bars. Be sure that shoppers and B2B buyers value detailed and well-written content more. Thus they are prone to trusting such websites more.

2. Maintaining a Blog

Updating a blog frequently is an excellent way to increase your website rankings and boost brand awareness. Blogging can be an effective tool to drive leads to the website. It can also complement your email marketing strategy by adding more occasions for you to send out campaigns. 

3. PPC

PPC is a flexible way to drive traffic and leads to your eCommerce website. It allows you to gain full control over your funds and advertisement placement. Moreover, PPC ads are so advanced today that they can target specifically the audience that is relevant to your business. Hence, this is a great tactic to implement in your B2B marketing mix.

4. High-Quality Content

Podcasts, presentations, and webinars that can be available for specific high-profile customers are excellent lead generation tools in inbound marketing. Those tools can also help you increase your brand awareness. They are also great for building long-lasting customer loyalty and running other ABM activities. Similarly, take into consideration that through SEO, such high-quality content can be repurposed and used for long term website promotion and high ranking.  

5. Content Upgrades

Constantly upgrading content is a less known and used tactic for website promotion. It revives your old content, thus making your website look more up-to-date. Upgrading content is much easier than coming up with new topics and writing new articles. Besides, it can help your website rank higher on search engine result pages, which should be one of your priorities. 

6. SMS and Email Marketing

SMS and email marketing versatile tools for marketing, which makes those channels an essential part of your B2B marketing strategy. Through the years, email and SMS marketing has proven to be above any other digital marketing strategy in terms of ROI. Through these mediums, you can send your customers individual and personal offerings, as well as run loyalty campaigns.

Coming to the B2B eCommerce website, you can use email and SMS marketing tools for a number of things. Some of them are communication automation for every step of the way, sending welcoming messages, reminding customers of their abandoned carts, or reaching out to them on their special days. Such personal communication can be a great way to boost your customer satisfaction, as well as increase the number of loyal customers.

7. Mobile Commerce for B2B

According to Google and Boston Consulting Group, mobile influences on average 40% of revenues in numerous leading B2B organizations. There are also projections that by 2020 the share of mobile traffic can take up 70% of B2B search quarries.

Mobile apps offer a lot of benefits to buyers and sellers, which is why they are amazing to use in modern B2B eCommerce. In order for your website to stay relevant and user-friendly when you transform it into mobile, it is important to start with the proper technology and transformation strategies. Whether you transform your website into mobile through a mobile-friendly UX, a PWA, or a native mobile app, conduct continuous testing to check that everything is changed appropriately.

8. B2B Brand Building

Brand reputation always plays a massive role in shaping customers’ preferences and achieving success in the market. This is more prevalent in the B2B segment, as other brands are looking for reliable and trustworthy companions as much as for a reasonable price. 

McKinsey provided evidence regarding this proposition. According to their report, brand reputation can be up to 20% of the influence on the customer when they are considering purchasing something or form a relationship with the brand. A more recent study from Lippincott illustrates that a purchase decision can be driven as much as 40% due to proper branding. 

In a very similar fashion, building a brand with a good reputation is a crucial step for attracting and retaining customers via a B2B eCommerce. The overall strength of your company’s brand depends on the effectiveness of all the other marketing activities, including building strong partnerships, raising your presence in the media publications, acquiring strong partnerships, attending events, and even offline marketing.

9. Account-Based Marketing

Account-Based Marketing enables you to focus on improving your personalized buying experience, feedback analysis, and customer conversion and retention. This is a long-term strategy that combines some other forms of marketing and optimization activities to allow you to follow through and keep a well-balanced contact with your prime consumer and partners. 

This tactic pays off in the long run if you wish to have customer loyalty, which will be excellent for your B2B eCommerce brand. It has been documented that spending time and resources on driving leads can cost from 5 to 16 times more than keeping your existing clients. This means that keeping your current customers should be your primary goal.

10. Personalization

Personalization will be beneficial for your business by helping your organization to organize different types of product catalogues that can be specific to each corporation, division, or any other type of partners you might have. 

It also works wonders in email and SMS marketing strategies that we’ve discussed. Sending customized offers to your clients increases your brand loyalty by making the clients feel special.

11. Brochures and Downloadable Content

Before completing any transaction, consumers like to know exactly what they are acquiring. At this point, guiding them by proving all of the necessary information is a crucial step to landing a deal. You can give out these types of data in the form of brochures, instructions, or any other type of downloadable content that you can imagine.

12. Website Reviews and Testimonials

Online buyers are paying very close attention to any kind of product reviews they can find. Reviews have taken up a significant spot in the consumers’ decision-making process. Very few buyers nowadays actually purchase a product online without thoroughly looking through the reviews and the ratings. In a B2B case, buyers are going to pay much closer attention to reviews and testimonials, more so when they are going to purchase large quantities of a particular product.

13. Shopping Cart Abandonment Issues

No matter what type of experience your customers get when going through the process of buying a product from your website, they might still abandon their shopping cart at the end and not complete the transaction. 

There are many different reasons why this can occur, some of which are connected to the shipping costs, price comparison with your competitors, and other specific reasons. When you want to tackle this issue, you’d have to consider using targeted ads and email/SMS messaging strategies. Don’t think of abandoning those customers, target them more aggressively instead to decrease the number of abandoned shopping carts.

14. Loyalty Programs

Customer loyalty programs can act as a great incentive to keep a lot of your customers with your brand for a long time. For a B2B eCommerce brand, this can be an effective means of driving conversion rates. In B2B, consumers are usually looking for long term relationships and partnerships, as they are making a large number of transactions and purchasing vast quantities of products.

However, B2B loyalty programs do require careful planning and consideration as every type of partnership varies from one another, depending on the type of the client. The use of more personalized customer engagement strategies is welcomed, as each client’s needs are different.

15. Tier Incentives

Tier incentives are also a great way to reward your customers as they increase their purchasing volumes through time. Customers will be more inclined to stay with your brand and will be continually rewarded for now switching over.

16. Third-Party and Reseller Programs

Creating a network of resellers and third-party sellers helps you to grow your business and revenue. It grants you a strong distribution network, which can grow immensely if you reward your current sellers for bringing in new ones.

17. Having a Referral Program

You can reward your customers through the same scheme you use for your third-party sellers. Creating a referral program will allow you to incentivize your customers to bring in new clients. You can even set up a tier list for them, to motivate them, so that they would bring you not just one, but many new customers.

18. Split Testing

Split testing, also widely known as A/B testing, is an excellent way to optimize your website design and look so that it would increase customer satisfaction and conversion rates, of course. With the help of this test, you will gain insight into what works best on your website, and you’ll be able to pull more organic traffic.

19. B2B Marketplaces

Starting or selling your products on B2B marketplaces will give you a lot of benefits, such as evaluating the demand for new products, expanding your customer base, building up your channel presence, and so on. This can be a safe and great start for newly formed B2B’s. However, you need to research every market carefully before entering.

20. CRM and B2B eCommerce Integration

Lastly, any successful B2B marketing strategy has to implement a continuous flow of optimization of customer experience. Automation is key to achieving success these days, do it as much as you can and wherever you can. More so, as already stated, B2B customers require an individual approach, which has to be followed up constantly.

Keeping track of all of your incoming and outgoing data, and creating targeted marketing campaigns plays a crucial role in satisfying your customers’ unique needs and buying habits.

By following through with these 20 provided tactics, your B2B eCommerce should be on the right track to achieving success. Keeping up with all of the modern trends and newly emerging tactics can be tough. Make sure to always strive to grow.