I get it. Increasing your B2B sales can be a real challenge. It’s not like B2C, where you have a plethora of effective tools and strategies. But it certainly can be done… if you use the right strategies! Here are three you can actively invest your time and resources in to help increase your B2B sales.
3 Strategies to Help Increase B2B Sales
There is no one or best way to increase B2B (business to business) sales. Depending on your type of business and market demand, you can combine proven tactics to help improve sales.
Let’s look at how you can devise a winning strategy to generate B2B leads, sales, and build a continuous sales pipeline.
Use Social Media as a Sales Tool for B2B Sales
Many of us think of social media as a tool for B2C sales. But, if you use the right platforms with the right strategies, social media can be an effective way to increase B2B sales. Let’s take a look at how you can use some of the various social media platforms to grow your sales funnel.
1. LinkedIn
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 97% of B2B marketers choose LinkedIn as their preferred social platform for B2B content marketing purposes. LinkedIn offers an opportunity to cut the clutter and connect with decision-makers on a platform built for business.
3 Reasons to Use LinkedIn to Increase B2B Sales
- Dedicated Platform for B2B Sales and Marketing Professionals
LinkedIn is the #1 network for B2B professionals. It encourages its users to share posts, articles, news, and participate in discussions and promotions. This increases your chance to expand your network and get noticed.
- Your Target Audience is Present on LinkedIn
Compared to B2C sales, generating B2B sales is way more complicated; that’s because B2B sales process involves decision-makers. LinkedIn gives the opportunity to directly connect with the interested parties and top-tier management who are interested in doing business with you.
- Develop B2B Buyer’s Persona
LinkedIn is not only great when it comes to attracting the right audience but allows you to learn more about your future prospects and create a buyer’s persona. This helps you create customized sales pitches and close more deals.
3 Ways to Generate B2B sales on LinkedIn
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Cut through the noise and reach out to professionals with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This is a direct sales approach that generates immediate results. Promote your products and services with high-quality text, supported by images or videos.
Publish Articles with LinkedIn Publisher or Newsletter
Publishing articles may not directly impact sales but carefully curated content can establish you as an authority in your niche and help you establish long-term relationships with stakeholders. If you are already blogging, add that content to LinkedIn via LinkedIn Publisher.
If you are one of the lucky folks who already have access to LinkedIn Newsletters, that’s another great tool to use to share content with the vast community on LinkedIn that is dialed into topics and products you offer.
Post Content Consistently
Like all other platforms, LinkedIn algorithms also work in your favor when you publish posts frequently.
Here is an interesting stat from LinkedIn on content and decision-makers:
You can’t expect your visibility to increase if you are not posting regularly on LinkedIn. That includes posting to the newsfeed and with LinkedIn Publisher.
2. Twitter
A whopping 87% of B2B marketers use Twitter for content marketing, as reported by the Content Marketing Institute.
What sets Twitter apart from other platforms is its short and crisp tweets. Twitter has set a 280-character limit for texts and glyphs while some glyphs can be counted as more than one character. This means your tweets need to be highly target-oriented.
Twitter Best Practices for Increasing B2B Sales
- Use hashtags to make your content discoverable.
- Keep your posts specific and target-oriented.
- Use visuals when possible. GIFs, videos, and images to make your content more appealing and interesting, thus, generate more views and engagement.
Using Promoted Ads to Generate B2B Sales on Twitter
Using Promoted ads onTwitter can significantly increase B2B leads and purchases.
Here are some quick tips on how to use promoted ads to generate more sales on Twitter:
- run ads for a limited time and create a state of urgency
- use the right set of keywords and hashtags to ensure you are showing up in the right channels
- Use a creative call-to-action to drive sales, boost revenue and generate leads
Use Podcasting as a B2B Sales Tool
For B2B brands and businesses, podcasting offers a great opportunity to establish meaningful and profitable, long-term relationships with B2B buyers. By creating valuable content for your podcast, you can communicate with your loyal customers and followers, create brand awareness, and generate more revenue.
Easier said than done, podcasting can seem overwhelming to many businesses because they need to be in a position to create content, be consistent, and maintain quality. But you can easily overcome these challenges with an effective podcasting strategy.
Create a podcast editorial calendar, generate topics for each episode and create content at least 3 months in advance. That way, you’ll have more control over the podcast content, get enough time to prepare, and actively promote your podcasts to generate more engagement.
Although you are trying to promote your service or products through the podcasts, your voice shouldn’t sound like you’re pushing your listeners to buy from you. This actually hurts your sales efforts. Craft your content in a way that truly resonates with your listeners, touches their pain points and educates them.
A Slow Website Slows Down Sales
Imagine this: you’ve executed your B2B sales strategy perfectly and you are driving quality prospects to your website so they can learn more about your products or services. And then when they click…
For every millisecond that it takes for your website to load, your sales conversion rate is decreasing.
Your website performance holds the key to selling more online. Website speed is not only a mandatory consideration if you want to improve site visibility and improve SEO, but it’s also critical to your bottom line!
Some interesting statistics regarding the correlation of conversion rate with website load speed:
- Pages that load in 2.4 s have a 1.9% conversion rate
- When page load speed is 3.3 s, you see 1.5% conversions
- Page load speed of 4.2 s sees less than 1% conversions
- For pages that take 5.7 s or more to load, the conversion rate comes down to 0.6%
Taking the above statistics under consideration, you should try and optimize the website speed not only for more conversions but to enhance customer experience and be in the good graces of Google because site speed is an SEO ranking factor.
Be creative with your B2B sales strategy and don’t be afraid to try and test new methods. By limiting yourself to the same old methods you’ve always used, you’re only hurting your business and sales. Apply these methods mentioned above and let me know in the comments what worked best for you. Happy Selling!
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