Successfully executing an effective B2B strategy means you need great products or services, good employees, and people to buy what you are selling.
We won’t waste your time on the first two parts of this (that’s your speciality) but we do want to offer some advice on how to get more people to buy what you’re selling. Why? Because even the best products and employees won’t grow your business if you’re not getting enough customers.
In this article, we’ve listed three things your business needs to do to operate as an effective B2B company in 2022.
Create buyer personas to understand your customers
Buyer personas are vital to B2B companies. They’re a fictional representation of your ideal customers that’s based on real data. They highlight the pain points of customers and help explain how your business can solve their problems. These are some of the things an effective buyer persona includes:
- Personal details: age, gender, education, location and relationship status
- Employment status: what they do, who they work for and how much they’re paid
- Customs: leisure activities, content they prefer and social media platforms they use
- Goals: what they want to achieve and why they want to do this
- Blockers: things that stop them from achieving their goals
Inefficiency takes many forms but few (if any) are more important than when your business is pitched to the wrong people, at the wrong time and the wrong way. No matter how great your products or services are and how beautifully they’re sold, if they’re put under the noses of the wrong people, finding success becomes difficult.
Creating buyer personas allows you to design efficient sales strategies by establishing who your products and services benefit, what they do to help them and how to pitch this to them. These are a must if you’re serious about growing your business.
Hootsuite has a buyer persona template you can use as the basis for creating your own. It’s our first example of an efficient business tactic your B2B company can start using. Hootsuite’s persona template covers all the essential elements you need to build the foundation of any successful marketing strategy — understanding your customers.
Credit: Hootsuite
If you don’t have your own buyer persona template (and you’ve got this far so we’re guessing this is the case) then we recommend you download Hootsuite’s. This will give you a valuable resource that helps your company to invest the time into your prospective customers that they deserve.
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Develop lead gen content based on your buyer personas
Lead generation is crucial for B2B organisations. It’s what your business does to get people interested in the products you sell. And there are few more frustrating things in business than being unable to get people engaged with what you’re selling.
This frustration is even greater when your time is inefficiently used by generating leads that do get a response but don’t go anywhere. No matter how good you are at getting people’s attention, if you don’t get any customers off the back of it then you’ve wasted your time.
To make sure you use your time efficiently, you need to create lead generation content your audience engages with. This means you need to give them the right content types at the right times, both in terms of format and intent.
HubSpot outlines four elements to lead generation (check the image below to see what they are) and it’s our second example of what you can do to boost your company’s effectiveness. This is because it highlights that you need specific types of content throughout the lead generation process.
Credit: Hubspot
These are great ideas and they give you something to work with. However, as we said earlier, you need to develop content based on what your buyer personas engage with. This could include things like:
- Twitter and Instagram posts for Zoomers
- TV commercials and newspaper articles for Baby Boomers
- YouTube adverts and long-form blog posts for Millennials
Of course, you must take a data-driven approach to deciding what content to use. However, our suggestions can help kick start some ideas on what you could do — the key is that your time is most efficiently spent by giving your personas the right type of content.
But lead generation alone isn’t good enough for your business to be effective. Once you’ve got people interested in your business, you need to take them to your home pages and get them to convert once they’re on them.
Make sure the CTAs on your home pages are on point
Home pages are where you turn interested web visitors into paying customers and CTAs are the actions you get them to complete to seal the deal.
To operate your B2B company efficiently, you need to know the best practices to use for the CTAs on your home pages. Because if you don’t, then all the great work you’ve done to highlight your ideal customers, deliver them the content, then get them to the pages you want them on will have gone to waste.
There are two key elements to a CTA that you need to get right to create ones that use your time efficiently and effectively:
- Verbal call-to-action: headline, supporting text and the copy on the CTA button
- Visual call-to-action: graphics you use to make your CTA appealing & clickable
These are the two foundations of CTAs and the best way to know how to create good ones for your home pages is to follow the lead of a B2B company that puts these principles into practice effectively. It’s why we’ve highlighted a home page from iCompario as our third example of business efficiency, because the brand’s telematics page does the right things simply and effectively. Just take a look at the image below to see why:
Credit: iCompario
To save you time, these are the key verbal elements the example page gets right:
- Headline: tells the user exactly what the page is about
- Benefits: the customer is given benefits that put them in a better financial position:
- “Save money on insurance, fuel and motor repairs”
- Action copy: the visitor is told what to do and what the result will be — “Get a quote”
These are then followed by the product features:
The visual elements of the CTA are strong too. The page background is light grey and the CTA button is bright orange. This means it stands out and draws the user’s attention to it.
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The final thing is that the page uses more than one CTA button — there’s one at the top of the page and another towards the bottom. This is a good use of psychology, as it reinforces the request iCompario makes of its users to click the CTA button and “Get a quote”.
These are all really simple things that are overlooked by so many businesses. Seriously, ask yourself now, how much attention has gone into your home pages and the CTAs they use? The fact you’re reading this says it’s not enough, and if you’re serious about growth then you’ll remedy this immediately.
Buyer personas, lead generation, home pages and CTAs are a systematic approach to operating an effective B2B company in 2022.
They take you on the full sales journey knowing who your customers are, getting them interested in your business and then getting them to pay for your products.
If you’re truly committed to seeing business growth this year then we recommend you put our suggestions into practice ASAP, utilising the tools and examples we’ve highlighted.
Elliot Mark is a senior copywriter at Ecommerce Platforms with a deep curiosity for the changing world of business. He’s helped create a number of unique online stores, providing content and marketing support to help people grow their ecommerce biz.