It’s indisputable! The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many changes, and more are yet to come. Overcoming distance and understanding your clients’ new needs, maintaining fluid and frequent contact with them, providing them with answers and alternatives, and enhancing brand visibility have all become key to companies’ survival.
In the B2B world, digitalization used to be an area of opportunity; now, it is a top priority.
Reflection, analysis, and ambition
- Let’s take a moment to reflect on your resources and processes in order to design marketing and communication actions that will improve your business efficiency. B2B marketing requires a deep understanding of business processes. Who is the specifier for your product or service? Where can you find them and how do you pique their interest? What means of communication do your competitors use? Verifying this will allow you to identify communication channels that may be relevant to your brand and assess how important they may be to your strategy.
- In this moment of stagnation in the national market, it’s time to diversify. You know that your product is relevant and interesting for other markets, but how can you communicate this to them? Your brand already has a certain level of international presence, but are there sectoral means of communication, professional portals, or online events through which you can gain notoriety and generate B2B leads? Several industry-specific B2B platforms allow you to present your products or projects and automatically collect leads. This can be particularly interesting in export markets, where your sales team is not as established and your brand needs to gain notoriety.
ZEKLUU has experience in a wide range of European markets, with specific expertise in the French market. We can help you with your international development process: contact us.
Let’s review the basics…and stop being so timid!
More than ever, visibility is crucial for your brand’s success. In times of limited travel and social distancing, let’s celebrate the fact that you already have a certain digital presence and then build on that.
How can you do that? Well, to start, you can rethink your strategy on channels where you don’t depend on anyone else: your website, social media, database…
- Get the most out of your website: it’s your main showcase. It should be functional, accessible, informative, and inspiring, but more than anything, it should be designed to attract high-quality traffic, instill trust, and generate business contacts. Do your potential clients see your website? Are you getting traffic? Let’s analyze this. If not, how can you increase traffic? Is your website designed to collect data? Do you download and efficiently manage the leads it provides? What could you do to collect more leads and manage them more efficiently? If you think that this discussion could be valuable to you, let’s have it together.
- What are the keywords your potential clients use? You may or may not know what these are, or you may not be using them optimally, which in turn limits traffic to your website. In the B2B world, a quality keyword analysis is probably one of the most cost-effective actions you can take, which simultaneously having a high return on investment, if used to optimize your web architecture and create a solid SEO strategy. If you haven’t done this yet, or if you did it a long time ago, we can help.
- Social media: which one to choose? Just one? All of them? Are you on the networks that are truly of interest to you? Can you concentrate your resources to create a bigger impact? Can you produce valuable content and synergies with your website? Social media can be a showcase capable of generating business, but it can also consume many more resources than it provides. You have to define a strategy, thinking in the medium-term.
- Databases and e-mail marketing: you surely have a large number of contacts that have been collected by your sales team at trade fairs or events, or which have come in from the contact form on your website. Unfortunately, a list of contacts isn’t a database if you aren’t using it properly. Do you use e-mailing as a communication strategy? Do you keep your contacts informed of relevant updates? Do you comply with GDPR? Have you designed a strategy that allows you to generate interest and then keep people interested, with the ultimate goal of informing, selling, creating loyalty…? If you would like to know more about this topic, contact us here.
In conclusion, for B2B companies, digitalization used to be an area of opportunity; now, it is a top priority. You don’t always have to change everything to improve your efficiency, but it is always fundamental that you understand your strengths and weaknesses so that you can establish a plan of action that will leverage the former while minimizing the latter.