B2B Strategy – Holiday Style

Graphic: b2b holiday season

Here comes the Santa Clause of your business sector with goodies for your prospects, customers and business associates. While reaching out to your business prospects during this holiday season, there is more than just sending a Merry Christmas card. In fact, this holiday season, your team should utilize a B2B marketing campaign which cuts across multiple channels.

Rejuvenate Social Media

The canvas of social media platforms is flooded this holiday season but there is always a way to be innovative. Bring out all the raving reviews and video testimonials from your customers and business associates and share them proudly. Over the past year, whatever you have accumulated, splurge on your social media pages of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others. Remember that B2B marketing strategies have faired well with prospects trusting recommendations from peers and other businesses.

Tradition Wins

During the holiday, there is always an underlying current of traditions; your team must play along. In your holiday marketing strategy, make sure to have a theme associated with your business sector and stress the application of traditional values in the festive environment. In all your physical and virtual decorations, engagements and reach-outs, local, geographical and social traditions help reach out to fellow businesses.

Reinvent Traditional Ways

In addition to reaching out through the internet, traditional methods are essential in a B2B marketing strategy as well. Your team needs to have a list of business prospects and current contact persons ready and should reach out in a traditional way such as, calling, visiting (although harder in our current times), or even just sending a postcard. Remember, a miss can cost you money in the coming year through unhappy clients who feel as though you don’t value them.

Personalize Your Approach

There is nothing better than developing personal relations over the festive season. Including business prospects while cementing the already made bonds with customers and business associates. It is a proven fact that there develops an emotional and familiar undercurrent of recognition which subconsciously affects your business deals and business relations.

Dive Into Communities

This festive season your team should break the barriers and share on all relevant platforms. Check out all virtual world sites where you can tap into a wide audience of relevant prospects. With your high values content and a commanding leadership tone, your experts can attract all the prospects who frequent such B2B information hubs, which serve their industry and provide solutions to their problem.

Wishes With Gifts

Your Festive Wishes, when sugarcoated with an offer or two will hit the mark. Your team can churn out different goodies you have been offering over the year and repackage them. Offer them as this limited time offer. Anything like an e-book, an expert advise time slot, a free sample or just an upgrade – all work wonders – depending on your business sector. If your business sector is facing a particular crisis or a hiccup, and you have a product or solution to offer, a very limited time offer of it can do wonders to spread the word.

Activate CRM & Funnel

With a year behind you, the time is right to top the funnel and activate a CRM tool (provided free with an Infofree.com subscription). The CRM will definitely play a major role as you move forward and utilize optimized details from your curated prospect lists. Need more prospects to get your CRM and sales funnel started? Check out FreeSalesLeads (free to use) or Salesflower.com (cheap monthly subscription), where business databases have 95% accuracy.

From Foes to Friends

Overall, just relax and take everything in a holiday spirit. If there was any misunderstanding with any customer this is the time of the year to rebuild a stronger relationship. During this festive season, all is forgotten and forgiven, so take advantage and mend any broken bridges.

Make your business stand out to consumers during the holiday season

Image with title: Stand Out During the Holidays

With every business competing extra hard during the holiday season it’s critical that you make your business stand out. With a little extra holiday cheer you can compete with top businesses. Here are a couple simple but effective ways to make your business stand out.

Holiday Drive

The best way to engage with the community while giving back to it is through a food, winter clothing, or toy drive. Choose a holiday drive you want to participate in and market it to your community. Getting the community involved in helping out others in need is sure to make your company stand out and show you care. Make the drive something personal to your company or your community.

To make your drive even more popular, you can also throw in a discount on items with a donation, such as 20% off your entire purchase with a donation. An example of a discounted drive that Credit Unions participate in all the time is for each can of food donated, they wave one overdraft fee. Customers feel as though they’re giving back to the community as well as gaining something from a business they’re a part of. It shows the company wants to do good in their community. Social responsibility plays a big part in consumers’ decision-making processes.

Send Out Holiday Wishes to Clients

Sending a note to clients during the holiday season can show clients you value them. It shows that even during the busiest season, you’re thinking about them and appreciate that they choose to do business with you. It humanizes your brand and builds loyalty between you and the client. The holiday wish can be as simple as an email saying happy holidays or as personal as a written letter thanking them and wishing them a happy holiday.

Give a Holiday Gift

Along with holiday wishes, holiday gifts are also a good idea to win over customers. Adding a little something extra to your holiday wishes brings even more delight to a customer. You can also choose to add a gift with purchase. It not only entices current customers to buy, it might also bring in new customers who love a good deal. Adding something extra to your already great deals will surely make your business stand out among others.

Give Holiday Discounts

During the holidays, consumers especially are looking for deals. Even if it’s just a small discount or added incentive, make sure you’re participating in the holiday season specials. Consumers will hold out looking for the best company with the best deals. With holiday discounts you’ll gain more customers than you’ll lose in profit. Holiday discounts are also a way to get consumers into the store enticing them to buy even more than just one discounted item. It also gives those who wouldn’t normally buy your product a reason to try it out.

Be Available

You’re obviously going to close down the office or store a couple of times during the holiday season and you should but be sure that you’re not restricting your hours so much that customers get frustrated. Customers want to be able to order at any time and receive customer service during normal times.

The holiday season is the one time a year you should be even more available than normal. Extend your customer service hours during the holiday’s to plant trust in your customers. The more a customer can trust a company to be there and meet their needs when they need it most, the more loyal that customer will become. The holiday season is a very stressful time and having a company that is there to solve their problems at the click of the button is something every customer wants.

If you’re an online store you also want to make sure your business is available without hiccups 24/7, being sure to fix any glitches as quickly as possible.

Charitable Contribution

Going along with social responsibility, a company’s contributions to charity also helps make them stand out. Ask your customers for ideas on what charities to donate to. Asking for their opinions will make them feel like a part of the decision, allowing them to help give back to a charity they strongly believe in. Making donations during the holidays is always a big deal and something people are proud to participate in. Customer’s knowing that their support in your company leads to you giving back to others will make you stand out during the holiday season.

Get started now on your holiday efforts to stand out among others and check out Marketing Ideas for Your Holiday Sales for even more holiday ideas including, holiday-themed offers, discounts, and content.

Spark Your Audience Engagement

Audience Engagement

All top companies have extensive customer engagement, and most notably, it’s largely customer-driven. Every company strives to have audience engagement. It helps build relationships, community, and loyalty, encourages conversation and participation, and makes your brand stand out among others.

Companies need a long-term engagement strategy as it is vital to their growth. Better customer experience means customers will not only choose your brand over any other they are also willing to pay more for your product or service. The better the experience the more loyal a customer will become and the more engaged they’ll get.

Humanize your brand

As a company you want to be able to play to people’s needs and be someone customers can relate to. Popular consumer brands such as Wendy’s and Under Armor have it easier while brands like banks and B2B companies have to try even harder. Utilizing people within your company that are passionate about your brand, you can work to create a humanized brand. Create content that is relatable, things consumers would interact with, and make your brand stand out as something they want to be a part of.

Consistent communication

Your engaged customers want to hear from you. They want to know they can count on you to inform them of updates to your product/service and company, especially in these unusual times. In gaining audience engagement, you also want them to count on you for supplying them with information within your industry. In gaining engagement, you must be consistent in your newsletters, social media posts, emails, and any other form of communication you use.

Get to know your community

The more you know the easier it is to interact with your audience. Do your research as to why your audience is drawn towards you. Take time to get to know them so you can engage accordingly. Know their interests, wants, needs, and lifestyles. Knowing your audience drives you in the right direction, making sure you don’t strike out when trying to engage. Asking for feedback will also help you get to know your community and gives you ideas of what your audience thinks currently and what they want to see in the future. Most customers are very willing to give their opinions and thus become engaged with your product and brand. You’ll also see engagement levels rise once you start implementing their ideas.

Surprise personalized outreach

Digital marketing allows companies to take personalized engagement even further. The most effective content strategy is to offer something that they wouldn’t expect. Real-time personalized deals are a sure way to get customers to engage with your brand. Making your deals relevant to customers right when they need it makes them feel as though the advertisements were made for them. Be sure to create marketing and advertising campaigns based on location, social platform, and specific products to boost your consumer engagement strategy. However, personalization should be about making the user feel welcomed and known without feeling like you’re digging into their personal data.

Schedule weekly activities

It can be effective to post activities or ask questions the same day each week on social media – promoting things like Sales Tip Tuesdays or Motivational Mondays. After posting your content, ask your followers to join in, sharing their tips and advice, or posting a photo of what motivated them. This encourages followers to not only engage with your post but others in the community as well. Being the source of community engagement ups your brand and encourages users to return to your page to interact each week, growing your engagement.

Understanding What Customers Want

Three Tips to Understand Your Customers

If we could understand what every customer is thinking, we’d be selling left and right. Of course, it’s very rare that a customer tells us how they’re feeling. With the constant bombardment of advertising and everyone wanting them to buy, customers are a lot less trusting and require more time and effort to convince to buy.

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Understanding what drives an individual to want to buy is a key factor in selling today. If you don’t get lucky with that customer who willingly tells you their wants, needs, and concerns for your product/service, it means you must figure it out on your own. Knowing how to figure out a client’s wants, needs, and concerns and use it to your advantage is something every good salesperson understands how to do.

Here are three ways to understand what potential customers are thinking.

Be the guinea pig

Go through the customer experience process. Follow the paths they would take on the route to buying from you. Act as though this is your first time coming across the product and note what value you receive. What key information do you take in, is there something not mentioned that you can note in your sales pitch or a key factor you can build off of? It’s important to understand the process and information the customer is taking in before they reach you. This way more value is being added to your product instead of just highlighting what the customer already knows. The more value you can add, the more likely a customer is to buy.

Learn as much as you can about your client’s job and life

It’s important to focus specifically on those who will be using your product/service. Learning about your customer’s job or life often helps bring to light key factors your customer wouldn’t think of if asked what they wanted from the product. The more you know about a customer, the better you can pick out key things the customer would enjoy. This tactic takes more time and empathy from the salesperson, but the more personal you can get, the more likely a customer is to buy from you specifically.

Understand what customers want

Personalized service, consistent answers, and optimized user experience.

Personalized service. Customers don’t want to be treated like a case number. As you want to learn as much as you can about your client, you also want to create an experience that’s personalized to them. Work with the client to figure out the best package for them, making sure to pay attention to their needs and wants. Giving them an experience different than the usual sales pitch will get them much closer to buying.

Consistent Answers. Seventy-six percent of customers receive conflicting answers from different support agents when asking the same questions. Make sure your sales team is on the same page. Consistent answers throughout the buying process will increase the likelihood of completing a purchase more so than receiving different answers to the same question. It shows you have your stuff together and that a customer can rely on each representative to give a good deal.

Optimized user experience. User experience is a huge factor in choosing to buy. Non-responsive and hard-to-use websites turn people away. Make sure your website is user-friendly through the navigation, homepage, and cart checkout. You want to make it a fun, easy experience. Aside from online experience, you also want to make sure customer support services are optimized. Using quality sales skills, salespeople can make for a troublesome user experience, one that will keep customers coming back.

Three key steps to improving your Lead Generation

Image: Man on computer

Lead generation is one of the best ways to grow your business and get quality sales. Sales leads provide opportunities to not only reach sales goals but to exceed them. Having a dynamic lead generation strategy will boost you to the customer goals you’re trying to reach.

Start using these key lead generation strategies to help your business get quality customers.

  1. Clearly define your goals

    While this sounds like a mundane step, it’s very important. You need to know what you want and what you think you can achieve. Being able to work towards something and reach it in the set amount of time gives you more motivation to achieve it.

    Your goal must be clear and precise. Goal setting is a common practice but while lots of people take the time to set goals, very few actually reach them. That’s why it’s important that we take time to really think over and set an achievable goal.

    In setting your goal you must start broad and then break it down even further. What is your yearly goal, monthly, weekly, daily? Having a goal broken down and implemented into to your daily routine will help you reach it.

    What is your lead generation goal?

  2. Make your company stand out

    What value do you bring? Let customers know the value they get out of using your product or service. You must explain what makes your company so special. Maybe it’s the added features of the products no one else has or maybe it’s just what your company stands for and how they benefit the community. Lots of companies stand out to consumers because of their social responsibility. Is your company helping others? Show your customers how.

    Another way to stand out is a comparison to your competition. Explain how you’re different and better. Why would the customer want to choose you over another company who makes the same product?

    Features, benefits, value, use these to make yourself stand out. A feature is an attribute or fact about your product, service, or company. A benefit is how that feature helps your prospect. Value extends beyond what your product or service can do for your prospect and aligns your benefits with the prospect’s larger goals and objectives.

    Position your company in a way that makes you stand out. Just because you know the benefits and value of your product/service and company doesn’t mean consumers know.

  3. Create Lead Magnets

    Lead magnets are the things that attract the target audience and convinces them to engage further. These are crucial to generating leads online.

    Lead magnets include:

    • Company’s homepage
    • Landing pages
    • Blogsite
    • Call to actions throughout the website
    • Contact us form
    • Get more information form
    • Newsletter signup form
    • Social media sites
    • Valuable content suited for your target audience for your website and social media accounts

    Lead magnets need to be very convincing. You must know your target audience and understand what they would find to be a tempting deal. There are lots of ways to capture leads through lead magnets, you just need to get creative in your approach.

Lead generation requires a lot of patience and new ideas. Even the simplest of ideas can match up to the most thought out ideas. It’s all dependent on how you utilize the information you have to create effective strategies that consumers would find irresistible.