The Ultimate Guide to B2B Ecommerce Marketing

Marketing in today’s challenging environment takes a creative, forward-thinking approach towards the understanding of business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce strategies. Often businesses lack the experience to pull it off thus ending up lagging behind the competition. Presented here are the ways through which you can put yourself on the right track in B2B ecommerce marketing. Let’s start by looking at a key factor of B2B success;

1. Agility in an Omni-Channel World

An Agile approach is likely to be the best option for you in this Omni-Channel world. An Omni-Channel world means that you are dealing with a range of options for making commerce decisions. Whether that’s coming in and buying it physically from you, buying it online, using a mobile device, or any other way, we have more options to buy items today than we likely ever have. To many B2B businesses, this means having an option of different means of sale can become a little confusing. To make this work to the level that you need, it helps if you can understand that a soft, less driven approach can work best. The pace of change in business today means a grand plan that could fulfill all of your needs when completed in a few years’ time could be outgrown by the time it’s ready.

This is why being Agile-minded business matters so much. In the past, we had to simply prepare all of our outlets and locations for business for just one form of the sales channel. Now, all systems, processes, features, and figures have to be optimized for multiple channels all at once.

You can’t always predict the big changes or the pitfalls that your business is likely to come up against, though. This is why staying Agile in an increasingly Omni-Channel world makes such obvious sense. If you are running a B2B business and you want to make the most impact, going for an Agile framework is your best bet for success.

Instead, a group has to find a means of working with a development team that can help them stay Agile as development occurs. The next generation of innovation in B2B marketing today could be outdated by the time you implement it – your business has to keep moving and making sales while making background changes and improvements to further improve the service on offer. Contact PROS e-commerce consultants today for a FREE consultation.

2. Boost Your Business Through Digital Marketing

Digital marketing has been changed with new innovations and marketing techniques like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR), mobile apps, big data, advanced search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing etc. Whereas, before we had to deal with keyword stuffing, cost-per-click marketing campaigns etc., today we have to deal with these unique marketing concepts. In short, the scene has changed beyond any old recognition. To help make your B2B business more likely to be found, listened to and then tried out, you need to find the best ways to boost your business through digital marketing. This guide should help you better understand that this kind of marketing can pose, making it much easier for you to begin making the kind of implementations that you need to get more clients returning.

So, how can digital marketing – of so many various forms – help you out in the B2B circuit?

• Greater Authority – Any business that has a strong marketing presence is likely to be more trusted. If you are gunning for contracts and sales from another business and they cannot find you with a few clicks on Google, you are unlikely to get a (pleasant) response. Instead, a smart digital marketing campaign that boosts your social media size and output as well as creates authority-driven blog posts and helpful content can be the solution you need.
• Insight Means Sales – Even other business owners are unlikely to know exactly what they need – it’s why they like to look around. If you can give yourself a better look and feel by using digital marketing, then you can make it much more likely that people will stick around. Giving them some insight that your competitors weren’t – even through a simple video hosted on YouTube, or a cool infographic you had designed based on market research – allows your business to be seen as the one worth listening to.
• Stronger Appeal – A business can really benefit from having a strong online presence. Although in the world of B2B marketing you don’t have to worry about social media marketing, CPC marketing, and the like as much, they create a better appeal about your business. A client is much more likely to invest time and money into what you can provide if you can show them that you have a strong appeal to others outside of themselves. While B2C businesses need to rely on masses of people to find them, you need a smaller number of people to find you. However, you need them to be impressed instantly – and strong digital marketing makes that possible.

With all of this in mind, you can very easily begin to create the kind of strategy and atmosphere that you needed. Now can you see why digital marketing has such a profound effect on the direction of your business? Now, let’s look at another element of B2B ecommerce.

3. Fast is the New ‘Better’ for B2B Ecommerce

Given that B2B ecommerce is now officially en route to becoming a trillion-dollar industry, ignoring it should no longer be a sensible option. The biggest and most rapid growth in the world of ecommerce comes from B2B sales, so the idea that it ‘does not work’ is most certainly outdated. Don’t believe the hype that sticking to old methodologies is the best way to sell to other businesses.

Although mostly driven by B2B buyers who are looking to use the power of the online channels more intelligently, your own business has to understand that a Fast approach is now needed. The power of having a strong and easily represented Fast approach should not be underestimated. The reason that ecommerce in the B2B sector is blowing up so much comes from the fact that Fast is the new Big, the new Better.

The companies who are quickest to get their ear to the ground and listen to market demand are the ones who will be making the biggest, most reliable profits. Companies might have larger budgets than you, a greater natural reputation, and also more of a typical pull, but do they lack your speed or your ability to get involved?

Fast is all about noticing the shimmers in the market that point to a big change being on its way. If you can then adapt to meet that change head-on, your business can outperform even the biggest and most well-armed B2B competition.

Those who don’t make a Fast approach, though, are the ones who will fall behind. You can be as diverse and as informative as you like. If you are not getting there first and noticing the market shifts before your competitors, it will not matter. Other businesses want to see that you have tagged on to the changes and demands of their own customers so that you can then offer them the best solutions to pass on to their own clients.

For example, one of the biggest shifts in most B2B circles is the use of mobile marketing and mobile commerce. Since many people still see themselves dealing with conferences and executives, they don’t factor in the power of mobile marketing in a B2B environment. This is dangerous and leaves the very profitability of your business in question.

Mobile is now the primary access point whether it’s your business, your potential clients, or their potential clients. A Fast approach is all about spotting the changes in the market – including the massive shift to mobile. If you are reading this and your B2B enterprise is not already putting in place a mobile commerce option, get involved!

4. Expert Tips for Ecommerce Success

Success in such a challenging environment such as ecommerce is a very hard thing to pull off. When you are spending a lot of your time marketing to other businesses that just became a little harder again to pull off.  To help you make sure that you are on the right track, here are some expert tips for ecommerce success in the B2B environment:

• Learn Your Audience

Just like a B2C business, a good B2B ecommerce project will know exactly who it is targeting. Do a bit of digging into every single business that you are going to get in touch with. Find out key employee names, make sure you know who you are addressing, and do some digging to learn about them. You want to get them that true, VIP treatment. The generic information here is not what you need – you need a profile. If you build a persona for each person you will be in contact with, you can better pre-empt what they may need or want.

• Content Remains King

Rumors of the demise of content have indeed been greatly exaggerated; you have to appreciate that content remains a premium part of a B2B ecommerce enterprise. Again, use your profiles and build content around that. Look at what your potential clients are missing and build content talking up the need to solve that kind of missing gap. If you can show yourself to be both knowledgeable of the problems they have, and be the one to provide the solution, then your ecommerce management just became so much simpler.

• Use Data Consistently

One of the major mistakes that a lot of your competition is likely making is not taking the importance of data seriously enough. Getting the most out of your data can be a fantastic starting point for making smarter ecommerce calls. Data defines where your potential clients are in their own journey, meaning that you can find the perfect time to offer the solution they need. Try and map out the typical decision-making process of one of your clients. Doing this allows you to identify where these business owners are in their own process so that you can offer the right answers.

• Perpetual Availability Wins

Just as being a Fast, Agile minded B2B business helps, so does being available. It’s another reason why Omni-Channel management of your marketing materials can matter so much. If you can make sure that it’s easy to leave an inquiry, you just made it so much simpler to earn a sale. By making sure that people can make a purchase even if it’s out of ‘office hours’ via your ecommerce platform, you make it much easier for people to invest in your business in good faith. Whether you make yourself available through having multiple channels of communication or by smart matching of your marketing, you can make the kind of difference that you intended by making constant availability your ‘thing’.

5. Agile is the Way to Go

While Agile is a software development methodology, it can be used for so many different purposes. For example, the principles that make Agile so strong – versatility, independence, creativity – can be applied to anything, including your B2B ecommerce strategy.

 

Agile marketing borrows a lot of the features from the software development strategy, but they are not the same thing. In the end, it produces what we need – active, rapid response to changes in the marketplaces that we inhabit. By reducing excessive up-front planning that can leave you implementing expensive and time-consuming ‘solutions’ that are now outdated and need innovation, Agile thinking instead allows for a more procedural organization.

When we hear people talking about elements of marketing such as being ‘Agile’, it can all become quite confusing. With so much hype around the Agile way of working in a B2B environment, why do so many people see it as the de facto path to head down?

For one, it’s a great way for your business to think about software development. You want your development to be fast, affordable, and innovative. This means that using an Agile approach to your ecommerce development makes perfect sense. It allows for an efficient, cost-effective, and diverse solution that can allow for the rapid delivery of sound business results.

This is because an Agile software development model concentrates on learning from testing. It basically allows for a lot of adjustments to be made when it appears that features don’t work as well/as consistently as intended. Whereas other methodologies can leave you with an expensive, clunky burden that needs a lot of work, Agile methods avoid that entirely.

The main reason that any B2B ecommerce option should be Agile, though, is the fact it can be adapted so easily to meet the changes in the market. Your clients will be improving and changing all the time to meet the demands they have from their own clients, so you need to be ready to change yourself to meet their needs.

Put simply, going for a more Agile approach allows for better activity management, too. It means that your own staff is going to be more likely to be understanding of how the operations are working. In other methods when using software, it can feel as if the software or the systems being used lack the ease of use needed to make them a major part of business operation,

Agile thinking avoids that entirely. It boosts creativity and makes it so much easier for staff to feel as if they are taking an active part in your business performance increasing. That’s a small but very important part of the Agile mentality; improving the input and the buy-in from staff. For example, an Agile team would be more likely to think outside of their usual mindsets. It could allow for more development of new skills and diversification of the qualities that your staff brings to the table.

By balancing out workloads accordingly and making that groups can organize themselves, Agile planning allows for faster work, quicker results, and making sure that you are first, not last.

6. Customer Satisfaction

Now, one of the most challenging elements of running a business today comes from sound customer satisfaction. Being able to hand over an Agile methodology is one thing, but how can you make sure that your B2B ecommerce strategy is successfully working for your customers?

 

After all, with a B2B business, you have fewer people to work with and potentially woo into using your services. Keeping them satisfied with the return they get each time is a tough thing to do, and usually needs a not-insignificant amount of work carried out to make it possible!

The main purpose of any ecommerce platform is to provide the best possible buying experience for your customers, not to build revenue. The other main factor of B2B ecommerce is all about client retention. To make that a possibility, you have to be providing a level of service that ticks their boxes.

7. Be Fast, Stop Being Last

The main element of customer satisfaction that you should be paying close attention to, though, is speed. Your ecommerce platform should be offering a fast, simple, and paperless solution to making purchases and orders. Most B2B transactions are slow, untimely, and tend to be loaded with back-and-forth paperwork and time-consuming factors such as this.

You can change that more or less immediately by utilizing the online experience, then. This allows you to offer a faster solution that breaks away from the technophobic mindset of much of your competition.

Remember, most business owners will engage in typical B2C buying on almost a daily basis in their personal lives. When they see how easy non-businesses get to deal with factors such as this, it can become frustrating having to wait on a more cumbersome B2B platform. Filling the gap, then, has to be your primary concern.

8. Provide The Reasons Why

Another major part of customer satisfaction is the power of explanation. Throughout any B2B transaction, you should be giving clear insight and advice on why your services are the best. Remember, most business owners won’t be experts on the products or services they buy from you. They merely see it as something that their business needs to perform at its maximum.

If you can provide them with easy and understandable reasons why you can be the primary choice, they are more likely to stick around. Don’t always try and push the sale that gets you the highest markup; push the sale that delivers exactly what they need. As we mentioned at the start of this section, revenue is the secondary objective here.

Retention matters more, so make retention possible by providing more reasons why. They are trusting in you to help them make the right decision financially and logistically, so don’t let them down by promoting the offer with the biggest sale for you.

9. B2B Ecommerce is More Than Just the Store

Unlike other forms of ecommerce, B2B ecommerce means offering more than just the storefront. The sooner that you stop viewing your ecommerce platform as nothing more than another avenue for making money, the sooner your B2B ecommerce strategy can actually start being worth the time, resources, and capital invested.

With a B2B business, you are looking to try and get more than sales through the door on the day. You want to be using as your business card; your introduction. When you start speaking with a prospective client via ecommerce platforms, you don’t really want them to just make a purchase and vanish into the night. You want information and you want to begin building a relationship together as a team.

Since you miss out on being able to see body language and physical reaction to what is being said with ecommerce, your storefront should offer insight and value. Think of the kind of things you would be sure to point out if you were making the sale in person; you want that included in easy to read pieces of content.

Start off by making sure that your platform is asking lots of open-ended questions. Questions can go a LONG way to making sure that you are 100% on the right track when creating the personality profile for any potential client. Don’t just assume, and don’t let your store do any presuming. Instead, use your store as the means to get people through the door to talk to you and to give you more information about what they need.

The sale can come – you want to make sure that every sale processed, though, is the right one. Was it exactly what they needed? Did you get enough information and specification before pushing through the sale?

This is like building a profile of the person for study – you want them doing all the talking while you use your knowledge of the market to find the perfect solution based on what they say. A typical ecommerce store – even in the B2B environment – makes far too many presumptions. Don’t just assume that your ecommerce platform solves the problems or asks the questions needed.

B2B is far different from working out the demographics of your average customer in a B2C transaction. You have to know a lot about the business, who makes the decisions, and what they really need. It’s far more bespoke and customized than the faster selling process in a B2C business, but the benefits are far more pronounced.

Let your storefront be the opening gambit, the means of garnering their interest. After that, the store should play a secondary role while your business does everything it can to build a complete profile of what is needed – and whether or not you have the means to assist further.

10. B2B E-Commerce Categories

One of the most challenging aspects of a good B2B ecommerce strategy is making sure you are fitting into the right category. Unlike B2C ecommerce where the ideas are typically built around getting the sale and hopefully hearing from them again, B2B ecommerce is far different. Businesses are looking to use your service, features, tools, or products to enhance their own offerings in some way.

For example, you might be falling under the Hardware and Hope Improvement category. This is one of the most common forms of B2B marketing, as it’s usually something that a business will need in the modern environment. Rather than buying it all from a retailer, they come to your business to get better deals, faster implementation, and more bespoke touch. As such, one of the main categories is going to be helping to provide the infrastructure needed for that business to implement their goals.

One of the other most common categories will be office supplies. From stationary and the like to furniture and fittings, this is one of the largest B2B ecommerce categories. If your business helps to outfit a new office or to help improve the conditions and qualities within a current office, then you have to make sure that you categorize yourself in this manner.

Apparel is another big part of ecommerce categories – from office uniforms to safety equipment, it’s a huge industry. Businesses would rather come to you for the deals and the quality of the product rather than try to get some kind of discount, bulk-buy deal with a wholesaler or a retailer. Instead, your business has to make sure it can be easily categorized in this manner.

Also, are you a manufacturer? Do you make the products yourself?

If so, then you are a different breed of business from one who merely distributors. This has become more increasingly common and can play a big role in how you market yourself. If your business is built upon the foundations of offering products it has manufactured, then the means of what you market – and how you market – will change from if you are merely distributing.

This makes it hard for your business to know where it stands in terms of categorization. You personally will need to do a fair bit of learning and research regarding the kind of category that you want to fall under. This will directly affect how you market yourself and how you try to come across.

From a more sales-oriented approach that looks to show potential buyers why you are the right choice to insight and driven facts that can detail why you make the best choice, the options and variables are there.

You just need to know where to start with. While this might be the most abstract section of your development as a B2B business, it’s important to thoroughly research this kind of information. The wrong kind of categorization can leave you dealing with requests and requirements that simply fall outside of your business’s jurisdiction and style.

11. What to Look for When Evaluating B2B E-commerce & Omni-Channel Solutions

The last – and most difficult – part of the process, though, is the evaluation. Now that you know what you have to try and provide, how are you going to go about successfully implementing the changes needed?

To help you make a more informed range of choices, consider the following as major outlets to look out for. Each should help you determine the quality and consistency of any B2B ecommerce and Omni-Channel solutions that you implement:

• Meeting Traditional Needs

In most normal B2B transactions, you would speak with the business owner in person or through a clear, visible channel. Make sure that all ecommerce and Omni-Channel solutions provided make it easy for people to stay involved with you both through an electronic sense and otherwise. Business owners need to still feel as if they are cultivating a relationship with your own business, not just your sales platform. If it feels a little wooden and lacking in authenticity, then it might have to be changed. Ensure you don’t get rid of traditional B2B methods when you modernize.

• Is It Personal Enough?

A major question should always be about how personalized the message feels. B2B business owners have had much better personalization in recent years when making personal, B2C purchases in their own time. They now expect the same level of care and authenticity from any B2B purchases. To make that count you should be willing to put in the work to dig deeper into the personal demands of each customer. If you can deliver that through your platform, then you are well on the right track. If your Omni-Channels all feel a little generic and as if they are speaking to one wider demographic, more personalization may be needed.

• Building or Re-Building?

Another significant element to take into account is how your B2B ecommerce builds on what you already have in place. By creating an easy to work with technological system that utilizes the power of personalization, you make it easier for B2B customers to work with a more streamlined ecommerce approach. If your new ecommerce platform feels as if it’s requiring a total re-structuring of everything you did beforehand, refine.

Taking those first steps into a well-prepared B2B enterprise can be a hard thing to do. What it is not, though, is impossible. Don’t let it feel that way – stick to the principles here, build it around the customers that you deal with on a daily basis and you are on the right path to success.

There is no one proven path to take with B2B sales – its’ far less predictable and easily generalized than B2C methods. If you accept that and instead look to craft and hone the perfect system for your business, you will be much closer to creating the kind of ecommerce platform across multiple channels that you so desired.