It is quite common to hear B2B company managers or old-school marketers saying that, in these kinds of companies, online digital communications are only useful to showcase their services and to detail product information. They claim it’s practically impossible to turn it into a sales channel because of the complexity of the company’s business matter, adding that it isn’t a massive business and therefore it’s not a good strategy to invest in these initiatives.
Let’s examine this claim more thoroughly and analyze how to go about implementing a lead-generation strategy on the Internet for your B2B organization.
The number one challenge is for you to generate and externalize attractive contents that drive your prospects to act. The key to attracting clients is relevance, a result of a deep understanding of the contacts’ behavior and feeling. Offer engaging and useful stories to them.
If you want to create relevant content to help you drive sales, first you need to know more about your contacts. You should identify the type of content they consume and what digital communication channels they use, during all the stages of the sales life cycle.
Build a relationship with these contacts and send them educational content, to establish your company as a referent in the industry. Offer them to take part in a webinar, to download a white paper or a similar pdf document or to read a reference case. As these contacts move forward within the life cycle, they need more and more materials to help them make a purchase decision, such as demos, data sheets or tutorials.
Make a survey to find out what kind of questions the contacts are making to their suppliers, and create content that helps to answer those questions. If it is correctly published on your online distribution channels, this knowledge base can help you to capture the Internet traffic you need to generate new prospects.
When your sales force works every day to turn opportunities into business, the existing high quality content (trends, white papers, cases, how-to) becomes useful material to be included in those interactions –and even in RFPs as a reference–, improving your clients’ perception of your company. You prove you’re trustworthy, because in those contents you speak knowingly about the topics they are interested in: they identify with the cases and value your professionalism.
And so, let’s think for a moment… After reading these lines, can we still claim that it is very hard or practically impossible for a B2B company to use the Internet to drive sales?
