8 protips on how to find new customers for your B2B business.
Regardless of whether your Internet business sells directly to the general public (Business to Consumer, or B2C) or to other businesses (Business to Business, or B2B), customers are your lifeblood. After all, what good is having all that saleable product if there’s no one to buy any of it? All businesses struggle with continuously finding new customers and it only gets harder as more and more competitors dogpile into an already-competitive market. B2B companies have the added challenge of attracting a target audience from a pool that is typically more savvy in regards to the product, the field, and the general ins and outs of commerce.
Here are 8 effective ways to find new B2B clients.
#1: Strengthen Your Relationship With Your Existing Customers
Start your search for new customers by getting to know your existing ones a little better. Identify your company’s most loyal repeat customers and start to form more cordial, personal relationships with them. People are more likely to do business with companies that make them feel special, wanted, and appreciated. Show your appreciation for this elite group of customers by inviting them to a VIP social gathering. Here, you can meet and mingle with your favorite buyers and get to know them on a personal level. You may choose to organize a workshop for your select group where they can offer up important feedback and opinions on specific field-related topics. Keep the door open for two-way communication; listen to their comments and offer up your own. Together, you and your customers can create new solutions and, at the same time, you’ll learn to hone in on certain criteria to begin marketing to new prospects.
#2: Pay Attention to the Competition
Staying on top of the competition is more than just trying to counter their moves as they attempt to overtake your spot in the market. Instead of thinking reactively, try to incorporate more proactive measures. For example, pay attention to what it is your competitors are selling, how they’re selling it, and how well they’re selling it. Also, take note as to which of their tactics have either underperformed or failed outright. Of course, the easy way is to try and mimic their every move but this can make your business model extremely predictable to your direct competitors (as well as the others in your chosen field). Without ripping them off totally, you can try and build on their successes with innovations of your own. You can even take a look at their failures, see what went wrong, and attempt to correct it for a different outcome. If you’ve noticed certain competitors creeping up on your share of the market closer and closer, there’s a very high probability that they’re doing the exact same to you.
#3: Make Your Website Work for You
Your website has a lot of roles to fill: it’s your company’s storefront, it’s your silent sales staff, it’s your operations crew, and it’s your marketing department, and it’s also your corporate PR officer. Your website represents your branding, your image, and adds credibility to your company name. But none of that matters if your website’s not ranking well with search engines (Google, in particular). Search engine optimization (SEO) is more than just targeting a select batch of keywords through written content. Today’s SEO also factors in aspects such as website loading speed and performance, navigation, efficient and optimized coding, and even accessibility. Cleaning up content and targeting keywords is still important, but you will want to do an audit of your current website and narrow down which areas could use improvement. For B2B websites, it helps to incorporate B2B-specific features such as increased personalization and greater detail on product pages. As the nature of online-based B2B slants towards a more self-serve environment nowadays, adding in more automated features can help improve your websites rankings as visitors will be encouraged to spend more time exploring your website. Organic search results are the modern ‘word-of-mouth’-type advertising, the most cost-efficient kind of advertising, but you may want to consider paid ads and sponsored ads to help grease the wheels a bit in boosting ranks. If you can get your website into a prime top slot within the Google search results, the amount of additional maintenance effort on your company’s part will begin to decrease.
#4: Build a Social Media Presence
Over half of the world’s population is on social media (as of January 2023), which means that it’s more than likely that your potential customers have social media accounts; either their own personal ones or using one under their company’s name. LinkedIn is the world’s largest business-specific social media channel used for employment, business networking, and professional development but corporate social media presence isn’t limited to just there. Some prospects may also be on YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram and of course, Facebook and Twitter. LinkedIn is a good place to start to build your social media presence but to broaden your reach, it’d be best to hit the most popular social media platforms as well. Having a strong social media presence connects your company to your existing customers and can help attract new ones through the creation of dialog and promotion of communication. Users can interact with you and establish new relationships which, in turn, have the potential to become future sales. Get involved in online communities related to your field and/or industry. From here, you’ll also be able to connect with your industry peers, which can also lead to mutually-benefitting relationships. There are several methods in which to choose when creating your social media presence and depending on your field and corporate image, you may choose a formal, more professional style or a casual, irreverent approach. The general public on social media tends to prefer connecting with people over brands so while professionalism adds business credibility, some users could find it to be a bit stuffy and pretentious. On the other hand, if your posts are too casual, prospects may get the wrong impression that your business is illegitimate. Finding the right balance between the two will help net you the most social media followers, but it’s important not to come off as ‘spammy’. Post regularly, but not too often lest the social media platform ban your account if you happen to trigger its spam detectors. Post content that is worthy of sharing but don’t just post anything, or else the same will happen with you inadvertently drawing attention to the platform’s automated moderators.
#5: Use Content Marketing
In addition to social media and SEO, use content marketing to create buyer personas for your intended target audience. Buyer personas are half-truthful-half-fictional representations of your ideal customer. Based on research and data about existing and potential customers, it shows who the customer is, what they do, what motivates them, and what they want. The first step for effective content marketing is to educate and inform your audience and your potential customers through the dissemination of resources and information. Use blog posts, written articles, instructional videos and webinars to your advantage and show the public that you have real-world industry experience, that they can trust you as a source of valuable information, and that your business has credibility. Content marketing also works hand-in-hand with social media. For maximum effectiveness, be sure to share your content through social media. The shareable content on social media will not only help in regards to building your social media presence, but will also draw more eyes to your created content and the more eyes that see your content, the higher the likelihood that it will be shared and go viral–with you as the original source being right in the center of it all.
#6: Socialize in the Real World
We’ve already covered creating live events for your customers and building a social media presence online, but it’s also good to get out there yourself and interact with the outside world. Networking, building relationships, and finding new customers can be done at corporate events. Getting your message out at events is great for reaching potential customers. If you are invited to attend a live corporate event such as a seminar, a workshop, or a conference, don’t pass up the offer. Get outside and make yourself known. Aside from networking, live events present opportunities for you to promote specific products and services. It’s important though that you don’t walk into any event empty-handed. This includes researching the event itself, the attendees, and preparing any necessary and relevant materials such as presentations and promotional materials. When attending a live event, you must interact with the others in attendance. Mingle, chat, get to know people. Otherwise, it’s valuable time wasted if you show up in-person without talking to a single attendee. You don’t have to meet everyone in the building, but be open to meeting as many people as you can. Because there’s always the possibility that one (or several) of these new connections you make could end up becoming your company’s dream customer.
#7: Cold Prospecting
Before the Internet, the traditional plan for B2B sales propagation involved a lot of cold-calling, business trips, and sales meetings. Think of the traveling door-to-door salesman. That’s not too far off on how traditional B2B used to work. With B2B eCommerce, your website does much of this legwork for you but it can’t do it all–especially, in regards to attracting new customers all by itself. Sometimes, it’ll be necessary to go back to the old tried-and-true method of cold prospecting. Cold-calling or cold-EMailing random contacts in the hopes of netting a few new prospects involves a bit of investment in man hours and while it may not seem worth the effort for what little results it produces, it’s still a viable source for finding new customers. Before the world went to work remotely due to the COVID pandemic, chances are you worked in an office and you heard the phone ring all throughout the day. That means that phone calls aren’t entirely obsolete yet. Also, you’ve probably opened your EMail account and saw the random sales EMail sitting in your inbox. As old-fashioned and as unfavorable as these methods are in today’s business settings, they are still being used on a regular basis. For B2B, the challenge is ever-so-slightly lessened in that when cold prospecting, at least your contacts won’t be totally random–they’ll be businesses that know what it is they want and need.
#8: Market Yourself, Advertise, and Take Advantage of Good PR
A B2B company needs marketing and public relations (PR) to grow. The goal of marketing is to build relationships with potential customers by creating and distributing content. You can do this by writing blog posts, making videos, making infographics, etc. (see #5: Content Marketing) and through direct marketing efforts such as EMail campaigns. One of the best ways to reach potential customers is through direct advertising. Advertisers can reach their targeted audiences on a variety of platforms, including print, broadcast, and digital means. B2B businesses benefit a lot from advertising; it helps businesses build brand awareness and generate new leads, as well as reach a wider audience. There are caveats to be had, though. Ad campaigns can be expensive, depending on how many campaigns are run concurrently and how many people you’re trying to reach with them. Identifying your target audiences first is important or else, you’ll waste both time and money trying to appeal to uninterested parties. It’s also important to think about the type of ad and the platform to be used. For example, Google ads and other search engine ads are best for or promoting specific products while public display ads are better for promoting your brand. With public relations, you’re spreading your company’s message to the media and building relationships with your customers and stakeholders. PR can include creating press releases, running media campaigns, and organizing events. You can establish yourself as an authority in your field with good PR. Needless to say, we all know what bad PR can do to a company.
Conclusion
Times may have changed in the business world (that rings ESPECIALLY true, given the events of the past 3 years) but the one constant is that customers are essential for the survival of any business. Companies with strong sales track records are likely to have a select group of preferred customers and while it’s important to take care of them and keep in their good graces, it’s extremely rare that continued business can be had on just maintaining that one group alone. Hence, the constant need to reach out and attract new customers on a regular basis. B2B sales and eCommerce were industries that had actually achieved great success during the thick of the COVID pandemic and despite an uncertain economic future, both are considered by industry forecasters to continue growing in the coming years. As stated before, B2B companies have a slight disadvantage versus B2C companies when it comes to attracting new customers but by utilizing these 8 methods–or better yet, forming a strong B2B marketing plan that involves a balanced combination of all 8 methods–your company can get into a sustaining rhythm of customer attraction and retention which will help encourage the growth of your business.