Category: Marketing

When potential customers start looking for the services your company offers, the first place they look is online. That’s why all your sales and marketing efforts must work in parallel, on every single digital channel. After all, the online customer journey is made up of the sum of many parts: SEO, content, targeting, accessibility, coding and everything in between. An objective assessment of these components not only helps measure your company’s performance against industry benchmarks, it also offers food for thought to make improvements. In this article, you will learn some of the key points for B2B marketing, which fall into six main themes: Proposition, Targeting, Website, Content, Search and Lead Generation. Visibility of the value proposition The visibility of your proposition has an impact on the success of your entire online presence. Great design, layout and structure are important … but if your site visitors don’t understand what you do and why you do it better than the competition, they don’t have the incentive to buy from you! It is therefore good to remember that the proposition is the explicit and / or implicit value that a company puts in its products and that helps its customers choose it because it can give them an advantage. It is therefore a concrete statement of intent, in which it is clearly explained what is being sold and how it will be made and, finally, what its key benefit is. Targeting Your online presence should immediately attract the kind of customers you want to win. So, the more you know your customers, the easier it is to tailor your offers to them. The more you understand them, the more comfortable they feel and the longer they will feel comfortable. So to identify the right customer target, you need to take into account demographics, location and, above all, interests and opinions. Site loading speed Visitors will linger on your site for some time. And the more time they spend, the more money they will spend on your products and services! So what should your website look like? In a word, fast. It needs to load images and text quickly, be responsive, work on both mobile and desktop, and keep visitors as engaged as possible before they lose interest. Google Lighthouse can be useful as an open source automated tool for measuring the quality of web pages. Accessibility Businesses that prioritize accessibility are more likely to be seen as innovative and inclusive businesses, thus reaching more people. But how does this impact your website? On two fronts. First, it means having a responsive site that works on different types of devices. Secondly, accessibility includes the implementation of several features to help users with some disability navigate your website better. Although the level of accessibility of a website may vary, there is no doubt that this translates into a better information consultation and a better user experience, which has a positive effect on your brand and its reputation. About us A company is more than just a business, it’s a group of people: talented experts who work tirelessly to help customers. People buy from other people, which is why it is so important to outline who you are on a dedicated page under the heading “About Us”. It is also an opportunity to tell the story of your company, why it was born and how potential customers can get in touch with you.

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One of the most efficient tools to make room in the B2B market, data in hand, is the evergreen email marketing. Even today, emails are the favorite channel of 9 out of 10 professionals (Content Marketing Institute, 2020), thanks also to the average levels of CTR (Click-through rate, a measure for the effectiveness of online advertising campaigns) that are truly impressive. But for effective communications, it’s important to know how to write B2B marketing emails. To do this, there are important factors to consider: below we list some of them to make your business fruitful. Target audience. First, you need to think about the target audience. Knowing your audience is the first step to be successful and establishing a good relationship with them is the second step. Knowing your audience means knowing who they are, the problems they have to solve and the values ​​they follow. This is essential to understand which topics to cover and how. Referring back to the buyer persona and related information is a great way to create targeted emails. Title. Then, it should be remembered that the title of a newsletter can be the reason for the success or failure of a communication. This is essential to ensure that the email is noticed and opened in the midst of the many that arrive in the inbox of their leads. It is therefore important that the object is close to the needs of users, proposing solutions to their needs. It happened, for example, that a first experiment of massive use of keywords in the subject made a lot of difference in terms of performance, with an open rate increased by almost 20% and higher conversions than other emails with a more reasoned subject. Mail Body. Once this first barrier has been overcome, the recipients of the email must find a text that is easy to read, with short and relevant sentences. Ideal is therefore a simple and direct text, which creates curiosity, which refers to the target and which includes the most important keywords. Better if accompanied by a captivating graphic style, with reasoned colors and elements that are quick to load and interpret. Time. Among the elements that make the difference, frequency and time should not be forgotten. The frequency refers to the interval that is allowed to pass between one communication and another: it can be a week, less, or more. Instead, in time, we refer to identifying the best time to send your newsletter: which day of the week? at what time? These are two factors that strongly affect performance and finding the best time becomes one of the keys to success. An example is letting a few days pass between one email and another, leaving time to think about the recipient. But to avoid the opposite effect, ie that the recipient forgets and considers our emails as spam, it is better not to wait too long, thus making sure that the sequence of the emails takes place preferably within a period of 7 days. Testing. There are studies that have tried to answer these questions, trying to identify the perfect email algorithm. But as always, the best way to know which option is best is to test! A / B testing is essential in email marketing and is used to test alternative versions of titles, graphics, texts, delivery times, but also for the combination of these elements. Knowing how to write emails in B2B marketing is important. There are many aspects to take into consideration, including public knowledge, the right subject, the text of the email, the sending times.To get the desired results, if this is your first time doing email marketing, it will take time and practice. But it is an effort that is worth making and that pays off, because email marketing is a classic that works and by now many companies have built and today are building their success in the B2B market with the help of good old email.

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In one day we receive much more information than a person received a hundred years ago in his entire life. A lifetime would not be enough to read all these contents. Legitimate defenseBy force of circumstances we have to defend ourselves. We have all become expert information selectors. In a fraction of a second we decide whether it is worth opening or scrolling that email, that article, that post on a social media. On what basis does this selection take place? One would say “I choose the most important”. But it is an imprecise explanation. If that were the case, we would all have followed closely the Indian elections (1 billion voters, the largest democracy in the world) or the evolution of global warming. No, the importance … is not important. Neither is the ‘freshness’ of the information. or the authority of the source. What really makes us decide whether to read content is its relevance: how much does this content matter to me reading it. “I read this content”, we say to ourselves, “because it talks about me, because it is ‘made especially for me’. The first rule of communicationBeing relevant is therefore the first rule of communication, especially in a B2B context. The center of communication is the recipient, not the issuer. If you read this text it is probably because it is about you. If it were just about us, you probably wouldn’t have gotten to this line. To be relevant upstream of the communication there must be drastic choices. I cannot be relevant to everyone: I have to get a precise picture of the recipient of my communication. I need to know precisely ‘for whom’ I am writing. The ‘buyer persona’We at Valuelead encourage our customers not only to select their interlocutor but to paint him with a wealth of details. We are not talking about the target (male, 30-50 years old, high school education, manager, lives in a big city) but about ‘buyer persona’. We urge the customer to draw a portrait as defined as possible of his ideal interlocutor (and therefore potential customer): What car does he drive, what kind of house he lives in, what sport he does or would like to do…. The paradox of verisimilitudeBy doing so, do we not risk reducing the effectiveness of the message by narrowing the goal? No. A novelist dedicates pages and pages to outline the protagonist with a thousand unique details. Yet despite this, indeed precisely for this reason, we identify with him. This paradox was analyzed by Daniel Kahneman, the ‘father’ of behavioral economics and Nobel laureate in Economics. Kahneman and Tverski in Thoughts slow and fast, reported an experiment that we propose again with some modifications: Based on this description “Linda, thirty-one years old, she is single, very intelligent and outspoken. She graduated in philosophy. As a student she was very interested in the problems of discrimination and social justice, and she also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations “; having to indicate the most probable alternative among the following: 1) Linda is a militant of a feminist movement, 2) Linda is a teacher, 3) Linda is a teacher and militant in a feminist movement, most of the subjects chose the third without hesitation. Yet the number of female teachers and militants is a fraction of the number of female teachers (perhaps less than 1% one might think). You ‘sound’ to us ‘more likely’ simply because it is plausible. A woman could identify with this character even if she does not teach or even if she is not a feminist or has no degree in philosophy. There is no relevance without ‘buyer persona’In practice, having a precise image of the recipient of the communication, what we at Valuelead call ‘buyer persona’, helps immensely in the selection of themes and their treatment and extends instead of restricting it, the number of people who ‘find themselves’ in the communication. . But it’s not just this. We dare to say that without investing time in defining the buyer persona (its attributes must not be chosen at random: they must be as relevant as possible … relevant to the purposes of what we want to offer or sell) it is not likely that our communication will be considered relevant .

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Needless to call it word-of-mouth. ‘Spread the word’ is fine. It is one of the best marketing tools, even if it is the oldest and the least expensive. But are we sure it always works? Yesterday I was stopped by a person. The battery in his car had run out and he asked me if I knew a nearby electrician. None of them came to mind. Continuing, not even 200 meters away, I saw the sign of an auto electrician to which I had also turned to even a year before! Maybe it happened to you too. I forgot it. Yet I had been happy with his work; it wasn’t too expensive either! Having a satisfied customer is not enough to trigger word of mouth. It is necessary to impress yourself in his mind in order to be remembered and therefore advised. Reflecting on my experience as a customer – and as a supplier – I started a list of ‘successful word of mouth principles’. Obviously it’s just a start and I hope you help me complete it. 1) Satisfying the customer is not enough, you have to amaze him!Today, as a customer, we expect absolutely error-free, fast and comprehensive service. Therefore, meeting the customer’s expectations fully is not enough to be remembered. We need to give something more. And this ‘more’ is not always the good price: it is something unexpected and personal. Let’s think about our travel experiences for example. What do we remember of a vacation or a stay in a hotel? Was the bed comfortable? Was the bathroom clean? No. We remember that personal and unexpected touch. That ‘something more’! 2) A flow of communication to stay in the customer’s radar.Why hadn’t the electrician come to mind when answering the unfortunate driver? Simply because… in life hardly one thinks of auto electricians. And vice versa, auto electricians hardly think about their former customers. To stay on the customer’s radar, on the other hand, you must always be present in his mind, with a constant flow of communications. Constant but not pressing. In my opinion, a continuous stream of unmissable, limited and exclusive ‘special offers’ makes you nervous. Better a flow of communications that are pleasant to read, with no or almost no overtly commercial connotations and consistent with the type of customer. 3) The miracle of the Prospect-2-prospect.In my opinion, doing so opens up the ‘miraculous’ possibility of being recommended by a non-customer! Like auto electricians, I sell services that are not of continuous use. It may be that my prospect has not yet had the opportunity to become my client but has nevertheless appreciated my way of contacting him. If I was able to give life to a narrative, I created a relationship, let’s say ‘platonic’ with the prospect and it is perfectly possible that this will lead him to recommend me to another potential client.

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