Business To Business (B2B) Industry is evolving with a great pace. Sustaining business through top marketing efforts, constantly evaluating the action plan that needs to be taken and the desired effective formula that one requires to skyrocket their business – these are nowadays becoming an everyday to-do for the decision makers of the business.
Though business-to-business is a decade-old concept, the recent growth has experienced some significant changes in strategies and their implementation, which has been resulting in huge growth of the E-commerce industries. If PwC report is to be believed, the industry is predicted to grow annually at a 12.9% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) through to 2018. The whole market has now moved on to work with full-digital architecture by leveraging online tools and get the target audience.
To enjoy the best ROI for your business, you need to adapt well to recent growth and changes in the techniques and the strategies.
Below are some of the strategies that are trending and which one should be focusing on in 2017 if they want to stay ahead of their competitors:
1. Influencer Marketing:
In this approach, the change in the overall feel is the major talking point, despite being a considered a conventional method. Once you are the shout to the top influencers in your target audience for your B2B business, the extent of reputation will automatically increase which help you to market your product easily than other similar providers among your industry since they are yet to strategize influencers in broad level. It requires deep thoughts and wide-level strategies to identify the top influencers similar to your industry and lets you plan the action you need to go through to promote your product so as to leverage their reputation and ultimately find valuable leads.
Below is a clear statistic on what customers are actually saying about Influencer Marketing:
2. Cross Channel Marketing Campaigns:
This trend will be much more useful in 2017 to drive qualified leads for your B2B eCommerce business. This is nothing, but keenly exploring all the marketing channels you have at your end with clear strategies and action plans.
Suppose you are investing heavily in paid platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook to build brand awareness and bring leads. At the same time, you need to work heavily on fixing all SEO issues pending for your site. Focusing well on keywords to optimize to bring your website in SERP with the selected top priority keywords. Also, engaging in local SEO practices for your business is good for the reputation of your organization.
Now, let us consider the results of using multiple strategies in a combined form with the scenario explained below:
Suppose your business may not be at #1 position, your Ads may not appear on top, or you may have missed the map results – but you have all of them working in tandem at the same time!
Source: marcduiker.azurewebsites.net
This means, that if someone checks your competitors, he/she has to scroll down the pages. Now, imagine you are contributing to all these three activities diligently and timely, then it is clearly evident that your competitors would not have to scroll down the pages to find you since they already see your company/product thrice at the top. Why your competitors will scroll down as they already see your company/product three times there?
This is where the advantage of cross-campaign policies lie and this is why it will be used extensively in 2017 as a top trend for B2B e-commerce markets.
3. Account Based Marketing:
ABM is considered as another great marketing approach that interconnects your personalized marketing and sales efforts to open up opportunities and extend engagement at specific accounts. You must include this new approach to your new workings if you are looking forward to generating huge income.
Using Account-Based-Marketing (ABM) you will just focus on targeting specific contacts at businesses that you want to sell to or where you have previously been engaged. ABM claims higher close rates for targeted enterprise accounts and it simplifies closer alliance with your firm’s sales and development ideas.
4. Social Media:
It has already been a conventional marketing trend for a long while now, but 2017 is going to be a win-win situation for those B2B businesses who are taking up social media practices (organic and paid promotion) strategically and more intensively. The below statistics says it all:
Source: business2community.com
If you are focusing on lead generation from social media, LinkedIn can be used as the priority, and then it can be spread via Twitter and Facebook as well. If you are thinking about brand awareness program, then Facebook is the main platform you can target, and then move on to Twitter. Always have a quick research on the activities performed in different platforms before being able to utilize them properly. This will consequently bring a huge revenue for your business, by improving the ROI (return-on-investment) significantly.
5. Dropship E-commerce (Growing Popularity in B2B Industry):
It is a retail fulfillment method where, as a store owner, you don’t keep the product in stock; rather than that, you contact with the third party to purchase the ordered item and then directly ship it to the customer. You, as a merchant, will never be able to see or handle the product.
This trend is acquiring more popularity in 2017 and will continue to do so as it directly helps the B2B industry to earn some really quick bucks…!!! Generally, dropship e-commerce plays a role of a cash register. The owners are middlemen who help a vendor’s products to be popularized, thus, earning a modest amount of profit on every item in return, without actually handling it directly. If you are a website owner, this technique gives you a little amount of popularity and responsibilities in the eye of law. This is why this segment will become more popular in B2B retail industries. Before stemming into drop-shipping, your site needs to focus intently on paid marketing methods to promote the business, otherwise, it will be a major challenge for you to showcase your business in your industry vertical.
These are few of the broader trends for e-commerce stores that will emerge brightly in 2017 and help the stores reach out for more productivity and profitability. Hopefully, you have got a few quick insights to follow and put it to real time practice in order to optimize your business as per your requirements.
Featured image courtesy: Business vector created by Freepik
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