After all, different audiences require different strategies to effectively engage customers and potential customers. Social media has made UGC much more popular; similarly, testimonials and customer reviews—B2B marketing mainstays—now also have more opportunity to flourish because of various digital media. Translation: More SEO bang for your buck, and more visibility for your B2B prospects. The additional markup can help your website stand out in search engine result pages. Accordingly, reviews collected with those platforms can help brands gain Google Seller Ratings. Among respondents, 20% use social media to "get information that helps solve problems at work," and 46% say that social media is "useful for finding information they need to do their job." 84% say that video content performed well on Facebook. A 2015 Google study found that throughout the B2B purchasing process 42% of researchers use a mobile device, a 91% growth rate over two years. The principles of optimizing speed can also be used for optimizing your mobile site. A recent Google initiative, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), is a mobile-first standard; if it's applied, it results in pages that load extremely quickly.
It’s easy to assume that B2C and B2B companies have little in common. After all, different audiences require different strategies to effectively engage customers and potential customers. And so, often, we’re all too quick to examine each through its own separate, distinct lense.
But what happens if we swap lenses?
Just because B2C brands cater to a different audience doesn’t mean you can’t pull a page from the B2C playbook. In fact, doing so may bring a little more clarity—and provide a little more bang for your buck.
Here are the three B2C marketing strategies your B2B company should adopt to generate some serious ROI.
1. Use user-generated content (UGC)
When thinking of UGC, it’s easy to picture the Nikes, Cokes, and Lululemons of the world that have thousands of brand advocates who are more than happy to tweet, post, and take a picture of themselves enjoying a brand experience.
Reality: B2B companies shouldn’t expect that type or level of engagement. However, they can harness the power of UGC content by adapting their approach. Social media has made UGC much more popular; similarly, testimonials and customer reviews—B2B marketing mainstays—now also have more opportunity to flourish because of various digital media.
Organic Search
Knowing how to use authentic B2B customer reviews can do a world of good for your bottom line. For example, rich snippets—structured data markup that site operators can add to their HTML—allow search engines to better understand what information is contained on each webpage. “Marking up” your customer reviews can help achieve stars in organic Google searches. Translation: More SEO bang for your buck, and more visibility for your B2B prospects. The additional markup can help your website stand out in search engine result pages.
Paid Search
Marketing to your B2B prospects using AdWords? You can also use those customer reviews…
COMMENTS