When you’re selling your business to other businesses online, your main weapon is content. You can create blogs, whitepapers, tweets, videos or any other content to attract prospects to your website. But how do you turn that content into B2B sales?
Don’t Sell Your Products
The natural instinct for a lot of businesses is to talk up their products when they post content. You need to be careful with this tactic. It seems sensible to use your blog or social media to sell products. That’s not what your website visitors will think. If they want to know about your products they can view those pages, on your blog they want to hear about you. If you’re just outright selling, prospects will just go elsewhere.
Sell Your Expertise
That doesn’t mean a blog won’t get you B2B sales. You just have to sell the right ‘product’. That product is your expertise. If a blog reader or social media follower sees your company as an expert, they will naturally see you as a viable vendor.
Identify Problems
The classic B2B sales shtick is to ask a prospect about their problems. That way they can explain how easy it is to solve those problems with their solution. That may sound very ‘salesy’ but it’s actually a great starting point for effective content. When things go wrong these days, our natural instinct is to Google the problem. If you can identify problems you’re creating content that your prospects are already looking for.
Offer Solutions
Of course just identifying the problem is only half the battle. You also need to offer a solution. And that solution can’t be just to purchase your product. You can make B2B sales by giving a little of your knowledge away for free. By providing one off advice you make your organization appear engaging, helpful and qualified.
Create a Clear Strategy
Every piece of content you produce should have a consistent feel and it should all channel prospects towards a sale. You should tweet on a similar topic to your blog and that blog should fit with your whitepaper output. Your email and LinkedIn activity should include the same topic and encourage prospects to follow from email to blog to landing page to whitepaper.
Target Your Market
A big part of that strategy will be targeting. You know who your product is aimed at, so your content should be aimed directly at them. Create blogs and post social media content about topics your target market are interested in. Even if it the content moves away from your product offering a little, as long as your prospects can make the connection you can channel them towards a sale.
Analyze Everything
Your content doesn’t just generate potential B2B sales; it also generates vital data. You can track prospects as they move through your content and analyze the success or failure of each piece of content. Once you have identified content that consistently leads to sales, you can use it to inform all of your future output.
Be Positive
It may sound a little simplistic but positivity really does make a difference. Nobody wants to work with the guy who’s always complaining or criticizing. They want to work with the friendly expert; content written in that way is more likely to generate sales.
Tell Stories
Your content will only generate B2B sales if prospects want to read or watch it. The more engaging your content is, the more likely you are to make sales. So tell stories, create content that guides you from an interesting opening to a compelling conclusion. We go online and engage with content because we want to be entertained. You can use that desire to make sales.
Call to Action
Every one of the steps above will fail if you don’t heed this one. If you want to make sales, you need to tell prospects what to do next. Your tweets should encourage a blog read or whitepaper download and each of those should encourage the prospect to take the next step. Every piece of content needs to end with a call to action, they are the most important part of the B2B sales process. If you’re not sure what calls to action should look like, there’s one just below this sentence.
The ultimate goal of your content is to generate sales. To do that you need to convert more. Read our whitepaper to find out how.
