Your Ultimate Guide to B2B Marketing When Business is Booming

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This article is the ultimate guide to B2B marketing for businesses that are doing great right now and have no time or headspace to think about it. First, because they are busy and second because even though their sales cycle is months or years, they assume that when needed, marketing will bring a flood of business to their doorstep.

Business is booming. You have orders coming out of your ears. Your team can barely keep up with the production, or delivery of services. You even have a waitlist for your waitlist. And you struggle to hire more staff to help with delivery.

This is an envious position to be in, and there are many businesses that end up in it for one reason or another. If this is a result of your efforts in sales and marketing – I salute you. You probably have good systems in place to keep it up long-term.

Read on anyway for a sanity check.

This article is really aimed at those businesses who have ended up too busy but weren’t in control of this happening. Basically, this means some external event has caused demand to surge. It could be that a competitor shut their doors, there is a tight supply, the government did something, or maybe a pandemic happened. Whatever the case, you’ve slowly or suddenly ended up being at capacity.

Typically, when we speak to businesses like this, they aren’t prepared to do any marketing. And why would they? Business is BOOMING! Your head is busy delivering. There is no time to work on the business. This is a common thought process; however, it can be detrimental.

The reality is that sooner or later the gravy train will end, and it’s important to have a solid foundation on which to bounce back. While times are good, you have a bit of extra profit, and you need to invest some of this in your future success.

This is your ultimate guide to B2B marketing when times are good.

Tidy up Your Brand Story & Messaging

This can be a really boring job, but it is good to have done. Luckily for you, once it’s complete it often doesn’t need to be touched for a long time.

Brand Story

Studies have found that the likeability of your brand is one of the key drivers in every purchasing decision. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, since as a consumer yourself, there must be brands you like and identify with yourself. While there are many ways to make your company ‘likeable’, a good story about yourself or your brand is one of the most distinctive and memorable methods.

Even though B2B is a business-orientated transaction, the decisions are made by people. People identify brands as likable or not mostly on a subconscious level. This is a process we can’t stop, but we can positively influence it by sharing a better brand story.

When business is going well and your company has been established for a while, this is the perfect time to reinvigorate your story or create it from scratch. This will support your future success and help make your message very clear.

By the way, if you think a brand story is only important for your sales and marketing, think again. Today brand stories are equally important in order to attract talent. Many people, especially younger people, want to work for a company that has values aligned with their own. A brand story is one of the ways to share your company values with the world in order to attract future customers and talent to you.

Brand Messaging

Once you’ve nailed down your branding and story, it’s important to become consistent across all media.

This starts with creating brand guidelines. It can be as simple as a piece of paper where you have your logo, your brand fonts, your brand colours, and any additional guidelines. More complex versions offer different logo versions depending on the background colour, brand voice guidelines, social media guidelines, and design standards for future graphics.

Once your brand guidelines are decided upon, it’s time to review your current media to ensure it’s all aligned. This is where the process can get difficult. Especially if you have produced many print materials over the years that are a mismatch of colours and designs.

We recommend starting with the simple things:

Your Website
Your Signature
Any Digital Assets
Your Social Media
Your Business Cards

Print materials that are close to running out can be done next. Any older print materials should be reviewed, if they’re not too far off the current branding then they can be kept. If they’re really way off or the content has become outdated, it’s time to recycle these.

Clean Up Your Website & Its Messaging

You should think of your website as your online sales rep. It should be able to present your business in a professional manner, answer any and all questions, educate your potential customers, and provide reasons to work with you.

Given all that, does your website currently do this? Most websites can be improved. It’s become quite easy to build a professional-looking website. What hasn’t changed, is the difficulty in creating good quality content.

When we say content, we mean all the images, texts and videos on your site. Here are the steps we recommend doing to ensure your website is up to scratch:

Check you’re happy with the design
Go through every page and note down what needs to be changed or updated
- Implement these over time
Go through with a fresh pair of eyes, imagine yourself as a prospect. Try to understand what is missing
- Make a plan of attack to address any issues
Review your blog
- Often over time our views change, and we get better at explaining things. Now is a good time to review what you wrote in the past and make tweaks to this content.
Come up with new topics for blog posts
- Create an achievable goal for yourself to write them. One a month is already a good start
Investigate your competition
- Check out their websites, see what they’re doing and try to make sure you’re at least as good if not better than they are

Work On Your On-Page SEO

One thing we find businesses are often lacking is their On-Page SEO. You probably don’t even have a clue what this means. That’s OK.

In simple terms, SEO can be split into two sections: On-Page and Off-Page SEO.

Off-Page means anything that doesn’t happen on your website. This primarily means building backlinks. A backlink is a link to your website on another website. Google bots read these links from other websites and use algorithms to assign a score to your website.

A higher score = easier to rank high on organic search. Historically more backlinks = higher score. Without getting into complex details, this is no longer the silver bullet it once was. Most SEO companies focus on this type of SEO.

On-page SEO is everything that happens on your website.

In some respects, you have a LOT of control over this. It can be a somewhat complex subject. In short, there are certain things you can do on a page that help guide Google bots and help them understand the information on the website.

Using this information and analysing your content, they come up with a conclusion as to how relevant your website is. Then based on this they determine where to position your website when someone searches on Google.

While this is a more technical job and we recommend enlisting help for it, there are good free resources. If you have the time then this is something that can be done yourself.

Ubersuggest – a great tool that has free and paid versions to analyse your site and identify issues
Neil Patel – same people as above, Neil goes over every aspect of SEO
Yoast SEO – for WordPress websites this is the best free tool to analyse how good your on-page SEO is
SurferSEO – a great paid tool to optimise your blog posts with correct keywords
Google Keyword Research Tool – lets you see what people are searching for, and optimise for these keywords

Set Yourself or Your Company Up as an Expert

Isn’t it great when people come to you for help? When it comes to business, it can really cut down the sales cycle. The prospect already knows you as an expert, trusts what you say, and likely has an idea of what you can do for them. How do you achieve this?

The short answer is LinkedIn. While for some LinkedIn is a battlefield for the next job offer, for business owners it’s a way to establish themselves and their companies as experts.

This doesn’t mean you need to become a public figure, far from it. It means engaging with your prospects, sharing your advice, sharing helpful articles, engaging with their posts, and overall building connections. You can think of it as a non-stop networking event.

Just act like you would at a networking function. When you connect with someone, try to ask some questions about what they do. Share some insights if relevant. Stay in touch over time and build a relationship.

When posting, think about what value your company has that can be shared. What is something that is truly useful? Better yet if you can share an article that you wrote. A pro tip is to break down an article into small chunks that can be re-purposed as posts.

Automate Engagement With Past and Future Customers

You’ve likely heard of the old adage that you must keep in touch with each customer every 3 months in order to maintain the relationship. Who has time for that these days? Nobody. What’s worse is that recent studies show you have to stay in touch even more often due to how busy everyone tends to be.

Well, the good news is that what passes as a touchpoint is a lot more achievable than in the past. Expensive old-school media has been replaced with targeted online ads, free posts on LinkedIn, and email. The best bit is that part of this can be automated.

We suggest that a regular newsletter is a great start to connecting with your clients, educating them on everything you offer, and generally building top-of-the-mind awareness. This last bit is vital for your business to survive, and even when they don’t open your emails, they likely see them. Just this is enough to jog their memory and start to build top-of-the-mind awareness.

A newsletter doesn’t need to be long and boring, it doesn’t need to have 35 of your top-selling products, you don’t need to write down your life story, or what you had for breakfast, and it doesn’t need to be sent every day.

We’re big fans of short and simple newsletters that aim to do three things:

Remind about the benefits of working with you
Educate on a set of products or a service you offer
Introduce the faces behind the business

These three simple actions will set you up for success in the future. They may seem too simple, but there is beauty in simplicity. Educating your customers is a hot topic at the moment. Email is a great way to do so semi-automatically.

The reality is a lot of your customers most likely don’t know about everything you do. Frankly, it’s a pompous assumption that they ever would. They are busy professionals and don’t have the time to study your business and catalogue every product and service you offer. Drip-feeding them information about different services and products is a low-effort way to educate them. Will this result in immediate sales? For some companies – YES. But for others, it will plant a seed for the future.

Create Sales Processes & Build a Funnel

Most businesses we’ve worked with don’t have a formalised sales process. In fact, they often don’t even have a sales process in their heads. If you start talking to them they have some long-winded story of how they got their start, how they slowly built up a client base, and how they’re now a success. Very few companies can point out and say exactly how they can acquire a new customer. Even fewer can give numbers to back this up.

While business is booming, it’s a great time to formalise your sales process. When the gravy train finally stops, you’ll have a set of processes you can follow that in theory will produce new sales. How great does that sound? Of course, nothing is as simple as it sounds.

There are two types of sales processes you can have – inbound and outbound.

Inbound

You can think of this as a pull approach. The goal is to help customers find you, educate them, get them to enquire and then close.

A lot of content marketing is focused on this approach.

Generate demand/traffic
Communicate benefits/educate
Proposal stage
Follow up
Close
Customer Care

Outbound

This is a push strategy, you go out into the world and connect with customers directly, then pitch, follow up and close.

Content marketing still has its place in outbound, although it is limited.

Identify your target market
Prepare your approach
Approach
Proposal/Presentation
Follow Up
Close
Customer Care

These are the most basic forms of the sales process you can have. Of course, you can add as many additional steps as required. But even starting with either type of sales process and implementing it all the way through will set you up for success.

Where to from here?

Now that you have recognised the need to continue to invest in marketing when times are going well for your business, it’s time for action.

First of all, we are running a webinar that goes into more detail on everything covered here in this article. It will arm you with actionable steps you can take.

The good news is – you don’t have to do it alone, because professional help with expertise in your industry is here and ready to help.

Secondly, book a 4R Blitz session for personalised advice. I’m running these 45-minute sessions personally and together we’ll discuss where you are, where you want to get to, and how to achieve this.

Finally, everything discussed in this article is something we have successfully implemented for a client or ourselves. So, if your business is booming, and you simply don’t have time to do it yourself, reach out. My number is 027 231 8631 or email me at assia@smarketinglab.co.nz

Ultimate Guide to B2B Marketing

Assia Salikhova

Smarketing Lab Co-Creator, developer of profitable B2B solutions to grow your business.

assia@smarketinglab.co.nz Ready for the next step? Learn about LinkedIn from Business Services from Smarketing Lab Find out how well your LinkedIn profile stands by taking a special Quiz to discover how your profile on LinkedIn stacks up vs industry standards. Then ask for help when needed. Because the #teamtalent at Smarketing Lab is on standby ready to help you gain the full benefit from LinkedIn for your business. Learn More