B2B Brand Marketing Growth Practical Methodology

Does B2B cross-border e-commerce need brand marketing ? It has become a common problem in the overseas industry.

With the improvement of the economic system, information is becoming more transparent, market rules are becoming more perfect, and competition is becoming more fierce. The B2B market, which is not understood by the public, has also entered an era of competing in products, brands, and services. Therefore, the procurement activities of B-end customers are becoming more rational and standardized. Usually, buyers have to compare many suppliers before making the final decision. How to influence their decision? The role of brand power is self-evident, but these roles are often hidden and often ignored by companies.

In the process of serving B2B clients over the years, I have witnessed that clients have gone from acquiring customers through "a mouth" and "a pair of legs" to acquiring customers through promotion by the marketing department. Brand awareness and customer inquiries can increase by as much as 10 times. This was unimaginable in the past. In the past, overseas buyers needed to come for inspection and domestic manufacturers needed to receive them. Now, cooperation can be finalized through remote contracts and transactions can be completed without meeting in person. This not only improves customer acquisition efficiency, but more importantly, reduces sales costs.

But the current situation is that more than half of the companies lack a formal brand marketing plan. So today we will mainly explain how to correctly carry out brand marketing for B2B overseas expansion.

B2B brand marketing has to go through three gates: the purchasing decision maker is the boss, the users are managers and employees, and payment requires the finance department. These three thresholds involve different people, so this is also the reason why the focus and direction of B-end and C-end marketing are different. The C-end pays more attention to users. The purchase decision process is relatively free and autonomous. If they see something, are interested in it, or like it, they may buy it. They may also make impulse purchases, that is, they make their own decisions without the involvement of other people. The process is generally short.

But the B-side is different. Buyers are corporate industries, and they are not concerned about novelty and fun, but whether the product can be better and whether the benefits meet expectations. It may also be linked to the company's budget and costs, so the overall decision-making process must be cautious. Therefore, how to better carry out B2B brand promotion is a science. Today I will mainly introduce to you 4 rules that are different from B2C brand marketing.

Rule 1: B2C “speaks human language”, B2B “understands terminology”

For B2C products, the entire sales process is handled by one person from the beginning to the purchase, which can be said to be a seamless process. Therefore, in the marketing process, we design activities that directly hit the user's pain points, keep it down-to-earth, communicate and converse in a language that consumers can understand, and use call-to-action language to arouse purchasing enthusiasm and impulse. Therefore, B2C marketing must "speak human language" to promote conversion, but the B2B market is often a very professional field, so in the marketing process, we must look professional, present the professional level and professional quality of the industry and products, and form certain business scenarios so that we can communicate with customers at the same frequency. At the same time, we must understand products and services from a professional perspective, and then use market language to promote them to our target customers.

The second rule: B2C is the "public lover", B2B is the "confidante"

Successful B2C brands are the "popular lovers" of users. They usually use brand spokespersons to create a popular persona, gain a huge number of fans and have the feeling of charming everyone. As for B2B brands, the goal is to reach the most accurate potential target customers in an all-round way. Whether a product is good or not cannot be determined by words, but rather by satisfying the needs of target customers with excellence and customization, so as to "understand customers best." Therefore, what B2B needs to do is to find a "confidante", which means having a deeper understanding of its own industry and products, as well as a comprehensive and clear understanding of the customer's business needs, and truly considering the customer's experience and feelings, just like falling in love at first sight and feeling that you had met too late.

The third rule: B2C needs to be “impulsive”, B2B needs to be “rational”

The marketing methods often used by B2C are discounts and free products. This strategy is easy for consumers to accept and can also clearly reflect the value of the product. Therefore, various e-commerce festivals are very popular and can easily spread word of mouth. For example, a very creative copy or a very smart and beautiful poster, or a video with creative content, may make consumers "buy" and pay.

However, the value of B2B products can only be felt through corresponding production lines, technologies, usage, and implementation. For example, for digital marketing solutions for enterprises, enterprises often need to set up corresponding operation personnel or use third-party service providers to carry out refined operations in order to obtain inquiries and conversions, and to generate value. For example, search advertising is paid based on performance, and the cost of each click may be a few yuan or more than ten yuan, but through AM's operation, it may be converted into millions of orders, so enterprises are still willing to buy. Therefore, B2B procurement is less impulsive than B2C procurement, and it also requires optimized multi-dimensional and rational strategies to reflect the value of the product.

The fourth rule: B2C relies on “feeling”, B2B relies on “value”

B2C brand marketing requires constant innovation and creativity to create various topics, narrow the distance and remove the sense of unfamiliarity with users, create a close feeling with users, and let users complete the purchase unconsciously based on their feelings. However, this method will obviously fail for B2B brand marketing, as buyers often consider the value of products or services when making a deal. They will not buy products and services worth thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands based on some feeling or impulse. Therefore, the right way is to adhere to customer value and maximize the value and continuously magnify the value.

Okay, after understanding the above four rules, what are the core indicators of B2B brand marketing?

Customer acquisition is the core indicator of B2B enterprise brand marketing. Similarly, B2B brand marketing always adheres to the principle of "effectiveness". The ultimate goal is "sales acquisition". Under this indicator, it can also be understood as three key small goals:

• Attract attention: The first step to acquire customers is attention, that is, to attract the attention of buyers. This is the premise of any marketing. Without attention, there will be nothing to follow up, and there will be no conversion. So we need to make the target customer group pay attention to your brand as much as possible. What you need to figure out is, through which channels can your customer base learn about your product information? Generally speaking, search engines are an essential channel, so search-based channels such as Google are standard marketing channels for companies. Therefore, it is important to pay attention to the company's official website and promotion. In addition, content marketing is indispensable, such as content operations on social media platforms such as Facebook and Youtube, and of course industry exhibitions or forums to attract target customers. This is also where B2B traffic is more concentrated. The above are the most direct, effective and accurate ways to attract brand attention.
• Lasting influence: If you want to be a strong brand, you cannot do without shaping influence, which is the only way to build an excellent brand. The continued attention on a brand is to increase its breadth and width, while enhancing its influence is to increase its depth. Therefore, it needs to rely on precisely positioned word-of-mouth communication and media promotion to gradually brew and ferment until it successfully "takes off". Therefore, for B2B, a very important task is to quickly spread and increase the "volume" of the already positioned brand image through appropriate media and channels. Brand ads such as Google's and YouTube's brand-building ads can quickly increase brand exposure and gain brand awareness.

• Gain recognition: In the B2B field, brand recognition is accumulated in the long-term service process and is an important manifestation of professionalism in a certain field. It can be said that "service is marketing" and "product is marketing". For example, when you mention strategic consulting, you immediately think of McKinsey; when you mention cross-border digital marketing, you immediately think of Chenggongyi; when you mention talent training, you immediately think of Silk Road Academy. This is the "sense of identity" formed by the brand in long-term service to customers, which cannot be solved overnight.

OK, now that we understand the rules and core indicators of brand marketing, how can we effectively use channels to implement B2B brand marketing implementation strategies? For 20 years, I have been learning and exploring on the Internet, helping more than 300 B2B customers acquire customers through brand marketing and contributing 70% of the company's sales opportunities.

Author: Silk Road Praise

Source: Silk Road Academy