Getting the attention of your prospective customers is the holy grail for marketers. With so many organizations trying to grab each prospect’s attention, B2B businesses must find innovative ways for it. While there is no formulaic approach, certain outbound strategies will work in your favor.
If you look at some of the most innovative outbound marketing campaigns, it never goes like, “Hey, buy this product,” or “Here’s what you can do from the product.” Hard selling is non-existent and passe. No one likes to be sold to.
Right? All right. Let’s look at a few examples of how B2B businesses do outbound marketing efficaciously.
6 essential B2B outbound marketing examples
1. Be strategic advisors
Let’s imagine you are a B2B SaaS company that sells a customer experience management platform. Here’s how you can take the role of a strategic advisor to sell. Before you say a word to your prospective customer, you must do thorough research on the firm.
Find the kind of solution that will be a good fit for their product. If possible, gather insights on the current solution they are using, the issues they are facing, gaps in the current product, etc. It will help you approach the prospect from a well-prepared vantage point.
The questions could go like this:
“Do you collect feedback regularly from your customers? If yes, how do you act on the feedback?”
“Do you know the experience of your customers at each touchpoint?”
“Do you know what your current NPS score is?”
“How do you find out customers who are dissatisfied with their experience with you?”
Pitching your customer experience management platform becomes easy by getting answers to the above questions. You have created a need in the minds of your B2B customer. Offer them a chance to work with a tailored solution for their needs.
When you understand your prospect’s current predicament, you can easily demonstrate how your product can be the right solution for them. You will be able to tackle any objections from their side. The consultative or strategic advisor approach is one of the best outbound methods since you develop a relationship with the prospect.
2. Leverage influencers
Imagine a saree outfitted with color-changing LED lights that change color based on one’s personality when paired with IBM’s technology. This was a part of IBM’s influencer marketing campaign for IBM Watson, in collaboration with designer Gaurav Gupta. This collaboration ended up creating the world’s first AI-inspired saree.
Brands can use leaders who have a large following to promote or sell their products. Create a B2B buyer persona to get an in-depth profile of your customers. By doing so, you will figure out the kind of content that piques your audience’s curiosity. Join forces with your industry influencers and leverage their expertise and following to your advantage.
Understand how B2B influencer marketing works. B2B purchase decisions are more nuanced than how one would shop at a Walmart. It involves multiple decision-makers, and it takes a considerable amount of time to influence several people. Give at least six months for the B2B influencer marketing program to work.
Bonus tip: Don’t focus only on social media numbers. Many real-world business influencers wouldn’t give two hoots about social media sites. But their influence on B2B decision-makers would be unparalleled. You must find influencers with that level of stature and reputation.
3. Building a community
Having a community of raving fans is akin to having a sales force that works for free. Building a community is a lot of hard work and requires immense dedication, but the results speak for themselves.
A 20-year-old online scheduling cloud platform, Mindbody, uses its online community to reduce its customer churn. The community encourages its owners to share training documents or resources. It is hosted on their own branded app. They regularly host events, and video training, add resources, and Livestream programs, create content themes, etc. The aim of the community is not to promote Mindbody’s products but to build a sense of belongingness. That’s exactly how you must build your community too.
If you can create a place for your B2B customers to benefit from using your products better, retaining them becomes easy. There’s more; a thriving community of engaged users helps you get newer customers as well. The Cisco Learning Network and Adobe Learning Communities are excellent examples of B2B business communities. It drives home the point that these organizations are in the best interests of their customers.
4. Personalized video messages
The average CEO receives 150+ emails every day. Cutting through this noise is difficult. But there is something that you can do to increase the chances of getting a response– personalized video messages. Yes. You can create customized messages to your B2B prospects that address specific needs and pain points. The last thing you want to do is send a video pitch in your first interaction.
Whatever your objective is, increasing email conversions, increasing event attendance, downloading lead magnets, or signing up for a product demo, personalized videos do the trick.
When we say “personalized,” it doesn’t just imply the usage of someone’s name or title in a video. It goes beyond that. Apart from employing eye-catching thumbnails, using props, and other things, the video should be directed at the recipient. It should be a one-to-one message directed only to them. According to a report by Vidyard, 58% of sales pros who leveraged hybrid videos reported the highest response rates. Note: Hybrid videos are a combination of screen share and webcam videos.
Videos are powerful enough to create unlimited chances to bond with the recipient. Personalized videos are great for gathering attention, forming connections, and building trust.
5. Account-based marketing (ABM)
Account-based marketing (ABM) concentrates on a set of target accounts (within the same organization) using personalized campaigns to engage with each account. Here, the sales and marketing teams are in alignment with their objectives. They work on finding high-value accounts, thereby making it easy to take out fewer ROI-generating leads.
You can engage with high-value accounts by personalizing the buyer’s journey and tailoring the communication and content to specific accounts. With ABM, you can create account-specific landing pages which show customized content, images, offers, and lead capture forms based on the account or person visiting the page. Engage with these specific accounts regularly so that they keep consuming your content.
6. Leverage LinkedIn
LinkedIn has 8.2 million C-suite executives on its platform. It should be your go-to platform for the discovery and research of B2B businesses that you want to target. It is easy to start a conversation with the CEOs of B2B companies who you intend to target. Apart from creating content directed toward your target market, you can also send personalized messages. Four out of five people on LinkedIn drive business decisions. You are better off creating content for LinkedIn than any other platform if you are a B2B organization.
The audience on LinkedIn, including C-suite executives, is primed to receive marketing content. Apart from closing sales, you can also use the platform for brand building.
Wrapping up
There are several outbound marketing tactics that you can work on. What we have touched on is the tip of the outbound-marketing iceberg. To get the best results from your outbound marketing, engage with your customers on different platforms. Send out surveys. Leverage internal and third-party data. Invest in competitor research. Outbound marketing in the year 2023 needs to evolve. It should be humane, individualized, experimental, and have the end customer in mind every single time.
Are you looking for a bunch of experienced marketing minds to get your outbound marketing strategy in order? Get in touch with us to see how Saasmarketing.in can help you.
