Gone are the days of attending two or three trade shows per year and fielding a sales team that lived on the road.

As technology continues to drive change in the B2C sector, those same consumers — who not coincidentally also work for businesses — expect B2B suppliers to use the same technologies and provide the same conveniences. Never has B2B selling changed so much in such a short time.

Social Proof and User-Generated Content

Business buyers have always relied on peer recommendations and referrals for their business relationships, and that hasn’t changed. What has changed is the way they find that confidence-building information. If you aren’t actively collecting new reviews, aggregating reviews placed on Google, Facebook, Yelp, Capterra, G2, and others, and displaying those reviews on your website, you’re missing out on important B2B selling opportunities. Not only do those reviews engender trust in your brand, they also provide a rich source of meaningful and credible content for your website!

Data-Driven Content

B2B sellers need a content strategy - perhaps even more than B2C sellers do. What is a content strategy? It is the focus on planning, creating, and delivering content on your website that is designed to attract people to your website, reinforce your brand, and create more educated, more connected customers.

And now, it’s easier than ever to understand what your customers are seeking when they come to your site. The data about what they searched for to arrive at your site, how long they stayed with the content they found, where they navigated to next, and how they are finding your competitors is all available at very low expense and easy-to-understand for even non-data-loving executives.

Spoken Search

If you haven’t found yourself yelling across the kitchen to a little round speaker to ask for the ingredients for masala sauce while up to your elbows in diced chicken, you’re in the minority. Today, much of search is voice search, and people phrase things differently when they are talking than when they are typing. Your website needs to be optimized for voice search, so when people ask questions of their favorite digital assistant, your website is there to offer up the answers.

You’ll need to make sure your SEO metas are optimized for Google (or rather, Google Structured Data), since Google makes up 86% of search. And the time to start all that optimization is … yesterday.

Digital Human-to-Human Engagement

OK sure, we mean Zoom. Or Zoom adjacent. People have discovered how easy it is to have a face-to-face without leaving their desks, and they’re sold. Sure, folks complained about Zoom fatigue at the height of the lockdowns, but now that we’re out and about again, it’s clear that digital H2H engagement can give people back some of the time they’ve lost in the return-to-normal. Make it easy to book digital H2H meetings with you - with “Book Now!” buttons on your website and easy calendar-booking links in your email signature. 

Push to Talk Options

What about folks who just want to make a phone call or send a text? You must accommodate them too. In fact, your website should be a buffet of contact options:  Zoom now! Call Now! Text Now! 

And while we’re big advocates of apps (BIG advocates!), you don’t have to have an app to make it easy to call straight from your website. Just add a phone link to any button, and website visitors can trigger a phone call right within your site.

Digital Assets Distribution

Sure, all your information is on your website (it is, isn’t it?). But what about clients who don’t want to dig through your site to find the things they’re looking for? You need a digital sales asset management system that makes it easy and fast for your sales team to snag the right link and send it straight to their customer via email or text.

Even better, you (or your marketing team) maintain complete version control! Don’t want that old Facebook post to ever be seen again? Take it out of the Digital Assets Distribution system!

These are just a few of the things B2B sellers must do today to stay on top of their marketing game. Pick one or two of them to start, master them, and then add on. Strengthen your B2B marketing and selling game a little bit every day, and in less time than you may imagine, you’ll be at the top of your competitive game.