Do you have a marketing department that still produces paper brochures?
Is your main marketing action throughout the year going to the trade fair for 2 days and spending thousands of euros on a stand? What brand awareness do you get from these events, and from the brochures? Do you really believe that this is the best marketing action to increase B2B sales?
You probably already know this, but all the content you transmit on a stand to your potential customers can be perfectly transmitted through digital channels. Trade fairs bring together the purchasing managers of your potential customers and you think that it is definitely worth attending even if the price of the stand is worth thousands of euros. That may well be, but what if we told you that by creating relevant content targeted at these potential buyers you can impact them on an ongoing basis throughout the year?
Let’s imagine you have a company that sells shopping bags made of different materials.
If for example you start creating content talking about the regulations to reduce plastic consumption, talking about the emergence of new materials that are more sustainable with the environment, the applications of the same, and the differences between them. This content will undoubtedly interest your potential customers, this value you deliver to the market is not in vain. You are transferring knowledge, you are attracting views of your content and you are indirectly introducing your brand into the minds of those buyers. Imagine the following scenarios:
- A buyer goes to a packaging fair, finds different stands about water soluble bags, thinks it is a great idea and takes the cards of three representatives of three different brands and gives his own.
- At all three stands he has been given physical brochures, he puts them in the trade fair bag, but they are mixed in with the 20 other brochures, trade fair information and samples he has been given.
- When he arrives at the office the next day, he takes the cards of all the representatives he has collected and enters the website of each of them. The digital presence of these three brands is quite poor, there is nothing about them that catches his attention, the water-soluble bags could be an innovation for his product, but there is no urgent need to introduce them, so he shelves the idea.
- He receives calls from two of the three brands, but gives the representatives the runaround, and after two months, the opportunity is lost.
- After 4 months, the buyer has to come up with proposals to improve the product he is offering to his customers, so he remembers the water-soluble bags again. Google “advantages of water-soluble bags”, the search results return different results, one of them is the article you have written entitled “Everything you need to know about water-soluble bags” in this article you take the opportunity to include references to your different water-soluble plastic bags. The buyer reads the article, finds it interesting but doesn’t go too deeply into it because he has to pick up his children from school.
- The next day in the morning, while reading “La Vanguardia”, he sees an advertisement for your company with water-soluble bags, and so on and so forth for the next 15 days while he is reading the general press.
- Similarly, when he gets home and is relaxing on the sofa, he goes on Instagram and finds one of your ads with some very striking and inspiring bags that look very good. He clicks on the link and starts to look at the prices of the products you offer.
- One morning at the weekly meeting, the buyer has to come up with new ideas to improve the product you are offering to your customers. While making the presentation he remembers the brand that has been making an impact on him for the last few days, yours.
- He enters your website again to see if your company is trustworthy, once he enters your website he sees on the home page that you already work for well known multinationals, he likes this, it includes the possibility of including water soluble bags in the presentation.
- The meeting is over, everyone has found it interesting to explore the idea of including water-soluble bags as packaging for their products.
- The buyer enters your website and leaves their contact details.
This is what a “Customer Journey” or B2B customer sales process is like today.
Obviously it can have a face-to-face part, but if your digital identity is not adequate, you don’t stand a chance against other companies that do have a strong presence in digital media.
On the other hand, unlike what many might think, the cost of appearing in digital media is not high. Without going any further, the cost of the media campaigns we have defined in the example above can be as low as €1,000 per month. Similarly, if this €1,000 per month returns to the company in the form of sales, will it be well or badly invested? If the €1,000 per month returns in the form of €5,000 per month, it is certainly a great investment!
Define your potential customer, think about what they do on a daily basis, then you will see that they spend several hours reading the press on the internet, checking Linkedin or even Instagram and other social media. All these media allow you to place your ads there. It is not expensive for your creatives to appear in “La Vanguardia”, you simply need to find an agency that can advise you correctly on how to reach these channels.
