Keep the Best Shoes for Yourself: B2B Business Development

According to an old proverb, the shoemaker’s children often go barefoot. In other words, professionals can get so focused on what they are doing for their customers that they forget to take care of their own business needs.

When it comes to business development, we see the same phenomenon. Companies that do great customer marketing for their products or services are sometimes terrible at promoting themselves. They’ve mastered B2C and brand marketing, but they miss out on B2B opportunities to build scale, distribution, market presence and revenue.

B2B business deals rarely close sales online. Nobody ever clicked on a button to become distributor of a new product or signed a large-scale contract without meeting face-to-face. However, B2B customer journeys have lots of digital touchpoints along the way that intersect with the offline sales experience.

Digital marketing is a great way for B2B companies to:

• Build targeted awareness at the top of the sales funnel
• Engage with prospects while they considering which companies to work with
• Build opt-in databases of potential customers to nurture along to be sales qualified leads

A sales-qualified lead could be the opportunity to meet a prospective customer in their office, at a trade show, or to receive an RFI or an RFP for a specific deal.

What are the most effective components of a digital B2B business development strategy? Here are some perspectives from Current Asia. We’re a leader in this space working with technology and software brands, financial services and fintech, professional services, property, and industrial products and manufacturing.

1. Build the right strategic foundation. Take the time to thoroughly research and understand your target customer. Where are they located? What’s their decision process? Which sources of information do they trust? Who are they influenced by? Who is the decision maker in their organization? The precise answers to these questions and more go into the creation of tightly defined customer persona profiles. You will probably end up with two or three distinct customer types, each of which will require a tailored approach.
   ‍
2. Get your messaging right. Corporate taglines and self-serving product promotion don’t work anymore, if they ever did, at the middle and top of the sales funnel. If you are building a B2B brand, you’ll need to have a powerful company point of view that sets you apart and shows empathy with your customer and the changing world in which you do business. At the bottom of the funnel, you can focus more on specific calls to action, such as “learn more” or “save 10%” or “speak to an expert” but in the middle and at the top, the objective is engagement, not conversion.
   ‍
3. Fish where the fish are. Certainly, well-constructed search engine optimisation (SEO) campaigns are worthwhile. Tag your web pages properly and use the keywords in your content that drive traffic and conversion in your sector. Create backlinks from trusted 3rd party sites to your landing pages.  
   
   Beyond SEO, we pretty much live in a pay-to-play world now, with little virality possible. The propagation of free content that starts to get popular will soon get slowed down as social media sites urge you to boost your posts or advertise to drive reach and frequency of your messaging. LinkedIn is a wonderful database of highly targetable prospects – the platform is relatively expensive but worth it, as decision makers rarely lie to LinkedIn about their titles, roles and responsibilities.  
   
   Across Asia, Meta (Facebook and Instagram) is also good for B2B because many businesses don’t distinguish between their work and personal identities, and in markets such as Japan and China Linked in either does not have traction or is not even operating.
   ‍
4. Be consistent and constant. Long after you are bored with your campaign content your target audiences will still be gradually absorbing your messages and getting educated about your company and your value. The common metric is that it takes six exposures for a prospect to recognize and process a marketing message.  
   
   Create a flow of content that fits your company point of view, B2B brand positioning and that addresses your target customer personas’ pain points. Think in terms of six-month campaigns with 4 posts a week on LinkedIn, for example. You can produce these in large batches all at once with your in-house team or using an agency. And then you can selectively create content to announce company or product news and tie in with events and trends in your sector.
   ‍
5. Nurture – don’t grab! Just like a plant needs nurturing to grow, your business development requires cultivating meaningful connections.  Take the time to digitally build and nurture relationships with key stakeholders, industry influencers, and potential clients.  
   
   Not every campaign objective should be conversion or lowering cost of acquisition, Fostering connections creates opportunities for collaboration, partnerships, and business growth.  
   ‍
6. Test and learn and test and learn. Do your B2B business development in bursts and evaluate the performance regularly. Swap out non-performing customer targets, media types, content, and targeting. You will find what works today may stop working tomorrow, and a campaign you might think won’t work suddenly gains traction. Double down on what works and let the metrics tell you what to drop.

You may know all this already from the perspective of your customer marketing, but make sure you are applying the same “shoemaker’s art” to the B2B marketing you do for your company. The shoemaker’s children should have the best shoes, after all!