How to Grow Your Customer Base and Acquire More B2B Buyers

It’s time to simplify the road to growing your B2B customer base. It may seem intimidating at first, but let’s break it down to bite size pieces. B2B customer acquisition uses the same fundamental principles as growing a B2C customer base. At the end of the day, businesses are still run by people, so don’t overthink B2B buyer behavior. It’s simply a matter of appealing to and connecting with the people behind the brands. With B2B e-commerce following suit to B2C’s online growth, maximizing your online presence and the tools available to you will help your business continue to acquire new customers and grow.

Get Referrals

Besides your own team, who better to advocate for your company than your satisfied customers? There are a few different ways your business can approach referrals. First, you can set up a formal referral program where customers can refer you to another business, and if it successfully converts to a sale, one or both of those businesses receive some sort of benefit such as a discount or service upgrade.

Second, online reviews are just as important for B2B companies as B2C. They help build credibility and speak to details from individual experiences that you would not necessarily know by reading about a company. Consider your business reviews as a resource to gain even more customers. Incorporate them onto your website and social media pages to help them have a larger reach than simply on an external review site.

Build Relationships and Leverage Them

In addition to having a good relationship with your B2B customers, consider the potential benefits for strategic partnerships with other businesses that you don’t directly compete with. Formal partnerships or mutual referral systems are win-win and get your company in front of businesses who may not have otherwise heard of, or positions you at top of mind when they need a service or product like yours.

Another way to leverage relationships is to highlight your existing B2B customers. If you’re working with a major brand, look to make the most of this success by showcasing it on your website and social media. Additionally, inquire about the possibility of co-announcing it with this client. Ultimately the goal here is to leverage existing customers to help generate more.

Be Social

B2B companies should not underestimate the added value and potential reach that can come from social media. Depending on your company’s industry, consider which platforms are the most valuable unless you have the ability to dedicate more resources across more platforms. Although your business customers are focused on their own customers, as they are spending time on these platforms, there is still an opportunity to connect with them that way. Some great examples to get inspired by are brands such as Hootsuite, Hubspot, and Slack who create diverse, informative, and enticing content.

Remember that social media does not yield instant results, like anything, it requires consistency that will pay off in the end. Publishing once a week almost certainly won’t yield the results you're after. In addition to publishing on business’s pages, interacting with other brands or key individuals helps contribute to your overall brand presence. Social media can help you build rapport with potential customers or partners long before you actually try to sell them anything.

Create Captivating Content

Content is key. Why? Because it helps establish your brand beyond the product or service that you sell. Again if you can speak from an informed position on a subject, and provide the added value of information, this helps build credibility and legitimize your business. The more types of content the better, businesses consume their information in different ways (news, social media, newsletters) and via different formats (visual, short-from, long-form).

Blogs, whitepapers, newsletters, infographics, videos (in addition to content on social media) are some of the formats that your business could consider leveraging. 

What’s Going On With Your Website?

Even though you’re selling to businesses rather than consumers, that does not mean that you can get by with a sub-par website. Your website should not just be a placehold with minimal information but rather a hub that provides all the information a potential customer could be interested in at an initial stage, as well as branching out towards your other pages and resources. On the other hand, it’s best not to overcomplicate things either with too many effects, or overwhelm your site visitors with massive blocks of text that likely will never get entirely read. Website success is relatively easy to track. It is simple, if it is not helping you acquire new customers—then it’s almost certainly working against you.

Improve the Status Quo of Current Offerings

The most important part of acquiring B2B customers is to find the right product fit. All sales and marketing activities will fail if the product is not right. Talk to your customers at every opportunity, to ensure you are receiving the valuable feedback and adjusting accordingly. If your product is exactly the same as your competitors, it becomes a race to the bottom when it comes to pricing. If you are not sure what your competitors are offering, then dedicating some time to research is the first step. 

B2B checkout process is crucial in improving your buyers experience. Tabit helps you get rid of dated, slow, and overly complicated application processes. Tabit incentivizes. Tabit is a tool that not only benefits B2B sellers, it’s also a way for them to entice their own potential customers by offering a flexible financing solution at point of sale.