Increase B2B enquiries with a smarter digital approach
“” WATCH OUT FOR THE ‘PEPPA PIG’ FACTOR
How do you generate more B2B enquiries from online channels? Here are some tips from what we’ve learnt in Tinderpoint over the last 15 years of helping B2B clients, writes Tinderpoint Managing Director John Ring.
Generating ‘awareness’ for your product or service is very different to generating enquiries from prospects who have ‘intent’ to buy what you or your competitor are offering. Most Irish business owners typically expect massive awareness of their product/service and lots of good quality enquiries – all very cheaply. You don’t get all three together, so pick any two.
Cold Email Works
If there’s a very niche job title you’re targeting, there’s a lot of potential in cold email marketing, which many people dismiss. As long as you’re extremely relevant and respectful of your target audience and know what you’re doing, you can achieve excellent results from this in a way that protects your brand reputation and keeps you on the right side of GDPR. We recently generated serious enquiries from Apple and Delta Airlines for a small but ambitious Irish B2B startup using this cost-effective approach.
Google Ads
Tinderpoint was Ireland’s first Google Ad partner a long time ago, and we’ve been working with Google tools daily ever since. What we normally see running B2B Google Ads is that quite often target keywords are not shown much due to a problem called ‘low search volume’. Basically, Google can’t be bothered showing your ads if it thinks very few people search for the keywords you want to be visible for. This approach makes sense for Google in a large market like the US/UK, but is a real B2B problem in a small country like Ireland.
Maths plays a big role too in B2B pay-per-click advertising. If you sell something for €10,000 but a competitor charges €100,000 (not as rare a situation as you might think), it’s often very hard to compete and still see a great ROI. A high-priced competitor can easily afford €30 per click here but a cheaper company can’t.
Google Rankings
And speaking of Google, don’t forget your Google rankings. It’s slow, costly, and patience-sapping to succeed here if you’re coming from a low base. It helps if you’re targeting just Ireland with a .ie domain, but if you’re a .com be ready to fight the big boys and girls and their deep pockets globally – even if you’re just targeting Ireland or the UK.
The good news is that great Google visibility is achievable, as two of our B2B clients can attest, having been acquired in 2021. Their B2B revenues come mainly from their global SEO performance, and their new corporate owners can’t believe the international Google visibility of the two small Irish firms. So success is achievable, but it’s not cheap or fast.
And More...
LinkedIn of course is the most obvious way to target specific job titles online. It’s expensive but very targeted. Providing useful guides, webinars or case studies are most effective here, particularly if you’re targeting IT folks who are in front of a screen 10 hours a day – but that’s most of us at the moment.
Video can be good to communicate a focused message too, but if you’re thinking of using YouTube to hit a specific B2B audience, watch out for the ‘Peppa’ factor. A 45-year-old male manager in Dublin in pharma – and watching Peppa Pig non-stop? That would be very precise B2B targeting… of his 4-year-old daughter who just robbed his iPad. Stay safe ’til next time.
criteria to keep in mind: user-friendly, responsive, secure and scalable. Gartner and Forrester produce regular reports that analyse the market to help.
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4. CREATE REMARKABLE CONTENT
One of the few things your prospects might find of interest about you while they are researching a purchase is your content. But there’s a catch. Your content needs to be remarkable, educational, entertaining or otherwise useful. Your prospects are not that much interested in your company. They are interested in how you solve their problem. Keep that in mind while creating content.