Traditional B2B marketing strategies focus on creating the right message to send to it’s established audience. They tend to be outdated and typically don’t generate the necessary growth that the business needs. In this article we will take a look into B2B growth hacking strategies in order to help accelerate growth and acquire new customers.
Create Content That is Shareable
In order for your brand and business to grow you must position it in a way that helps it grow without constant effort on your end. It’s important to build your brand and business that allows your audience to help it grow organically.
A good way to help make this happen is to create content that can be easily shared by your audience. The types of content that tend to generate the most engagements and interactions with your audience include:
- Informative videos
- eBooks
- Webinars
- Podcasts
- Embedded Images
What do all these pieces of content have in common?
They are educational and can hook your audience. These pieces of content provide instant value to your audience. In order for them to be effective for your business you have to make sure the content is related to what your business offers.
Don’t create content simply to promote your business. Create content in order to educate and help people find a solution to their problem.
It’s also very important to make this content easily shareable by including quick social sharing buttons around your content. This can help push the social element of your content and gain some organic backlinks.
Reading tip: 7 Growth Hacking Strategies for Startups
Make Your Products and Services Easy to Use
One of the biggest frustrations clients can experience is the inability to use or learn a product or service quickly. It should be your goal to ensure that clients can learn and use a product or service effortlessly.
It should be intuitive, free of confusion and make clients feel at ease. If you begin adding new features to a product or service it should be built with the customer experience in mind.
Even if your product or service is complicated you should have guides and video tutorials for you customers so they can take the necessary time they need in order to become proficient.
You should go above and beyond and even offer online training, demo’s and even in house training depending on your product or service. The easier you make your product to use by customers the longer they will stay customers.
It’s also important you adequately test your products and services and see where your product or service can get confusing for customers.
Offer Branded Merchandise Items As Freebies
Gone are the days when branded merchandise items were only for business-to-customer (B2C) companies. Customized items, like t-shirts printed with your company logo, are now growing in demand as marketing tools for the B2B sector.
Now more than ever, B2B companies can use branded merchandise to establish and grow reach, influence, and success. B2B companies can participate in social events and advocacy gatherings, such as supporting sustainability and anti-cyber warfare.
So, how can you use branded merchandise for your B2B company? Branded merchandise items have many marketing applications for your B2B company. For instance, you can design and print 4th of July images on shirts, hoodies, or mugs and give them as freebies for your new and loyal B2B customers and other stakeholders during the company anniversary or the holiday season.
Many B2B companies use events and gamification to attract and engage with C-suite positions, managers, administrators, and other business decision-makers. You can embrace these growth hack strategies to accelerate your sales. For instance, gamification, such as crossword puzzles or fun quizzes, can help B2B companies acquire more leads.
Branded merchandise makes cool prizes and giveaways for event management, such as fireside chats, webinars, and executive roundtable attendees. Moreover, personalized freebies are also suitable for survey or gamification participants.
Offer Discounts and Incentives For Customers to Refer Others
Offering discounts and incentives for your customers to refer your products and services is a great way to get new customers rolling in. It’s a good strategy to add inside your marketing mix when you have customers that know your product can be useful for others.
It’s essentially a low cost method to bring new customers in which requires no marketing on your end. Your clients are vouching for your product or service and are referring new clients back to you.
In order to do this successfully it’s important to offer either deep discounts or incentives for your clients that refer new business to you. It’s important you establish generous commissions so they are more incentivized to bring you new business.
The great part about this b2b growth hack is the fact that you only pay out a referral fee if a new customer signs up. It’s virtually a risk free method for you to bring in new customers.
You should think about what kind of commission or discounts structure is fair enough for both you and the customers who refer business back to you.
Recommended Reading: Growth Hacking Tools
Offer Free Versions of Your Product Or Service
Having a free version of your tool is a great way for potential customers to test out your service before they decide to make a purchase. It’s recommended that you strategically decide how much functionality to allow in a free version of your tool.
You should allow basic capabilities in the free version of your tool, just enough so clients keep coming back. Once they are hooked on the product they will eventually want to purchase the paid version.
A great example of this is by the graphic design company Canva. You can use their platform to accomplish just about any time of graphic design task 100% free. However if you do want to use their library of professional graphic design assets, you will have to upgrade to their paid pro version which only costs $12.99.
They have done an amazing job at making their platform intuitive, newbie friendly and it’s 100% free to use. Canva doesn’t aggressively push their audience to upgrade to a pro membership, but they do have an amazing library of graphic design assets that can truly make your work unique. This is why they are an industry leader.
Establish partnerships with global businesses
Pursuing international expansion and collaborative ventures is a must to retain the competitiveness of your brand. Expanding in a larger market means having more opportunities for possible clients and customers. Global partnerships offer leverage of resources and assets while retaining flexibility for your expansion goals. You can also capitalize on the strengths of each other for your international campaigns.
When planning your partnership, make a thorough research about the departments where you need help and the companies or agencies you can partner with. Make sure that they can offer the skills and resources that you are looking for and that you can also be beneficial for them. However, you must note that having separate providers can also be disadvantageous in collaborations and task management.
Instead, create your own team of freelancers or employees who know the local market and business politics. Align them to your company’s vision and let them know how they can benefit from your business. You can also partner with a company that offers business translation services for localization and document translations. Although it is generally more costly, your globalization efforts can easily be centralized into one effort, rather than a disjointed campaign. You can visit this site to learn more.
Create a Weekly Content Newsletter
It’s important that people on your email list receive a consistent flow of emails so you are actively engaging with them. Most people will not buy your product or service the first time they come in contact with it .
In order to eventually convert a person on your email list to a paid customer you have to interact with them and help them understand your brand and service. Having a weekly content newsletter will help you stay in constant contact with your leads.
It will also help establish your business as being professional and providing value from day one. You shouldn’t just send emails to send them. Make them personal and check the performance of your email campaigns in order to gauge how effective they are.
Checkout some recent findings by Campaign Monitor about the performance of email marketing below.
In order to separate yourself from the competition you can make some changes to how you are sending your email campaigns, what time of the day and with a unique title. Having a well performing weekly newsletter can provide serious value for your business and also create consistent growth.
Campaign monitor also provides important email benchmarks by industry. This can help you identify the performance of your campaign and how it relates to industry averages.
Recommended Reading: Ultimate Email Marketing Benchmarks for 2021: By Industry and Day
Create Content For Trending Topics
In order for your business to grow and for your b2b growth hacking strategies to be effective you have to create content that is relevant today. Creating content around trending topics is a great way for you to increase your readership and capture new clients.
One way to identify trending topics for your industry or niche is with BuzzSumo. It can help you discover content types that are performing extremely well inside your industry or niche.
You can also see the top trending content for the niche you are in and use it in order to effectively structure your content strategy.
Writing about trending topics helps you identify new business opportunities and can help you create awesome content. If a piece of your content happens to go viral you can see a surge of interest on your website overnight.
It’s important to note that this shouldn’t be your only content strategy. You should also strive to write evergreen content that can help your business be consistent long term.
Tool tip: check out this growth hacking suite of tools