How To Successfully Increase Your B2B E-Commerce Sales

Increasing B2B E-Commerce Sales Requires Social Media and Product Awareness

While retailers throw everything they have into the e-commerce blender – with much success – manufacturers and distributors, who focus on business-to-business sales, tend to be a bit more reserved. But this reserved approach could be hurting their overall business and marketing strategies.

On the whole, manufacturers and distributors sell just a small portion of their catalogs through e-commerce. As a result, customers who use e-commerce regularly tend to be kept in the dark about a company’s total product line. This doesn’t just hurt a company’s B2B e-commerce sales, but it also hurts their overall business strategy.

Luckily, there are ways to increase your B2B e-commerce sales, thus helping to inform a broader reach of customers about your products. A major factor is social interaction.

Social Is A Key To Boosting Your B2B E-Commerce Sales

How can you tell what products to push or sell to your customers? One of the most effective ways is to know your customers’ spending behavior. At a recent B2B Multichannel conference in Phoenix, Steve Howard of IBM Corp. suggested that companies use social media to their advantage.

Social media provides you with insight into your clients’ purchasing behavior as well as interests. By using this information, you can remodel your websites and train your customer service reps to highlight and focus on certain products to specific customers. By offering suggesting that fall in line with your clients’ interests, you’re far more likely to increase conversions.

Free Information

Your customers love receiving free information, which is why blogging is such a popular and effective marketing strategy for any company. And while offering informative blogs can help you reach your customers, the web has developed beyond just words. An effective way to stand out among your competitors while offering your market helpful information is by providing how-to videos that feature your products.

These videos need to be well produced, SEO friendly (so they’re easily found online) and responsive (meaning they can be easily viewed regardless of the device a customer browses the internet on). How-to videos not only add a layer of UX (user experience) to the mix, but they are also far more likely to be shared among your customer base.

Get Your Information Out There

One of the largest complaints B2B companies have when it comes to their e-commerce products is that their customers don’t know what they sell. This issue stems directly from a lack of effective e-commerce marketing. Getting your products out there to your customers is an elaborate and detailed task that requires far more than just creating a website. Social media, SEO, and SEM are effective steps to help broaden your reach; however, what you don’t want to do is overspend your time or budget on products that won’t offer you a high return on investment.

Prior to making any decisions on how to expand your B2B e-commerce product line, it’s important to sift through the data, market trends, and your customers’ buying habits, and make decisions that will offer you the best ROI. Steadily increasing the number of product lines you sell online is far more likely to yield you long-term success then jumping all in. OperationROI can help. Call us at 1-888-277-5429 or fill out our contact form to learn how we can help you.