Most B2B businesses are interested in increasing revenue. But with so many competing strategies for increasing B2B revenue, how do you choose the most reliable and effective tactics to incorporate into your business?
Core Strategies for Increasing B2B Revenue
Most strategies for increasing B2B revenue can be categorized into one of the three following buckets:
- Marketing and advertising. Marketing and advertising strategies are designed to spread the word about your business, raise brand awareness, and get people to engage with your brand more often.
- PR. Public relations (PR) strategies are also about building brand visibility, but more importantly, they focus on improving your brand reputation and getting people to trust and recognize your company as a thought leader.
- Sales. Sales strategies are all about finding and engaging with prospects, and then guiding those prospects to a final sale.
Historically, these three buckets have been treated independently, with distinct departments focused on each individual group. The problem with this approach is that there’s considerable overlap between these strategic categories, and oftentimes, a single strategy can help you with marketing, PR, and sales simultaneously.
In fact, some of the most successful B2B companies are ones that coordinate and collaborate with all these departments in a combined effort to increase revenue across the board.
These are some of the best strategies for accomplishing that:
- Search engine optimization (SEO). SEO strategies prioritize increasing your organic rankings in Google search results. With a combination of onsite changes, published content, and link building, you can gradually boost the authority of your website and make it more visible, attracting more traffic and building trust in the process.
- Content marketing and press releases. Content marketing is arguably essential for effective SEO, and press releases remain a hallmark of good PR strategies. Together, they can help you cement your reputation as a thought leader and reach your target market.
- Pay per click (PPC) advertising. PPC ads allow you to practically guarantee traffic and brand visibility, as long as you’re willing to pay for them. You’ll only pay for the clicks you generate, so it’s an excellent strategy to start with as a new business.
- Email marketing and sales. Email marketing and sales tactics were among some of the earliest online marketing approaches – and they remain highly effective, in part because of how inexpensive they are. You can use cold outreach, drip email marketing, and personalized, targeted emails to increase revenue in multiple lanes simultaneously.
- Social media. You can organically promote your brand on social media, advertise on social media, or just use platforms to promote your other work.
Keys to Increasing B2B Revenue Reliably
All the strategies we’ve covered can potentially increase your B2B revenue, but how do you increase that revenue on a consistent, reliable basis?
- Have a coherent, overarching strategy. Everything starts with a coherent, overarching strategy. You can’t impulsively try strategies just because they sound good on paper; you need to be methodical and deliberate about the strategies you choose to integrate. Everything needs to tie into your core brand identity and be aligned with your long-term vision for the company.
- Know your audience. Almost any visibility channel has a chance to be effective, as long as you’re using it strategically. That means creating content and engaging people based on their individual identity. You need to know your audience, inside and out, and talk to them directly in all your materials.
- Upgrade your tech. Good technology isn’t going to increase your B2B revenue by itself, but it can make your job substantially easier. Marketing automation software, CRM platforms, and effective tracking solutions can give you the tools and resources to improve your results.
- Integrate your departments. You can no longer treat marketing, PR, and sales as separate silos; our omnichannel online world is too multifaceted and enmeshed for this to work. Instead. you need to integrate your departments and encourage all your staff members to work together for the same goals.
- Learn. The more you learn, the better you’re going to perform. Dedicate time each week to learning new strategies, tactics, and trends in the B2B world so you can stay on top of the latest changes and expand your skill set.
- Experiment. Experiments, like AB tests, give you an opportunity to try out new strategies and subtle tweaks to your existing strategies (like changing the wording in the headline of a landing page). Experiment frequently to learn more about how your target audience reacts to your various materials and approaches.
- Measure and analyze your results. You must rely on objective evidence to come to reasonable conclusions about your performance. That’s why you have to measure and analyze your results consistently.
- Cut what doesn’t work. Finally, be willing to cut whatever isn’t working. Don’t keep paying for a strategy that isn’t actively increasing your revenue, even if the sunk cost fallacy makes this difficult. Too often, entrepreneurs in the B2B world stick with marketing, PR, or sales strategies that yield few, if any results, simply because they believe that eventually it might pay off.
Increasing B2B revenue isn’t exactly easy, but it’s certainly possible if you’re willing to commit the time and resources to the effort. With a more concentrated strategy and a deliberate approach, you should have little trouble growing your business revenue.