Lessons on B2B e-commerce and growth marketing
Lessons on B2B e-commerce and growth marketing
The transition from the modern consumer tech marketing space to B2B commerce has been truly an interesting growth jump forward for me. Despite the radical industry switch from consumer to construction and manufacturing, there are surprising learnings. Let me share 👇 here a few since taking the lead on Growth at Cronvall.
What is Cronvall?
Cronvall is a B2B marketplace on a mission to make it easy to buy and sell standard construction products 100% online.
Lesson #1: People are people whether it is B2C or B2B
A big lesson is that while a company may be operating in an industry where digital services are lagging behind the latest consumer tech trends, people are still looking for answers to their problems online just the same way. It is a great growth opportunity for any business to identify these needs and harness that traffic and convert it to sales. Keyword research, customer interviews, and behavioral analytics work in the same way as in B2C -people are people. Of course, the method needs to be adjusted e.g., purchase frequency regarding conversion tracking analytics and optimized retargeting, etc. But essentially it works.
Lesson #2: Make your digital tools obey your business
When making decisions on how to orchestrate performance marketing, instead of finding ways to gain quick wins with hacks and optimization tricks, think about what your business needs to achieve next on a concrete level and organize your marketing stack so that you can achieve this with existing resources.
For example, when planning how to organize Search Engine Marketing and Google Ads, we have learned that to maintain a profitable ROAS we should follow some basic principles:
- Keep it simple - our team must be able to understand the data and be able to optimize marketing easily and fast
- Write and create content for your customers instead of Google’s algorithms.
- Keep control in your hands instead of letting Google’s dynamic tools make all the decisions
This works for us but the principals should be aligned with each business.
Lesson #3: Trust drives conversion
As with gaining trust for your consumer brand, well-tuned performance marketing doesn’t pay off fully unless the target companies are aware of who you are and trust you. And most importantly what the company says in its brand messages to its customers must be met in the delivery of the service -not surprising. Awareness building is just as important for consumer business.
Positive user reviews lead to an increase in word of mouth. Developing marketing messages and value props with this natural reaction from your customers will increase your brand reputation (increase brand searches) and not only increase conversions but also drive retention.
Growth as a mindset
The biggest effort for me has been to mentally take the position of our users to understand their behavior and then reflect that in our marketing accordingly. After successfully adjusting for our customers, the same growth hacking tactics that work in B2C can be applied to B2B online commerce.
