In this edition I wanted to share a really straightforward strategy to growing your B2B business.
It’s a simple 3 step process that any B2B can (and should) be following.
Step 1 – Build an audience of your ideal prospects
This is absolutely fundamental if you want to grow and scale your B2B business.
Building an audience gives you the opportunity to develop your authority and trust with them so that when they’re ready to buy, your business will be front of mind.
It’s not difficult to build a B2B audience reasonably quickly, here’s a few ways you can grow an audience:
- Run PPC ads to your target audience and offer a free downloadable book to them
- Create free webinars
- Operate a free weekly email (like this one)
Step 2 – Develop a strong relationship with your audience
The next step is to build strong relationships with your audience, this is achieved by:
- Showing up on a consistent basis
- Understanding what they want
- Creating valuable content that helps them solve a problem
By doing these three things your audience will start to get to know you and your business, and more importantly get to trust you.
There’s no great shortcut to this, it requires hard work and consistency.
Ways you can develop a strong relationship with your audience include:
- Creating a Podcast for your ideal customer
- Starting a regular newsletter
- Running free or low cost workshops
- Engaging with them on social media
- Create free guides and cheat sheets
Step 3 – Have products and services they can buy from you
The final step is to not be afraid to sell to your audience on a regular basis. Sounds obvious doesn’t it, but you’d be surprised how many businesses don’t try and sell to their audiences.
It’s a fact of life that businesses need to sell stuff and make money, it’s what makes the world go round. So therefore you need to have products and services they want.
But remember, make sure you’re making regular deposits with your audience in the form of great content, before you try and make a withdrawal (i.e. sell to them).
The key to selling is to understand what outcome your ideal customer is seeking.
For sales to be successful you need:
- A product people need
- At a price they can afford
- That delivers an outcome they seek
- And a transformation they’ll love
The really important thing to remember is that for this 3 step process to be successful you have to patient. It takes time to build an audience, and even longer to develop trust before people will buy.
I use this 3 steps process for my clients and typically it can take 6-12 months to grow a really strong, warm list.
But once you’ve grown and nurtured it, then getting traction for new products and services is much faster than starting from scratch.
Just this week we have created an event and managed to get 180 people attending online, all through having a warm audience.
Good luck, and let me know how you get on.
