In 2020, B2B vendors have become increasingly aware of the huge importance of having a strong presence online. Due to the COVID-19 crisis, staying ahead of the curve has become a necessity to survive. As part of your B2B marketing strategy, having a well-performing website is just the first step. However, simply making your products become available online and listing them on a platform is not enough anymore. You need to employ top-notch, advanced strategies that can allow you to outsmart your competitors and attract more clients.

Because of the extremely competitive B2B environment, you have to properly understand the gap that exists in the marketplace and find out how to position yourself there. You want to become both a provider and an enabler for your end customers, not just a mere seller. So what can you do to up your eCommerce game and stay ahead of the competition? We’ve put together a number of strategies you can use right away.

Improve your Customer Experience & Leverage Ratings

Improving the on-site experience of your customers is a gap you can definitely leverage. Displaying social proof on your B2B eCommerce site and adjacent landing pages can skyrocket your conversions and can boost your brand trust. To boost your customer’s experience, you need to anticipate consumer behavior, provide outstanding customer support, strive for business retention, leverage ratings, and ultimately accelerate the sales cycle.

By simply displaying ratings or reviews for your products, you can increase conversion rates by up to 270%. Know that over 85% of consumers trust online reviews their peers leave while showing at least 5 reviews for your products can boost your conversion rates by a whopping 400%.

Ensure you Can Boast with a Mobile Optimized Website

The vast majority of B2B buyers are unlikely to make a purchase from a vendor whose mobile site is not optimized. In fact, around 57% of B2B prospects won’t recommend a site that is not mobile-optimized.  Let’s say that you are selling virtual servers and you’ve just sent a potential customer to your site using a paid ad. That person enters your site on his desktop at the office and finds it very helpful. However, he has to leave home earlier, so he tries to access your site again on his mobile, on his way home.

That’s when he realizes that your site loads extremely slowly and the Contact Us button does not even load properly. That’s a lost customer right there who will probably never want to buy from you again. You’ve probably invested over $100 for that lead, which could have brought you over $10k in revenue, but it all amounted to nothing because of a site that was not mobile-optimized.

Never underestimate the power of mobile optimization, especially in 2020. As a growing number of B2B buyers are using their mobile phones to conduct business, it becomes critical that your site offers a streamlined mobile experience to users. Here are some practical ways to make your site more mobile-friendly:

• Leverage mobile features such as location services, tap-to-call, autofill, and geofencing.
• Create your own app: a properly-developed B2B mobile app can reduce friction and boost your conversion rates by allowing potential buyers to utilize a modern channel in order to buy from you.
• Place the CTAs closer to the header or just in the lead space in order to minimize scrolling
• Simplify the checkout flow to ensure that mobile users can easily finalize a purchase
• Format the content to fit any type of screen and to contain sections. Basically, sections need to contain a headline and need to be closed. They can open once the user clicks the headline to read more. This means that the way your content is shown on a mobile device is different than how it is displayed on a desktop one.

Product Videos are Key to Success

According to extensive research conducted by Insivia back in 2017, over 52% of marketers consider that video content is excellent for brand awareness. However, out of all B2B companies, only around 18% are actually using product videos. This is a gap that you can fully capitalize on in 2020.

Because video marketing is continually evolving, you can dramatically boost your on-page engagement rate and conversion rate by using product videos. You can do a few practical things for that:

• Create videos that are highly engaging and relevant to your end-users
• Use demo videos to showcase your services or products in action
• Make the most out of animated videos to grow your reach
• Add customer testimonials in the mix and enable your prospects to see for themselves how you have helped other companies succeed
• Use various types of videos to promote your company: company overview, recruitment, behind-the-scenes, vlogs, corporate interviews, and corporate event promo.
• Use your videos throughout the entire buyer journey cycle and tailor each video to the specific needs of your customers who are in the Awareness, Interest, and Consideration stages

Capitalize on Enhanced eCommerce Features

All B2B customers want to benefit from the opportunity to self-service their accounts, perform their own research, manage their footprint, and ultimately place an order whenever they want to do that.

According to a recent customer service study in the B2B market, over two-thirds of respondents said that they prefer self-service over talking on the phone with the sales reps from the company. This means that your prospects are much more willing to make a purchase on their own, so they need to benefit from a superior site navigation experience.

To help them out and to increase your chances of transforming site visitors into actual buyers, you can integrate the following features in your store:

• Provide a bulk search functionality:  instead of searching for items individually, provide a bulk search feature that enables B2B customers to add several products or services at once. For instance, if you are selling physical servers, you might want to make it easy for your clients to purchase additional services such as maintenance, onboarding, warranty, backup generators, and the list goes on. A bulk search feature helps to streamline the buying process and boosts the average order value (AOV). It also helps you with upsells and brings more profit to your firm.
• Save cart: your B2B clients need to be able to save their carts. If they cannot finish a transaction due to an urgent business meeting, they should be able to finalize it without adding the product/products again to the cart. This feature will drastically reduce the cart abandonment rate while also boosting client satisfaction and increasing conversion rates.
• Re-order: large B2B customers need to re-order the same items time and time again. Providing your clients with a list of past purchases and enabling them to re-order with the press of a button can help you sell more and boost the customer lifetime value (CLV).
• Support: adding messenger, live chat, and other support tools to your website and pages will enable you to assist your prospects in their buyer journey and encourage them to make the correct buying decisions.
• Payment options: B2B customers prefer to make payment methods using a wide range of methods, including purchase orders, ACH, e-procurement, bank transfer, or even extended credit. You should ensure that you streamline the payment process and make it easy for your clients to pay you for the services/products bought. At Tremend, we offer a multitude of eCommerce end-to-end solutions to allow you to leverage these gaps and outsmart your competitors. Contact us now to learn how we can help you stay ahead of the curve and get more conversions on your eCommerce store.