Anyone responsible for B2B sales marketing will agree: calling on customers to buy your product or service only when you want to make a sale is ineffective. To succeed, you must ensure your company’s offering is visible when the customer is ready to buy.
Advertising and marketing teams focus on brand and impression-based campaigns to raise awareness of the offering, its features, and its unique qualities. They achieve this through paid placement advertising strategies such as broadcast television, radio, magazines, events, email, SEM, display banners, and increasingly, digital platforms like podcasts, YouTube, LinkedIn, and X. Depending on your offering, Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram may also be valuable platforms.
Moreover, these social channels offer value beyond traditional methods and present real opportunities for companies to inform decision-makers among their potential customers.
B2B marketers leverage these social platforms in two ways:
1. Building a communication channel by tirelessly seeking to add more followers
2. Paying these platforms for access to targeted marketing communication tools.
In the first approach, the goal is to add new followers to a unified communication channel shared by all departments. The larger the audience, the higher the chance that someone will pay attention to posted messages. This method is valuable for announcements and broadcasting communications. However, it often isn’t conducive to two-way communication and can become saturated with various messaging needs across divisions and products.
In the second approach, paid placement tools offer reach through impression or action-based campaigns. These campaigns reliably introduce your offering to prospects for the first time or continue to nurture them through retargeting. The controls and targeting are precise. However, access to these audiences is expensive and lacks authenticity.
I’d like to present a third option. At Vsbl, we realized that one of the most valuable and fertile channels for B2B marketing is often ignored by marketing teams. Thousands of high-value contacts go untouched every day. This marketing channel is primed and ready. It only needs you to recognize its value.
I’m talking About Your Team’s Peer Networks
The professional networks of your sales team and other employees are full of trusted peer connections, many of which are industry-related.
LinkedIn serves as an example. If you look at their feeds, you will usually find very little unique activity. At best, you will mostly see “likes” of company posts or the posts of their peers. Rarely will you find product messaging or content that raises the visibility of the offering they are responsible for selling.
That is why we created the Vsbl Platform. In minutes, Vsbl enables you to load campaign creative for existing assets or create unique campaigns and then notify your team members. They can (and should) access the promotion and post it to their networks. Sales teams see the value immediately and engage because they recognize the critical importance of staying visible.
What’s more, there is no platform cost for the impressions or clicks. The targeting needed for success has always been an asset within your reach—for free. I suggest you sign up for a quick demo or create an account today. See how easy it is to leverage this untouched gold mine. Thanks for listening!
