The difference comes from how you can drive your business with the right tools and strategies and not the market. The good news is that it might be possible for you to emerge stronger, better than ever before in the end. Let us discuss some of the best business growth ideas to drive your company through these challenging times.

Get Back to the Basics

The first key is to trust the very fundamentals that got you going in the first place. Tough times can often urge us to push our limits and try something (or everything) new. However, always remember that starting was also a challenge for you. In those times, the basics that you clung to – your business’ core – helped you sail and achieve. It is boom times that call for experiments and risks; the tough phase can pretty much be handled well by sticking to the essentials.

Therefore, use these challenging times to identify your business’ bedrock. Identify the real revenue drivers for your B2B company. Direct a greater part of your energy, time and team towards them and ensure you get the basics right.

Understand Your Customer

These times are challenging both for you and your customers. If you are a B2B company, your customer businesses and brands must also be going through a rough patch like you. If these are existing clients, ensure that they stay close. Address and share their pain points, understand their needs and provide them as much room as they need without hurting your business.

Getting new customers can be challenging but not entirely impossible. Having said that, this is also not the time for an open-to-all approach because the ratio of actual conversions is going to be too low to compensate for your efforts. Therefore, make a clear-cut strategy on who you want to cater to in the present and direct your efforts only in that direction.

Become a Content Shop

Now is probably the best time to focus on your website and content than ever before. Let’s face it – there is no website which cannot be improved! Especially considering the pandemic-induced changes in workplace structures and logistics, working on your website’s relevance is a step in the right direction.

Also, generating great content is a time-tested winner among all B2B marketing strategies. There is no dearth of content you can compose based on your speciality – blogs, articles, research, publications, case studies, whitepapers, executive briefs and so on. Besides, videos and infographics are already hitting all-time highs in the content market. 87% of video marketers say that video has increased traffic to their website.

The idea is to pop up enough times before your potential customers for them to retain you subconsciously whether or not they purchase your products and services.

Nip, Adjust, Polish

Your sales process and the team certainly need a revamp at this hour, for the market is under an overwhelming change. Early solution sales tend to exert too much pressure on your human resources – something you neither want nor should proceed with right now.

The best idea would be to tweak your sales process – automate those areas that you can and narrow down the rest. Put templates, monotony and uniform guidelines to use. Invest a little time and money to compress profitable parts of your sales cycle now for magnified rewards later.

Increase Productivity

By automating your sales process, you are already charting a path of greater productivity. Look around for new technological shortcuts – technology is the clear answer to driving growth in challenging times. Channel your human resources to spend their valuable time in tasks that need them – strategies, ideas, communications. With the admin processes taken care of, there is negligible wastage of time. Besides, you can get maximum outputs from your staff even as they work from home.

Adjust your Product Offerings  

The market is not just tough, it is the worst the world had seen in a long time. For several industries and niches, hospitality included, there seems no way for businesses to retain, leave alone attract customers.

One idea that you can use during this phase is to tweak your product offering. Adjust your supply chain logistics to continue offering products to customers despite movement restrictions. Introduce a sub-brand related to your industry that will work despite the pandemic, if the original one won’t. Start a blog or vlog and talk to your customers about your services in a fun way. Hire a professional B2B marketing company to ensure all these updates, content and additions are reaching your customers better than before.

Time to Vamp Up Marketing

The caption says it all. For your business to drive and not just sustain growth in these tough times, you must align both your sales and marketing team efficiently for maximum output.

However, break away from the conventional approach. This is the time of social media and the internet. You need to be wherever your customers are, and they are most probably scrolling their feeds on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. Come up with a digital B2B marketing strategy, or best, consult professional experts to handle the entire process from head to toe. 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing.

Now is the time to reach out to potential leads, customers, partners and industry contacts and build a solid network. Chances are your connections are feeling equally uncertain; make it a priority to deliver trust through your marketing initiatives. Talk about what makes you different, why they should opt for you and what is in store for them.

If we had to rank all the strategies you need to put in place to drive business growth during these times, efficient marketing would occupy the top spot.

Food for Thought:

While this crisis could be taking a toll on your business, remember that everyone around is struggling. Use digital marketing ideas to keep the ball rolling, until this too passes.