While many B2C (business-to-consumer) companies have recognized the value of investing in online marketing strategy, I’ve often found that many B2B (business-to-business) companies are slower to adapt unless pushed by competition. With this in mind we’ve put together some key online marketing best practices to help B2Bs understand steps they can take to help their businesses grow.

1. Know your audience
• Invest in gaining a better understanding of your customers’ needs and behaviours.
• Develop personas to embed your target audience as people within your organization and use them as a filter for new initiatives, products and services.

2. Create and offer real value
• Offer value added marketing and communications that will help clients run their businesses more effectively - through content, widgets, tools, exclusive access, etc.
• Develop approaches and methods to better understand what your customers really need. Create and take advantage of opportunities to ask them what they want through online and offline channels.

3. Make your website user and member friendly
• Design your website to be user friendly with easy access to resources, services and client log-in pages.
• Content is one of your key values – make it easy to navigate and access with intuitive menus, search functions and offer help through direct contact if users cannot find what they need.
• Ensure that eCommerce shopping and check-out processes are simple and quick.

4. Be mobile friendly
• More users, especially professional, are accessing information increasingly on their mobile devices so provide online content that is easily accessible to them and consider how mobile commerce affects your users.

5. Ensure transparency and authenticity
• Ensure that your organization’s vision and goals are transparent and upfront.
• The recession weeded out weak competitors and in 2010 consumers will continue to scrutinize the transparency of companies, the authenticity of brands and their claims.

6. Engage your audience
• Engage your customers in dialogues to know what they want and like. Consider using surveys, email and social media sites like LinkedIn to engage audiences in channels where they frequent and to spread awareness to their networks.
• Consider adding a social bookmarking tool to your website like AddThis to make it easy for users to share content with others. In addition, it provides analytics on the bookmarking and sharing activities.

7. Search – SEO and SEM
• Design your website with SEO (search engine optimization) in mind and use SEM (search engine marketing) to ensure prominence on Google and other search engines.
• Use social media to get more search engine visibility, optimize key phrases on your website, and avoid any mistakes which may incur penalties from Google.

8. Invest in your relationships and communicate with supporters on a regular basis
• Keep email communications personal, timely, consistent and action-oriented. Don’t be afraid to experiment with A/B testing while tracking metrics to determine what is and isn’t working.
• Consider how your customers will be accessing these emails and ensure that the communications are designed with mobiles and handheld devices in mind.

9. Set goals, metrics, measure and test
• Set goals for the online marketing plan, track with appropriate metrics and continue to optimize the plan based on analysis and results.
• Standardize metrics for comparisons, test different tactics and measure to best leverage your email database