What we've learned running B2B marketplace

Unique Selling Proposition matters the most

Without USP there is no business. This is why our business exists, and we are still working on it. The great thing about our USP - it’s also a mission for our product and our core team. We believe in influencers as genuine content creators who are close to the audience and have incredible power to develop audience preferences. They are tech savvy, fast, social, and stay on the side of consumers/customers. Influencers are extremely passionate about what they do and will promote the product only when they feel they have the right to do so.

We run HotJar to understand our visitors. The heatmaps show that our customers stayed a long time on USP description section. And now we feel obliged to make this section as simple as possible to understand it. Thoughts are: creating images, providing a video, etc, etc. The reasons to change are quite subjective. If the section has a high astonishment factor, it shall be redesigned. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment.

People love to read

We were smashed with negative critics on the length of the website. Yes, millennials, including me, we don’t like to read. We skim the content. However, the people who stay in business for over 20 years tend to carefully analyse content on the website. Desktop users differ from mobile. Mobile users dropped off faster than desktop, but isn’t this the issue with the usability of the device. Balmer was right back in 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U. Unconventional isn’t it?

Customers get the value straightaway

If the customer gets the USP, they don’t spend time looking around. However, what’s the most interesting discovery was, business customers who didn’t get the value instantly browsed the site for over 2mins on average, reading content, clicking different areas of the text, trying to get the value for their business. Key take away do not underestimate the customer. They are trying hard to understand what does the business does and they believe till the end that the product will empower their business.

Hand-picked customers are the best

We’ve run several marketing campaigns and to no surprise we understood, hand-picked and personally approached customers where the best. Thanks, Sam (from YCombinator): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBYhVcO4WgI&feature=youtu.be&t=22m05s

We’ve personalised the message, targeted people who we felt were the right fit for the product, and got 46% conversion rate with incredible response rate. The cons of this approach was time, and lots of questions we had to answer, like:

1. At what funnel stage was the person

2. How she/he would like to be approached

3. What unique message shall I put in to sparkle her/his attention

Hope that might help any B2B business to revise their marketing strategy, and feel free to share your B2B advice, thoughts or just comment if you are the first one who read it. When commenting, please, let us know:

1. What business

2. Who is your target customer niche

3. How long is the business on the market