Hello and welcome to another Whiteboard Sessions with me Andrew Maff. I am the founder and CEO of BlueTuskr, a full-service digital marketing company for E-commerce sellers. And today what I'm going to go over with you is the eight different B2B marketing strategies that work just as well, for a DTC e-commerce seller. So I'm going to dive right in, I'm going to go through my top eight, they're not really in any particular order. It's just the eight that I've known had become tried and true and worked well for us.
Live In-person Events
So the first one to go over is live in-person events. Now, obviously, with everything that's been going on, these are not as easy to do as they once were. However, these are obviously starting to come back now. And the great thing about live in-person events is the ability to really showcase different things for your customer. So let me give you a couple of ideas here. So let's say that you're a seller, and you have some kind of really tight-knit community behind you.
So let's say you do coolers, right, so you got into that cooler market, like everyone else did with Getty, and you're fighting up against them, but you really wanted to do like this whole tailgating thing. So really, what you started to do is start to cater towards tailgating events. So yes, you can set up shop and just sell, your coolers in a tent at some kind of tailgating event, whether you're at an NFL game, or an NHL game, or NBA, or any of those. Or the other option that you have is to also set up a custom event where essentially you do your own custom tailgating event. Yes, you may still have your coolers for sale. But really, this is about bringing your diehard customers into one place.
So another great example would be something along the lines of let's say, you sell surfboards, I know for some reason on all these episodes of whiteboard sessions, I always talk about surfing, I've no idea why I don't surf, but somehow we got here. So let's say you talk you do surfing, right, and that's the product line that you sell. Well, the other option you have is to do your own in-person events of whether you're doing a competition, or you're doing just a get-together wherever you guys traveled to a certain area.
But just because you're an E-commerce seller, and you obviously sell your product nationwide doesn't mean that you can't have some kind of localized in-person event that can really help build kind of a closer relationship with you and your customers, and also start to build word of mouth in that central localized area.
Podcast
The second one, we're gonna talk about is the podcast. Now podcasts are very much a, I would say underrated. And a lot of times what I'll find is an E-commerce seller will sit down with him and try to figure out ideas of stuff to do that maybe other people aren't doing. And podcasts always seem to come up, there's always a bit of a push back. The reason there's a 10 tends to be a bit of pushback is because the question is always like, Who would want to hear from me? And you know, why would they want to listen to me regarding whatever it is.
The thing is, you have to not think about the specific product, you have to think about the community that's buying your product, and how you can relate to them. So, for example, let's say there's a company around here that does home brewing kits, and they sell them all over the place online. And what they started to do is actually work with, you know, they've done some live person events where they've done gone to breweries and worked with things like that, but they actually started their own brewery in house brewery podcast where essentially what they do is they just talk about different breweries and different beers and where people are getting hops from where people are getting their wheat from, like all the different things that can kind of be incorporated into the beer-making process and our home kit.
So what they're doing is this is a constant weekly podcast, they have this conversation where really all they're doing is just entertaining people that are in the beer industry, or that just like beer, in which case, that could be your average direct to consumer person that's looking to buy a home kit. So it doesn't always have to be specific about the home kit, you don't have to sit there and just talk about your actual product, you just have to sit there and entertain while you're the one that's sponsoring it. And obviously, somehow your brand name is incorporated into the podcast name.
Gated Content
The third one is gated content. So this one is interesting to me. So this one's typical. This one's interesting to me because I find a lot of sellers that don't really like doing gated content stuff. A lot of the ads that they run, it's just straight to the product, buy the product or leave. And I really hate that because you think about it with like a car salesman approach of if you walk into a car dealership, all they do is just nag you and they're like what car can I get you in? Let's get you this one. Let's start signing a deal now. Like it's literally just buying, buy and there's no relationship to it and it feels grimy.
So, what we always suggest is for e-commerce sellers to consider some kind of interim step between the person visiting the site and then the person just purchasing. So what else could you be offering them? Yes, there are things out there like ebooks. looks in white papers. But you also have other things like quizzes, and Calendars, and checklists, and all these different things that you could create.
So all you have to do is think about, again, it's about your community, do you have your product and your products going to be obviously relevant to the specific product, but the community that buying that, what else are they interested in? Is there some kind of blog post or article or kind of anything that you can write, where if that's bringing in that clientele, or that customer base, that you can then offer them some kind of gated content, in which case, you're just asking for an email, you're not asking them to purchase anything, you're not asking to do anything else?
Yes, technically, if you look at like a first-time buyer pop up of like, 10% off or something like that, that's technically still gated content, but anything else that you can actually gate where all they have to do is provide an email to get that from you. In which case, now you have better opportunities, you have a ton of different email drip campaigns, you can just plug those email addresses into almost any advertising platform and run ads straight to them, there's a ton of other things that you can do with emails. So if your sole focus is just purchasing, you're missing out on the opportunity of gathering emails and developing a big email list because that is a really, really strong asset to use.
CEO / Founder Influencer
So the next one we're going to do is, this one's always bought it. So this is labeling your CEO, as like, I don't even know why I do a whiteboard. So if you there's no way you can read that. Um, the other thing you can do is like a CEO and influencer kind of thing, right.
So this is kind of like you see a lot of this in the b2b side, where you get this guy who's like the big to-do in the whole industry, all they do is talk about, you know, what's going on their industry and stuff like that, let's be honest, I'm kind of doing that right now. So literally this, but really all it is is taking a person and making them the face of the company. Sometimes that's the founder, sometimes it's not, sometimes it's someone else in the company. But the whole reason that that people take that approach is that people don't really like to buy from a company if they're not really comfortable with the company already.
So what might happen is actually that you're going to look at people are more comfortable with certain buying from a person. So if they actually get to know the founder, they actually you'll see a lot of times that the founders will have more of a following on Instagram or on any of these social platforms, then the company will, or if the founder has its own newsletter, his own newsletter, her own newsletter, or blog post or anything like that, there's more people going to that specific person than they may be going to the company and a lot of situations. And the reason that can help is that a lot of people prefer to buy from the founder prefer to buy from a person than they do from a business.
Partnerships
So if you can actually leverage that, and you can do all of these things, whether your founder is the host of the podcast, whether your founder signed off on some good content that he wrote, or whether your founder is going to be the one like doing a talk at the live event, whatever you have, it's getting that person's name out there. And it's a lot easier to get a person's name out there than it is to get an entire business, just from a funding standpoint, because it's expensive to get brand awareness sometimes.
So by leveling, by using that opportunity, you can actually use their name to kind of narrate the story of your product line, which can actually because I don't see this happening a lot. And it's always very odd to me that this doesn't happen. So there are always going to be a ton of indirect competitors or even just other companies that are similar to you in the fact that they sell to the same community. But maybe they don't, you know, maybe they're just not direct competitors. So what we'll see a lot of times is in, there are certain companies out there that will do this.
But essentially, what you'll see is when you buy a product from a company, maybe they have an insert in there, that's a discount to another company. Or maybe when you sign up for someone's newsletter, you'll see that they're giving you like 10% off to another company. And the reason that people start to do this is there's a ton of ways where you can pull in more revenue, and then obviously, where you can start to pull in more customers. So if you have a product line where you can work with someone else.
So again, let's go down this surfer route for whatever reason. So let's say you sell surfboards and used to have this big newsletter that you send out that all-around surfboards and everything that you have and great things with surfing. And then there's another one that's surf wax, and they don't sell surfboards, but they have a very similar newsletter, and all they do is talk about surfing and their whole, their whole community is all surfers.
The two of these companies can actually work together to promote each other's products because they have an audience that this company wants. And this company has an audience that this company wants. So by doing some kind of tagging and play here where you can actually start to promote each other's company, you start to basically rent other people's lists or rent other people's like space on their website.
I've seen some companies where they've worked out deals where they each have some kind of blog posts that they both promoted. So it's kind of helping it look like hey, we're just working with this company because they really know what they're talking about when in reality you're offering the sale, and then again, there are other ways where you can do it, where if someone's list is bigger than the other, and it's not exactly tied the way you want it to, and it's not a perfect world.
You can also work out different affiliate programs where if you have a newsletter, where you're willing to provide more value to your email list, by giving them a discount to another company that you know, they would be interested in, then there's absolutely benefit to that. And then, you know, obviously helping your list because they're never gonna know what they're getting. Sometimes they might get a discount on your site, sometimes it might just be informational. And then other times, it might be a discount to someone else's site. So now your newsletter is becoming that much more valuable.
Webinars
Webinars, webinars, this one's not 100%, perfect. There are sometimes situations where webinars don't really work as well. But the one thing that webinars can be used for on a product basis that sometimes doesn't always compute with a lot of e-commerce sellers, is your webinars don't have to constantly be teaching. Like if you're attending a webinar, in b2b, they're kind of boring, there are slides, you sit there, they ask questions, and then they offer you some kind of crap that they say that you can't get anywhere else when in reality, you can. But what you can actually do webinars on an e-commerce site, is think about the different ways that you can leverage just doing a live video like that.
So we've seen where we worked with e-commerce sellers, where we do a webinar with the founder, who's essentially the influencer of that company, and then we get an influencer in that space. So again, I don't know why I keep doing this. But let's do surfing. So if we have surfing, we're founders, a big surfer. He sells surfboards. He loves doing it. And he brings on an athlete that's, you know, one of the top surfers in the world. And then they just have a webinar that's just talking about surfing and talking about, you know, different techniques and things like that the best place that this person's been to, you know, be to basically go surfing, there's a ton of different questions that they could be asking.
But basically, what it really does is it allows you to kind of have this like exclusive live event where it's a webinar, and there's a bit of teaching behind it. And then yeah, in the end, if you want to throw out doing some kind of like a giveaway or anything like that, by all means, but it's also a great way to grow your list.
Newsletters
Another one is informational-based newsletters. So this one is a little more common. But he thought this would be a good idea. So informational newsletters, you got to think of like most e-commerce sellers, they think when they send out an email, it's got to have a promotion in it. And if it doesn't, why am I even reaching out to them. And the issue that I always find is that when they first even kind of test doing an informational newsletter, they do like one or two, and then they're like, Oh, no one cares.
But the problem is, is that your customer base wasn't expecting that. So they may see and they go, I don't know what this is. And so your open rates probably gonna go pretty low, until you can start to actually start to get people used to the fact that you're sending out informational newsletters. So it doesn't always have to be a 10% off, it doesn't always have to be some kind of like, Hey, here's our new product or anything like that.
It can simply be some kind of informational news that you've done that's relevant to your industry. So whether you have blog posts, or whether you're pulling blog posts from other people, it doesn't matter if you drive traffic somewhere else, as long as you're supplying some kind of value to your customer base, they're going to really enjoy your newsletter, just obviously, I wouldn't drive them to a competitor's page.
So if you do some kind of informational newsletter that has like your blog posts in it has other people's articles and news and that's just relevant to your community, it becomes this informational newsletter that people keep an eye out for whether you do it weekly, or monthly. And it's really kind of like this overarching news of everything going on that's relevant to your community. So if you sell pet products, it could be anything around like studies that have come out about how to take care of your dog or your cat. Or again, if you're surfing, it could be about all of the different events that might be going on across the world that are different things for surfing, or how you can tune into certain areas.
There are so many different things that you could write email newsletters about to keep that email list warm because as soon as you go too long without sending out any kind of email to your list, that list can go cold, you're going to get spammed, you're gonna get unsubscribed from the next time that you try to reach out to that list and your email list is key.
Last but not least, is LinkedIn. Now, length this fun last thing with LinkedIn. So here's the thing. All this stuff gets tied into LinkedIn. Right? LinkedIn is a great place to advertise your e-commerce company with a couple of solutions. If your founder is doing the whole influencer route, great. Keep at it, keep doing it. Because what might happen what you're always trying to think about is your trying to think of like sales and revenue and how am I going to get more product out.
But what you could also be thinking about is, what could our founder be doing that might get us a discount on some of the stuff that we're offering. So hey, are founders really great, maybe I'm gonna do a live video for like a 3PL that you're using, in which case, they give you like some kind of discount for a while, or there's a company that you want to try their new app. So instead of paying for it, you just do some kind of live video. But then there's also the product line you have to think about is LinkedIn where your community is.
So there are people out there who do office supplies, or suits, any kind of apparel that's more professionalized, or anyone that does, like customized embroidering on different apparel for companies. That is obviously a much more b2b play. But there's so much that you can do on LinkedIn that can still help you sell products or worst-case scenario. The other thing you have to think about too is if down the road, you're worried about hiring and you need to be able to make sure that people really want to work with you, promoting your company and how awesome it is to work there on LinkedIn is fantastic. Because when it comes time for you to hire people, again, it's going to be that much easier.
So these are the eight things that I always say when we go through a list of like, hey, what else could we be doing that maybe we're not trying? These are eight b2b marketing strategies that I always see DTC e-commerce sellers are not trying out. I always suggest testing as much as possible. And I highly suggest testing these eight things out. But that's all I have for you today. If there's anything I missed that you think is a b2b strategy that typically isn't needed. See, comment below. I'm happy to update the video. But do the usual rate review, subscribe, and we'll have these videos every week. So there's anything else that you'd like me to cover? Feel free to comment. I'll make sure to cover it next time but I appreciate it and I will see you all next time.
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