What is B2B Multi-channel? Possible Strategy for Wholesalers

Today, there are many marketing strategies and channels for B2B companies. However, not all tactics are effective and necessary for your business. Multi-channel B2b is one of the excellent strategies to optimize your business profits and brand coverage.

What is B2B Multi-channel?

ARE YOU NEWCOMER? Check out B2B eCommerce definition HERE.

B2B multi-channel refers to wholesale activities combined with marketing on many different social channels.

Enabling multi-channel selling for B2B gives wholesalers more ordering options. Depending on the shipping method or the order volume, B2B customers will place the order directly at the factory, store or place orders online via an ecommerce website and social channel.

With the growth of e-commerce, wholesalers have many ordering options, via:

• Social network (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.)
• Online marketplace (Amazon, eBay, etc.)
• Hosted eCommerce platform (Shopify).
• Non-hosted eCommerce platform (Magento, WooCommerce).

In recent years, with the steady development of ecommerce, wholesalers tend to place orders online instead of offline at the store.

B2B multi-channel strategy allows small B2B businesses to set up their store at a low cost. For example, Wholesalers can set up an online store on Amazon or Shopify for no more than a hundred dollars.

The Benefits of B2B Multi-channel Strategy

LOOKING for appropriate B2B platforms? Take a look at our list of best wholesale platforms.

For wholesale businesses, a multi-channel B2B strategy provides various sales opportunities for the company. Whether it’s a selling or marketing strategy, B2B multi-channel promises many benefits to both your business and customer.

Impressive social signal with cross-promotion campaigns

Using multiple platforms in the marketing process creates more opportunities and reach for wholesalers. Each platform has a unique display style and a wholesaler group of different characteristics.

By cross-advertising between campaigns, you create a network that engages closely with your brand image, creating a strong social signal that impresses your customers. To do this, a CMS system or third-party software is recommended to achieve the most effective synchronous sharing.

For example, newly launched products will be announced across all official company channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, Youtube, etc.

Better outreach with personalized promotion

Cross-platform marketing helps generate substantial social media signals, makes search results and top-of-page more feasible, and makes it easier for customers to receive news and updates.

By having multiple channels and regular campaign/promotion updates, customers will be reminded more about your brand, which also leaves them opportunities to learn about your products. 

Besides, by personalizing the promotion message, the customers will also be more satisfied with what they receive.

For example, an optimized message for Instagram would be an eye-catching square-sized image with a clear and concise message to convey information about the ongoing campaign.

On the other hand, a post on Twitter or Facebook should be rectangular in size and have a clear intention in the approaching method (formal or informal, depends on the branding strategy). Some businesses even use meme images as their advertisement to make it friendlier to a specific customer group.

Optimized performance for the marketing campaign

Not every marketer are excelled in multiple channels. Many are only suitable for certain ones. A Facebook specialist might not work great on networks likes Twitter or Instagram.

That said, by enabling the multi-channel strategy for B2B, you can put marketers in suitable places for better performance, which of course, might bring great results to your campaign. This might increase the chance of success to the overall outcome of your B2B multi-channel campaign.

3 Tips for Develop a B2B multi-channel strategy

The strong development of ecommerce makes businesses compete more fiercely in the online market. For companies to increase brand coverage and create more profit opportunities, a multi-channel strategy needs to be effective and fully contain the following elements:

Choose the suitable sales channels

Multi-channel benefits in terms of brand coverage, but the cost will be huge if the multi-channel implementation is rampant. You should only choose sales channels with suitable customers. Unrelated media can do more harm than good for your business.

Experiment to find the best channel to maximize profitability for your B2B business. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Shopify, Amazon, Magento, etc. All of them have different advantages & quality requirements for the content to achieve the highest efficiency.

Many B2B sellers make the mistake of buying external modules for existing management systems without checking their effectiveness. For long-term B2B companies, platforms such as Magento, although expensive, are usually a few suitable options for massive B2B orders.

Once you’ve selected the right marketing (sales) channels, continue experimenting with different strategies for each platform to see what works best for your business.

Begin multi-channel with only one more sale channel

Small B2B businesses should initiate the multi-channel strategy by developing channel by channel. Although slow, this development method gives you more time to understand each of them and choose the right direction that brings more value to your business.

B2B businesses also need to consider starting with a particular product line before scaling up so that there is time to deal with problems encountered in the sales process.

Pay attention to inventory management

Situations such as overselling and stockouts will often occur when implementing multi-channel strategies without careful consideration, especially for B2B businesses due to the large wholesale orders.

You should review and update the inventory management system before implementing multi-channel to avoid these situations.