In the past, the sophistication of the B2B web marketing environment has lagged some way behind the innovativeness and creativity-focused efforts of B2C. This is particularly true when it comes to the user experience — just consider the likes of Amazon with recommendations based on past purchases and browsing behaviour.
But as the B2B digital arena catches up, just how important are aspects like marketing automation and building customer personas?
The user experience
The key thing to remember — regardless of whether it’s B2B or B2C — is that whatever users are doing, searching for information, making a purchase or trying to get a query satisfied, it’s all about creating an exceptional user experience.
So, yes, for the B2B environment, aspects like customer personas, content personalisation and marketing automation are important. The challenge for us B2B marketers is that website visitors are not necessarily always intent on buying something immediately, as they may not have an urgent need. This is especially so for high investment products. Therefore maximising your opportunities with online and digital customer touch points is critical. Often, with B2B markets, the user is not intending on engaging with your site for a substantial amount of time as a customer may do on say, a retail site such as ASOS.com. The user may also be on your site due to an offline marketing campaign but have no real intention on returning. Your challenge is making sure that they do return and interact with your site.
Getting it right with segmentation
A big part of achieving excellent average session duration and repeat visits, and thus increasing your opportunities for conversion, is recognising that every customer is unique, with a different personality and different requirements. This is where segmentation plays a role, gathering information on users based on their location, interests, behaviour etc.
User friendly CMS
In the last few years advances in CMS platforms have meant that the process of creating and managing content is no longer as complex and time consuming as it once was. In fact, marketers no longer need to rely on the IT department for assistance and can develop that tailored content, publish it and track it yourself. A sophisticated CMS platform can even help you with features like lead scoring — assigning values to customer behaviours like visiting a product page or buying a product — that aim to identify a company’s most valuable customers. Once you’ve identified those customers it becomes that much easier to develop personalised content and promotions based on their needs.
Marketing automation
According to research by Aberdeen Group, companies that use marketing automation convert 53% more leads and report higher market growth (3.1%). That said, you should be using marketing automation as a tool in the personalisation journey. It allows you to tailor your approach and deliver different messages at the right time to the right customer segments. In this way you create customer touch points along the experience journey, be it newsletters, emails or promotions. You can use it to great effect for all types of marketing communications — retaining current customers, reactivating dormant customers and recruiting new ones.
Marketing automation works hand in hand with customer personas — developed in the backend of your CMS system based on the information gathered. It’s here that once you’ve developed your customer personas you can really start to shape their experience, for example, personalising content and making recommendations, whether that’s for a product, service or even downloading a whitepaper.
A friendly reminder
Marketing automation can also be used to give your customers a friendly nudge. For example, if a user visits a B2B website and adds items to a basket and then doesn’t follow through and make the purchase, marketing automation can be used to send them a reminder that the product is still in the basket. This tactic has been used for years in the B2C sector, so why not in B2B.
You can also track when people are dropping off in the buying cycle and possibly identify trends, helping you get to the root of the problem. It could be a small thing like a badly worded sentence on the checkout page, or something greater. Either way, it will help you identify where the problem lies.
It is just as important in the B2B sector as it is in B2C, to recognise the differences and desires of your user personas, i.e. your customers, and to use your online marketing tools and platforms to tailor content for those different customers. B2B marketing has made some significant strides forward in recent years and as long as we remember that it’s always about creating the best customer experience, it won’t be long before we are giving B2C marketers a run for their money.
By Robert Yardy, head of new business and marketing at MMT Digital.
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