In terms of economic impact, the COVID-19 pandemic dealt most businesses a serious blow. Some folded, while others had to shift their models just to survive. Digital interactions accelerated as both vendors and buyers scrambled online for tactics to manage the crisis.
As the world surges forward and the B2B marketplace starts to “stabilize” brands are now reviewing these band-aid tactics in favor of steady revenue-generating strategies. Let’s delve into some of the top post-pandemic strategies for B2B digital marketing.
- Buyer Intent Data
Combining in-house and third-party data can revolutionize the way your sales and marketing do business.
This strategy gathers information about your leads’ activities online, right from the topics they research to the competitor pages they visit, and the pages they read.
With this info, your team can spot quality leads with a greater propensity to make purchases and zero in on them.
Here are some great ways to use buyer intent data
- To identify hot leads frequenting your website. Monitoring data about the pages a lead visits and frequency helps you gauge if they are closer to buying. If they come to your demo and price pages often, it could indicate buying intent.
- To aid segmentation. Even prospects in a specific industry will have different needs and motivations. One buyer might be a start-up and the other well established. You can categorize and pursue these leads appropriately.
- To help reactivate lost deals. It’s easy to believe that once a sales deal is lost, it’s gone forever. What if at renewal, that lost customer checks out your website for a better option? Tracking buyer intent data allows you to pick up lost deals revisiting your site so you can know how to approach them.
- Multichannel Marketing
Today’s savvy buyers possess greater control over the sales process—they choose how to access information about the solutions they need and from whom. As a marketer, the best you can do is to be where your ideal customers are online.
Multichannel marketing is about letting the customer or prospect communicate with your team using their preferred channel.
The strategy combines direct and indirect communication channels to interact with customers, interest them in your offerings, and get them to buy.
These channels may include email, online ads, SMS, direct mail, mail order catalogs, web push notifications, and social media.
To succeed here, you’ll need to
- Build singular views of your prospects and customers across your communication channels. Centralizing all customer data irrespective of the source provides a 360° view of their behavior across the channels they use.
- Employ the right process and tech to support your multichannel marketing activities. These will include cross-channel campaign management, analytics, advanced execution capabilities, and response attribution.
- Make customer experiences consistent across channels. Customer experiences are powerful differentiators so ensure customers enjoy consistent and quality experiences, whether they are reaching you online, over the phone, or physically.
- Cold Calling
With so many teams turning their backs on cold calling, you would think the strategy doesn’t work at all. But B2B sales organizations are setting up considerable sales meetings for their customers using this very tactic.
Besides, research shows that senior executives would rather communicate over the phone than on other channels. So, if you believe cold calling belongs to yesteryears, you’re missing serious opportunities to connect with prospects and grow your business.
Best practices include:
- Know your prospect. Use in-house and publicly sourced data to know your prospect and determine how to package your offering to suit their needs. The buyer intent data we mentioned earlier can help identify prospects who are ripe for calling.
- Know how to disseminate product information. It’s easy to confuse prospects with too much information and jargon and turn them off. Work out how to communicate your product’s value in layperson’s terms.
- Offer value. People, decision-makers in particular, want to know what they don’t know—especially if it’s something that will help them avoid a problem. So, offer the prospect something of value that also keeps your brand top of mind.
- A/B test your calls. Vary your cold calling script to see if certain lines work better on your prospects than others. You may also want to test the time of day to identify times when prospects are more approachable.
- Prioritize Positive Brand Experiences
A study showed that up to 85 percent of business buyers consider customer experiences as important as the product/service a company offers.
In short, the experiences you offer customers can help your business grow or take a nosedive. Each touchpoint in the process is an opportunity to maximize your relationship with your customer and build trust.
The more positive the experience, the higher the likelihood of driving loyalty, revenues, and referral business.
Consider the following:
- Map your customer’s journey from end to end. Identify roadblocks and what needs to be done to eliminate them. Look for areas you can add value to make the experience better.
- Approach customers and prospects with empathy. Connect genuinely with customers, recognize their needs, and work to help them out. Gather feedback, review, and revise. It may help foster enduring relationships.
- Automate processes. For your team, automation tools streamline productivity and increase productivity. For your customer, it translates to faster delivery, reduced frustration and delays, and efficient communication.
- Referral Marketing
The proliferation of multiple communication channels means customers are constantly inundated with marketing messages to the point of numbness. This makes reaching and convincing target audiences to convert even tougher.
But here’s the thing—people will gladly consider another person’s opinion of your brand over any marketing tactics you make. So, the positive experience we mentioned earlier ties in with this strategy.
To get the best out of it
- Provide exceptional service. Convincing a happy customer to make a referral is easier than one who is alienated from your brand. Pay attention to your customer’s comments and questions and attend to them promptly.
- Train your employees to ask for referrals. People shun asking for referrals because they think they will annoy their customers. As long as you get your timing right, most customers won’t mind doing so. Keep referral templates and supporting materials handy to make the referrer’s life easy.
- Engage in joint venture referrals. Collaborating with complementary brands to cross-promote both your solutions to your customer bases can prove invaluable. You can offer the referring company a commission for referral business and discounts for customers coming on board.
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