Whether you run a FinTech start-up, a SaaS company or you offer on-premise hardware solutions, features and product price are not going to be the top concerns for B2B buyers and decision-makers in 2021. Instead, customer experience will.
What can you do today to prepare for the future and start offering exquisite customer experience to attract more qualified leads and grow your business in the years to come?
Sharpen your pens and start taking notes because we’re about to walk you through the five most important digital strategies you can use to get your business in front of the right audience, manage your online reputation and build a strong, recognizable brand.
1. Carefully Manage Every Step of Buyer Journeys
Managing buyer journeys step-by-step is a top-priority for improving customer experience.
Today, more than ever, B2B buyers expect to land on fast, reliable and enjoyable web pages. This means that your website should be easy to navigate, with simple layouts, clear messages and secure privacy-first processes.
To meet buyers’ expectations, not only do you need to know exactly which steps they are going to take in interaction with your products or services, but you also have to offer streamlined guidance every step of the way to help your website visitors complete their tasks smoothly.
Ideally, these journeys would be a linear line. But more often than not, journeys are complex and unpredictable paths.
To take customer experience to the next level, you need to know who your buyers are, understand their decision-making process and manage their journeys in real time while making user data the center of your digital marketing efforts.
Use the data at hand to deliver an outstanding experience at every stage of the sales funnel, whether a potential customer is still learning about your products or they are close to making a purchase.
2. Focus on a User-Centric Web Design
You may be in the middle of a website redesign process or you could be building your B2B tech website from scratch. Either way, try to implement a user-centric approach to your web strategy.
What does it mean to be user-centric in web design?
It means that, again, you need to know exactly who your target audience is and you need to develop each page with your potential users in mind.
Think about their needs, pain points, objections and expectations when you – or a creative digital agency you hire – develop elements like your website header and footer, navigation bars, forms, shopping carts, checkout process, pop-ups, call-to-action (CTA) buttons and more.
The same goes for the content on your website. To write website copy from your user’s perspective, think about the ways your products or services can solve their problems and present the solutions in the form of benefits throughout your copy.
Also, don’t forget to include original, on-brand images, custom illustrations and demo videos if these suit your business.
Quality web design can help you personalize offers, boost online visibility, raise brand awareness, differentiate your business from the competition and strongly influence customer retention.
3. Publish the Right Content at The Right Time
One of the most important and still highly relevant digital strategies is content marketing.
As the DemandGen’s 2020 Content Preferences Study showed, during a time of worldwide lockdowns where in-person engagement is being replaced with digital alternatives, content has become an even more important tool for B2B buyers to research business solutions.
This study showed that 67% of B2B buyers rely even more on content to educate themselves, but they are also expecting richer content experiences from vendors, as well as peer-to-peer content influence. And, their preference has shifted more to visual, more engaging, mobile-optimized content.
The wide variety of content formats you should consider for your content marketing include:
- Video tutorials
- Demo tours
- FAQ documents
- Blog posts
- Case studies
- White papers
- Product comparisons
- Industry surveys
- Research reports
- Interactive pages
- E-books
- Podcasts
The list goes on as there are almost endless possibilities.
To decide which type of content to publish, when and where, learn all about your audience’s expectations, habits and behaviors.
Find out about the problems they encounter in interaction with your products or services, what bothers them, what confuses them, what they find to be too difficult, what is hard to understand, etc.
Then, help them solve all those problems within the content you create. It’s as simple as that.
4. Build Authority with Thought Leadership on LinkedIn
With more than 30 million companies active on LinkedIn, it’s still one of the most important platforms for B2B lead generation, while building authority with thought leadership content remains the best tactic to get attention from potential buyers.
According to LinkedIn, 75% of B2B buyers say thought leadership helps them determine which vendor to put on their short list and 49% of C-Suite executives say this type of content has directly led them to choose one company over another.
So, start sharing your knowledge and insights on your LinkedIn business page or on your personal profile. In fact, you can ask your employees to share their expertise with their network to grow company value even more, expand reach, find new sales opportunities and attract more potential buyers.
Connect with your peers to grow trust and build relationships organically and consider creating paid campaigns with granular targeting options to reach decision-makers in your targeted industry or niche.
5. Manage Customer Data Effectively with AI Tools
According to Adobe’s Digital Trends Report, centralizing data sources and serving the individual in real time and at any scale are the “superpowers of marketing,” but you need to create a unified, robust customer profile to accomplish that goal.
Use marketing automation tools to integrate data from across teams, create buyer personas and try a wider use of analytics.
Automation technologies can help you maximize efficiency and offload repetitive tasks from marketers. This will free their time to focus more on strategic thinking, problem solving and goal setting for future campaigns.
Tools based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can help you:
- Process large amounts of data
- Segment your email audience
- Test your paid and social campaigns
- Optimize campaign content
- Apply retargeting when needed
- Measure key performance indicators (KPIs)
Plus, AI/ML tools are capable of constantly learning and improving on their own, which can make your branding strategy much more efficient in providing a personalized experience to potential users.
Managing data effectively will help you assess risks, break down data silos and work across multiple data sources to improve lead generation, email list management and digital campaign performance.
Conclusion
In 2021 and the years to come, offering an impressive service within a frictionless buyer journey will help you grow a base of potential buyers.
The best lead generation strategies for B2B tech business will include:
- Carefully managed buyer journeys
- User-centered website design
- Content marketing in all of its forms
- Smart campaigns powered by AI tools
- Thought leadership on LinkedIn
Keep in mind the importance of local and international regulations compliance for digital advertising and focus on incorporating transparency in your digital strategies as well.
Remember to stay agile, make data-backed decisions, set long-term goals and focus on providing excellent customer experience and you should see more qualified leads coming your way.
Author bio:
Nadja Bozovic is a Content Specialist at Digital Silk, a global digital agency helping brands grow online. Writing well-researched, purpose-driven content is what makes her tick and she is always on the lookout for the latest trends in digital communications.