Every successful company has been known to make the quality of customers’ experiences their top concern. This is even more true with big tech companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet Inc., Tencent etc. So whether you are a SaaS company, Fintech start-up or you offer on-premise solutions, you should understand that what is going to be the top concerns for B2B buyers and decision-makers are not the product features and product price but the quality of customer experience.
Businesses want to attract more leads, the goal is to continue to flourish. So what are the things that I need to do today, as an owner of a B2B tech firm, to prepare ahead and begin to offer excellent customer experience?
To help you answer this critical question, we have gathered eight most crucial digital strategies that can help your business connect with the right people, manage and improve your online presence, build a strong reputation, and popular brand. For that reason, we implore you to sit tight, and be ready to roll with us as we take you on a journey that will help transform your business by leveraging key digital strategies discussed below.
1. Mobile user experience on your website is absolutely crucial
If your business website was developed a while ago, it is probably mobile friendly. There is a huge difference between your website mobile friendliness being able to display your website and the forms customers interact with to be user friendly. A recent survey found that more than 50% of websites that are mobile friendly, do not contain mobile friendly forms. You should get your IT manager to double check all the forms used to capture information on your website for mobile friendliness. You can also us a marketing automation tool to help ensure you get those forms working perfectly
2. Publish the Right Content at The Right Time
Content marketing is one of the most important and highly relevant digital strategies.
A report by DemandGen’s 2020 Content Preferences Study showed that content has become a more important tool for B2B buyers to research solutions during worldwide lockdowns as in-person engagement is being replaced with digital alternatives. According to the study, about 67 percent of B2B buyers now see content as a means to educate themselves. They however expect good and rich content experiences from vendors and peer-to-peer content influence. More than ever before, visual and more engaging content are given more preference by the buyers.
Listed below is the collection of content formats recommended for your content marketing and the list is not exhaustive.
- Blog post
- Interactive pages
- Demo tours
- Case studies
- Podcast
- Research report
- White papers
- Industry survey
- E-books
- Product comparison
- FAQ documents
3. Carefully Manage Every Step of Buyer Journeys
One of the ways to ensure quality customer’s experiences is by managing buyer journeys consistently.
B2B buyers are more likely to land on friendly, reliable and fast web pages . Those that are easy to navigate, simple layouts, with readable and clear messages.
If you are to meet buyer’s expectations, you must be ready to build a website with these qualities. Not just that, it is even more important that you understand every step, if possible, that your customers are going to take on your website while they interact with your products or services and also be ready to provide streamlined guidance that ensures a smooth and hassle-free completion of tasks on your website. Though these tasks are usually complex and have unpredictable paths, the ideal journey is one that is linear with a simple process.
User data should be at the core of digital marketing efforts in order to understand the behaviour of your customers, their decision-making process as well as managing their journey in real time. The available data should be used to deliver an excellent customer experience at every stage of the sales funnel, whether the prospective customer is learning about your product or close to making a purchase.
4. Build Authority with Thought Leadership on LinkedIn
Linkedlin has over 30 million companies active on its platform and as a result is one of the places B2B firms look into for lead generation. One of the best tactics to use to get attention from potential customers is building authority with thought leadership content. A report showed that about 75% of B2B buyers confirmed that thought leadership helps them evaluate and determine which seller to put on their list. A survey of C-suite executives showed that 50% of them considered thought leadership content has directly affected their decision making with respect to selecting companies to do business with.
In order to grow your company value,reach more people and get new sales, this might be the time you start to consider sharing knowledge and insights on your Linkedln Business page or personal profile. You and your employees can connect with your respective peers to build relationships and further expand your company reach by making your peers share your content with their connections. You can also use Linkedln Ad with granular targeting to reach companies in your target market.
5. Focus on a Customer-Centric Web Design
A user-centric website design is one that takes into consideration the wants and needs of a business’s customers and prospects. To build a user-centric web design, you need to know exactly who your customers are and you need to develop each page with your potential users in mind.
Whether you are just starting to build your B2B website from scratch or you are in the middle of the redesign process, it is imperative that you ensure that the implementation is done with the users’ wants and needs in mind. To have an effective user-centric design process, you need to put yourself in the customer’s place to develop a site that is user-friendly. Developed website elements like navigation bars, header and footer, pop ups, shopping cart, forms, call-to-action (CTA), checking out process and more.
The content on your website should be based on the user’s perspective and you can do this by understanding the ways your products or services can benefit them by providing solutions to their problems, and write your website copy in such a way that the same information is best communicated to the users. By clearly stating the features and benefits of what you’re selling, it will help differentiate your business from the competition and strongly influence customer retention. Also, when you clearly state the benefits of what you offer, your customers will gain an understanding of the value of doing business with you.
6. Use AI Tools to Effectively Manage Customer Data
Tools based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can, among other benefits, help you process large amounts of data, test your paid and social campaigns, measure key performance indicators (KPIs), optimize campaign content, segment your email audience and apply retargeting when needed. Also, AI/ML tools can learn and improve on their own, this can help make your branding strategy or tactic more effective in ensuring prospective users have personalised experience.
Adobe’s Digital Trends Report submitted that managing and centralizing data sources and serving the individual customer in real time and at any scale are the “superpowers of marketing”. However, a company needs to create a unified, robust customer profile if this goal is to be accomplished. Efficiency can be maximised and repetitive tasks from marketers can be offloaded with the help of Automation technologies. It’s therefore important that you use marketing automation tools to pull and integrate data from across teams, create customer personas and endeavour to use analytics on a wider scale.
Using automation technologies will free up time that can be spent on strategic thinking, key decision making process, problem solving and planning for the future.
7. Offer Multi-Channel Support
It is important that B2B offers multi-channel support to stay in touch with customers from various backgrounds and demographics. Usually, customers have diverse interests and preferences when it comes to selecting their marketing channel of communication. It is therefore essential that, through multiple channels, you initiate active customer experience strategies.
A report has shown that only few companies integrate this approach in their day-to-day business activities and about 42% customer service agents still fall short of providing active multiple channels support.
8. Create Consistent Customer Experiences
It is becoming increasingly difficult to manage all the wide variety of engagement platforms upon which B2B offer digital experiences. This is even more true for big companies that provide a consistent customer experience across a variety of digital channels, with a greater need for quality control and the attendant proneness to error.
For this reason, it is fast becoming a norm that companies employ SaaS Digital Quality Management (DQM) platforms to integrate with their current web content management system (WCM) in order to provide a centralized control of content across their digital landscape based on certain criteria. Such centralized management of all digital touchpoints not only ensures a consistent customer experience but also consolidates brand integrity.
Final Words
More than ever before, customers now have more power and their buying decision ultimately determines the faith of a company. For B2B to generate more leads and maintain brand loyalty with the aid of digital strategies, it is imperative that these strategies are carried out with focus on the users of their products and/or services and how to ensure that they (the users) have the best experience doing business with them.