Fueled by stiff competition, the digital landscape continues to evolve with businesses looking for new ways to stay on top.
Those that refuse to adapt often witness lower engagements and fade into the background.
As we move past the pandemic, and hopefully, into better years for the B2B environment, here are some digital marketing strategies we expect to trend.
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Delivering Top-Notch Customer Experience
The plurality of stakeholders in B2Bs creates complex purchase behavior and makes delivering excellent customer experiences that much harder.
A business may focus on pleasing the C-suite and ignore departmental executives and end-users who may have a say.
If these “ignored” customer groups aren’t happy with your experience, they can easily persuade the top leadership to head in a different direction.
To deliver quality experiences, you’ll need to map the customer journey from end to end to understand the perspectives of everyone involved.
This way, you can tailor experiences that address their concerns and expectations.
Sounds like a ton of work. It is, but the benefits far outweigh the effort you put in.
A study by PwC points out that 73 percent of buyers consider experience an important factor when making purchase decisions. A further 43 percent will pay more for enhanced conveniences.
People are willing to cough more money if it means better experiences. If you don’t do what needs to be done, your customer will find someone else who will.
Transparency is also a key part of the experience. Create transparent customer journeys where team members and the customers are aware of what is going on at every stage of the journey.
This helps remove ambiguity and doubt.
Build Brand Authority
Think about this…
When a business has a problem and is looking for solutions, who do they turn to?
A brand they trust.
Brand authority revolves around earning trust among customers and prospects.
It reflects the degree of your expertise and credibility, the superiority of your offerings, and the experience you provide.
This doesn’t happen overnight. Nay, building brand authority takes consistent effort over time.
Here are factors that may help improve and build your brand authority:
- Create on-site content. From blog posts to videos, industry reports, videos, infographics, and how-to guides, etc, let your website be a hub of credible information. Make use of an editorial calendar to help you maintain consistent posting.
- Maintain an active social presence. Identify social channels where your ideal audience hangs out and connect with them. Ensure your social profiles are up to date and share snippets of knowledge with links to your site for further information. Deal with questions and criticisms promptly.
- Conduct and share insightful and factual research on factors affecting your industry. Industry analysts, blogs, and other businesses are likely to cite you when backing up their arguments.
- Carry out surveys to gauge customer satisfaction and use the feedback to improve your services. Once you implement the changes, write to the customer, let them know you’ve noted their feedback and have taken measures. Welcome them to explore your products/services.
- Sponsor an event in your community, donate to charity, or round up your team to do something for your community. Besides, building a good name for you, it also shows your caring and humane side.
Own Your Audience
Social media is great and many businesses use social channels to reach potential and existing customers.
Hey, three million businesses run ads on Facebook, while up to 58 million brands have created brand communities on LinkedIn.
With social networks, you can maximize awareness, build brand authority, connect with others, and generate revenue.
But here’s the thing—they own the audience, not you.
Gasp! What?
If these channels shut down, does your business stand to lose?
Do the ever-evolving algorithms affect your reach, with some messages getting lost somewhere? Let’s not even mention the multiple firms competing for the same customers.
The best way to get your messages heard is by building and owning your audience.
How?
- Build an email list. When you get access to your audience’s inboxes, you can send pertinent information about your products/services without worrying about messages getting lost.
- Create newsletters. These are ideal for building relations and sharing updates on your business and products/services. Above nurturing audiences, newsletters also encourage audiences to make purchases.
- Create thought leadership content. Thought leadership content shows off your expertise and builds both credibility and trust. Start by identifying your audience, the questions they want to be answered, and tackling them. You can share thought leadership content through podcasts, best webinar software online magazines, ebooks, and articles.
Cold Calling
For as long as people are running businesses, cold calling will have a place in B2B digital marketing.
Many B2Bs are willing to converse with vendors to know how your solutions can capitalize on opportunities.
You just need to know how to communicate your value to them.
Here are practices worth considering:
- Target good fit prospects. Teams waste resources calling prospects who can’t benefit from their offerings. Go through your calling list and eliminate companies that outrightly don’t fit.
- Research the prospect. Having eliminated bad fits, it’s time to build some familiarity. Search out their demographics, challenges, contact persons.
- Work on your opening line and the information you want to share. Let your opening line cover a key pain point experienced by a company in the prospect’s niche and how you helped them. Focus on sharing the value you can provide.
- Maintain conversational control. Some prospects like taking over the call and intimidating you. Don’t take it as a personal attack. Keep your cool and respond with a question. It will give you time to regain your composure and control over the conversation.
- Make multiple follow-ups. Sometimes, you may need to make up to six calls before securing your goal, so don’t give up so easily. Any more than six, and it’s time to move on to other prospects.
AI Chatbots
The appeal behind AI chatbots is their data mining ability, 24/7 availability, and high productivity. Features that aren’t possible in the live chats visitors have with human operators.
Here are some rewards you can enjoy by employing AI chatbots in your strategy:
- Powering communication with customers. Through data mining, an AI chatbot can quickly establish a lead’s preferences and serve up appropriate answers.
- Improving efficiency. Chatbots expedite the sales process by answering questions, effectively reducing the time a prospect spends researching. The fast response also means the prospect won’t have to jump to a competitor to find answers.
- Offering great customer support. In a world of speed and convenience, AI chatbots provide real-time support, solve routine problems, and can be customized to speak different languages. This improves your customer support capability.
- Excellent marketing research. An AI chatbot’s ability to drill through tons of documents and social conversations means they can discover hidden trends and behavior. This information can help you personalize messages and create relevant content.
