B2B Customer Experience Opportunities

B2B brands are struggling to reach their target audiences and maintain successful campaigns across channels. Many forms of digital marketing are becoming less effective. Strategies that performed well at one time, are now less effective.

There are many problems that currently plague the quality of B2B customer experience. Prospective customers are often faced with obstacles, dead-ends, or been-there-seen-that content, when what they really want is a seamless, relevant, enjoyable content journey — one that they control and that’s aligned with their interests and needs.

Search Engine Optimization & Blogs

Use the tools that make your articles discoverable to funnel prospects deeper into their content journey.

Marketers spend a tremendous amount of time and effort trying to create engaging articles for blog pages and optimizing SEO to make it easy to find them. But once a prospect discovers and reads that great relevant article, the next recommended article may simply be the previous or latest piece published, or one that is rated as most popular. And none of these pieces may be relevant to the reader’s interest. Then, since the recommendation doesn’t follow through to the transactional goal, the prospect simply moves on. Without presenting the right purpose-built content journey for sale readiness, the opportunity is lost.

Nurturing on Demand

Go beyond email-based drip campaigns by empowering your prospects to access as much content as they want, when they want it.

Traditional email nurture campaigns often use a drip strategy; doling out one piece of content at a time, using a scheduled cadence (e.g., every few days). But allowing a prospect to personalize their own experience and pursue self-education is more effective. Let them choose as much relevant content from a list as they wish to consume in a single sitting.

Websites/Landing Pages

Make the entrance to your website or landing page the start of a customer journey.

A typical objective of driving traffic to websites or landing pages is to funnel prospects to form fills, with the promise of more information, a webinar, more articles or a demo. Once the form is filled in, the prospect may be simply dumped out onto a dead-end thank you page, with nowhere else to go. But why show a customer the door when you have their attention? Seize the opportunity to provide additional content and educate your prospect while their interest is still high.

Ads

Use paid media support to drive traffic using objectives that take in the big picture.

If you’re investing in pay-per-click ads, promoted social posts and cold content syndication, don’t you want to get the most value out of that investment? You can easily generate more value from paid clicks by ensuring prospects have the option to engage with more than one piece of content during a single session. When a prospect clicks on a topic, you already know they are interested in it, so why not give them the opportunity to educate themselves with additional content - and provide as much of it as your prospect wants? Creating a content library with multiple pieces of content, tagged for relevance to specific areas of interest, will let you capitalize on the 1st click and maximize your advertising investment.

Events & Webinars

Use follow-ups as an opportunity to empower prospects with an ability to meet their own content needs.

If you’ve ever attended an event (including webinars), chances are you’ve gotten a generic follow-up email along the lines of, “Thanks for attending, here’s the recording,” Even if you sign up and don’t attend, you might’ve been sent an email saying, “Sorry you couldn’t attend, here’s the recording.” This type of email provides little value beyond politeness — it certainly doesn’t qualify a lead beyond the fact of their signing up. Don’t let your follow-up emails be dead ends.

The Future of B2B Marketing is Self-Service

Allow prospects to access content they need when they want it by enabling self-service.

In a world where customers are struggling with too much irrelevant information, the most successful marketers are focused on ensuring that information is specifically designed to make buying easier.

Brent Adamson, vice president at Gartner, explains the importance of buyer enablement

“Repurpose successful content by identifying pre-existing sources of buyer enablement from functions such as sales or customer service and modifying them for customer self-service.” - Gartner Sales & Marketing Conference in Las Vegas, October 2018

Learn how to create smarter content experiences, speak to one of our Client Success Advisors


Empower your business to move beyond the short-term focus of closing the single transaction to a more holistic approach that wins lifetime customers.