B2B brands are striving to become more customer-centric, but what mistakes are they making along the way? Jessica McGreal investigates
Every B2B brand wants to be customer-centric, hyper-personalised, and be using data-driven personas to understand their customers and ultimately drive sales. But what do all these buzzwords actually mean?
Mario Kyriacou, marketing and demand generation manager at Sitecore, explains: “In traditional terms, customer centricity means listening and paying attention to the needs of your customer, ensuring their needs are met and anticipating possible future customer requirements. Thanks to digital technology, brands now have more data than ever about their customers and can build a good personalised profile of their individual customers that allows them to deliver a bespoke customer experience.”
Yet, being customer-centric is not as straightforward as it might sound and, as a result, many marketers are struggling to get it right. To ensure your customer centricity programme doesn’t fail, avoid these five mistakes:
Forgetting strategy
Customer engagement is the number one priority for 22 per cent of B2B marketers, while a further 57 per cent say it’s a top priority, a study by B2B Marketing and The Telemarketing Company has shown. However, the same research revealed that just 28 per cent of respondents have a strategic plan in place for increasing customer engagement. This is the first mistake a marketer can make.
Ensuring your brand becomes customer-centric doesn’t happen overnight; it’s a continuous process of learning and development. As a result, having a clear strategy outlining key objectives and how you are going to achieve them is vital to the success of any customer-centricity programme.
Meanwhile, ensuring all stakeholders (including other departments such as sales) have agreed to this strategy is cruical. It doesn’t matter how fine-tuned your data is, or how perfect your customer personas are – without these customer-facing departments on board customer-centricity won’t work.
Confusing personas with people
Creating customer personas doesn’t necessarily mean you’re putting your customers at the heart of your marketing campaigns. Although it’s vital to use data (including website and social analytics) to build user profiles, marketers need to go beyond data sets to become truly customer centric.
Chris Mair, founding partner at DADI, argues: “Personas serve a useful purpose, but that should not include defining the rules of the personalisation. The persona of a customer changes with every engagement and over the duration of the engagement. By focusing on the individual’s engagement at that particular moment and responding in real-time, customers are more likely to respond positively than if they were treated as a pre-defined persona.”
Likewise focusing on segmenting data sets into demographics, purchase history or social data is a big error – customers are more than generalisations.
Andrew Davies, co-founder and CMO at idio, explains: “We need to move from segmentation to ‘segments of one’, where we use the needs and interests expressed by our customers to inform how we communicate and engage with them.
“My advice if you want to understand your customer at a personal level? Look at what they read: your demographic data alone won’t reveal that you are currently looking for a mortgage – but your reading habits will; you wouldn’t reveal on social media that you have a fungal infection and that you’re currently looking for a remedy – but your reading habits would. Our content consumption reveals our deepest needs and interests. You can’t get more customer-centric than that.”
Not recognising customers
On the other end of the scale, not recognising a loyal customer or a previous buyer is also a big mistake B2B marketers need to avoid.
“Not recognising if someone has previously been a customer can be frustrating to end users – the least a brand could do is remember them for it,” warns Kyriacou of Sitecore. “For example, customers do not appreciate being required to repeatedly input their personal details.”
He continues: “Using the knowledge accumulated to personalise the customer experience even further will ensure the customer journey is seamless and indicates brands are listening and responding to customers’ needs – ultimately increasing loyalty and spend.”
Limiting personalisation to digital
Customer-centricity and personalisation shouldn’t be confined to digital channels; rather it should be implemented at all touch points with a consistent tone of voice. This includes face-to-face events, direct mail and telemarketing.
For example, at Christmas a PR firm sends journalists quirky trophies for a range of funny attributes that are not linked to their day-to-day job, but sourced on Twitter. Silly awards for the ‘most vintage’ or ‘biggest cat lover’ are distributed as a simple but interesting way to strike a cord with reporters. These fun trophies end up remaining on desks for the rest of the year, ensuring the PR company is the first port of call when comment or information is needed for an upcoming article.
Going a step too far
The final mistake marketers easily make with customer-centricity is simply overdoing it, and taking personalisation too far. No one appreciates being called up and told you’ve been stalking them online – it’s creepy.
Joo Teoh, MD of Ampersand Mobile, adds: “I don’t think I want to be reminded constantly that someone else knows what I have done and can presume to know what I will do. There may be moments I will appreciate it, and there will be moments I will not appreciate it. The difficulty is that no amount of modelling is going to get that bit right all the time.”
