Linh Bergen-Peters, CMO at SME loan provider Spotcap, wants to dispel the belief that B2B is boring. She describes the myth of ‘robotic decision-making’ as being up there with unicorns and leprechauns. “There is a rational data-centric element to it, but there is still a person with emotions making that decision.” This, she says, is the crux of where B2B marketing is heading.
After adopting a deluge of technology in recent years, many marketers have forgotten the human element to what they do, and how they are received. It’s no longer enough to fire off mass emails and take a broad-brush approach – you must be personal.
Map your marketing to the customer journey
The rise of alternative and online-only lenders like Spotcap has disrupted the financial market. These challenger brands are elevating customer expectations by delivering new people-centric business models.
Take Spotcap. Its communications are designed to be approachable and let the customer know there’s a person behind the web browser. “We’re in financial services so we’re not about to start joking around, but you don’t need to bore your decision-makers with complicated financial lingo they don’t understand,” says Linh.
When she first joined the company in April this year, Linh challenged the financial jargon used in its marketing. “We adjusted the wording because what might be normal terminology in banking isn’t understandable for everyone. You don’t want to dumb it down, but it needs to make sense.”
Spotcap doesn’t just use language to make things more personal, it’s central to its business model. We’re always looking at analytics for our clients,” says Linh.
Using a feedback loop from account management, the marketing team makes sure they know where customers are getting stuck in the online process, whether that’s filling in forms or consuming content.
The benefit of a digital business is that it can adjust its offering to fit these pain-points, and in doing so build customer loyalty and soften the hard edge of traditional lenders.
“We realised it was very laborious for customers to upload all their financial data and information online, so we built proprietary software that allows them to load the documents within a few minutes without any manual processes,” she explains.
GDPR wake-up call
Spotcap’s goal is to understand each of its customers and provide them with solutions to their challenges. “We created a template for forecasting sales as we noticed this was an area smaller companies had trouble with,” says Linh. These tailored pieces of content have been extremely successful and prompted the company to use this tactic in other ways. “Recently we created an educational piece for our Australian partners as we realised they’re not that familiar with alternative finance. We did an e-book about the world of commercial lending… [since then] we’ve had brokers come to us for more help and it’s worked really well,” Linh underlines.
The market also has to respond to GDPR and a redistribution of power to the customer. “GDPR was a wonderful wake-up call and made us switch our view in terms of content – it’s very much in the hands of your customers whether to interact or not. We’re not going to push them, we’re just going to make information available in places they’re going, and if they connect with it, we’re doing something right.”
How can human-to-human marketing encourage the customer to engage? “Marketing has a lot to do with psychology,” Linh explains. “I don’t see AI picking up on intuition. EQ and creativity are what distinguishes us from machines.”
