B2B brands should look towards business intelligence and social media tools with a strategic focus to better engage with customers, says Carl Robertson, chief marketing officer, Colt
In order to succeed in these challenging economic times, B2B organisations need to evolve, not only to meet their customers’ needs today, but to help their customers stay innovative in the market tomorrow. Brands need to ensure the right changes are made at the right time to meet customers’ needs. This is especially important to those at the CxO level, who should be at the heart of the decision-making process. Many B2B organisations can no longer rely on simply selling products, instead they must evolve to become a trusted advisor, offering a service that is appropriate to customers at each stage of their journey. This is all well and good, but how can a company gain the necessary insights and supporting data to effectively engage with their business customer base, especially the all-important C-suite? And who is responsible for championing the customer and their needs within the business?
Put simply, the marketing team is the one, focused area of the business that cares about the full end-to-end customer journey, from the first awareness building exercise, through to consider/select, delivery and in-life service management. The sales team is focused on selling, the operations team is focused on delivery and management, but only marketing looks at the complete customer journey. In the future, we will see the CMO role evolve to more of a CCO or chief customer o fficer and therefore, marketing teams need to put greater effort in customer base management.
Strategic focus
Firstly, it is critical to have a strategic focus. A successful business does not have to deliver all things to all people. By focusing on specific strengths in the market, such as strong vertical alignment, geographic reach or specific solution and service portfolios, and mapping the target market to this, business can spend the time developing the right relationships, knowing that the expertise and knowledge they have is suited to engagement at the CxO level and that their messages will have strong resonance in their target base. Being close and being aware about a customer’s direction is a much more effective way to work, rather than waiting for a request for approval (RFP) to come out onto the market.
Customer engagement
Alongside having a strategic focus, there is the issue of customer engagement. It is critical to ask for feedback across all stages of the customer journey. Feedback at each stage, from awareness building and initial engagement through to service delivery and management confirms and develops awareness of the buyer personas. A consistent feedback mechanism also ensures that results can be benchmarked and that the business can make appropriate responses improves business processes. Developing communities appropriate to the customer level is also key. Forums where customers are not only asked for opinions but are also provided with early information on plans bring them closer to the business and helps with references and new cycles of customer generation. The good news for CMOs is that both strategic focus and customer engagement can be strongly supported by a range of business intelligence (BI) and social media tools.
Business intelligence and social media tools
Business intelligence tools allow the marketing teams to devise strategies appropriate a specific customer segment, looking not only at the stage in their customer journey, but the buyer persona, and the types of supporting materials they will require. For example, are they technical, work in procurement or have a business focus? Other tools, such as Eloqua, improve the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, with clear insights into areas customers like to focus on, so that campaigns can become more targeted to the needs of customers and prospects and engagement with the C-Suite can be more tailored.
As well as business intelligence tools, sales and marketing teams can use social media tools such as LinkedIn and Twitter to develop more complete profiles of target customers and prospects. However, it is important to ensure appropriate engagement through these forums as they are not specific sales channels for the hard-sell but communities for relationship building. With LinkedIn for example, developing forums around specific areas of interest for partners and customers is a suitable way to engage, especially when the forums can be developed in local languages and provide content or answer queries that are relevant for peer-to-peer communications.
In summary, it is clear that the marketing department’s role is fundamental to relationship building activities with customers and prospects, offering forums to listen and understand, and appropriate materials to educate. The marketing team is responsible listening and understanding, as well as actively participating in conversations that address business needs. There is no doubt that if deployed correctly, certain business intelligence and social media tools can go a long way to helping companies to address these business needs.
