Everything is marketing. But just because everything is marketing, doesn’t mean marketers can do everything, try as they might. Marketers need to make sure all of the work they do is getting results. They cannot hope to micro-manage every interaction within a business; even if they could, it would be a colossal waste of effort. They need to focus efforts on what’s going to get results and prove their contribution; everywhere else, they need to lose control.
In the first of three Lose control features, Will Green argues: You can’t control your customers, but you can give them what they want.
Own the journey, but don’t try and control it
Marketers need to own the customer journey and be the voice of the customer within their organisations to ensure all activity is focused on delivering an experience that engages and retains customers and, ultimately, delivers revenue. But owning the customer journey is not the same as controlling it.
The digital revolution and the proliferation of channels means that you simply cannot know, in a lot of cases, where a customer journey starts, or how it progresses – though the end goal remains the same. The oft-cited stat that customers are 57 per cent (or 75 per cent or 90 per cent) of the way through their journey before they speak to a salesperson has changed the game.
As Simon Carter, head of marketing, UK and Ireland at Fujitsu, says: “This means the role of marketing is more important than ever before. As marketers, we have to get to those customers to influence their thinking – to ensure our brand is on their long-list, and ensure we are highly regarded when it comes to them making their shortlist.”
Be where your customers are
There are some broad inferences marketers can make about their largest touchpoints, and so put less time, energy and budget into the less crucial points of customer contact. As Louise Ainsworth, CEO of Millward Brown UK puts it: “If 90 per cent of your business comes through your website, focus your efforts on improving it and anything that drives traffic.”
While this is reasonable advice – if your customers simply don’t use social media, there’s little point in spending a lot of time and energy on your social channels – it’s not the whole story. To use the above example, the problem with ‘website’ is that even that is not a singular entity.
For instance, it’s easy to make the mistake of thinking of a home page as the equivalent of a shop window, the first thing a potential new customer sees, the starting point of their journey. And that may be true. But it’s equally likely that a Google search has caused a researcher to land on a completely different part of your site.
This becomes very different from trying to plan a ‘controlled’ customer journey that looks something like ‘educational content -> email sign-up -> price information -> SALE!’ It becomes a question of navigation. A footer suggestion for ‘related content’ is a good start. Perhaps a link to an ‘about’ page so a customer can immediately get a feel for what the organisation is about would be helpful. Perhaps a link to a showcase of your best product.
Exactly what this is will vary from business to business. But there are also some fairly obvious don’ts: if most links on your page go to gated content that require email sign-up, a lot of people will simply click away and never return. If a page has an abundance of links to other site areas that won’t really make sense unless you already know the company, you’re also likely to see people disappearing. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking about the logical steps a customer might take towards a sale; but customers are illogical creatures.
Marketers shouldn’t waste time thinking about all the iterations of the customer journey and instead think like customers.
Play to the self-educating tendency
B2B customers, compared to B2C consumers, are easier to get a handle on. Aside from the obvious things like customers being segmented into smaller groups and being self-selecting, the big bonus for B2B marketers is that their audience are relentless self-educators.
This is well acknowledged, but far too often ignored. In that 60 per cent of the time customers are researching solutions but not interacting directly with companies, they are learning absolutely everything they can. The marketing challenge is to facilitate this.
This is very different from pushing product information and other content towards anyone who’s hit upon a touchpoint. It’s about creating the space for researching customers to guide themselves through the space and get a clear picture.
What if, for instance, your company had a page on its website where it listed and linked to the major competitors in your industry and gave a frank and honest assessment of their strengths, weaknesses and differentiators?
It may seem counterintuitive, but there are upsides: it establishes you as an industry expert, it shows that you’re honest, it gives your own differentiating factors credibility and, most importantly, it’s the page a researcher will come back to time and again for information. Rather than having to gather web addresses from five different companies and put a load of links in an email, for instance, it’s your page that’s going to be read and shared.
Learn from the best
Rishi Dave, CMO at Dun and Bradstreet, implemented a much grander version of the above idea in his previous role at Dell where he was instrumental in creating the Tech Centre community. Communities – hubs where buyers can discuss products and get information – were initially seen as the preserve of B2C.
But Dave pushed against this, arguing that communities can be hugely useful in a B2B setting where buyers need problems solving.
He describes the creation of the community like this: “The Tech Centre was a community which was focused on helping tech people make decisions. It was started just because a lot of tech buyers were asking tech questions. It started off with no money and existed on a third-party platform, but then it just grew because B2B buyers are self-nurturers. It also ended up driving a lot of sales, because in that industry tech buyers have a big say.”
This is a clear example of genuinely thinking like the customer and giving them what they need: it is not a place for pushing Dell products; it’s a place where buyers can educate themselves.
This change in mindset is vital: it drives customers and potential customers to a singular space enabling the collection of data, both in the form of obvious information like names, job titles and email addresses, but it also enables marketers to actually hear pain points, problems and how a whole industry – not just your company – could do better.