Placing the customer at the center of your business strategy is best for all companies, not just the B2C world. Creating a positive sales experience for clients throughout the entire funnel now can mean the difference between success and stagnation. The effect is quantifiable: B2B companies with marketing based centrally around the customer reported an average of 31% more growth in revenue. An additional report found that customer-centric marketing increases return on marketing (ROM) by up to 30%.
Market leaders in all major industries are making a push to this new customer centered marketing model. Here are some of their best techniques.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) anchors B2B customer centered programs for complex buying cycles. It is aligning sales and marketing on named accounts with personalized engagement and account-level metrics. Demandbase, Terminus, and 6sense enable orchestration, insights, and account measurement.
More Efficient Data Aggregation
Leading companies are making huge investments in full scale teams of marketing analysts to helm new software packages based around datacentric CRM. Many of these companies are taking their entire analytics operations online to take advantage of the wealth of resources in spaces such as the Oracle Marketing Cloud.
Customer Data Platforms unify consented first-party data into durable profiles. Teams are connecting CRM, web, and product usage to drive real-time segmentation and activation across email and paid media. Segment, Adobe Real-Time CDP, and Salesforce Data Cloud support GDPR and CCPA.
These aggregation strategies are also accompanied by engagement strategies. Companies such as Juniper Networks have taken great pains to close the gap between their marketing and sales teams. They are using the precision data they cultivate from social media and information grabs to ramp up their marketing campaigns with an eye to continuous improvement.
Customers Are Now Top Marketing Executives
Do not take that subheading seriously if these customers are not actually titled within the company; however, this is to the company’s advantage, because they do not actually have to pay their most insightful workers! Companies such as Wells Fargo are paying more attention than ever to the customer journeys they initiate with their sales funnels. They are developing personas around these journeys and segmenting their investments in advertising around these more detailed personalities.
Complex B2B deals involve 6 to 10 stakeholders researching independently. Buyers consult G2 and TrustRadius when building shortlists and validating claims. Encourage verified reviews, customer references, and role-specific content across channels, search and LinkedIn.
For instance, the same company may run three completely different marketing campaigns on the same social media network depending on the age, gender, income, hobbies and other psychographics of its audience. Most top distribution platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) are more than robust enough to accommodate these segmented, customer centered efforts.
Redesigning Internal Company Functions
Many new strategies run into friction at the top executive levels. Old-school executives have a problem moving into new patterns of marketing. The most efficient companies are restructuring their entire hierarchy to represent a more socialized approach to change.
Revenue Operations centralizes data, tools, and process across marketing, sales, and success, and partners with finance. Teams are using KPIs such as pipeline, retention, and expansion to drive cleaner handoffs. RevOps improves forecasting accuracy and attribution for customer centered initiatives.
Cross functional teams that involve several departments into a single function are more common now than ever. Many companies are employing or outsourcing the role of traffic controller to monitor the movement of data between departments. The role of executives has been scaled back in the sense of actually executing individual strategies, although they still retain the ability to change the overall vision of technical focus points within the company.
Considering the Customer Narrative
Marketing teams are now taking the lead in sponsoring digital transformation rallies around companies. These rallies are focused more on driving value than clicks – the old quality over quantity platitude that actually means quite a bit in the world of customer centric marketing.
Many companies have created a new role, the CX strategist, to keep marketing campaigns aligned directly with customer objectives. Although many technologies are quite able to follow the movements of customer segments, it still takes a human touch to apply the data streams that are created into a viable program. This is especially true because of the highly transient nature of customers in B2B product industries such as high tech, fashion and entertainment.
With more focus on the customer than ever, you can expect personalized solutions and companies that are very interested in what you have to say as a patron. It is definitely a good time for the consumer, and things are only looking up.
