There is no question that the Covid pandemic changed how businesses approach sales and marketing. It taught us that things can change on a dime and that agility is more important than ever. Today, businesses aren’t just focused on recouping their losses, but taking their companies to the next level. For this to happen, it’s essential for them to embrace B2B growth trends and be quick to adopt those that are relevant for their business and industry.
It’s crucial to be an early adopter of rising trends. Leveraging new growth trends gives you a competitive advantage over companies that only do what they’ve always done. B2B growth strategies are embracing B2C tactics that are focused on customer-first and building brand awareness and trust to tap into the market’s emotion.
Omnichannel Marketing
A customer’s purchase path can begin anywhere. It could be from sales pages on your website, a Facebook inquiry, a referral from one of your social media profiles, and so on.
Since every company channel has prospects at every stage of the sales funnel, it’s no surprise that omnichannel marketing is on the rise. Omnichannel marketing makes use of multiple channels that, together, form a unified customer experience.
It’s not the multichannel type of marketing where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Omnichannel marketing aligns sales efforts with marketing, across all distribution channels, allowing your target audience to get relevant interactions wherever they engage with your company.
When done right, omnichannel marketing reduces buyer friction. Ask for feedback from your existing customer base on their buyer’s journey experiences and see which areas you can improve to make engagement with your brand across different channels a more unified effort.
Hyper-personalization
Studies suggest that the average B2B customer spends about two minutes or less on a website. In that short amount of time, they need to know whether the product or service they’re considering will solve their problem. If they decide that it will, they need to be able to make the purchase or inquiry process seamless.
Even having too many fields on your contact or opt-in form can add friction and significantly lower completion rates. More companies are using tools like Clearbit to auto-fill forms by instantly inputting their data without having to repeatedly key in basic information manually.
Delivering the same message to prospects, even if it isn’t relevant to them at their stage in the buyer’s journey, doesn’t cut it with today’s buyers. Current marketing trends focus heavily on personalizing the buying journey for customers.
You can do this by making sure your customers receive the right message on the right channel at the right time. For example, instead of generic email blasts, find out your customers’ triggers to know which emails to send, boosting the overall effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
Today’s marketing looks to address these issues in the B2B space, with tools that don’t just attract marketing qualified leads (MQLs) but sales qualified leads (SQLs) ready for account-based sales and marketing efforts.
Virtual Events and Teams
As the world continues to grapple with the pandemic, work that can be done remotely will likely stay that way for the foreseeable future. This is one of the most popular growth trends. Businesses that still require in-office work could seriously impede their chances of retaining and attracting top talent; especially sales and marketing staff who don’t need an office to do great work. They simply need access to the right tools on the market so they can work from anywhere.
In terms of strategies for success, virtual alternatives to in-person meetings will still be a preferred way to connect. Companies were quick to adapt virtual conferences, workshops, and webinars, and many experienced an increase in participants, with attendees extending beyond their local pool and giving them global reach.
Customer Experience Management
With the strong global shift to digital that accelerated this past year, digital customer experience must be prioritized by B2B businesses who want to recover and grow. Mapping the customer journey is even more critical now, with companies needing to have a true understanding of how people interact with their brand to make genuine connections with their customers on their mobile devices.
More than 65% of customers said that their digital experience with a brand is important in referral marketing as well. Part of customer experience is also providing customers ways to give you feedback and creating business processes that allow you to respond to this feedback.
Your feedback system is also important as this is how you’ll get insights into customer sentiment, diagnose broad problems to make lasting solutions, and adjust problematic touchpoints on your customer journey map.
The same is true for support systems, with online channels now outperforming speaking with agents over the phone. Focusing on these channels allows you to scale your business by reallocating this budget onto other customer experience strategies.
Self-service tools are also on the rise, with customers preferring to do their own research and troubleshoot themselves before reaching out to help desks. A large part of customer experience management is making sure the content they have on hand to do their research is high-quality.
Key Takeaways
Customer buying has altered drastically during the pandemic. Businesses need to adapt to these changes by embracing what’s new in sales and marketing.
Growth trends show the line between B2B marketing and B2C marketing is blurring even more, with strategies once thought only effective or appropriate for B2C showing effectiveness in the B2B space.
At the end of the day, connecting with customers is what drives conversion. As you invest in the platforms and tools necessary to attract and convert customers in this new B2B paradigm, let Allied Financial help you safeguard your cashflow with a line of credit. Contact us today.