Brands – Customers are more likely to buy from brands they know, like and trust
B2C marketeers have been creating strong brand identities for decades, but this is still fairly new in B2B marketing. You’ll have to show your Exec Team that your brand needs a personality that your customers will know, like and trust to strengthen customer relationships with your brand.
Personalities take time to ‘get to know’… for this, you’ll need to keep the DRIP of the long tail burning, long after planned campaigns, with continued targeted messages to your key personas. It’s not a case of turning the tap on and off but setting the tap to low then doing a top up again. This creates sustainability and it means it takes less effort and investment to kickstart a new campaign as you won’t have to start back at ground level… your brand familiarity will ensure you already have a good base level.
You’ll need to put the right trackers in place to monitor the effectiveness and contribution that brand is making towards pipeline and revenue.
Integrate marketing across the business – every customer touchpoint is a brand experience
Making sure that the company’s brand is consistent, reliable and authentic requires transparency and integration throughout the business.
The mutual relationship between sales and marketing has finally taken root with many sales teams working in close collaboration with the marketing department to engage their targets. Anyone who implements Account Based Marketing ABM knows this relationship is a critical requirement for this strategy to success. Take the time to aligning Sales and Marketing business metrics, goals and bonuses a close partnership and not 2 separate departments.
It doesn’t stop there … marketing must integrate beyond sales. Every customer touchpoint is a brand experience, and all your touchpoint teams need to be audited, designed and trained on the brand personality and correct customer experience (CX). If you think of the tone of voice that you would expect in a gaming platform would be very different to what you’d expect from your bank. Each communication style is unique yet fitting for that industry and channel.
Leading brands are now aligning and integrating marketing, sales, business development, customer
success, product and support teams. Revenue related to all forms of value and not just sales e.g., retention, good CX and brand loyalty are contributing to revenue success.
CX allows you to build customer relationship across the customer lifecycle
Marketing needs to be taking part and improving the entire customer journey and lifecycle.
The key to unlocking additional value is providing an outstanding CX – especially if you providing anything as-a-service. You’re only as good as your last interaction and subscriptions can be cancelled.
Marketing integration will forge individual customer relationships that increase personalisation and eases relevant communications. These authentic brand relationships create new opportunities for customer satisfaction and revenue growth.
Your toughest task is breaking down the internal silos. This is a steady approach to engage department heads and teams to bring them along the journey. You are the DJ in the organisational club, and you need to find the right tune that brings everyone to the dancefloor.
Your end goal would be to view the entire customer journey, for each individual customer, from the very first moment to present day.
We’re not there yet, but its key to make a start now with long-term investment in CX which will return dividends in the boardroom.
Auditing your customer journey touchpoints and mining current customer data will highlight where you can start to automate and integrate communications and reporting with your current tech stack.
Let’s chat
If you’d like to discuss how to make a start on auditing the customer journey and integrating marketing, drop me a message or book a complimentary no-obligation meeting and find out how I can help your business.
