Guest post by Apoorv Bhatnagar. Revised April 25, 2022.
B2B customers have come to expect the same type and level of personalization as B2C customers. Consequently, businesses must personalize interactions across channels to form a rich, cohesive experience for B2B customers.
Here are ten tips to help ensure a smooth transition from single or multichannel marketing to an unforgettable omnichannel marketing campaign.
Ensure Buy-In Across Departments for Your Omnichannel B2B Marketing Initiative
The biggest key to success for any business initiative is team buy-in. Omnichannel B2B marketing experiences will require an “all hands on deck” approach from each department; without buy-in, your organization will struggle to deploy this new measure.
Look for change agents in your organization—those with a passion and excitement for what omnichannel experiences can bring to your organization’s value offerings. These change agents will answer questions, alleviate concerns, and show everyone in their department that this change is a vital part of moving forward, not just for management.
Use research to help “sell” colleagues and executives on the value of omnichannel B2B marketing efforts. As this infographic from Ibexa shows, 83% of B2B leaders believe omnichannel selling is vital to securing new business, and two of three B2B buyers agree, preferring remote assistance or digital self-service over “face to face” sales.
Utilize Localization
Localization is an essential tool for ensuring that your omnichannel experiences are tailored to your customers’ unique cultural expectations. Even within the same country, different areas may have different views and values, and localization provides a personalization at the cultural and language level.
Localization allows you to customize experiences to appeal to customers within a geographical boundary. It optimizes the entire experience to suit their needs rather than applying a set of generic, universal (i.e., irrelevant or worse, offensive) principles to deployment. Your customers will appreciate the cultural sensitivity and could become more loyal to your business because of it.
Optimize for Mobile
Though the majority of visits to B2B websites are still from desktops and laptops, mobile access (smartphones and tablets) is growing rapidly. Boston Consulting Group found that 60% of B2B users reported that mobile played a significant role in deciding purchases, and that was back in 2017. Mobile optimization is only getting more critical as millennials and Gen Z dominate the workforce.
Optimizing for mobile ensures that your company experiences are standardized across platforms. Your clients won’t tolerate a great website with a poor mobile experience. Check this off the list, and you automatically create better experiences overall. Now that Google has moved to mobile-first indexing, a great mobile experience is also a key part of SEO.
Map the Customer Journey
It’s impossible to build personalized experiences if you aren’t sure where your customers are coming from and where they’re going. Building a robust customer journey map helps you understand the steps customers take to come on board and how they progress through defined stages.
Physically mapping the journey helps you understand your customers’ and prospects’ movements across all channels. From here, you can optimize critical touchpoints to determine if your organization is offering a cohesive experience across all channels.
Outlining your customer experience prevents confusion and helps everyone in the organization get clear on the specific expectations customers may have.
Customize Messaging Based on Channel
Omnichannel experiences must be consistent, but they aren’t identical. Different platforms have different conventions, expectations, and formats; it’s vital to customize your messaging to provide a convenient and seamless experience.
This isn’t just about the logistics of the platform itself. Customers expect certain things from different platforms. An Instagram user probably won’t be happy with something formatted to be perfect for Twitter. Unclickable links and poor images will derail that offer quickly. To feel personalized, content and offers must also feel native to the channel itself.
Master Segmentation
The biggest personalization option you have is utilizing your customer segments. Omnichannel marketing can overload quickly without mastering segmentation. There are a variety of ways you can segment your audience, but they all have one thing in common—optimizing your marketing ROI by targeting the right audience with the right offer.
Omnichannel personalization is no different. Segmentation considers the background, role, and priorities of your B2B customer because it turns out that the type of customer doesn’t make humans any less … well… human.
Your B2B customers are still looking to solve their pains, change their lives, and find solutions they didn’t know they needed. Segmentation helps turn the vast space of omnichannel experience into something much more personal.
Invest Big in Omnichannel Customer Support
If you’re going big, you need the support to back it up. There is no omnichannel experience if even one element is lagging. Placing your best people in customer support roles across channels helps ensure seamless handoff no matter where or how your ideal customer decides to consume your offers.
You may need to hire more people, but don’t just think in terms of numbers. Invest big in experience, providing clients with customer support from those who have experience and understand the unique environment of omnichannel marketing offers. They’ll form a solid foundation for your customers’ experiences.
Honor and Value Privacy
Great omnichannel experiences rely, to some extent, on data sharing. You must have a transparent plan in place to keep your customers’ sensitive information safe from purposeful and accidental leaks.
Even better, a clearly outlined plan that’s available for every customer to see right away will help your B2B customers be comfortable with sharing, and more willing to share, their information to onboard into your full omnichannel experience.
Measure, Test, and Gather Vital Customer Data
Customer data is meaningless if you aren’t prepared to use it. Measuring your customer experience and then testing for continuous improvement is a critical part of continuing to deliver value and innovating throughout your omnichannel marketing.
Upgrade Your Own Software
You need the right software to support your omnichannel marketing strategies. The entire process can get unwieldy quickly, and the right software solutions can gather and protect data, provide support to customers, provide testing and innovation solutions, and build campaigns easily and effectively with full interdepartmental support.
Understanding your B2B customers and creating an unforgettable omnichannel experience can help you build a dedicated customer base and ensure your offers drive value. Products like CleverTap help you manage your data, channels, and personalization.
Apoorv Bhatnagar is the digital marketing manager at CleverTap. CleverTap’s platform helps customers design an omnichannel experience that brings their B2B customers back again and again. It’s time to wow B2B customers with a supportive, rich experience personalized to their needs.