b2b marketing

B2B Marketing Funnels

B2B Marketing Funnels

Marketing /

Regardless of your industry, you need customers to buy your product or service. However, satisfied customers who make repeat purchases, upgrade and become brand ambassadors for your company are even better. A positive customer experience generates loyal customers. You can accomplish this with B2B marketing funnels.

To read this article in its entirety, continue, or you can “jump ahead” to the following topics:

The Importance of Positive Customer Experience

Think about it. Would you do business with a company you don’t have a relationship with? Probably not. This is why a positive customer experience through the B2B customer journey is so important. 

When customers have a pleasant interaction with your business, they are apt to spend more and recommend your company to others. Conversely, B2B customers who have a bad experience will ditch your company for another and broadcast their disappointment in word of mouth and online reviews. In fact, customer experience will be the main differentiator between brands. 

Customer experience is catching the attention of marketers. One study found that almost half of the companies responding seek to invest more in ensuring a positive customer experience.  

Customers value customer experiences

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In a competitive B2B market where customers can access everything at their virtual fingertips, a positive customer experience is everything. The most successful companies deliver superior customer experience throughout the B2B marketing funnel stages.  

A positive customer interaction begins with successful navigation through your B2B marketing funnel. This powerful relationship-builder starts with the first interaction with your brand and extends beyond conversion or purchase. Your B2B marketing funnel is designed to not only result in initial sales, but to create a loyal, repeat customer base.

A positive customer experience begins with a map of your customer’s journey through all the touchpoints with your business. This map will help you identify trouble areas and barriers that keep people from making a purchase.

Mapping the B2B Customer Journey

To deliver a positive customer experience, you need to get into the customer’s shoes. This involves being familiar with all the touchpoints a prospect will encounter in becoming a paying customer. 

LeadBoxer Marketing Funnel
LeadBoxer Marketing Funnel

The customer journey begins with making them aware of your brand and ends when their relationship with your company ceases. Touchpoints commonly include advertising, PR, marketing, content production, sales support and interactions with sales representatives.

A B2B customer journey map moves a company to be more customer-centric. Your company will be more mindful of your customer’s experience with your brand throughout the purchasing process. This tool helps you improve your funnel to ensure a pleasant customer service interaction so people will return. 

Each company will have a different customer journey. For B2B customers, this journey is complex and time-consuming because of the following: 

  • It takes more time to get buy-in from senior management
  • It requires getting cooperation from various staff involved in the different stages of the customer journey 
  • There is the unknown availability of resources needed for a company to implement a new product or service 
  • Possible uncertainty about how to get started using your product or service, especially for multi-site locations 
  • Technical or service requirements a product or service needs to pass before being implemented

The added complexities of B2B customer journey mapping can either make maps overly complex or simplified. As a result, there is the risk of being process-driven instead of experience-driven. This can make your brand seem out of touch with customers. 

The B2B Marketing Funnel

Marketing funnels are the processes of taking website prospects and converting them into customers and advocates for your brand. Each stage of the B2B marketing funnel has relevant content that boosts your company’s trustworthiness. The more authority your company has, the stronger your relationship with customers, resulting in a better customer experience.

In B2B marketing funnels, prospects are broken into customer journey stages where they are delivered tailored messaging. Each of your customers will travel through these stages on the way to becoming loyal, repeat customers. Your prospects must be moving onto the next stage through the funnel.

B2B Marketing Funnel Stages

As previously mentioned, the B2B marketing funnel is divided into stages. These stages are top of funnel (ToF), middle of funnel (MoF) and bottom of the funnel (BoF). The top of funnel stage will have the largest audience while the bottom of the funnel will have the smallest.

Top of Funnel

At the top of the B2B marketing funnel, you have prospects who aren’t aware of your brand, product or service. This stage is all about spreading awareness of your product or service and how it can solve a prospect’s problem. This is usually done by educating prospects and answering their high-level questions in blogs, articles and videos.

At the top of the funnel, you want to attract prospects to your website in order to spread awareness. As people don’t know much about your brand, product or service, this is not the stage in which to try a hard sell. Once your prospects show interest or desire, they are ready to move forward toward the middle of the funnel.

b2b marketing funnel stages

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Middle of Funnel

While the bottom of the funnel focuses on awareness, the middle of the funnel is about sharing product details. Prospects that make it to this stage are interested in learning more about what exactly you have to offer. The extra sharing of information about your offerings helps you gauge your user’s experience.

Some of the content you might use at this B2B marketing funnel stage include:

  • eBooks
  • Whitepapers
  • Case studies
  • Webinars
  • Tutorials
  • Landing pages
  • Surveys
  • Email sequences

Customers who respond well to the middle of the funnel stage, then move on to the bottom of the funnel stage. This is where you push for the final sale. 

Bottom of the Funnel 

At the bottom of the funnel, your goal is to sell your product or service. A secondary goal at this stage is to build customer loyalty. Purchases are good, but generating loyal, repeat customers is even better. 

At this stage, customers are familiar with your brand and offerings. They also have had many relationship-building interactions with your company. Your chief aim is to build customer loyalty by informing them of the value of your product or service. 

Email marketing, especially onboarding email sequencing is effective at this final stage of the funnel. In these emails, teach customers to fully utilize your product or service and let them know all the ways your offering can benefit them. 

Bottom of the funnel content types

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You can also send surveys to new customers asking about their experience and inviting them to join a loyalty program. You not only want customers to make a purchase, you also want to persuade them to become brand ambassadors for your company. 

The Role of SEO Content in the B2B Customer Journey

Strong content is a game-changer in digital marketing. The more informative, relevant and personal your brand’s content, the better your lead generation and sales will be. This is because well-written content delivered to the right people builds your brand’s authority and trustworthiness.

People who see that a company is knowledgeable and transparent will be more willing to do business with that company. As in generic digital marketing, great content is crucial in your customer journey mapping and funnel effectiveness. In fact, 87% of marketers create content for each stage of the customer journey.

The B2B marketing funnel and all the B2B customer journey steps can’t build customer/business relationships without content. Each touchpoint along the customer journey needs to have well-written, strategic content. What you communicate with the customer should meet them where they are and encourage them to move forward.  

Customer Journey Mapping and SEO

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With content marketing for B2B marketing funnel stages, produce quality content that answers your audience’s questions. Cover topics of interests in your niche or industry to make your company the authoritative source of information. 

Content marketing also includes search engine optimization (SEO). This type of B2B marketing funnel content will utilize researched keywords and link building techniques. 

In today’s digital age, you can’t create effective content without using keywords. Content without keywords will not be picked up by search engines. When this happens, your great content will never be seen by your ideal audience. 

After you identify your keywords, use them throughout all your digital assets. This includes website content, product descriptions, blogs, whitepapers and video transcripts. 

Another tactic used in SEO content is link building. This involves strategically inserting links throughout your content. These links can be either internal, linking to a page on your website, or external, linking to outside sites. 

It is best to use a combination of internal and external links. The external links need to go to reputable sites to further your brand’s credibility. When link building, don’t use too many links, as your content will be penalized.

All the B2B marketing funnel stages and each touchpoint along the B2B customer journey need SEO content. This type of content will target a specific audience, catching their attention and compelling them toward the next stage. Your content will inform prospects and turn them into loyal, repeat customers. 

To generate B2B leads and sales, you build relationships with your prospects and customers. Excellent customer service and experiences with your company are the foundations for this relationship building. 

Great customer experience comes through meeting your customers where they are in the buying process. It also comes through understanding the journey your customers go through from brand awareness to making purchases. 

LeadBoxer’s unique lead generation platform with its full complement of integrations, make it easy for you to target and communicate with your ideal customer base consistently and effectively, ensuring a great customer experience. 

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B2B Marketing Workflow Automation Guide

B2B Marketing Workflow Guide

Marketing /

The B2B industry continues to benefit from innovation sparked by the evolution and implementation of new technologies. As they advance the process of emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, companies are adopting practices that were discovered during the shift to virtual work spaces.

Automation remains a key player for competitive B2B companies. By embracing B2B marketing automation tools, your team will have clean data and continuous communication with leads. Duplication is avoided; the process is streamlined, and you have the flexibility to reallocate resources to other departments as needed! 

This means your marketing team will be able to accurately track the success or the need to fine tune campaigns in real time!

By allowing automation to take over parts of your marketing department’s daily, repetitive tasks,  engagement and lead nurturing can be prioritized resulting in a higher conversion rate.

Keep reading, or use the links below to “jump ahead”, to learn the best ways to optimize and automate your marketing process.

The Benefits of Marketing Automation

how marketing automation works

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Marketing is a key component in the success of any B2B company. This outreach allows your company to communicate with leads and generate interest in your product and services.

LeadBoxer’s Workflow Automation allows your marketing team to Assign, Route and Qualify leads using automated rules you can set and configure to meet your customized needs. Learn more about how LeadBoxer can help your organization streamline its marketing workflow by scheduling a free demo and signing up for a free trial today!

B2B marketing automation is a must have for enabling your marketing and sales teams to become more efficient and effective. This is essential for making a good first impression on potential customers. Replacing repetitive tasks with automated workflows allows your marketing team to focus on creating meaningful campaigns that showcase the value of your product or service.

Automation helps align your marketing and sales departments. While their daily tasks look different, collaboration between sales and marketing teams is vital. Automation assists with every aspect of lead management, from lead qualification to following up with prospects and providing valuable insights into customer engagement with your content.

By gathering this data from your automated marketing practices, the department will be able to share these insights with salespeople. This will help refine their sales process and clean up the sales funnel. With the marketing and sales departments properly aligned, less leads will fall through the cracks and customer relationships will be strengthened.

Through automated practices, lead generation is apt to increase. When using a platform like Leadboxer, information can be gathered from website and email campaign engagement. This allows your marketing team to identify more prospects based on their activity with your content.

Follow up time for new leads can be shortened by utilizing trigger points. When prospects engage with your content, follow up communication can be sent automatically. 

This practice helps keep the lead warm, as well as collect data to score and qualify the customer. Once this lead is ready to be passed to sales, there will already be a line of communication in place, upon which the salesperson can build.

Automation optimizes the lead nurturing process. For customers who aren’t quite ready to hit the sales funnel, automated communication through relevant content can keep your product top of mind. This helps create strong brand awareness and nurtures the potential relationship. 

Your marketing and sales team will have access to cleaner data through automation. Featuring easy to install Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Integration, Leadboxer helps fill in the details while constantly tracking leads. This allows your team to feel confident in their contact information and provides valuable insights into a prospect’s recent engagement. 

With accurate data, aligned departments and increased lead generation, B2B marketing automation offers huge benefits for your company. Once your team is ready to move forward with this strategy, creating a workflow will help keep things on track.

Getting Started With an Automated Marketing Workflow

Automated Marketing Workflow

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Simply put, an automated marketing workflow is a series of triggers and steps that help streamline efforts. Almost any step in the process can be automated, and your team will need to decide which areas can benefit most from this.

First, identify the steps your team will want to take before, during and after the automation is implemented. The goal is not to replace your entire marketing team but to streamline the process, so your team can focus on improving their outreach and content.

Most likely, your first step will be to generate a list of leads for outreach. Then, the automated marketing will take care of the communication. After the campaign has been launched, your team should carefully evaluate the reactions from leads.

Allow leads to be segmented by their responses. Qualified leads will be handed off to sales to begin their journey within the sales funnel. From there, your team can begin another campaign and restart the process.

Understanding Best Practices for Automation

B2B marketing automation is different from your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy, but the two may share similar goals. Both are best executed with proper software. 

Platforms like Leadboxer help automate some of your marketing tasks while also qualifying and segmenting leads. This technology should integrate with your CRM to make sure data is accessible across departments.

Next, you’ll need to understand which tasks are being automated through this strategy. This will include trigger points for integrations designed to work with your existing tech stack for enhanced data collection and email marketing automation tools including email tracking and email marketing campaigns.

Data Collection

Website and social media engagement is crucial for identifying new leads. Most customers begin their search for solutions online. This means their first interaction with your company will most likely occur when your site pops up in an online search, or when a customer comes across your social media.

Having an automated process to collect data can help speed up the lead nurturing process. By allowing software to gather information based on a prospect’s interaction with your site, leads can be accurately qualified.

The gathered data will also help build out customer profiles in your CRM. This helps your marketing and sales team have the most up to date information on leads. Communication efforts will benefit from this data.

Trigger Points

Gathering data is nice, but having action behind website engagement can help boost the number of leads in your sales funnel. Trigger points are a key aspect in automated B2B marketing practices.

To create the best trigger points for your company, study the behavior of website visitors. Identify which interactions lead to customers who are ready to enter the sales funnel. Once this has been decided on, create an automated follow up to streamline outreach.

Keeping leads warm is crucial to successfully moving them all the way through the sales pipeline. An automated touchpoint created by a trigger point takes the stress away from having a real human follow up. This allows your salespeople to begin prepping for their pitch before they’ve even had a conversation.

Trigger points can also help convert leads who may not be in the purchasing mindset. Automated follow ups through website engagement can help your marketing team segment leads who need nurturing. This helps your team get these prospects on email lists for future campaigns.

Email Marketing

Creating touch points through email campaigns is a great way to keep leads engaged with your brand. Automation can help free up your team to focus on other goals by handling the distribution of this content.

Once content has been created, your marketing team can allow automation to handle the rollout of the campaign. This includes monthly newsletters, educational resources, and product updates.

Your team will also be able to track the engagement of these campaigns, which helps plan future marketing efforts. Combine this tracking with your lead scoring efforts to make sure leads are being properly segmented and handed off to sales in a timely manner.

Key Takeaways

Marketing efforts are crucial for companies to remain competitive within the B2B industry. They help your salespeople identify prospects and allow your company to build brand awareness. Your marketing department plays a major role in connecting customers with the right solution for their needs.

By embracing an automated process, your marketing and sales teams can benefit from an increase in leads, better lead quality and cleaner data. Automation also helps free up resources and employees to help your company focus on bigger picture items.

B2B marketing automation helps streamline costs within your organization. By reducing the amount of people who are needed to take on repetitive tasks, your marketing budget can be evaluated for bigger projects.

Automation helps reduce duplicated efforts and the introduction of human error. By utilizing software that integrates with your CRM, automated marketing efforts can avoid duplication across departments.

The customer experience may see improvements from implementing this strategy. With trigger points that handle immediate follow ups, clients will feel important and valued. Having fresh data can also help your salespeople deliver a better customer journey through the pipeline.

Automated marketing practices can also help fine tune your outreach strategies. By gaining feedback from customers and tracking valuable insights, your team will have the knowledge needed to adjust campaigns. It also allows you to see your strengths and weaknesses through lead engagement. 

Overall, B2B marketing automation can prove to be a key factor in helping to take your company to the next level. 

Take Leadboxer up on its offer of a Free Trial today to see how its innovative lead generation platform featuring key integrations can help automate your marketing efforts and accelerate the growth of your B2B business!

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Psychographics A Game Changer for B2B Marketing

Psychographics: A Game Changer for B2B Marketing?

Marketing /

Understanding your target demographic is crucial to successful marketing in the B2B industry. Campaigns rely on strong data surrounding consumer behavior. Rather than reaching out to a broad audience, segmentation can make sure messaging gets to the right leads at the ideal time.

Creating a marketing segmentation plan can help jumpstart these efforts. There are several ways to segment your audience including firmographics, demographics, geographics, behavioral and psychographics.

Psychographics for B2B marketing may be a huge key to helping your company remain competitive within your industry. By separating your clients and creating outreach based on lifestyles, relevant information about your products reaches qualified leads to push them into your sales funnel.

Read on or use the links below to jump ahead to learn more:

What Are Psychographics?

Audiences can be segmented into several different categories. By focusing on psychological traits like lifestyle, personal interests and opinions, outreach will target consumers based on their psychographics. 

This information looks deeper into the behavior of the target consumer. The goal of psychographic segmentation is to gain valuable insight into the lifestyle and preferences of your ideal audience. While it seems like a great way to categorize leads, this information is not always as obvious as demographics and may require data discovery.

Having this type of understanding allows your marketing team to create content that resonates with buyers. This will encourage engagement and allow for the development of a strong customer relationship.

Psychographics can also help uncover new leads. When identifying the audience and targeting your outreach, marketing can focus on sourcing new leads who follow similar behavioral patterns. Understanding what motivates your customers is important, but psychographics can also be paired strategically with demographics. 

demographics vs psychographics

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Simply put, demographics explain who is buying your products while psychographics break down the factors behind the purchase. Utilizing this data together for segmentation can help narrow your targeted audience even further

For example, demographics might include gender or religion, while psychographics look at the buyer’s habits. Not all individuals in the same demographic group are motivated by the same factors, which is why combining behavioral traits is helpful. This data allows your marketing team to round out the ideal buyer persona as well as segment audiences based on personal preferences.

Along with segmentation, psychographics can provide valuable insights to inform your ideal customer profile. This big-picture strategy helps your company make overarching decisions around marketing, sales and product development. 

The customer profile is created by assessing your product and the value it adds to the market, as well as defining ideal customer characteristics. By understanding the psychographics of your clients, this profile can be tailored to reflect real consumer behavior.

This data allows your organization to see the ‘why’ behind each purchase. Lifestyle data helps determine how customers are choosing to buy products and what motivates the purchase. This type of information can play a large role in any product updates or future rollouts. 

Breaking Down Types of Psychographics

Buyer persona psychographics

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It’s important to realize there is a difference between behavioral data and psychographics within the B2B industry. Behavioral segmentation relies heavily on product and content engagement. Essentially, this category looks at the way customers are interacting directly with your brand.

Psychographics are still informed by consumer behavior, but it’s more about lifestyle choices. Rather than tracking product usages, this type of analysis looks at how consumer values and habits affect buying decisions. The daily actions of customers are studied to better understand what type of person may benefit from the solution your company provides.

The goal of this segmentation is to target leads who will be most receptive to your outreach. It can help foster strong customer relationships based on emotions and shared values. This can lead to stronger brand loyalty and potentially increase return on investment (ROI) by encouraging repeat purchases.

When gathering this data, it’s important to have a grasp on which factors fall under psychographics. Below are a few examples to help your team get started.

Lifestyle 

This includes how a consumer fits into society and where their values lie. Characteristics for this category may include relationship status, type of occupation, or homeowners vs. renters. This data helps segment people based on what stage of life they are in. 

Habits and Opinions

People tend to stick to their habits rather than breaking them. This is important for marketing to understand since many customers may have specific habits when it comes to content engagement and the sales cycle. 

Understanding the makeup of a customer’s daily life can have a significant impact on advertising choices. For example, if your ideal customers prefer to do product research via social media rather than company websites, outreach can be tailored to better accommodate this type of engagement.

Behaviors

While segmentation can be categorized on behavior alone, it can also work in conjunction with psychographics. These characteristics can be studied through product usage, content engagement and purchase history. This data can help segment outreach by anticipating a timeline for when your leads may be most interested in making a purchase based on their prior actions.

Social Class

Economic status influences purchasing behavior. While social class may also be a self-identification for some people, this information does provide valuable insight for purchase capacity.

Personality Traits

Understanding the types of personality your products attract helps your marketing team develop content that will resonate with your leads. Not all of your customers will have the same personality traits, so this type of segmentation can make sure content reaches the right person. This can help increase engagement across campaigns.

Interests

Similar to personalities, a person’s interests can help steer the direction of your marketing. Segmenting leads and sending outreach based around clients’ interests helps form a strong connection with your brand. This can also help your marketing team avoid sending out fluff to leads.

Using the data found around client interests can make sure your outreach is relevant to the receiver.

The Importance of Audience Segmentation

Your marketing department’s ROI benefits from data-driven campaigns that encourage customer engagement. Before a lead can enter into the sales pipeline, it must be qualified and segmented into the proper group for continuous outreach. These efforts help nurture leads and eventually guide them through the buyer journey.

The goal of marketing efforts is more than just landing a sale. The department should be focused on creating lasting relationships to encourage repeat sales and promote brand loyalty. It can cost up to five times more to acquire a new customer compared to the cost of retaining an existing one.

By using psychographics to tailor content and segment target audiences, marketing can help strengthen client relationships. Using this segmentation helps break audiences down into more specific groups. Broad outreach may feel impersonal and doesn’t provide a unique call-to-action based on the customer’s current needs.

Instead, using psychographic segmentation ensures content is personalized and helps set attainable next steps based on a lead’s preferences. Overall, audience segmentation should help improve the relationship between leads and your company.

Psychographics help by providing a deeper understanding of customer needs and driving communication. By shifting the conversation to focus on customer interests, your teams will be better equipped to sell the product.

Sales pitches and marketing contact can feature ways your product is able to improve your customer’s life. Psychographic data allows for accurate examples of these improvements to be used based on lifestyle and habits.

This data can also help improve overall product features. By understanding why customers are using your product, features and updates can be created to meet their needs. Psychographics also allow your product to be customized based on different buyer personas, allowing for more options to choose from.

Gathering Psychographic Data

Once you have a grasp on the benefits of psychographics, it’s time to start gathering data to implement this strategy. While it may seem like a daunting task to try and understand the motivations of potential new leads, there are several approaches that can jumpstart the process.

Speak To Current Clients

You already have existing customers who use your product, so understanding their lifestyle is a great place to start gathering psychographic data. This approach allows your team to decide how many customers you’d like to speak with to gather this information. 

First, make a list of your top clients. If you have a strong relationship with them already, getting to know more about them is a good way to figure out what your ideal client profile looks like. Schedule a time to speak with them, or create questions you’d like to ask next time they reach out. 

These questions should focus on their lifestyle, hobbies and interests. They can be as simple as “What did you do this weekend?” or “What does a typical evening after work look like for you?” This can help create conversations around their lifestyles and provide insight into what motivates them.

Going further than a handful of top-tier clients, your marketing team can create a customer survey and send it out for feedback. If you choose to take this approach, try to be as transparent as possible with the recipients. Explain that your company is trying to better understand their clients to help provide the best experience possible.

Try Focus Groups

This is a way to gather unbiased feedback from participants that are not immediately familiar with your product and services. While this group does not include current customers, it is important to keep the sample size as close to your target audience as possible. Use demographic information from clients to model your focus group. 

Create a questionnaire that helps provide the type of feedback you want to gather. For example, make sure that the questions you are asking focus on the participants’ lifestyle rather than just your product. 

Utilize Third Party Research Companies

While handling the research on your own can help gather insight from current clients, consider sourcing this part out to a third-party company.  Market research companies can focus on similar demographics to your target audience. This allows your sample pool to widen while still gathering relevant information.

Use Website Analytics

Content engagement can tell you a lot about a person. Information can be gathered from the type of content that gets the most clicks, the time of day purchases typically occur, and what website forms gain the most traction.

Data can be collected regarding the usage of discount codes to help segment those who prefer a bargain deal. Seeing which blog posts have the most visitors can determine what type of people are using your products and which areas they are searching for more information about.

If you’re not already utilizing the data provided by website analytics, now is a great time to get started. Software like Leadboxer can help track this type of engagement across platforms, while simultaneously uncovering new leads from website traffic.

Approaching Psychographics in B2B Marketing

This strategy should focus on motivating customers based on their current needs. Segmentation allows you to run multiple campaigns simultaneously while making sure content is tailored to the intended audience. Your team should work to provide any resources needed to complete a purchase.

Find ways to incorporate the customer’s priorities into all of the content they receive from your company. For example, if exercise is one of the main hobbies of your target audience, publish a blog talking about how daily exercise can lead to productivity at work. If possible, you could include pictures on social media that display these hobbies in a way that relates to your product.

Make sure the call-to-action is customized to encourage engagement from each audience. This can be as simple as including language that reflects their interests.

When planning outreach and applying psychographics, your team needs to determine which factors are going to segment the recipients. There are a multitude of options to choose from, so it’s important to narrow the scope before planning a campaign.

Leveraging Psychographics to Optimize Marketing Efforts

This strategy goes further than simply segmenting your email campaign lists. It can be used across your website and all social media channels. This content will help reach new leads, nurture relationships and encourage brand loyalty from existing customers.

Social Media

Chances are, your marketing team is posting content on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, as well as running targeted ad campaigns. Psychographics can help determine how to develop content that resonates with your intended viewers.

On social media posts, work to make content that goes further than a sales pitch. Not every post needs to invite a sale. Some of these posts can be educational, or may provide a behind the scenes look at your organization. This type of content can be used to address the lifestyle of your audience without overdoing the promotional material.

Utilize social media as a way to organically grow relationships with your target audience. Becoming a thoughtful leader within your industry that provides content based on psychographics can help promote brand loyalty and boost engagement. Your customers will be able to come to your social media channels for advice and share this content across their own channels when it aligns with their values.

Blogs

Using the blog space on your page should be a priority for your marketing team. This content is crucial for multiple reasons including SEO, website engagement and providing valuable information to customers.

This is a great way to create content that is tailored to specific groups of customers. Using psychographic data can help your team determine blog topics that will resonate with your leads. This helps your brand showcase your product and provide information that is relevant to your industry.

When creating these posts, find ways to incorporate psychographics into the title to immediately draw readers into the piece. Rather than simply writing about the ways your product is useful, tie it into your audience’s interests. For example, if your target customer works in marketing, including a piece about the “Top 10 Ways Lead Generation Can Improve Your B2B Marketing” is a great way to encourage engagement.

Testimonials

Encouraging buyers to purchase your product through other user’s experience helps build trust. If you have clients who are similar to your targeted lead audience, use their positive feedback to showcase the solutions your company has to offer.

This content can be created for different stages in the customer journey, which helps buyers who may be on the fence about making a final decision. Not only should this information discuss how satisfied current customers are, it should also tie into the lifestyle of your segmented audience.

Continuing with the marketing example from above, show your leads how the product has helped customers streamline their marketing efforts and increase ROI. This will entice prospects to either make a purchase or reach out to your sales team for more information on next steps.

Customer Appreciation

While psychographics can be used to uncover new leads, it can also help strengthen current relationships and encourage a continued partnership with your customers. Buyers who have already purchased your product will be more interested in remaining with your company when they feel appreciated.

Using psychographics can provide insight into the lifestyles of customers and shine a light on their current needs. This gives an opportunity for your brand to showcase how well they understand their clients.

Consider sending out appreciation gifts that are relevant to your customer’s interests instead of something with generic branding. The extra effort will illustrate the values your company has in common with these clients.

Key Takeaways

Audience segmentation can play a vital role in successful B2B marketing. Rather than simply grouping customers by demographics, using psychographics can provide valuable insight into the lives of your target audience.

This strategy is a great way to uncover new leads, strengthen existing relationships, and build trust as a key player in your industry. It can also work well with other types of segmentation to help build out your ideal client profile and inform the buyer journey.

Before incorporating this into your marketing efforts, it is important to have a grasp on the different categories of psychographics to determine which will benefit your audience the most. These include personality type, lifestyle and habits. Each can be utilized to create targeted content that encourages engagement.

Make sure to set aside the time and resources needed to successfully gather psychographic data. This can include customer surveys, focus groups or outsourcing to a third-party company. Most importantly, continue gathering this data as your customer base and list of leads grows.

Psychographics may change as your product continues to develop, and it is helpful to have up-to-date data to drive marketing efforts. Track website analytics to have accurate data that provides valuable insights into consumer behavior.

Consider using software like Leadboxer to uncover and qualify new leads as they interact with your site. This can help segment potential leads into audience groups as soon as they are introduced to your brand.

Allow this data to help inform your marketing content and create pieces that provide more than a sales pitch to prospects. Utilize social media channels and blog posts to create organic connections with customers based on their hobbies and interests. Use this content as a way to tie in your product or services with their lifestyle, but make sure the pieces aren’t full of fluff.

Make sure calls-to-actions are personalized. This encourages engagement from customers and can help your marketing team qualify leads by understanding where each prospect is within the sales journey.

Overall, psychographics for B2B marketing can help elevate your campaigns to the next level, as well as increase your ROI. Use these strategies as a way to nurture relationships and promote brand loyalty.

To begin incorporating psychographics and segmentation into your lead generation process, check out Leadboxer for a free trial!

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The Importance of Single Customer View in B2B Marketing

The Importance of Single Customer View in B2B Marketing Today

Marketing /

Customer experience is an essential component of success for B2B companies. Building brand loyalty and encouraging long lasting customer relationships can help boost your company’s overall return on investment (ROI).

While having a good product still matters, customer experience has added an additional layer of competition between B2B businesses. A customer centric business model will require transparency across departments and a deep understanding of client behavior.

Through a single customer view, your entire company should be able to access relevant data on clients, regardless of the department. By integrating this into your business strategy, your company can stay on top of the journey and experience your clients receive.

Keep reading to learn about a single customer view, or use the following links to jump ahead:

What is a Single Customer View?

Simply put, a single customer view is a consistent collection of data that can be accessed by all departments for an accurate summary of clients. Going a little deeper into this strategy, a single customer view is implemented through the daily systems your team uses.

By investing in software that provides the ability to collect this data across departments, your business is able to begin benefiting from this information. This should help your departments seamlessly transition customers between each stage of the buyer’s journey, which will improve the overall customer experience.

A single customer view helps avoid any issues in the buyer’s journey. By aligning data and company goals into one platform, the amount of miscommunication between departments is minimized. This also allows your company to track key performance indicators (KPIs) across all teams, which can help pinpoint problem areas and provide insight into which areas need improvement.

Most importantly, this strategy will help your team make sure the customer is central to all business decisions. According to a Gartner Trend Insight Report, 80% of organizations within the B2B industry are competing with each other on customer experience rather than solely on the product.

By having a data-driven customer strategy, your company will remain competitive within the industry. Gartner also found that 50% of companies have found a way to track the financial gain of customer experience initiatives. Not only will a single customer view help improve the overall journey, it can also provide valuable financial insights for your company.

The Benefits of a Single Customer View

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A successful customer experience doesn’t happen overnight. While your product might help meet a client’s needs, the buyer journey is just as important as the end result. A great starting point for improving the sales cycle is taking a customer centric approach.

This means relying on accurate data to evaluate the journey as well as identify areas of improvement.

With social media marketing and online buying continuing to rise in popularity, the customer journey begins before the prospect is introduced to an actual salesperson. In some instances, they may not even speak with a salesperson until they are ready to make a purchase.

Because of this, utilizing a single customer view can help all your departments improve their interactions with new site visitors and existing clients.

One of the biggest benefits of a single customer view is cleaner data. Information from your target audience and current customers is valuable for informing future product decisions. Traditional marketing and sales practices don’t constantly communicate across departments, which can lead to information being siloed.

By having up-to-date contact information, customer history, and data based on marketing engagements, all departments will be able to see the buyer’s journey in real-time. This helps encourage communication between teams when there is an issue that needs to be addressed or when tactics are yielding positive results.

This also helps cut down duplicate information. Rather than multiple departments logging similar data, a single view allows your team to see what has already been recorded. This keeps your data clean and coherent.

A single customer view allows your team to have access to better insights. An accurate portrayal of the buyer’s experience can help employees measure the success of campaigns and sales tactics. This provides value to your marketing department as they can plan for future outreach to find the right audience.

Alongside having a clearer idea of what the customer experiences, this tactic helps your team measure KPIs accurately. Assigning data driven metrics is a great way to encourage your teams to meet their goals. By using this data, your company is able to create realistic KPIs and re-evaluate when teams are not hitting the mark.

Understanding customer behavior helps your marketing department track which channels are best for campaigns. A single customer view tracks customer engagement across platforms to determine what’s most likely to gain interaction from your target audience. This insight can help your company allot the proper resources for the most successful channels.

A single customer view helps optimize your company’s workflow to produce the best results. From the beginning of the sales process, leads are identified and qualified in the same platform. This helps marketing and sales departments accurately segment audiences to ensure each qualified lead is being nurtured by the right team.

Leadboxer, with its unique offering of the platform’s native integrations combined with the integration of the best email marketing applications, allows your team to integrate with your current techstack. This cuts down on unnecessary duplication between programs, and allows your employees to work with familiar software.

Techstack integration is a major benefit of the single customer view. It helps your marketing department track engagement across multiple channels including email, social media and website engagement. When implemented on a lead data platform, data is collected and accessible for all teams.

What is Customer Intelligence?

It is not a secret that customers are getting quicker and more efficient during the sales process. With the rise of online sales, prospects are able to conduct their own research and engage with a free trial before speaking to a salesperson.

However, customer intelligence does not refer to an increase in self-sufficient prospects. Rather, it defines the process of collecting data to understand insights about consumer behavior. This helps companies create a successful customer journey that provides an excellent experience.

Customer intelligence is more than using data to achieve client satisfaction. It is a practice that helps companies fine tune their internal processes, tighten up marketing campaigns and boost customer retention.

Understanding the target audience, or the ideal client profile, for your product is a crucial first step to B2B success. Customer intelligence takes this one step further by helping provide insights into the behavior of real leads and customers.

Expanding upon the client profile, data from current customers and potential leads can inform the decisions your company makes for marketing and sales campaigns.

Customer intelligence comes from multiple sources and tracks a variety of consumer data. On the internal side, this information can come from outbound calls, sales pitch meetings and interactions with your customer success team.

Internal customer intelligence is generated any time a member of your company interacts with a client. Between marketing, sales and customer success, the number of interactions can start to add up quickly. To avoid missing important feedback or duplicating efforts, storing this data in a platform with a single customer view can be a huge help.

As your teams gather internal information, the client profile can be updated in real time to reflect the customer’s current position in the sales funnel. This data benefits every department.

Your marketing team will be able to segment customers to ensure they are receiving relevant campaigns. Salespeople will be able to create a timeline for communications and set follow-up reminders. Customer success can make sure onboarding materials are prepped.

External data comes from a variety of sources including personal demographics, geographic location and marketing campaign engagement. Using website metrics as external data helps your team identify and qualify potential leads as they interact with your pages.

Successful customer intelligence relies on both external and internal data to provide informed patterns of client behavior. Just like internal information, external data should be stored in your single customer view platform. This information helps give a complete client profile alongside the interactions with your company.

Overall, customer intelligence will help boost your ROI and increase customer retention. Prioritizing the customer experience and tailoring methods through data-driven decisions helps create lasting business relationships.

Having a customer centric approach means your target audience is at the forefront of all business operations. By storing your customer intelligence on a single view platform, the ‘customer first’ approach can be implemented easily across all departments.

Single Customer View Vs. Traditional Marketing Tactics

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Although proper software is an important component, the single customer view is more than just utilizing a platform. It is a process for storing data that helps your company provide the best customer experience. To be successful in this strategy, using an integrated platform like Leadboxer is a good place to start.

Traditionally, marketing and sales teams work side-by-side, but not always together. The sales department may put more focus on warm leads, while the marketing team spends their time identifying prospects.

When these employees are working with different types of clients, it is easy for miscommunication to occur. Salespeople may be having active conversations with a customer while the marketing department is adding them to a segmented list of prospects that haven’t been contacted. While this may not seem like a huge slip up, it is a waste of time, and it may confuse potential clients.

The single customer view helps eliminate these mistakes by allowing both teams to work simultaneously with the same data. Using Leadboxer puts important information into one easy-to-access platform. This software allows your marketing department to track email campaigns and website engagement, while your salespeople are sharing where prospects are at in the sales cycle.

Leadboxer provides more than just the ability for teams to see the same data. It encourages collaboration between departments, so customers get the right amount of attention and client relationships are continuously nurtured.

Knowing where someone is in the buyer’s journey helps both teams develop a strategy to close the deal. Sales and marketing employees can work together to determine the best segmentation of audiences and which campaigns each lead type should receive.

Eliminating the silos of information within departments will help your company embrace a customer centric approach. There is more to a successful client experience than getting a sale across the finish line. Proper communication and clean data will make a huge difference in providing a positive experience for those in the sales journey.

The single customer view also promotes brand loyalty. It is cheaper to continue servicing an existing client than it is to onboard a new one. That does not mean prospects are not important, but it does mean cultivating strong customer relationships can lead to a higher ROI.

Implementing Single Customer View Into Your Company

Once you have a grasp on the concept, it’s time to start implementing a single customer view into your business. While your company should already have a customer centric approach, developing a process for a single customer view can further improve the client experience.

It may seem like a big undertaking, but the following steps can get you on the right track:

Collect Your Current Data

This sounds simple enough, but if you haven’t been storing your data in one platform, it may take awhile to complete this step. First, determine who is in charge of storing information in each department.

Collaborate with these employees to understand what type of data they have been collecting and why it is relevant to your customer experience. From there, begin compiling the information and cleaning up any duplicates.

This data may include contact information, personal demographics, previous customer interactions, marketing engagement and purchase history. Talk with your employees to figure out how this data is being used within each department. This will help determine the best ways to store and collect data once you have implemented your single customer view.

Decide Which Platform Best Fits Your Needs

It is important to find software that will help your team align its goals and share data across departments. Leadboxer takes a cutting edge approach to data analysis while integrating with your current techstack for easy implementation.

It is important for your team to be able to do it all in one location. From identifying leads, qualifying and scoring, Leadboxer is there to help from the very beginning of the customer journey. This platform does more than just filter through website traffic to identify prospects. It provides a series of integrations to help analyze important customer data.

Leadboxer can integrate with CRMs to help optimize workflow and make sure your sales team is spending time on the leads with the most potential. Marketing departments will benefit from its ability to track engagement and store valuable information. The rest of your company will have access to this data, which helps inform future campaigns, customer success outreach and financial decisions.

Determine KPIs Across Departments

The best way to measure the success of your customer centric approach is to set goals across departments. Using KPIs can help your teams stay on track and refine the customer experience.

While everyone will be working off of a single customer view, their tasks will be different. Therefore, it is important to provide clear objectives.

If teams are succeeding in meeting or exceeding their KPIs, your company will be able to see the positive effects within their customer relations. If teams are coming up short, it may be a sign to redirect efforts and come up with a new strategy.

The important thing to remember when implementing a single customer view is to allow room for growth. The first approach may not be the best one. Your measuring KPIs will help your managers guide teams through this process.

KPIs can also help provide insight into areas of improvement within the customer journey. If you notice negative customer feedback regarding specific parts of the sales cycle, your team will be able to adjust and improve their actions.

Utilize Data Managers

This step may be better suited for bigger companies, but if you can, dedicate a role to data management. This will help ensure that your platform contains the most up-to-date information without having duplicate or old data.

This role can also help analyze data to inform teams about how customers are feeling. With one person focusing solely on organizing and cleaning information, departments can feel confident in the data they are using.

Data managers may provide valuable insight for process improvement as well. Once you’ve taken on a platform for your single customer view, processes should be developed and implemented across departments. With constant audit by a data manager, workflow optimization can be handled easily.

Develop and Implement Company-Wide Processes

While the specific actions vary across teams, taking the time to determine best practices makes sure your company benefits from a single customer view. Managers should meet to discuss the way each department uses data currently, and processes can be built out based on these conversations.

When developing these workflows, efficiency should be a top priority. Since all of the data will be stored in a single platform, it’s important to cut down on any actions that may duplicate efforts. For example, if sales and marketing departments were both previously qualifying prospects, decide which team should take that on in the new process.

Take the time to introduce and properly train employees on these processes. Employees should feel comfortable accessing and inputting data into the new platform. Make sure they understand how their current techstack integrates and works with the single customer view.

It’s important to make sure this transition causes minimal interruption to current client relationships. Ensure your departments feel confident in the new processes before letting them loose with the new system.

When deciding what processes should be implemented, make sure customer experience is at the forefront of these decisions. Any changes made should benefit your company’s overall ability to provide top tier services.

Key Takeaways

For B2B companies that want to remain competitive in the industry, successfully taking a customer centric approach is crucial. Pairing customer intelligence with a single customer view can help put your company ahead of others while promoting brand loyalty among your clients.

Investing in LeadBoxer, a fully integrated lead generation platform, can ensure that implementation of this strategy benefits all departments. Make sure your teams are onboard with these changes by providing ongoing support so they can utilize the platform to its fullest potential.

With a constant focus on improvement, your customers will feel valued. It’s important to evaluate the current buyer experience. Using the data collected and analyzed by Leadboxer, your teams will be able to gain valuable insight into customer behaviors.

Allow data to drive your decisions. A single customer view can help take the guesswork out of marketing and sales tactics. Use previous customer interactions and tracked website engagement to plan future campaigns.

Encourage your departments to collaborate based on the gathered information. By having a sales and marketing team that works together, customers can experience a seamless hand off between stages in the buying journey. Customer success teams will be able to track and preemptively do outreach to ensure the best possible post-purchase relationship.

Using a single customer view helps create a robust strategy for managing client relationships. Prioritizing the buyer experience through segmented outreach, personalized sales calls and efficient customer support will increase client retention.

Above all, make sure your company is encouraging employees to value customers. Lasting relationships lead to repeat purchases, referrals and higher sales conversions.

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