Tapping Into Signals: How B2B Marketers Can Place The Customer At The Forefront
Key Highlights :
In today’s world, B2B audiences expect the same responsiveness and relevance in interactions with providers that they seek in their personal consumer interactions. The bar has been set high for B2B marketers, who must meet their discerning audiences where they are, anticipate their needs, and enable them to take the next step. To do this, B2B organizations must choreograph the information requirements, interaction paths, and engagement style of an individual with other members of the buyer or customer group as they move together through the customer lifecycle.
Organizations must understand the influences and behaviors characteristic of their audiences, where to capture those insights, and how to classify and connect those insights across systems and workflows. To place the customer at the forefront, B2B marketers must embrace interdisciplinary signal literacy, tune teams and technologies into signals that matter most to the audience and business context, and empower and interconnect frontline marketing teams.
Embracing Interdisciplinary Signal Literacy
B2B organizations require a comprehensive signal-sensor network to fuel precision interactions inside the customer-obsessed growth engine. Focusing on signals that illuminate customer needs, preferences, perceptions, motivations, and influences will enable marketers to create more meaningful interaction experiences. Organizations that struggle to put the customer at the center of their universe do so because they’re not taking advantage of the insights that they already have or could easily gather, resulting in poor or incomplete signaling systems, interpretive capabilities, and response mechanisms.
B2B organizations must know their customers, anticipate their needs, and empower them with each interaction — or lose to providers that do. This requires understanding the influences and behaviors characteristic of their audiences, where to capture those insights, and how to classify and connect those insights across systems and workflows.
Tuning Teams and Technologies Into Signals
B2B organizations should look across data sources, tactics, and interaction types to effectively leverage the signals that matter most to putting the customer first. To do this, they should use four dimensions of customer value to separate signal from noise. Customer-obsessed B2B organizations must take advantage of all available insights in order to proactively detect, diagnose, and take action on signals that indicate whether a customer realized value in an interaction.
Economic value requires frictionless interactions, so marketers should use interaction behavior to translate engagement to enablement. Functional value delivers immediate relevance in tactic interactions that support productivity and efficiency at each stage of the customer lifecycle. Experiential value is cooperative and co-created through pleasant interactions that recognize audience expectations, preferences, attitudes, and engagement levels. Symbolic value is derived from meaningful experiences, requiring B2B marketers to understand the psychographic makeup of their audiences in addition to firmographics to inform content, creative work, and activation.
Empowering and Interconnecting Frontline Marketers
Buyer and customer expectations for immediacy, value, and transparency are mirrored in the expectations characteristic of a younger-generation workforce. Employees expect intelligent and actionable insights specific to their role. Frontline marketers are internal customers that require value realization through the technology, processes, and culture that they depend on to get work done.
Customer obsession requires democratized access to comprehensive, dynamic, and real-time insights about customer audiences made available through a purposefully designed and interdisciplinary signal-sensor network. Signals and sensors, interpretive mechanisms, and next-best-action decisioning must be integrated across the B2B customer lifecycle to enable intelligent response across contexts, systems, and processes. This helps B2B marketers on the front line understand, reach, and engage their audiences and trust that they’re doing so with respect, relevance, and proper use of data.
A holistic signal-sensor network that synchronizes seven sets of signals enables the B2B customer-obsessed growth engine by providing a focused, comprehensive, and near-real-time understanding of audience context across interaction types. To learn more, organizations should attend an event such as the Forbes Innovation Enterprise Tech conference to gain insights on how to better place the customer at the forefront. By tapping into signals, B2B marketers can create personalized experiences that anticipate customer needs and enable them to take the next step.
