
Rob Sauter
Vice President, Account Management
Authored Posts:
The Right Digital Customer Experience for B2B ABM
B2B marketers are facing digital acceleration and significant pressure to determine how they can shift more of their marketing tactics to online media. For many B2B marketers, this shift has to accommodate an Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy: a specified list of accounts that serves as the central target audience in order to create more personalized experiences. At its most effective, an ABM strategy can improve B2B marketing efficiency by capturing the leads with highest value and intent, thereby shortening the B2B sales cycle and exploding media ROI.
So what does the most effective ABM strategy look like? For starters, it requires lock-step alignment between marketing and sales to close the loop on qualified leads. Below, we’ll dive into the steps of one essential component to this collaboration: the right digital customer experience for your target audience.
Customer Experience Strategies for Your Target Audience
Mapping the Customer Journey
For acquisition-focused B2B companies especially, the customer journey to conversion through owned media is a key consideration for business growth. Start by asking yourself the following questions:
- What is the journey we want a client to take? Is there one primary conversion point where you want to direct users? If there are multiple, are you accurately and equitably tracking the conversion metrics between those points?
- Where are we strong? Through an audit of your customer’s journey, you may find that certain content pages on your site are more likely to inspire users to click to a conversion page, or users from a specific referral source have higher propensity to convert. Understanding your strengths presents an opportunity to scale that strategy out for more conversions.
- Where are we weak? Similarly, understanding where your site experiences the most significant dropoff in traffic can help you engineer new page paths to correct that deficiency.
- How do we align this to our target audiences? One immediate check you can take on pages and sources with low conversion rates is confirming that your messaging above the fold is speaking directly to the needs of your target audience. Why should your audience choose you? Oftentimes, the most compelling way to answer that question is by first showing you understand the audience’s need. Make that connection with your users in a clear way for a great first impression.
Reducing Friction in the Customer Journey
In addition to communicating your value proposition and understanding your customer’s journey, you need to apply a technical focus to the conversion rate and potential bottlenecks in your brand’s website experience. Optimizing for a data-driven journey flow can propel media spend from merely a supporting growth factor to a leading driver of growth.
Secondly, though many marketers see digital as a separate group, budget, and initiative, those of our clients who are best-positioned for growth simply do not see business that way. We need to ensure the role of digital media is aligned within the larger customer-facing marketing effort. This is done by conducting a symphony of effective marketing engagements driving clients on a compelling and effective path to conversion. Without this alignment, poor customer experience and disjointed efforts will result in wasted media spend and worse: lost potential revenue. Digital can be a leader here by providing the data on your clients’ and prospects’ behaviors, as well as key demand information from channels such as search, which can help reveal prospect intent.
Let Rise help you drive record-breaking business results. In 2020, our B2B expertise brought hockey stick performance improvements to a leading B2B manufacturer. To learn more how a Rise partnership can benefit your brand, reach out to us.
Read MoreThe Right Media Optimization Framework for Your B2B ABM Strategy
B2B marketers are facing digital acceleration and are now faced with the critical decision of how they can shift more of their marketing tactics to online media. For many B2B marketers, this shift has to accommodate an Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy, a specified list of accounts that serves as the central target audience in order to create more personalized experiences. At its most effective, ABM strategies can improve B2B marketing efficiency by capturing the leads with highest value and intent, thereby shortening the B2B sales cycle and growing media ROI.
So what does the most effective ABM strategy look like? For starters, it requires lock-step alignment between marketing and sales to close the loop on qualified leads. Below, we’ll dive into the steps of one essential component to this collaboration: the right media optimization framework.
The Right Media Optimization Framework
There is an art and science to delivering a strong, relevant customer experience. The art is setting up the right ads within the right media strategy targeting the right audience. The science is making sure you’re using data to tell you if the experience and journey a potential customer went on was good enough to make them convert. Being data-driven and having the right framework in place allows you to feel confident that your artful decisions are supported.
To establish this data-driven framework, your campaign measurement should be aligned to the goals you have set for business growth. Remember that customer experience continues through the web, into further engagements of research, and of course, their experience through both the marketing and sales funnels, all of which need a place in your plan. Establishing a framework that enables both efficiency in spend and efficiency in return is crucial, however, supporting metrics of engagement and experience will yield improvement opportunities through the larger digital experience. Let the data inform you on what is working and be agile to shift strategies to those tactics that are performing well.
Alignment to your CRM is the key. The impact of closed-loop on your marketing efforts through the sales funnel enables you to map efficiency and targeting directly to the dollars that produce closed business instead of solely relying on marketing metrics. This creates a full cycle of optimization, to impact, to conversion, and back to optimization.
Having a media optimization platform that can scale your optimization strategy is what brings all of this strategy to fruition. Connex is Rise’s media optimization platform that enables granular performance optimization aligned to our client’s business goals. Connex was born from the DNA of Rise’s industry-leading cross-channel Interactive Investment Management philosophy: an agile approach to digital media that operates with your bottom line in mind.
Want to learn more about the power of a B2B measurement framework? Reach out to Rise.
Read MoreTransparent Audience Strategies: The Fuel for Your B2B ABM Strategy
B2B marketers are facing digital acceleration and significant pressure to determine how they can shift more of their marketing tactics to online media.
Read MoreCustomer Experience Strategies That Inspire
It is well established that Rise is a data-driven marketing agency. Sure, we deliver the best in industry results, however, we also focus on delivering remarkable experiences for our clients... Read More
The Importance of Marketing to Profitability
Marketing has made a massive transformation from the days of Mad Men to become a data driven, quantitative, and scientific endeavor. The accessible data landscape has allowed marketing ...
Read MoreThe Data-Driven Marketing Journey
The introduction of “Web 2.0” initiated a massive increase in data volumes in 2005; then 2007’s emergence of the big data craze sent organizations scrambling to organize, c... Read more