Rob Sauter

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.

The Right Media Optimization Framework for Your B2B ABM Strategy