The conventional wisdom is that the world of B2C marketing is very different from B2B marketing. For that reason, some of the core aspects of B2C marketing – such as brand management – never make it into a comprehensive B2B marketing campaign.
The top B2B marketers take a holistic view of the overall customer experience. As a B2B marketer, you may not have the same type of consumer reviews as your B2C peers to guide you, but there are definitely reviews out there. There are rankings and ratings. There are industry wrap-ups that present the “best of” a particular category or niche. And there’s a wealth of information that you can pick up at trade shows, exhibitions and industry events.
The good news is that there are plenty of online tools out there that make it easier to understand the customer experience. For example, Feefo offers you a full suite of tools to give you greater insights into the overall customer experience. Feefo calls itself the “global feedback engine.” You can see at a glance any ratings or reviews of your products, as well as specific examples of customer feedback that exists on the web.
As a B2B marketer, you also need to be thinking about monitoring your competition. This is something that B2C brand managers understand intuitively. Think of the epic marketing battles fought between Coca-Cola and Pepsi, or Apple and Samsung. These companies are constantly keeping an eye on what their rivals are doing, and then upping the ante.
You can use that same approach within the world of B2B marketing. For example, consider social media marketing. Are you doing better or worse than your competitors when it comes to marketing on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn? If a customer had the option of spending five minutes on your Facebook page or five minutes on your competitor’s Facebook page, which one would they pick?
Most likely, you may have a few proxy metrics that you use to gauge your success – such as the absolute number of followers – but may have very little insight into real metrics that matter, such as engagement. That’s where tools like RivalFox can play a huge role.
Essentially, RivalFox lets you see who’s “winning at the Internet.” It’s a way to monitor the digital marketing strategies of your competitors so that you don’t fall behind the pack. Think of this as a dashboard that you can check out to see how well you’re faring against competitors on the major social media networks.
Finally, B2B marketers need to have some tool for winnowing through all the potential leads to find the best ones. The big buzzword these days is “predictive analytics” – and for good reason. Predictive analytics from companies like LeadSpace can help you predict which leads are going to turn into future sales. You may not have 100% visibility into which leads are going to become future sales, but you will know enough to find and prioritize the right people in your target accounts.
And that just makes your sales funnel that much more effective. Imagine being able to convert a higher percentage of your leads, just by running all the data and feeding it into a powerful algorithm. That immediately gives you a jump on your competition and helps you with both your top line revenue and bottom line profitability.
Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.