A vital attribute B2B marketing CEOs will need to possess to lead organizations in Buyer Experience Innovation is ecosystem thinking. B2B marketing ecosystem thinking can be characterized as combining integrated review and extensive picture analysis, along with leading marketing automation and customer experience management tools.
The B2B marketing buyer experience is the process of engaging new prospective customers with your products from first being aware of your brand to eventually convert them into customers. As B2B marketing businesses start to grow and scale up, the need to for higher reach is important. Hence it is important to be mindful of your B2B marketing to ensure that you maximize conversion.
It is an attempt to understand the relationships and interdependencies amongst B2B marketing essential elements. The complexities of B2B marketing and buyer experience environments make this thinking all the more necessary. It also provides a platform for communicating to the organization just how to think in terms of giving buyer experience loyalty and creating B2B marketing buyer experiences.
Four broad elements lend themselves to an integrated view of the B2B marketing Buyer Experience Ecosystem:
- Relationship
In the broader context, B2B marketing offers the most complex network of buyer experience relationships. Not only must the entirety of the Buyer Experience Ecosystem be considered but gaining insight into the Buyer Ecosystem of your buyer persona base becomes critical. The challenge for most B2B marketing CEOs is that they will discover a significant shortcoming in the organization's "inside-out" understanding of the many relationships in their buyer experience buyer persona's ecosystem. Acquiring the "outside-in" view of the web of B2B marketing complex relationships becomes an essential ingredient of the B2B Marketing Buyer Experience Strategy.
This quote from David Meerman Scott is on B2B marketing and is relevant because, with all the shiny new objects that have been introduced in the past few years, we can forget it is still about relationships:
"It's fascinating how the fundamentals of business-to-business marketing are the same today as they were 50 years ago. It's still about relationships, although today we have new tools and techniques at our disposal."
- Engagement
Understanding B2B marketing engagement pitfalls, as well as opportunities, is like playing a game of chess. B2B marketing CEOs will need to anticipate continuously the types of buyer experience engagements that buyers will respond to most favorably. Here's the bad news for B2B marketing CEO.
Most buyers will have difficulty articulating exactly how they wish to be engaged. Thus, the ability to anticipate B2B marketing expectations and read the unarticulated through qualitative buyer insight becomes a core requirement. In the modern B2B marketing world, discovering the right mix of outbound and inbound buyer experience engagement can be an ongoing design challenge to get the right recipe of engagement channels that buyers will select.
The advent and rise of engagement channels related to digital marketing and social media have made this undoubtedly a perplexing issue for many B2B marketing leaders. Sales and marketing roles with respect to engagement are best defined when shaped by how they contribute to the overall buyer experience. B2B marketing leaders will be challenged to no longer hold a provincial view of conventional sales and marketing roles when it comes to buyer experience. A focus on a Buyer Experience Strategy recasts the sales and B2B marketing alignment issue from how marketing will enable sales or how sales will align with marketing messaging to how each contributes to allowing the overall buyer experience.
- Brand
Over the past several decades, the brand concept in B2B marketing has essentially been one of identity, positioning, and messaging. Today, B2B marketing buyers look to branding as an embodiment of an overall buyer experience and use various tools to support incidents with leading marketing automation software.
A new way of thinking for many B2B marketing outfits. B2B marketing leaders will need to ponder how the branding experience is integrated and interwoven into every aspect of the buyer's engagement and experience with their organization. Extending the brand experience values to every employee is a considerable undertaken. While this is of the utmost importance, addressing organizational systems and structures that impede facilities, brand, and buyer experiences are often forgotten. It does no good to arrive at the brand, and buyer experience values yet leave organizational systems and structure in place as potential obstacles.
B2B marketing messaging and branding identity alone will not create a buyer experience that engages buyers. Irreparable damage can occur when buyers respond well to branding identity and messaging but then encounter systemic and structural obstacles resulting in the mindset that the organization fails to deliver on its promises. This, in turn, severely undermines customer acquisition and growth strategies.
- Technology
B2B marketing leaders must be mindful of assessing and integrating sales enablement and marketing automation technology and the multi-varietal CRM applications that enable CRM applications to help buyer experiences. A significant risk in the buyer experience area is that there can be an unconscious gravitational pull towards viewing sales and marketing automation as a panacea to challenges in meeting buyer experience growth strategies.
Carefully assessing B2B marketing insight and mapping a view of the buyer experience journey is necessary before determining which technologies are the appropriate enablers for implementing a Buyer Experience Strategy. Taking a step back and evaluating via an insight-driven approach can lead to choosing the right mix of technologies contributing to overall buyer experience growth strategies.
If investing in the right type of B2B marketing buyer experience seems like the right direction for your business, it is important to consider all of the points we have made able to ensure that you stick the landing when it comes to buyer experience. Without considering the pitfalls companies can commonly fall into when designing their B2B marketing buyer experience journey, you may hurt your brand image without being mindful of it.
If you would like to learn more about buyer experience software solutions for your company, please refer to our B2B marketing buyer’s guide and also compare the best marketing automation software and buyer experience management service vendors available in the market.
