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Business

Why and how a modern marketing strategy should put customer experience first

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By Jim Preston, VP EMEA, Showpad

In 2004, the Leading Edge Forum coined the term ‘consumerisation of IT’, defining a trend in usability and customer experience that would be confirmed by the launch of the iPhone three years later. Long gone are the days of trawling through esoteric and poorly-written manuals, the trend said – if technology isn’t usable off the bat, it’s out of the question.

This trend gradually permeated all of IT, before making its way through customer and buyer experiences, regardless of sector. In fact, research has shown that a staggering 81% of B2B buyers purchase based on the buying experience alone, well ahead of either price or product. Of course, price and product are important, but with markets becoming increasingly commoditised, buyer experience, including the trust and relationships that are built, is fast becoming central to the equation.

However, this experience begins long before a customer meets with a salesperson, hits send on an enquiry email, or calls the sales team. According to studies, B2B buyers will spend an average of 20 hours doing research before they contact someone in sales – and if they’re not finding your content online, you can be sure that they’re finding your competitor’s content.

In short, this means that your marketing strategy needs to be much broader than just a Gantt chart of campaigns – a real marketing strategy encompasses all aspects of the customer experience, before, during and after a sale. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Regtech, payment processing or retail banking, it must be easy (and even pleasant) to find, understand and engage with your content and brand.

Where to begin

Sun Tzu wisely said, ‘know yourself and know the enemy’, and the same is absolutely true for your marketing strategy. Providing a good customer experience and consequently, good marketing, is impossible if you don’t know the market that you’re serving.

For example, if you’re in Regtech, make sure you know the exact ins and outs of the compliance headaches that you’re solving. Regulation is highly nuanced and will vary from country to country and sector to sector – so make sure you understand what problem your company solves and for whom! Regtech often relies on algorithms and big data to make life easier, which isn’t always easy to communicate clearly. Consequently, it’s worth spending time immersing yourself from the outset and fighting through the jargon until you’ve got it clear, so that you can brief teams and create marketing content that will really resonate rather than repel.

Similarly, if you’re working for a business bank, know the particular kind of businesses that you’re targeting – do they work in one country or multiple countries? Are they in particular vertical markets, or are they a generalist? What pressures are they facing at the moment?

Once you have a good understanding of your prospects, how they’re segmented, their challenges and how they work, as well as the respective strengths and focus areas of your own brand, you need a few more things – content, the means of communicating that content, and the means of measuring the success or failure of that content.

Clearly, if we were talking about historic marketing, we’d limit this discussion to just direct mail or events, but today, it needs to encompass all of that, as well as ongoing content that goes to existing customers – and even former customers! This means communicating better with teams like sales, customer success and product development. In fact, there is anecdotal evidence of companies pausing outbound campaigns to focus purely on marketing to current customers, in an effort to delight and retain during the pandemic.

This article won’t go into detail about how to draw up content at a tactical level – this is different for every single organisation – but there are a few very pertinent elements that apply to all companies.

The components of a great connected marketing strategy

Jim Preston

Jim Preston

Be Targeted

First and foremost, don’t do less well, do less, well. Every buyer is almost drowning in content today. Producing infrequent but regular content that is excellent – whether that means being surprising, informative, thought-provoking or just plain useful – is much more appreciated than weekly drivel. In fact, research suggests that buyers often feel overwhelmed when presented with more than five pieces of content, so less is definitely more. Quality content is good for your brand equity, and it keeps you engaged with prospects.

Closely aligned to quality is specificity. In many financial areas, products are strictly controlled and how they are sold and advertised can differ or be limited by regulation. Consequently, it’s important to have a way of segmenting which marketing content goes to which audience – and ensure that this is consistent across your organisation!

Use Analytics

Secondly, have analytics in place that can show what content is being consumed. As John Wanamaker said, “half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half” – and the same is true for marketing. You wouldn’t run an event and not solicit feedback, so don’t create content where you can’t measure its success once it’s been distributed. Being able to tell other teams which content is working really well also helps them – and not just by bringing in new customers. If you can tell the sales team that prospects were really engaged with a webinar on the ePrivacy directive, for example, then that also gives them a conversation starter for their next interaction with a prospect.

Get Feedback

Similarly, getting feedback from broader teams is important, either to reinforce that you’re taking the right marketing approach, or to use their insights to fuel your next marketing campaign. Most large organisations will store and generate a large amount of data every single day, so mining this data to create meaningful insights and translating that into content and approaches that are impactful is extremely important.

Keep Improving

Finally, unless you’re working in a startup, you’re probably not going it alone, so you also need mechanisms to make sure that the content is being communicated and followed-up effectively by all members of the team. This means that tracking what’s been distributed, how it’s been received, as well as providing good training, coaching and performance management of staff, is key.

This also ensures that you can not only do more of what’s been working, but that you can improve things that aren’t. In some ways, it doesn’t matter whether you’re dealing with an underperforming marketing asset or a member of staff – either way, you need to change something and then make sure that it’s improved!

Into the Future

With most western economies drawing a large proportion of their revenue from the service sector (in Germany, for example, this figure stands at around 70%, with the UK at 80%) it’s unsurprising that experience, above price and product, has become a central differentiator. It may have been slower to permeate through B2B organisations in the financial services sector, compared to B2C firms and retail banks, but as budgets tighten through the pandemic and recession, it’s crucial that marketers step up to take on the mantle of being experience champions.

Clearly, this will manifest itself in different ways, but whether it’s better enabling the sales team by producing highly specific content for one prospect, helping a CSM promote a product change because of customer feedback, or simply promoting a new service, the central tenet holds: experience has never been more important.

Global Banking & Finance Review

 

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