Companies have been investing in top-notch marketing strategies in today’s digitally connected and always-on-the-go world. Be it hosting events, being active on social media to put out the best content, or having everything curated, they are giving their customers the best experience possible. 

As every company’s goal is to give a memorable and unforgettable experience, it is also necessary to have long-lasting customer engagement whilst creating seamless experiences that build trust. According to Forrester, 56% of marketing leaders say that improving customer experience is a top priority for supporting their company’s business strategy.

Customer engagement ideas and strategies are a key aspect of your business and thus strategizing this relationship for B2B will continue to evolve in the coming years. So, here are some strategies that you could use to help achieve that;

Understanding your Audience 

Making it obvious, knowing your audience in any spectrum gives you the first hand to attract them sooner than later. Knowing your target audience is a getaway to better customer engagement and retention. 

While there is no set standard template for a successful customer engagement strategy, you can always begin with an effective client engagement technique like mapping the customer journey. This way you can touch base on all the important touchpoints, bottlenecks, and challenges that your customers might encounter, thus identifying potential engagement opportunities. 

Account-Based Marketing Strategies

Every brand needs curation and with account-based marketing, you give you the best and biggest existing customers in an attempt to sell more. Account-based marketing strategies can help you increase the worth of your existing customers. With ABM’s personalised approach and attention to detail, customers are easily drawn toward your brand and likely to allow you to specifically nurture your primary decision maker, along with all relevant prospects. It also structures your marketing efforts on key accounts to drive the most revenue. 

Testimonials and brand promotion

Never underestimate the power of direct referrals and word-of-mouth endorsements as they are more critical when making B2B sales than ever before. Even though growing technological advancement can be confusing, B2B buyers, even today, rely on testimonials and referrals while making purchasing decisions. Using genuine testimonials in your marketing materials, thus, is an important aspect for any B2B company. You can also look for various other ways to encourage your existing customers to promote your brand. 

Automated user experience and its promptness 

Engaging B2B customers has now become a casual communication, thanks to the AI-powered Chabot that lets you connect with your customers in an instant, making customer engagement strategy immensely easier. It analyses your data and can talk to customers via texts, WhatsApp and social media.

The use of automated user experiences has accelerated even more with the advent of the pandemic, wherein this sort of conversational marketing moved from a quick fix for a temporary problem to a long-term solution. And the best part of automated user experience is that it always acts based on the customer’s needs. 

Interactive user groups, events, and activities

Speaking traditionally, groups and events have been able to build a true community and yield a brand. This, even today helps in promoting your brand. Not just that, it also reduces the likelihood of customer disloyalty. Webinars, special virtual events, or face-to-face meet-ups are a great way to relationships between businesses and have become one of the top B2B marketing strategies. Such events give a valuable opportunity to interact with the prospects directly, answer their questions and address specific pain points.

Presence on relevant social media channels

During the Covid-19 pandemic, online communities have seen a resurgence, as in-person conferences and peer-to-peer networking opportunities saw a decline. This is when you tap into the world of social media and make sure to be present on relevant social media channels. 

Social media platforms are an excellent tool for effective customer engagement strategy. For instance, for a B2B company, LinkedIn can prove to be a pertinent platform to present your products and services. Along with attracting a bunch of like-minded people, it also helps you to reach entirely new target groups. You can also create a customer-exclusive online community with a private Facebook or LinkedIn group, or on a messaging app like Slack, or build one from scratch on your web platform. 

Newsletters

One of the oldest forms of outreach is newsletters and interestingly, they continue to be a part of the customer engagement strategy. Newsletters are still very much a part of many B2B companies and are heavily used. A well-made newsletter is an excellent tool to keep mindshare among customers and leads.  Another interesting thing about having newsletters in today’s era is that they can be customised according to the target audience. With the help of automated marketing style systems, you can build personalised newsletters based on individual customer profiles. This aids in grabbing your customer’s attention at once and generates reading interest.  Visit Our SalesMarkBlog Section to Uncover the Sales Strategies That Ignite Your Sales Journey!

In today’s digitally connected and always-on-the-go world, companies are ensuring to invest in top-notch marketing strategies to stand out different amidst the lot. 

They are out there to provide their customers with the best services — from hosting online and offline events to having impressively active social media accounts, they are doing it all. One such marketing technique that is the talk of the B2B town is Account-based Marketing (ABM), also known as key account marketing. ABM, as it is shortly called, is a combination of marketing and sales team expertise that provides tailored marketing. 

What is Account-Based Marketing (ABM)?

A form of marketing that uses highly targeted, personalised campaigns to win over particular accounts is known as Account-Based Marketing. ABM or key account marketing is a marketing technique that uses the combined expertise of marketing and sales that focuses on the specific target group of accounts that requires customised marketing or something that is specifically designed for a particular brand or company. 

How does Account-Based Marketing work?

By focusing on a specific niche group of customers, Account-Based Marketing views each as a market of one and then targets, specific people at each targeted account. An ABM marketing technique targets a few high-value accounts with personalised content and messaging, unlike other B2B marketing campaigns that focus on the largest possible group of potential customers. 

Firstly, identify your high-value target accounts and then research those accounts. After this, develop customised marketing campaigns wherein you can run these campaigns to the target account. Finally, analyse, the data to see how your campaigns are performing. 

Benefits of Account-Based Marketing 

Who doesn’t like a tailored, well-curated item or activity under their belt? After all, customisation gives you the best and biggest advantage of selling more. 

In B2B, account-based marketing strategies can help you increase the worth of your existing customers. With ABM’s personalised approach and attention to detail, customers are easily drawn toward your brand and likely to allow you to specifically nurture your primary decision maker, along with all relevant prospects. It also structures your marketing efforts on key accounts to drive the most revenue. 

Moreover, with ABM, you can go deep, wherein you can design campaigns specifically for one account so that every touchpoint along the buyer’s journey is personalised. 

Also, ABM aligns Sales and marketing and encourages marketing teams and sales organisations to work together, identifying target accounts, and crafting customised campaigns for them. This way fewer resources are wasted because they narrowly focus on a small number of accounts that are most likely to close sales. This frees up resources that would previously have been wasted.

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Benefits of Cold Calling in B2B Sales

In today’s world, where emails and social platforms are on a ride, one needs to make the best effort to reach out to your prospects. Cold calling may be dead today, but it still acts as a primary tool to build your list of prospects and help you land more deals.

A well-articulated cold call paired with a crafted email can be leveraged to build a brand. When a highly effective email can be easily ignored, using cold calls can help bridge the gap in attention.

The added benefit of cold calling post-Covid-19 is that many businesses have transitioned to contactless sales and have adopted phone and video conferencing exclusively. So cold calling has become more effective more so than ever. Thus, due to this, many B2B sales professionals are planning to leverage colder outreach triggering buyers’ decision-making mindset.

Other benefits of cold calling reaching net-new customers, perfecting your sales pitch and making a personal connection with a potential customer.

Overview of Cold Calling in today’s world

Let’s admit it! In the age of scrolling where information is available at a click, cold calling can be a daunting task. Today, introducing your offers and services to people not who are not aware of your business is a massive challenge.

Besides, many customers mistake B2B cold calling for spam or “robocalls” from automated dialers, with callers ending up with no prospectus. However, cold calling is a legal business development practice and is not considered spam, provided with some rule adherence.

While the debate on whether cold calling is worthwhile or not is still on among sales professionals, cold calling still has value and remains one of the most cost-effective methods for B2B businesses to reach new customers. These calls may not lead to an actual sale on the first go, but it serves as an opportunity to familiarise a potential prospect with your brand and product.

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Today, every aspect of business and marketing is data-driven, which means, data has become an essential part of the whole business arena. The dependence on data has also made it essential that we have a clear and bigger picture of the data to achieve great results. This is where data enrichment comes into play—a technique used to improve lead quality and create an actionable database.

What is Data Enrichment?

The process of taking an analytical step before lead generation, i.e. merging third-party data from an external, authoritative source with an existing database of customer information is known as data enrichment, or data enhancement. Data enrichment is used to create a ‘richer’, more complete profile for your customers and aid in filling in the gaps with important insights. Along with enhancing the shape, data enrichment also lets you get to know your lead better and the more you know about a lead, the better your chance of converting them.

The What and Why of Data Enrichment

As the name says, data enrichment helps in adding value to the already existing data, making it an essential part of marketing. Through data enrichment, businesses get a deeper awareness of who they are and what they are seeking. Companies today, are rethinking how data work efficiently and keeping up with the pace to win in today’s digital market.

But what makes all the data enrichment worthwhile is the way it is used. As data enrichment allows you to learn more about your customers, it helps you gain a deeper insight into who they are and what they want. However, value extends beyond that face value. Enriching data allows you to customer information in a better manner so that it’s in one place. It helps you build a 360° view of your customer, and that saves time and effort.

Benefits of Data Enrichment for Business Growth

When you have a clear picture of your data, the process of data enrichment can directly translate to more meaningful customer relationships and more business opportunities. Through data enrichment, you have enhanced customer segmentation that puts your customers into groups that accurately describe their likelihood of buying.

It also helps in better personalisation, i.e. when you understand who your customers are, you can target them with more relevant offers. Not just that, it also improves the customer experience overall. All of the interactions you have with customers will be better because you have better data on them. Complete and accurate data depict that your customers have a cheerful sight of your company and brand.

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In today’s competitive world, businesses always want to stay ahead of their game. The pressure to be on top has been more existential than ever, which has given rise to various marketing tools, one of which is lead scoring. 

 Lead scoring has been growing in popularity and plenty of sales and marketing professionals have been offering basic contact scoring features to stay competitive. Moreover, lead scoring has helped marketing teams prioritise which leads they need to focus on and who can become potential customers, resulting in revenue growth. 

What is Lead Scoring?

A method that is used by marketers and sales teams to orchestrate and determine how likely their leads are to buy is collectively called ‘Lead Scoring.’ It is a process wherein you assign a score (often 1-100) to the potential leads. This scoring is essentially done based on an individual contact’s specific traits or actions and the score then determines your leads’ buying intention. The higher the score, the more likely they’ll buy. 

Benefits of Lead Scoring

As lead scoring determines how valuable a particular lead (potential customer) is and how much effort will be required for converting the lead, it brings along various other benefits to the business. 

With flustered information, it can be daunting for the sales department to focus on the potential candidate. Having firm, concrete, and customisable lead scores can help in scoring strong leads who should get immediate and high levels of attention and those who can be put by the wayside. This saves time and thus costs and incidentally increases sales. 

This way sales no longer have to pick leads at random and decisions are based on reliable data. The employees then have a comprehensive 360-degree profile of the customer, inclusive of their lead score. 

Lead Scoring and its value in Businesses

Every potential customer is important and having detailed information about them, already makes you ahead of the game in the business. In the B2B world, sales reps only speak to leads with higher scores. Leads who score below 50, for instance, go through an automated lead nurturing email workflow. This slows down the entire process and makes it redundant for the employees as well. 

Not just that, lead scoring sophisticates this whole process and allows companies to generate maximum revenue with minimum effort. Moreover, it decreases the probability of failure when it comes to converting leads.

Another aspect of lead scoring is that it doesn’t rely on guesswork. 

The entire concept of scoring the leads enables them to compare systematically with minimal error margin. The scoring is therefore designed in such a way that marketers can identify the right channels to acquire the best leads.

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Who doesn’t want an impromptu answer while you are looking for one, in a situation that demands a quick answer while you surf the world of the internet? Well, thanks to Artificial Intelligence, or what we call commonly called ‘AI’, it has made this very customer experience flawless, while we aimlessly surf the internet.

Today, online shopping and digital experiences have engulfed our lives tremendously, wherein customers expect instant answers if they are stuck anywhere in the process and those present at the right time with the right solution—win! Hence, when customers get accustomed to such a degree of instant gratification and customisation, especially when they are looking for it, it gives rise to an enterprise. Hence, Conversational AI in Marketing is becoming the trend, especially in the B2B sector.

Successful marketing campaigns with a constant inflow of customer behaviour intelligence help achieve marketing goals faster and more efficiently—for instance, by catering to real-time website visitors, and responding to a user who downloaded a whitepaper, among others.

What is Conversational AI Marketing?
Based on the art and science of customer behaviour, Conversational AI is a type of artificial intelligence platform where users can receive customer support, engage with sales, or enter a marketing funnel.

Marketers use Conversational AI in abundance due to its versatile nature, as it can be used on various social channels, website landing pages, and even your brand’s mobile app. This brings accessibility and personalised conversations to prospects and customers directly from your business.

Conversational AI carries on these functions with the help of machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU), and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). With the combination of such functions, conversational AI helps streamline questions and answer common and complex queries and objections to provide a superior customer experience.

Conversational AI Chatbots Vs Traditional Chatbots
With time and advancement, the way Conversational AI work, have changed. Traditional Chatbots is a rule-based software, wherein it is designed to automate recurring objections to answering frequently asked questions. They have been designed one-dimensionally, follow a workflow designed by organisations and are relatively easy to build. These aren’t fully equipped with the technology to provide the same information and therefore, do little to improve customer satisfaction.

While traditional Chatbots are one-dimensional, AI Chatbots do way more than just answer FAQs. An AI Chatbot allows customers to communicate with applications, websites, or devices in a more lucid manner, meaning, they converse more in the user’s language—which can be easily understood by sales agents to deliver an appropriate response.

Benefits of Conversational AI in B2B
Today, the more we speak of Conversational AI, the less it is. From our mobile phone devices to our home assistance, almost everything is a part of AI. Today, the B2B digital buying experience has been enhanced with AI as buyers and customers continue to show a preference for self-guided interactions at each stage of their journeys.

Whether buyer, customer, or employee, the ability to reach, engage and enable empowered B2B audiences means something different to every firm based on what they offer, how buyers buy, how customers adopt the solution and the engagement rate post-sale.

According to Forbes’s The State Of Conversation Automation Technology In B2B Marketing report, “More than half of demand and ABM marketers use conversation automation in the tactic mix. Fifty-eight per cent of demand and account-based marketers are leveraging conversation automation technologies, with 43% planning to increase or significantly increase the budget for an online chat as a conversational delivery mechanism.”

One of the major benefits of Chatbots in B2B is promptness. Being automated, bots can respond to customer queries within seconds. There is no limit to the number of questions you can ask, and you will get an answer right away. This automatically heightens the user experience of the buyer.

It is time-saving as it provides a shorter sales cycle. With AI, almost everything is answered in the chat itself, whether it’s signing up, taking a survey or even making payments. So much can be just within minutes saving time and effort for the sales team.

Several clients can be managed at the same time with AI in place. Whether you have a small or large sales/support team, they can handle multiple clients at once regardless of how long each client’s conversation might be.

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Keeping the marketers ahead of their game, Account Profiling helps them understand their potential customers along with their specific requirements, thus providing value-added information to the marketers.

In the age of an ever-changing world, everyone likes to keep up with the pace of what is happening around them. Similarly, the brands in the B2B industry, too, want to stay ahead of the curve, and account profiling is something that would keep your company one step ahead.

Rather than wandering in the dark, account profiling helps you reach your desired destination, as it helps flesh out account profiles with accurate information.

What is Account Profiling?

Customer Account Profiling is a process to build a complete picture of every lead, customer, and account –customer-centricity. Account profiling gives you actionable insights about the prospects that will enable on to start meaningful conversations that resonate with their pain point.

How does Account Profiling in B2B work?

Account Profiling must include everything you know about an account. However, since most of the time, the needed information is missing, in-depth research is required. To do that, online research plays a primary role.

For instance, check out the company’s website, and profiles of the company and employees on LinkedIn. Checking if the company is making the news and how that may or may not impact the sales strategy, can also be an important aspect of account profiling.

After the diligent research process, you will have narrowed down who your key players are, their titles, contact information and roles in the buying decision. In short, Account Profiling is like a map for a marketer for how and when to approach an account with a solution when decision-makers are looking for answers.

Benefits of Account Profiling

Through account profiling, one can fetch more results than the other approaches out there. Knowing which businesses need to be focused on, a refined and accurate data list helps you generate more leads than any other technique.

Account profiling helps businesses with relevant information on key decision makers, the structure of a business, the process of decision-making, current vendors, and the prospects’ key initiatives to help you determine the business potential within an account.

Keeping marketers ahead of their game, account profiling helps them understand their potential customers along with their specific requirements, thus providing value-added information to the marketers.
With the help of account profiling, you can define the needs of the clients and the goals of the engagement. This way, you can fast-track the process of garnering potential business.

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‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ and rightly so, the same phrase has found its way into the world of digital marketing. At a time when the internet is beaming and overflowing with a glut of information, narrowing it down to a sizeable and graspable amount has become the need of the hour.

While there is no end to the flow of surplus information, infographics have come to the rescue of digital marketers. Be it a hundred million tweets, two million video content, or pictures and information, narrowing it down to sizeable details and graphics, can add to more content engagement.

What are infographics?
Just like the name, information, or data put across in a visual presentation, for instance, pie charts and bar graphs, and minimal text that gives an easy-to-understand overview of a topic, is infographics. These compelling visual data pieces put in a presentable manner can help grab the attention of your audience, adding to the audience engagement.

Infographics —the new ‘quick read’
Visual data and information tend to attract more and infographics do the task. When written content fails to get through, visual components can help attract your target audience. With the help of infographics, one can grasp a surplus amount of information at a glance without having to go through a lot. In a fast-paced life, one needs more amount of information in a shorter amount of time.

Enhancement of user base
An infographic is ‘shareable content’, i.e. an easy way to reach the maximum number without having to say or write elaborative. Visual content used in infographics can help in producing more likes, shares, and other social signals. With each like and share, the data needed to pass on using such visual components can create significantly more supporters. Digital marketers, thus use these to target specific audiences on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, which can be downloaded by users for their own use, thus creating more outreach.

Leaders of social media
In the age of social media, you are only some clicks away from loads and loads of information. Within a fraction of a second, users can get hold of information that is catchy, quick, and crisp. With the incorporation of infographics that contain attractive and relevant colors, texts, or designs that can be easily circulated around the web, it is more likely for the user to relate and share the content further.

The overall brand benefit
Let’s be honest, visual experiences are memorable, and creating one for your brand or business will only add to the growth, and incorporating them can be a great way to do that. An infographic is meant to present complex information in a user-friendly way, wherein businesses can leverage these to cater to their target audience, and generate more interest, thus expanding their businesses.

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