How to Improve Your B2B Customer Experience In 2019

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What happened to the B2B customer experience? An inordinate amount of attention has been paid to the evolution of retail consumer marketing, the adoption of digital advertising, social media marketing, and other new media.

In many cases, B2B businesses have fallen behind in adoption of cutting-edge technologies and techniques. Websites have fallen into disrepair, even neglect. And no one notices, that is, except for the prospects and customers.

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Even if the B2B business has just launched a new website, that site may not be designed with the customer experience in mind, optimized to facilitate discovery, planned to leverage content marketing initiatives, or infused with inbound marketing processes to nurture leads and convert to sales.

Considerations for Improving the Customer Experience

1. A Website is No Longer Just a Website

Congratulations on your shiny new site. But now what? The game has changed. the shift has happened. Today’s consumer arrives at your site already educated through web search and armed with remarkable intelligence. And regardless of your business sector your customer has expectations of how your business enables and responds to your community.

Are you engaging your prospects and customers across all platforms – not just the website? Are you creating valuable content that binds the website and the marketing messages together? Are your customers compelled to share this content in their respective networks?

2. Customer Engagement Begins with a Digital Strategy

A well-conceived and properly developed digital strategy is absolutely critical to most every successful B2B marketing plan. When executed, it will leverage all your internet, social, and content marketing initiatives in a way that will generate leads and result in new revenue incredibly fast.

A digital ecosystem schematic will illustrate how internet traffic (demand) will be generated and how it is commandeered and routed between web site, blog, audio, video, ebooks, eNewsletters, as well as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other social sharing platforms.

3. Inbound Marketing Converts Leads Into Customers

Inbound marketing is based on the concept of earning the attention of prospects, making yourself easy to be found, and drawing customers to your website by producing content that customers value.

This process facilitates and hastens client discovery of your offerings, increases web traffic, generates leads, facilitates sales conversations, and builds loyalty with consumers.

  1. Generate more traffic
  2. Turn visitors into leads
  3. Convert leads to sales
  4. Turn customers into repeat higher margin customers
  5. Analyze, refine, and repeat

Inbound marketing is especially effective for those businesses with long research cycles and knowledge-based products. In these areas prospects are more likely to get informed and hire those who demonstrate expertise.

Given that the average B2B purchase is often many multiples of those made by retail customers, the stakes are high. Investment in customer acquisition strategy and tactics are critical to long-term success.

Your digital marketing agency partner will help you create multiple paths to revenue and give you the technology and consultation that will positively impact your bottom line quickly, this quarter.

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What is Marketing Automation?

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Marketing Automation is the hottest phrase in marketing.

In a nutshell, it is a process of leveraging digital technology to facilitate online discovery of a product or service, acquire a qualified sales lead, and nurture that lead closer and closer to a buying decision — with little or no human intervention until the optimum moment of contact and/or close.

Marketing Automation is also synonymous with a wide variety of software programs that marketers use to facilitate this inbound marketing process.

But software by itself is not worth a hill of beans without a solid strategy designed specifically for your particular business and prospective customer.

So let’s go back to the start…

If you or someone in your organization has identified the need for marketing automation, then there is likely an understanding that two things have changed for the business.

1. The traditional methods of sales are not working. It’s getting harder to sell!
2. Most prospects would rather cut off their ear than listener to a sales pitch.

Consumers want to discover your product either through search or through a social recommendation. In fact, 82% of B2B buyers start with an internet search.

Your team, perhaps with guidance from your digital marketing agency, will help you determine the strategy and marketing automation tools required to design and execute an entire program, to attract visitors to your business, pre-qualify leads and nurture them with specifically crafted content and offers to lead them through the various stages of your deal funnel.

Only at this stage is it a wise to employ a marketing automation software program to carry out the program devised above. If you pour money into a SAAS (software-as-a-solution) without a plan, you will be wasting your precious marketing dollars. Arguably the true value is in the plan, not the software. In fact, the best digital marketing agencies will provide a robust agency-grade marketing automation software program at little or no cost when you work with them to create, measure, and refine a plan to reach specific goals.

The agency will also train your marketers to properly drive the system on an ongoing basis. Of critical importance is the need to assess performance of every campaign every 30 days. Your agency will be able to crunch the data, make adjustments based on the results, and help you make better business decisions as a result.

Most importantly, you will be generating more, highly qualified leads, meaning that the sales department will spend more precious time closing than warming up cold prospects. Companies that use inbound marketing automation campaigns routinely close 15-30% more business with a properly coordinated strategy and execution.

Momentum Marketing offers comprehensive Inbound Marketing strategy and service coupled with our powerful agency-grade Momentum Marketing Automation software – all for less than a monthly subscription alone for other leading SAAS solutions.

Invest your precious marketing into inbound marketing strategy and training that will drive your business and your team forward. (And get the software for free.)

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social media

Making Money with Social Media

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Many social media marketers talk incessantly about things like “depth of engagement,” “catering to the audience,” and “the importance of a Like.” They can talk about Likes until they’re blue in the face. But what’s the value of a Like to the brand? The answer: It depends on what you plan to do with it.

You can make money with social media. But first you must be prepared to break-up with engagement and fall out of love a little bit with the Like.

At Momentum, we always set out to convey to our clients the importance of a path that provides them with measurable return.

The important questions involving social media are: How do you attract the prospect? How do you convert the prospect to a sale? How do you measure the effectiveness of the process? What does it cost?

In some cases, a brand may only be in it for the Likes. More likely they’ll see an opportunity to drives sales, stimulate trial, or sell event tickets.

In the case of a client of ours in the financial services industry, the initial goal was to accrue Likes as a means of enhancing the credibility of the brand. After a short time with Momentum, we succeeded in helping the client realize a much more lucrative path of leveraging social media to generate leads for its financial services.

We worked with BBC Kids Television to create a strategy of gaining Likes in order to put the daily program schedule in front of new moms and encourage them to subscribe to the channel – clear calls-to-action with measurable results.

We worked with the Vancouver Giants hockey team to create a Facebook advertising campaign to sell $99 White Spot Family Game Paks. The data that Momentum generated in the first few days of the campaign ended up also illuminating the need for an improved, streamlined ticketing process.

Getting beyond engagement for engagement’s sake. That’s performance defined… and the key to making money with Social Media.

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Google adwords

What’s the ROI on your Google AdWords Spend?

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Google AdWords are an essential form of marketing for many businesses.

However, the world of Google is rotating with blurring speed, which means that unless your campaign is being monitored on a weekly basis you are likely losing efficiency with every passing day. You may be paying far too much for the results you’re getting.

5 Key Questions (to ask yourself and your agency) about your Google AdWords spend:

1. Is your Google AdWords campaign improving your business?

Every marketing dollar should tie directly to revenue. Marketing tools exist to measure and report the results of search, click, and subsequent action. If you’ve created landing pages with compelling content, clear calls-to-action, and submission forms, the entire inbound ecosystem can be measured and optimized for success.

With the right tools and advice, you’ll know exactly how your campaign is impacting your business and what to do to improve the results.

2. Are you paying too much for your Google AdWords?

Do you know which keywords and search terms are you chasing and why? You could be pursuing expensive terms – the ones for which everyone else is vying which drives costs up and puts you in hard fought competition for those terms. It’s often possible to pursue low-cost alternative search terms that will result in better conversion.

A comprehensive keyword and search term analysis will help you increase results and decrease costs. It’s conceivable that might need to spend more but more often than not increasing the efficiency of your campaign and improving after search conversion will allow you to spend less than ever.


3. What insights have you gleaned from your Google AdWords campaign?

Our clients are often surprised about what they learn from their Google AdWords campaign. In some cases, they’re taken aback when they realize the majority of their traffic is coming from mobile. This would highlight the need to optimize the website, landing pages, forms, and eCommerce for mobile devices.

Clients are also more aware that their website infrastructure must reflect the insights gathered from their campaign. For example: Is the most often searched information available at the top of your homepage? If the answer is no, let the work begin.

4. How can my Google Ad campaign be improved?

You can conduct more testing, audience segmenting, and hyper localization and then follow the paths that are most efficient and cost effective. Also be sure to employ Negative Keywords to make sure search results do not appear in a context that may be unfavorable to your product or proposition.

It could be that up to 35% of results display next to unfavorable content if left unchecked.

5. What is considered a good click through rate (CTR)?

CTR’s (the number of clicks versus the number of impressions generated by the campaign) can vary anywhere from 0.6% to 2% depending on the industry and whether the prospect is on desktop or mobile. But the click through rate, although important, can be a false metric. It’s meaningless if no one converts to an inquiry (and ultimately a sale).

If you’re simply letting your homepage do the conversion work and waiting for the phone to ring, your results are likely pretty low. Your campaign could be so much more efficient.

The bottom line is that a business cannot evaluate a CTR without knowing CPA – Cost per Acquisition. For example, if you are paying $150 per click but every click through converts to a sale and you are selling the item for $799 — that’s a great CTR (even though it may look terrible on paper). It’s all in the interpretation of the data.

Your marketing department or marketing agency’s goal should not be to spend your ad budget but to improve your business and garner as much intelligence as possible to help inform your business decisions. Question your ad spend, and demand answers!

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Five Keys to Inbound Conversion For B2B Marketing

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There are a myriad of reasons why it’s getting harder to sell. It’s not your imagination. Your sales prospect is not interested in taking your call. Culturally they are increasingly incensed by the uninvited approach.

Like a man on a hunt for a tool in Home Depot, your prospect doesn’t want your help. They cannot tolerate interruption. They want to discover you on their own – because your service will seem more credible that way. That is, if, and only if, your business has mastered Inbound Marketing.

The Five Keys to Inbound Conversion

1. Understand that Content Drives Discovery – 82% of prospects begin with a web search. You need to be found. Your company needs to generate and proliferate high quality content regarding your offerings. The more, highly focused, high quality, and user-centric pieces of content you offer the higher your business will rank in search returns. Organic Search results convey legitimacy. The goal is to create the perception (which is true) in the mind of the prospect that your business is driven by industry experts. Therefore your business will immediately occupy a superior position in the mind of the buyer versus your competition. You are now selling on quality not price. And you are receiving the lead, not banging your head against a brick wall trying to create one.

2. Develop a Game Plan and Calls-to-Action – Keep your Content Strategy top-of-mind. Your digital agency will develop a digital ecosystem schematic to visually illustrate for you how all of the paths to discovery will drive traffic to specific calls to action. Every opportunity will be used to convert the contact to prospect, to lead, and then most importantly to customer, with specific calls-to-action.

3. Employ Marketing Automation. In the days of traditional advertising, the key to message penetration lay in frequency of message. In the early days of digital, marketers individually built all of the campaign assets such as webpages, landing pages, and emails and managed them using disparate platforms. Powerful marketing agency software now exists that cuts the production time –and expense- to a fraction of the former cost. This allows your agency to highly format and schedule your inbound marketing efforts, spending more time on messages that create action and assessing results. The software will also track the prospect as they flow through your sales system to close.

4. Refine and Repeat. You must measure all your efforts and adjust tactics every 30 days, at minimum. Automation, expertise, and service are a critical combination of services that are most effectively delivered by your agency.

5. Get Started Right Now. The “we’re too busy taking orders” to do new things attitude will bite you in the ass. All businesses have cycles and you will need to be ready for the next lull in production. Because when you go to dust off your phone to make new calls you’ll realize that the old way is gone. And so too is your pipeline.

Creating and improving inbound conversion is a very specific expertise and is predicated on choosing a great agency partner who will take the time to understand your business and customers. They will develop a content strategy and develop engaging content and calls-to-action that are proven to deliver higher quality leads that are much quicker to close than other old school tactics like cold calling and yellow page ads. Let’s get started!

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Fuzzy Brand: Rebuilding Brand Equity

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In our work as a digital marketing agency, one of the most common declarations we hear from prospective clients is:

“I’m spending the same marketing dollars yet my brand equity is increasingly diluted.”

Every time we hear this phrase we hurt a little for the client. But we smile on the inside because before us is a client that we can help. We can help them overcome the cumulative effects of changing consumer behavior that are driven by technology, the resulting fracturing of the media marketplace, and the ages old issue of “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

The brand message becomes diluted resulting in reduced brand equity – a widely suffered malady known as Fuzzy Brand.

Here’s why some brands are experiencing diminishing awareness and significance as well as some prescriptions to cure fuzzy brand and rebuild brand equity:

1. Media use has fractured. The same money spent in the same places is most likely producing diminishing results. Television used to be the de facto mass reach medium. First the networks, then cable television and the 1000-channel universe. Terrestrial radio was followed by satellite radio and then internet radio. Add online and mobile smart phones and there are infinite programming possibilities and platforms of distraction for consumers. Brand activity must now happen across the right mix of platforms and aggregate audiences that use each medium in a unique way.

2. Interruptive marketing is not an effective stand-alone strategy. Television is still relevant. But how it is used and extended in order to continue brand engagement off-platform is critical. For instance, a portion of each campaign could include an interruptive message that includes a clear call to action. The same campaign could include video content that the user is invited to view based on his or her preferences. This is usually facilitated through social media and inbound online discovery. A common faux pas would be to use paid interruptive techniques to deliver content marketing initiatives.

3. All media should be measurable. More than just ratings points, creative, where appropriate, should include calls to action that can be validated and lead to solid paths of monetization. Read: Impact the bottom line. Every channel can and should deliver measurable results.

4. Traditional should coordinate with Digital. Multi-platform campaigns should consider in-program and content initiatives that promote interaction of the audience with the brand, offer strong calls-to-action, collect data, and allow conversion to sale, and create traffic to bricks and mortar stores, where applicable.

5. Engagement for engagement sake is B.S. Engagement is a buzzword among coffee shop social media experts. But the truth is that engagement is only worthwhile if it’s leading somewhere. Furthering the brand conversation is nice, but how does this activity convert to a sale? The brand benefits from engagement, with a purpose.

6. The media mix is probably out of alignment. Every marketing strategy is different. However, if you are spending the same proportions of your budgets in the same places as five years ago, your media mix needs immediate assessment.

Avoid the effects of Fuzzy Brand.

If your customers are asking you where your brand went, it’s time to make some changes. Your strategy-driven digital marketing agency will help you understand the environmental changes that have challenged your product or service. They will help you coordinate all of your media activity. And they will work with you to realign your marketing strategy and tactics in a way that will dramatically improve your campaigns and rebuild your brand equity.

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The Naked Truth About Shiny Object Syndrome

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How the ‘Latest and Greatest’ Can Leave Marketers Exposed

With the pace of change in the world of marketing and advertising, it’s very easy to get blown off course by a mass email solicitation or sales person flogging the latest and greatest marketing solution. You’ve seen the random pitches:

  • We can deliver Likes! (even if the user has no affinity for your brand)
  • QR codes are the future (even though you’ve never seen anybody use them)
  • Your website is not optimized properly for your industry (even though it is)
  • You need an on-site video (even if you are in waste disposal)

We can debate the merits of any particular tactic. And the prospect of impressing the C-Suite with the latest cutting edge marketing widget may seem intoxicating.

However, unless a particular tactic is central to supporting your marketing strategy, it is utterly useless and not worth a minute of consideration. Furthermore, if the shiny object presents itself mid-way through a campaign or budget cycle, the odds are even greater that it will detract from the overall marketing efforts.

The marketing strategy is the roadmap for success. It must be carefully constructed in order to address organizational goals and revenue objectives. And every tactic employed – from traditional media to leading inbound marketing techniques – must be deliberately on-strategy and be directly tied to revenue production… and ultimately measurable.

Let’s face it. If the ‘latest and greatest’ would help achieve the marketing goals, it would already be a part of the plan. If someone on the team darkens your doorway flogging the latest and greatest, perhaps the underlying reason is because the marketing strategy is not as strong as it should be. Send them back to plan.

Great tactics ought to be preconceived – not knee jerked into the marketing plan. Proactive rather than reactive always wins the day.

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How Canada’s Anti-Spam Law Impacts Your Social Media

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Canada’s Anti-Spam Law (CASL) will come into effect on July 1st. It prohibits sending Commercial Electronic Messages (CEM) to electronic addresses unless those message follow three simple rules:

  1. Identify the sender
  2. Obtain consent
  3. Provide an unsubscribe mechanism.

If you are doing business in Canada or if your customers are accessing their emails in Canada, CASL applies to you. But it applies not just to email but to social media as well!

In other words, CASL’s effect on your communications is likely broader than you may think. The Government of Canada’s website for CASL states that “Canada’s anti-spam law takes a technology-neutral approach, so that all forms of CEM sent by any means of telecommunications are captured under the new law.” Furthermore when listing the list of potential violations, “social networking” is mentioned.

To add to the confusion, the CRTC previously stated that, “Whether communication using social media fits the definition of ‘electronic address’ must be determined on a case-by-case basis, depending upon, for example, how the specific social media platform in question functions and is used. For example, a Facebook wall post would not be captured. However, messages sent to other users using a social media messaging system (e.g., Facebook messaging and LinkedIn messaging), would qualify as sending messages to “electronic addresses.” Of course, you didn’t expect the government to make anything easy did you?

To make sure your interactions with potential customers on social networks comply with CASL, one solution would be to include the following in the communication: “Could we send you a DM so we can discuss this with you in more detail,” as it is asking for consumer’s consent prior to encouraging them to engage or participate in a commercial activity.

If in doubt, and to make sure you don’t run afoul of the regulations, reach out to the marketing and media pros at Momentum Marketing for advice on your campaigns.

Happy CASL-Compliant Messaging to You!

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LinkedIn – The Business Social Network to Watch

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When asked which social network will be tops as it pertains to building business, especially among B2B companies, the easy answer is LinkedIn.

Bigger Isn’t Necessarily Better

LinkedIn is the social network for business. And although it doesn’t boast 1 billion served, LinkedIn does offer some impressive stats:

  • 300 million users (May 1, 2014)
  • 187 million daily unique users (Feb 6, 2014)
  • 40% of users check it daily (July 2, 2013)
  • 2.1 Million LinkedIn Groups
  • 41% of daily visits are mobile
  • 44,000 jobs accessed via mobile every day

What makes LinkedIn so powerful is that it is fast replacing Address Book (which replaced Rolodex – look it up kids!) as the place to store and access contacts. The beauty of course is that you stay in touch with your connections as they move from job to job.

It’s a Matter of Intelligence

Most business and sales people miss the vast intelligence that LI affords. By watching moves your contacts make, you can identify an opening for a conversation about your product or service. With just five minutes of research, smart users can identify and qualify prospective buyers or business partners. The act of this pre-qualification can mean the difference between having your advance welcomed or rebuffed.

Unlike Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, or any other network, LinkedIn is simply the most effective way to pre-qualify leads.

The Cost Efficiency is Compelling

If you are selling a product or service, LinkedIn advertising (at least for now) remains one of the best and least expensive advertising opportunities when it comes to cost per lead. It amazes our clients when they realize that we are able to target their message right down to the ZIP code and connect with the precise target within corporate hierarchy. And because users tend to be connected with like professionals, there is huge value in reaching those people as well.

LinkedIn Groups and Spotlight pages also create an amazing opportunity to share critical and timely content with connections.

As with all things, the manner in which you use LinkedIn will define the quality and quantity of the results you get.

Reach Out For More!

Contact the marketing and media pros at Momentum to receive a complete digital strategy and social media plan designed specifically to generate results for your business.

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Do You Know Exactly Who Your Customers Are?

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One of the biggest challenges in marketing and sales is knowing EXACTLY who your core customers are. If someone asked you today “who are your customers?” and you say “people who buy my product”, you’re in trouble. This answer means that you’re selling to whomever stumbles across you in the marketplace and you’re not being strategic. The only way you are going to scale your business is by working way too hard and relying on luck.

If you want to scale your business, you need to have an effective Customer Acquisition Strategy. Who are your customers? How do you tell a customer from a non-customer? Where do you find them? What are they most interested in buying? What pushes them into making a buying decision? A good Customer Acquisition Strategy will answer these questions and more.

At this point, you might be thinking “what makes an effective Customer Acquisition Strategy?” You need good, solid data on the customers you already have or insight into the customers you want to sell to. You may have a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution like Salesforce.com, but the quality of the data in your system varies wildly based on who inputs it and the last time you analyzed your customer data.

Don’t feel bad if you don’t have this information. Many businesses do not have adequate customer data and have not done significant market research on their customers. If you don’t have solid customer insights, you’re going to need to do Customer Segmentation research.

In a nutshell, Customer Segmentation is when you break all of your potential customers into categories that define who they are, how they buy and how to reach them.

For example, if you have a company that sells screws and other types of fasteners, your total addressable market is everyone who needs screws and fasteners. As you can well imagine, you would treat a $500 million company that builds townhouse complexes differently from the suburban homeowner who buys 25 screws a year.

The townhouse builders would probably fall into a segment defined by the volume of fasteners they buy (probably in bulk, by weight) and the fact that you ship directly to job sites instead of having them come to a retail location to buy them. Let’s call this segment “Industrial” and the suburban homeowner would probably fall into a segment called “Retail” where their buying behaviour is defined by the fact that they buy at national hardware chains.

This kind of information can be used to:

– Differentiate customers from one another (eg. Enterprise vs. non-enterprise)
– Determine the best marketing channels to reach specific types of customers
– Determine who NOT to sell to
– Qualify leads (knowing what characteristics or behaviour make a customer more likely to buy)

Typically, a persona is developed for each customer segment before sorting each segments into one of three buckets:

– Those highly likely to buy (Primary Market)
– Those who buy but are harder to reach (Secondary Market)
– Those who are very unlikely to buy (non-customers)

The reason breaking your customers up into segments (with hard data and use cases) is difficult because the exercise is both an art and a science.

At Momentum, we start with an analysis of your current customers and their buying behaviour. Once we understand the characteristics that drive your customers’ behaviour – such as income, technical knowledge about the product category, industry, budget, etc… – we can draw a box around a subset of customers.

From there, we can measure and quantify the factors that drive behaviour before describing each customer segment in a way that informs and inspires your marketing and sales initiatives.

We have worked with customers who discovered through this process that their primary market is utility companies who have between 10 and 50 trucks and cover large rural areas with low population density. These predominantly co-operative utilities were easy to target through marketing channels specific to rural utilities.

You may have Customer Segments that you are working with right now but segmentation exercises go stale. If your company has defined Customer Segments but they haven’t been revisited in the past 5-8 years, it might be time for a refresh to confirm that these segments are still relevant and that their buying behaviour hasn’t changed radically.

If your Customer Segments needs a refresh or if you have never had clearly defined Customer Segments, give us a call. Your sales and marketing teams will thank you.

Customer Segmentation Is The Reason You Are Here

At Momentum, we have found that the single biggest challenge for our B2B clients is reaching perfectly qualified buyers for their good or services. In fact, our own use of customer segmentation for our marketing agency is the very reason you are here.

We can help you evolve your marketing, right now. We begin every client engagement with a Marketing Assessment. And that begins with a free 30 minute phone consultation.

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