In any successful B2B relationship, trust, personalisation and consistency are all essential in creating an experience that justifies your customer’s return business.
When considering customer experience from a B2B perspective it is important to consider every customer touchpoint throughout the buyer journey. This includes your frontline sales team, online resources, your advertising and communication via all channels, response times, service levels of technical and support staff – and even your recruitment process. A strong brand is brought to life from the inside out.
All of these experiences contribute to customer loyalty in the B2B landscape, and there are a number of critical components that you should consider for your business to put your brand in a position to deliver exceptional brand experiences and compete in your market environment.
In the B2B world, a strong relationship with your customers is crucial. Uncovering powerful consumer and market insights and building your brand strategy from there means you will be one step ahead when it comes to building out B2B customer experiences and ensuring your brand remains consistent and clear. Through brand research, you can uncover your customer’s preferences, their habits, their emotions and their desires from you as a business and beyond.
Once you have a deep understanding of your customer, you can develop specific personas. A customer or buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer – based on the facts you have gathered from research and understanding of your real customers. The development of personas helps you continue to attract and appeal to your ideal audience and build a deeper connection.
The more in-tune you are with your target audience the more likely you are to build a strong relationship with them and develop loyalty and advocacy.
For today’s increasingly time-pressed B2B customer, an ideal brand experience is one that is quick and easy. Seamless integration and interconnections of B2B brand’s websites and apps have a long way to go, where typically legacy systems tend to slow down service delivery across these newer tech and digital platforms – an issue which B2C brands have been quick to identify and adapt to.
Getting your house in order can help your customers better understand your brand, your offering and assist with cross-selling and upselling between your brands and revenue streams.
It’s one of the reasons why a clearly organised brand architecture and product portfolio is so critical in a B2B service environment. Confusing brand architecture presentation can dilute the potency and depth of your service offering to market. It may mean that certain B2B customers might come to you for one service only, when in fact they could be receiving multiple services through your business.
Presenting your brand architecture in a potent way can be as simple as rationalising your brand and product names, but it also might be more complex if your architecture has developed organically over time and your brands appear to be competing or cannibalising each other. Whatever your unique circumstances are, our eBook on B2B brand architecture will help you along the journey.
In the B2B world, your sales team, technical support team and post-sales team are at the coalface of your brand, therefore it is vital that they understand what your brand stands for and how to deliver an exceptional brand experience that is aligned with your brand’s distinctive positioning, promise and value system.
Brands in the B2C space often spend millions of their marketing dollars communicating these efforts to customers via various channels – but one of the most effective from a cost and efficiency point of view in the B2B space is vocal endorsement via your own employees.
The real power of people to drive up B2B brand equity is often undervalued, as some businesses are more focussed on embedding their brand in the hearts and minds of their clients – external engagement first, internal engagement second. But is this approach skipping over the latent collective voice of those delivering the brand?
The ultimate lesson when delivering exceptional brand experiences is that is those who live your brand, amplify your brand. It creates a brand authenticity that a marketing communications program cannot replicate. It provides a low-cost but powerful expansion of your brands’ reach and can further embed your brand in the eyes of your customers and audiences.
Measuring satisfaction during the buyer journey is the biggest gap most B2B brands face in understanding what matters to their customers. Continual evaluation of your brand’s performance across these key customer experience drivers is essential. The best B2B brands don’t just make good products or provide good services, they exceed expectations along the entire customer journey.
The use of brand measurement tools throughout the customer journey will enable B2B brands to monitor and make corrections to the areas of their service delivery which is not meeting customer expectations.
At BrandMatters, we integrate measurement activity and brand strategy, deploying a range of agnostic research methodologies to understand how brands are perceived in the B2B space, as well as how effectively marketing activity is portraying the desired messages and communications of your organisation.
A brand is a promise kept, so ensuring your B2B brand delivers on the promises you make is critical. Developing and implementing proof points that resonate with your customers is vital. Consistently demonstrating these proof points to your customers is an important part of your brand strategy.
At BrandMatters, we specialise in helping B2B brands get to know their customers via our proven methodology where customer, market and competitor insights are gathered, analysed and then utilised to develop winning brand strategies.
BrandMatters are experts in brand strategy and have a deep understanding of the interactions between brands and CX in the B2B landscape and beyond. Get in touch to discuss how you can truly understand your customer and drive deep brand loyalty.
