You can visualize the state of customer marketing as a large plate of crispy chicken and stir-fried rice. 

Nearly every customer glances at a restaurant’s rating when buying a Thai takeout off Uber Eats, and that place with the 4.9-star score is probably going to get the most orders. 

“Someone could be a 4.5 or 4.6, but you’re going to go for the 4.9,” says Alex Gammelgard, Senior Director of Go-to-Market at customer experience automation platform ActiveCampaign, in this edition of Leadtail’s Spirited Conversations.

“Why would you get an order of Thai food that’s not as good as the best? That’s the mentality that we have as consumers.”

That mentality, Alex says, is proof that customer marketing matters more than ever. And the same reasoning is affecting B2B marketing. What other people think, even if the consumer or client has never met them, influences purchasing decisions. Seventy-four percent of people are at least “somewhat likely” to make a purchase based on experience alone.

It’s crystal clear: B2B marketers need to nurture customers if they want their brands to thrive and survive, just like B2C marketers have done for years. 

Alex shares customer marketing tips that prove valuable for B2B organizations everywhere.

Why Should B2B Marketers Care About B2C Marketing?

B2B marketers rarely play by the B2C rulebook, and for good reason. These different marketing approaches serve different customers — either consumers or businesses — so require different methods. But things are different now. 

As businesses adjust to a new world impacted by COVID, B2B’ers should look to their marketing cousins for new ways to move customers through pipelines. 

“When you capitalize on the opportunity to market to customers and make sure they’re happy and excited, you get a lot of lift,” says Alex.

Read more: Why B2B Brands Need to Focus Harder Than Ever Before

Making the Most of Customer Marketing

Alex shares important customer marketing tips that all B2B marketers can incorporate into their campaigns:

  • Implement win-loss analysis to better understand customers and find lucrative marketing opportunities. “I typically use SurveyMonkey where I have unstructured data bucketed in a structured way to analyze trends,” says Alex.
  • Turn customers into advocates. Leverage user-generated content to increase awareness about products and services and give customers a reason to promote your brand. “Think about how you are growing influencers.” 
  • Align teams that already focus on customers. B2B teams can learn from customer success (CS) teams when creating campaigns. Alex says CS teams truly understand customers and have lots of valuable data B2B marketers can use: “CS often flies blind. They have their own materials and gather a wealth of customer information that nobody’s doing anything with. They might not even be putting that information in Salesforce.”
  • Create better use cases that attract customers. “We get caught up in B2B sometimes, thinking we can only tell stories we have a case study for. There’s value in putting out an ideal use case first and using that to train customers to behave in a certain way.”
  • Expand focus to support post-purchase growth. Alex says marketing is moving further down the funnel. However, there’s an opportunity to market to customers at every point in the pipeline, including long after someone makes a purchase. 

Read more: How B2B Marketers Can Build an Online Community

Final Word

B2B marketers should take inspiration from their B2C counterparts if they want to generate more sales. 

Using techniques like win-loss analysis, user-generated content, customer success, customer-focused use cases, and post-purchase outreach proves valuable for B2B organizations in the post-COVID landscape.

Watch Alex’ full presentation here. If you’d like to attend the next Spirited Conversations virtual event, keep an eye on LinkedIn.

Want to have a conversation about social media? Let’s talk.

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