7 steps to acquire customers onlineProfitable digital acquisition strategy for B2B organisations

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7 steps to acquire customers online2

B2B buying decisions are becoming increasingly complex

Gone are the days when your customers looked forward to their regular visit from their sales representative, or relied solely on industry shows to find new products. Today’s B2B buyers are sophisticated, empowered and independent. These buyers are leveraging an increasing number of digital channels to research and buy products and services, with 89% using the internet during the B2B research processi.

Potential customers are out there looking for products like yours. They might be following a group on LinkedIn, seeking advice on Twitter, or using Google to research. If you haven’t built a long-term strategy for acquiring new customers, taking into account everything from buyer profiling to customer journey mapping, to how to use technology to support your customers through the buying process, you are surely missing opportunities to convert new customers and grow your business.

In this eBook, we offer 7 tips to help you acquire customers online – from how to map your customer journey to how to build an effective channel strategy to how to design a content strategy for B2B customer acquisition.

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Buyer profilingWho are the key decision makers and influencers? How do they want to research and buy?

Customer journey mappingWhat is the ideal journey for each of your buyers and influencers?

Retention dynamicsHow many of your newly acquired customers will become loyal?

Content strategy & deliveryWhat types of content can you use to help prospects make a purchasing decision?

Channel strategy & deliveryWhich channels should you use to most effectively acquire and retain customers?

Technology strategy & implementationDo you have the right technology in place to help attract, convert and retain customers?

KPIs and optimisation

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You may think that you know who your buyers are, but buyer profiles and behaviours are changing constantly in the new digital age. And without fully understanding who your customers – and potential customers – are, you risk jeopardising the overall effectiveness of your customer acquisition strategy.

In today’s environment, decision-making authority for purchases is gradually moving away from individuals in familiar roles, and towards so-called “buying committees”. It is therefore important to take into account not only all of the decision-makers in your customer base, but also the various influencers.

Profile your buyers

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Looking at job titles or functions, as well as key pain points for each segment, are obvious places to start when developing buyer personas. But don’t neglect other important criteria, such as those identified in Annuitasi 2015 B2B Enterprise Demand Generation Surveyii:

y Product interest

y Purchase authority / influence

y Size / revenue of company

y Buying processes

y Demographic information (age, marital status, hobbies etc.)

y Content channel consumption

y Obstacles that inhibit better engaging with the buyer

Equally important is to ensure you employ a wide variety of sources - both internal and external - when developing buyer personas. For instance, ask your sales team for recommendations. Not only will they have a unique, front-line perspective of your prospects and customers, but getting their involvement and buy-in from the start will help ensure the success of your customer acquisition strategy. Likewise, interview your current customers and prospects if possible, in order to gain a first-hand perspective.

Finally, you should review your buyer personas on a regular basis, to ensure they are accurate and that your content and channel strategy are speaking to these personas in the most effective way.

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Once you have identified the various buyer personas involved, the next step is to map out the path from awareness to purchase for each segment.

Design the ideal journey for each of your buyer personas

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Many B2B companies have access to vast amounts of data about their customers; yet this data is often simply collected rather than mined and analysed. Instead this data should be used to help map out the customer journey, to find out, for example, when users drop out of check-out, so that you can optimise your site accordingly.

Consider which channels each buyer persona uses and prefers. Recent McKinsey researchiii suggests that, on average, a B2B customer will regularly use six different interaction channels throughout the decision journey. And this figure is likely to be much higher in some B2B industries given the volume and value of transactions involved.

In particular, mobile is playing an increasingly significant role in many B2B customer journeys. Google’s 2015 report on The Changing Face of B2B Marketingi indicates that 42% of B2B buyers use a mobile device during the purchasing process. And this is at every stage of the journey - from comparing prices and reading about products, to contacting retailers and even purchasing via mobile.

This example highlights the importance of gaining a thorough understanding of your customers’ entire journey - from awareness to purchase. In doing so, you will be better placed to meet customers at various points along their journey, and to encourage them along the path to purchase.

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The next step is to consider how you can use content to support the customer journey and help prospects to make a purchasing decision, against the different buyer personas identified.

Develop a content strategy to engage throughout the customer journey

3.

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A recent CEB statistic suggests that a typical B2B customer is already 57% of the way along the purchase process before engaging directly with any supplier. Not only that but it takes on average 5.4 people to sign off on a business purchasevi. This all means that it’s more important than ever to develop content for every step of the consumer journey, for each buyer persona identified.

In doing so, keep in mind your customers’ pain points and challenges throughout their journey so that you are directly addressing these and providing useful, practical content. The content itself - whether internally developed or user-generated - can take many forms, including:

y Product data

y Search and product comparison

y Buying guides, case studies, testimonials and product reviews

y Blogs and forums

y Email marketing

y Offline marketing

Think about which of these content types best fits in with your customers’ journeys and addresses their pain points, so that you can prioritise content production accordingly. For instance, to attract new customers, you might focus on blogs and forums, whereas to help your buyers with their research, you might concentrate on product data and guides.

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With your content strategy in place, the next step is to decide how to share your content.

Everyone might be saying that you should use social, for example, but think carefully about which channels are really right for your business, based on your buyer profiling and customer journey mapping exercises. It might be the case that social media works well as a customer service and brand building channel, for instance, but not in terms of customer acquisition, so your resources could be more effectively invested elsewhere.

Choose the right channels for your business

4.

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According to the DMA’s Customer Acquisition Barometer reportvii, only six channels are used by one third or more of B2B marketers, compared to 15 being deployed by the same proportion of B2C marketers. Whilst the number of channels being employed should not necessarily be your primary concern, research has shown that omni-channel customers spend more than single-channel, offline-only customersviii. Therefore it’s important to ensure you are interacting with prospects via various channels throughout their journey with your organisation.

The DMA’s report also highlights the importance to B2B marketers of employing a mix of on- and offline channels, with the most popular channels being:

y Email (used by 79% of those surveyed)

y Own website (73%)

y Face-to-face (65%)

y Organic social media (55%)

y Direct mail (46%)

y Telemarketing (41%)

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Attracting and acquiring customers requires a first-class digital experience. Ensure you have the right technology and set-up in place to deliver this, or your investment could be wasted.

Make sure you have the right technology in place

5.

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Start by auditing your existing systems and technology set-up against your vision for the ideal customer journey. For instance, an online ordering portal might tick the box for eCommerce, but will fail to offer the B2C-style experience B2B buyers now expect. The most important thing is to ensure you offer a seamless customer journey – from one channel to another – to make it as easy as possible for customers to purchase from you. Having a portal behind a log-in, which requires a clunky, manual set-up procedure, is not necessarily the best way of achieving this.

A sophisticated eCommerce platform offers your customers – and potential customers – a more modern, convenient shopping experience. Many B2B organisations work with a specialist systems integration partner who manages their eCommerce platform, so that they can focus on managing the business, whilst ensuring the technology side of things is in safe hands.

Consider also the breadth of technology available to help salespeople, for instance in onboarding new customers face-to-face, or placing orders on behalf of the customer there and then. Such technology can not only lead to increased efficiency and greater visibility of the customer journey, but may also help to appease salespeople wary of customers moving to do everything self-service online.

Having a robust technology roadmap and set-up in place is also vital to future-proofing your organisation. After all, with your customer base increasingly researching and buying online, can you

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When putting together a customer acquisition strategy, it’s vital not to forget about retention. As the barriers to switching suppliers become lower with increased digitalisation, so retention becomes even more important. Yet, a recent study suggests that B2B companies are at risk of losing more than two-thirds of their customer base, with only 29 per cent of customers fully engagediv – that is emotionally and psychologically attached to the companies they do business with.

Don’t neglect customer retention

6.

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This is not surprising given that many B2B marketers admit to focusing their attention and budgets on customer acquisition rather than retention. In fact a recent survey revealed that only 48% of B2B companies have objectives tied to customer retentionv.

B2B organisations would do well to follow the lead of their B2C counterparts, almost all of whom have some form of loyalty scheme in place to encourage repeat purchase. In the B2B sector, returning customers are often even more valuable, given that many business buyers are slow to change suppliers due to internal restrictions and lengthy procurement procedures.

When developing your customer retention strategy, consider what type of scheme might work best for your customers. There are a wide variety of potential options available, such as a traditional points system or rewarding repeat buyers with additional value-added services, corporate days out or team building opportunities.

Be wary, however, of taking a “one size fits all” approach to loyalty. Genuine loyalty can only be achieved by taking a long-term, personalised approach, and by building relationships with your clients. A loyalty programme should instead be used as a way of reinforcing your existing efforts to build relationships with your customers.

Finally, ensure you have objectives and KPIs attached to your retention strategy, as well as acquisition. These might include customer retention rates, retained revenue and customer satisfaction.

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In order to measure the success of your customer acquisition strategy, it is vital to have KPIs in place. Not only will this allow you to assess the effectiveness of each aspect of your plan, but also to continually optimise your strategy.

Continually optimise your strategy by embedding KPIs

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The DMA’s study found that B2B lead generation marketers have markedly different priorities from their B2C counterparts. Quality of leads was first and foremost a B2B objective, whereas cost-per-acquisition was primarily a B2C goal. This reflects the more varied nature of B2B customers. In B2B, order values can vary wildly from customer to customer; whereas the range of order values for B2C is likely to be within ±50% of the average. Consequently, cost per acquisition is a useful guide for B2C, but much less meaningful for B2B.

When developing your KPIs, it is important to take into account the bigger picture. Consider each of the following aspects – and example metrics – to help you monitor the contribution of each business area to the success of your overall customer acquisition strategy.

y Marketing: Marketing cost per order, number of marketing qualified leads

y Sales: Number of sales accepted leads, new revenue per sales headcount

y Site: Average order value, new customer registrations

y CRM: Visits, existing customer order %

y Buying and merchandising: Gross margin, views availability

y Operations: Net promoter score, % of orders despatched within promise

Ultimately a successful customer acquisition strategy will be reflected in increased placed order value and operating profit, so these two vital metrics should also be part of your ongoing measurement and optimisation.

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In an increasingly complex, digital world, B2B organisations must adopt a strategic approach to customer acquisition, taking

into account the myriad ways in which customers and businesses interact today. Only by doing so will they be able to thrive

in today’s digitalised, always-on world.

eCommera can help your organisation to develop a comprehensive customer acquisition strategy.

Contact us to find out how we can help:

info@ecommera.com

+44 (0)20 3530 5800

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Sourcesi. Google, The Changing Face of B2B Marketing, March 2015ii. Annuitas, 2nd Annual Enterprise B2B Demand Generation Study Report, November 2015iii. McKinsey Quarterly, Do you really understand how your business customers buy?, February 2015iv. B2B Marketing, B2B companies risk losing two-thirds of customer base, 3 February 2016v. Act-On, Rethinking the Role of Marketing In B2B Customer Engagementvi. CEB, Two Numbers You Should Care About, 31 March 2015vii. DMA, Customer Acquisition Barometer 2015 October editionviii. Andy Hoar, Forrester Blog, US B2B eCommerce To Reach $1.1 Trillion By 2020, 2 April 2015

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About eCommeraeCommera, linked by Isobar, is a specialist commerce services business that provides retailers with a single source for expertise, technology and operational support. Having launched more than 170 eCommerce sites for over 25 brands across 33 markets, eCommera is part of the Dentsu Aegis Network and provides innovative multi-channel commerce services and platforms for major international brands and retailers, including Clarins, Tempur and Arla.

For more information on eCommera please visit the website: www.ecommera.com Want to find out more?If you’d like to find out more about how to develop and implement a B2B customer acquisition strategy, get in touch to find out how eCommera can help.

Contact us:info@ecommera.com+44 (0)20 3530 5800