The future of B2B marketing is insightful and predictive – harness it!
Numerous studies have proven that for organizations, customer experience is the key to future success. Even though B2B customer journeys differ significantly from consumers, B2B customers still expect the same quality experience. Therefore, to provide excellent customer experiences, organizations should genuinely understand their customers and show this to them.
Organizations are working hard to understand their customer behavior and needs to achieve this success. However, companies often rely only on traditional surveys when gathering customer insight, which means continuously looking at a sample of customers through a rear mirror. And even though for quite some time, companies could have been generating realistic and humane insights with real-time interaction data. The biggest question is why are companies leaning on historical data when at the same time, modern customers are expecting brands to react fast or even anticipate their needs?
Surveys are an excellent tool for research, and they have their purpose in gathering customer insight. Still, in this super-fast transforming “VUCA” world, organizations should be looking to the future and re-examining their focus – is it CX? Modern and leading marketing (B2B and B2C) organizations are improving their data, analytics, and insight capabilities to harness predictive insights to connect more closely and deeply with their customers.
All customers just want to feel seen, heard, and valued. Building a successful customer relationship that is profitable and value-adding is a two-way journey consisting of multiple encounters between an organization and its customer. Companies could be offering this and improve their efficiency and growth simultaneously with end-to-end predictive experiences and predictive nurturing programs for leads and current customers.
Predictive nurturing program framework is the foundation of building future
The simple framework case example below showcases the principle of end-to-end predictive experiences for B2B customers. To create predictive lead nurturing and customer value programs, organizations need to have a solid knowledge base. The foundation of knowledge is quality data
management, analytics, and a technology ecosystem. Organizations can add relevant development themes according to their strategic goals and long-term vision when those are in order.
The framework case illustrates that four different development themes are needed to achieve this vision:
1. Predictive modeling: Utilizing algorithmic predictions to fuel customer-centric marketing and resource optimization for every customer life-cycle phase
2. AI optimization: AI tools for optimizing towards high-performance advertising results and algorithm utilization for valuable advertising content creation
3. Effective operating models: Growth-oriented culture utilizing growth marketing methods such as data-based hypothesis, testing, effective scaling, and rapid actions based on insight
4. Insight measurement: Creating a holistic understanding of marketing performance with strategic, tactical, and operational measurements
Progressive profile view is the heart of success
A predictive customer nurturing program requires quality customer insight as customer nurturing is based on customer intelligence. A progressive profile view at the heart of the frameworks enables organizations to create effective and highly personalized nurturing programs. Profile views are dynamic, advanced, and they should always consider two perspectives for the client – individual and organizational – especially when acting in B2B environments.
Individual data sources give insight on communication and content while organizational data feeds insight for relationship success purposes.
Examples of individual data points are general demographics or behavior, and organization data may include purchase history or general company information. Both data perspectives should also have quality predictive analytics, such as the likelihood to buy or the subsequent reaction.
Lead nurturing programs & customer value programs bring your customer insight alive
Nurturing programs are a never-ending story. They are updated and optimized continuously and improved along with increasing data amounts. Customers are implemented to different programs based on their customer profile data, touchpoints, and content is modified according to algorithmic predictions and data insight.
The objective of lead nurturing programs is to generate revenue with an increasing amount of good-quality leads. With algorithmic predictions, every lead can be analyzed for its potential value and scored according to that. This way, marketing and sales can focus only on the highest potential leads.
Customer value programs also utilize algorithmic predictions so that organizations can maximize the satisfaction and value of their current customers. They can also use predictions to prevent churn by analyzing customer behavior and anticipating the moves of unsatisfied customers.