B2B marketing, whether online or off, is all about relationships. With longer sales cycles, and often, larger purchase amounts, it’s the relationship that a customer has with a business that really determines whether or not they’ll make the sale. This also means that how the customer thinks and feels about the B2B company is vital to understand, throughout the relationship — especially in customer service after the purchase. eMagine has a good article on B2B online marketing tactics for 2014: The B2B Online Marketing Quick Checklist for 2014, and while they mention Facebook and LinkedIn, I think that social media marketing has to be one of the top tactics for any B2B company in 2014 — and that means finding the social networks that make sense for your particular business (which may mean publication or association social networks or even creating your own). Also vital to the success of any social media marketing efforts are being able to track customers throughout the sales cycle — which means a CRM that can be tied to social networks and campaigns and can find customers who are on social networks to know what they’re saying.
customer relationship management
Social Media as a Vital Customer TouchPoint
When you’re thinking about your customer touchpoints, are you considering other ways customers may try to communicate with you or about you? Are your company or products mentioned on social media by customers having problems? While you may have the greatest customer support process in the world, it’s only good if people are actually using it to let you know about problems. Even if you’re not doing any other type of social media outreach, at the very least, monitoring for mentions of your company and products can go a long way for improving your online reputation.
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Don't forget the Relationship in CRM
Does your company have CRM (Customer Relationship Management)? CRM used to be about a business process of managing a relationship with a customer, but now it often just applies to a piece of software that stores customer names and some information about them. During this recession, there is an opportunity to actually form relationships with your customers. As Lee Odden from Online Marketing Blog says:
As companies decide where to invest their limited marketing resources, there is a distinct opportunity to focus on investing in relationships: with their customers, prospects, employees and business partners.
So instead of using your CRM to blast out targeted email campaigns, use CRM to form long-lasting relationships with your customers. Reach out to them and see if you can help. Companies and people who connect with their customers will be remembered much more than companies that just sent out lots of advertising. Best of all, building relationships is easy on the wallet – just takes a bit of your time.
(photo by “Solar ikon” @ Flickr CC)
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