Three methods to construct long-term relationships together with your prospects
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For B2B companies, producing a great product or reliable service is not enough to be successful. Beyond the transactional experience, customers are looking for an emotional connection, an educational trip, or a unique memory. And now that more than three-quarters of B2B buyers and sellers say they prefer digital and remote human interactions over face-to-face interactions, it is clear that the extraordinary digital transformation that has taken place in 2020 will continue.
To navigate the unknown terrain of the pandemic, most medium-sized B2B marketers switched from face-to-face conferences – traditionally the most efficient method of generating leads – to webinars and digital summits. But many of these online debuts failed; it was an extremely competitive area. Audiences didn’t participate or refused to actively engage, resulting in lower conversion rates for B2B marketers.
Instead of waiting for offline events to come back, B2B marketers can offer personalized webinars, refine their email marketing, and use live chats to build long-term relationships with their customers.
1. Best your webinars
Promote your webinar effectively
During the pandemic, B2B companies were pressured to learn how to navigate all digital marketing channels at the same time, which resulted in some companies not being able to effectively promote their webinars.
To promote educational webinars, B2B marketers should focus on channels like LinkedIn, which is where 46% of the social media traffic that reaches B2B company websites comes from.
Check out thought leadership articles and recommendations, and consider B2B influencer marketing as well. Investigate the social impact of your business partners as well as the people who follow your brand.
Include a short question-and-answer session at the beginning of your webinar
92% of webinar attendees would like a live question and answer during a webinar. So why not start with it?
Find out what your viewers’ goals are and what unique insights they are craving. If the Q&A is live chat, write: What would you like to learn here? What problems do you have?
If you make your digital event engaging and interactive by solving real-world problems, your audience will stick around to learn more. Word of mouth is very effective when you listen to your audience, provide quality content, and present yourself as a brand that wants to help people, not just sell a product.
Have a customer-centric approach
Imagine this: you start your webinar, but all of a sudden you get several questions from the audience.
In this situation, focus on your viewers and their questions and not on your product or the topics you wanted to present. People’s attention span is short, so get to the point quickly and be ready to adjust. Personalization makes a significant contribution to building customer relationships.
Actively listen to customer feedback
Collect customer feedback from webinars and turn it into action. If your viewers ask about a specific product or want to hear from a specific speaker, promote the adjustments made in the live video or webinar that follows and share information about the organized event with the guest you are looking for.
Keep promises and your customers will stay longer.
2. Conquer email marketing and communication
Sign marketing emails with a real name
Email marketing captures top-of-the-funnel prospects and is an integral part of lead nurturing. But a lot of marketers write emails and sign as CEO.
You don’t fool anyone. The prospect or current customer who receives this email knows immediately that it is an automated message.
Instead, the person creating the email – the email marketing specialist or marketing manager – should sign it themselves. This proves to existing and potential customers that your B2B company values the frontline staff and that there is a real person behind the company emails.
Be aware of what you can and cannot offer
If you’re a B2B marketer with a SaaS product and responding to inquiries from potential customers via email, you should be honest about what solution the company can deliver.
Helping a customer doesn’t always mean selling your product. Sometimes you have to say, “I know how to solve your problem, but not our product.”
Even if you promise to develop a certain function in your software within a certain time frame, you are not breaking the tacit contract. Stick to your word. (Tip: It’s better to promise too little and over-deliver.)
3. Master live chats
Realize the importance of human customer service
A customer support team or an online chat function often define how a customer journey begins with a company; both are invaluable. Customers want to be treated as individual people and they hate being spread across different media and departments.
Although chatbots are scalable and inexpensive for large companies, live chatting with human agents offers a more personalized and flexible experience that is often pleasantly surprising for customers. In 2018, around 40% of US respondents to a CGS survey said they would rather talk to a person than an AI-powered chatbot.
That preference grew during the pandemic as people yearned for human connection and the number of complaints about automated experiences with chatbots grew.
Start a conversation right away
Instead of using “click here” on a website to get people to buy something or read an article, use this call to action to open a conversation channel: “Click here to speak to us” .
When a customer is immediately greeted with a personalized, concise and transparent message, it helps to build a long-term relationship. It also confirms that there is no chatbot behind all of the website’s customer service.
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During the pandemic, it became difficult for many companies to ensure long-term engagement in a remote environment. As B2B marketers adopt an adapted “business as usual”, the switch to digital interaction could mean less authentic communication.
Alternatively, if your shopping experience is tailored to meet individual needs, it can result in more conversions and leads, rebuilding relationships with customers, and regaining their trust.
Additional resources for building customer relationships
Customer relationships | MarketingProfs training course
Loyalty, loyalty, relationships: what do your customers really get out of it?
How to build successful B2B relationships