5 Critical Components of Customer Engagement Needed to Fill your B2B Sales Pipeline

Guest Post: This was written and contributed by Matt Haag, GM at SimpleData.

Customer engagement revolves around encouraging clients to share and interact with your business. However, the strategy does not entail taking a 360 degree view. An effective approach provides a sure-fire way to foster brand loyalty and growth. In turn, your business achieves much-needed value creation rather than revenue extraction.

A good strategy leverages the power of various aspects, including laser targeted customer profiles, automated social media marketing and more. These measures complement basic approaches, such as creating great content and providing exceptional customer support. The level of engagement can be measured using wide-ranging metrics. These include email open rates, page views, social media shares and more.

Engagement provides a solid indicator of the customers’ view of your organization and product or service offerings. It is important to understand that all B2B customers want to know that you have a firm grasp of their needs and that you can relate it to your brand message. Publishing relevant content and sharing on social media is one way to showcase your brand’s identity and philosophy.

To implement an effective customer engagement strategy, make an effort to start small and gradually expand. This allows you to adapt your approach to the audience’s specific needs.

Laser targeted customer profiles

A useful customer profile provides a detailed guide for interacting with the prospect. It allows you to take a structured view of the prospective customer’s goals when trying your service or product. You can identify the content and features that are most valuable to the customer. In turn, the insights make it easier to craft effective marketing messages that are guaranteed to appeal to the prospect.

An ideal customer profile describes an organization that obtains considerable value from your range of products or services. The B2B client also provides significant value to your entity. The prospect described in the profile can create value for business in a variety of ways. These include filling B2B sales pipeline, referring your company to other B2B prospects, providing valuable insights into new opportunities and more.

To create the profile, you can use flexible and an informative persona template. The ideal template covers the following:

• Size of the organization
• Industry or niche
• How long they been operational
• Size of the relevant department
• Goals they achieve using your solution

Role of email automation and behavior triggered messages

Automation is a useful approach when it comes to email marketing. It has the capacity to save your business time by triggering an email whenever a customer completes pre-defined actions. It makes the process more immediate for the customer. This approach is proving to be useful for many companies regardless of sector or size.

The automated emails can be personalized, which makes them hyper-relevant to the recipient. As a result, the reader is highly likely to open and click. In turn, the strategy translates to increased website visits and sales conversions.

Sending targeted emails based on specific behaviors is undoubtedly key to effective sales automation. To implement an effective behavioral email strategy, identify key activities that allow you to create relevant messages.

According to research, the majority of visitors to company websites are yet ready to make a purchase. However, their presence is a sign of interest in your solution. For this reason, it is vital to invite them to subscribe to your newsletter. This creates a B2B lead gen opportunity that you can use to nurture the relationship.

Automated social media marketing

Automating your social media posting activities is a sure-fire way to streamline your tasks. This approach comes with a wide variety of strategic benefits. For instance, it allows you to focus attention on testing and improving your strategy. You will be able to create more relevant, engaging content according to insights gleaned from the analytics.

Automation allows you to handle social media marketing much better. It ensures posting consistency, which enables the target audience to get accustomed to regular updates. However, this does not mean you should flood the social media page with updates. On the other hand, automation makes it easier to communicate with audiences in different time zones.

You can take advantage of automation to become more productive, but automation can also have some pitfalls.  You will free up your schedule when you also take advantage of group post scheduling.

Using analytics to measure and optimize results

Marketing analytics helps maximize effectiveness of your campaigns and boost return on investment (ROI). By measuring and managing performance, you become more efficient at customer engagement and bolstering your B2B sales pipeline. Analytics provides valuable insights into trends and customer preference. As a result, you can optimize your email, content and social media marketing campaigns.

The information gleaned from analytics helps you focus on the most valuable tasks and audiences. If a particular approach does not yield results or costs more than it returns, then you can simply adjust your strategy to maximize ROI. Studies have shown that businesses making the most of analytics outperform their competitors. When it comes to content marketing, keywords are a vital metric that can boost your campaign’s effectiveness.

Enhance missing customer data to build a complete picture

Enhancing the quality of your data by appending missing customer attributes boosts business performance. Doing so allows you to gain a better understanding of your clients for more effective engagement. Good customer data is imperative when it comes to making good business decisions. Complete attributes data provides the much-needed holistic view.

Consolidating the information helps create a single view of each B2B client. You can rely on advanced data quality tools designed to help you gather the information into a single master reference file. As a result, the comprehensive details about the customer are readily available in one place. The consolidated view provides a more convenient way to identify the most valuable clients.

Complete information helps leverage actionable insights. In addition, you can increase customer retention rates and deliver upsell as well as cross-sell opportunities.

Investing in a good data quality tool ensures your customer information is fit-for-purpose. In the end, you save both time and money while enhancing your engagement strategies.

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