Which touchpoints are B2B marketers missing?
As is well known, the customer journey is often divided into phases. In this way, you can -roughly- divide the entire customer journey into a part 'becoming a customer' and a part 'being a customer'. A further division can be: orientation, purchase, use and service. From the B2B Marketing Trend Report 2017:
As a marketer, which phase of the customer journey do you pay the most attention to?
The B2B Marketing Trend Report 2017 underlines that B2B marketers still have a greater focus on 'becoming a customer' than on 'being a customer', but these same marketers recognize that the customer journey as a whole needs to be optimized. This is true for 56 percent of the B2B marketers surveyed. The reasons for this can also be read in the trend report.
The shift to inbound
An important reason has to do with a development that has already started in B2C, but is now slowly gaining ground in B2B. It is about the shift to an organization that is increasingly inbound, hong kong mobile number format increasingly online, increasingly works with marketing automation and increasingly works from data.
In B2B too, customers increasingly contact us via -for example- social media or via a form that they download from the website. Of course, B2B organizations want to serve these customers with correct and relevant information. This means that B2B marketers need to know where in the customer journey customers are.
Longer purchasing process
A second important reason is the following. In B2B, not only does the purchasing process often take longer than in B2C. The process of 'being a customer' is also often longer. Many B2B organisations have long-term contracts with their business customers. B2B marketers indicate in the trend report that during this purchasing process, factors such as customer satisfaction, processing speed and service level are increasingly being taken into account. This means that potential customers are already paying attention to matters they will experience in the 'being a customer' phase during the purchasing process. This means that in B2B, the customer journey as a whole must be firmly set up.
However, this attention to the entire customer journey is still a pipe dream for many B2B marketers. The B2B Marketing Trend Report 2017 also shows the graph below.