Level-up customer experience: Lean on your marketing team.
Every business knows customer experience is important. Some companies have whole departments devoted to it. But do they include marketing in the discussion?
Not often enough — but they really should. Especially in B2B.
The Harvard Business Review (HBR) says, “Developing positive customer experiences is all about building relationships — and your reputation.”1
Building relationships and reputations? That’s our wheelhouse! They’re both essential marketing goals — social marketing and content strategy are all about relationship-building, and reputation is at the heart of every brand.
When it comes to creating a positive experience for your customers, here are three pragmatic ways your B2B marketing team can lead the way.
What’s the bottom-line impact of positive customer experience?
Before we look at how marketing can help improve customer experience, it’s worth taking a closer look at why it’s important in the first place.
It’s well-known that positive customer experiences — and a reputation for delivering them — are important to an organization’s bottom line:
- 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services2
- Service is the top factor affecting customer loyalty, cited by 74% of customers3
Those stats reflect B2C research, but many consumers are also business buyers, and (last we checked) all business buyers are human beings. So, it’s safe to assume that people’s personal buying habits will invade their business expectations and buying habits.
In other words, improving the buying experience for business buyers can generate strong bottom-line results for B2B companies. And improving the B2B buying experience starts with marketing.
Here’s how.
1.
Marketing drives the emotions that drive positive customer experience
Every buying decision is an emotional decision. Yes, even in B2B. That’s why the most effective B2B marketing campaigns are the ones that create and reinforce emotional connections with their audiences.
One small example: personalization. The more a buyer feels like a message is tailored precisely to them, the more likely they’ll have a positive emotional response to that message. In fact, research shows that personalization:
- Reduces customer acquisition costs by as much as 50%
- Lifts revenues by 5 to 15%
- Increases marketing ROI by 10 to 30%4
Personalizing your buying experience can generate similar results. And your marketing team knows more about personalization than anyone.
That’s one reason StudioNorth content strategists read what our B2B audiences read, watch what they watch, and celebrate what they celebrate. It helps us forge those emotional connections with B2B audiences that drive positive customer experience and stronger bottom-line results.
2.
Marketing understands buyer journeys best
Too many B2B organizations do far too little to understand their customers’ true buyer journeys — how their needs evolve, how they gather information, and what triggers their decision to buy.
You can’t optimize the buying experience if you don’t understand the buyer’s journey.
Who actually does understand buyer journeys? Your marketing team. At StudioNorth, we dig deeply into buyer journeys that visualize the true motivators and barriers in today’s more complicated buying cycles with a three-step approach that accelerates performance.
Your marketing team should lead the way in the buyer’s journey research, suggest improvements, and help facilitate cross-functional teams to create buying experiences that drive revenue and brand value.
3.
Marketing has the creative power to build peak moments
B2B buyers (or buying committees) might spend months evaluating a purchase, but there’s almost always a pivotal moment when that evaluation tips toward a decision.
Most organizations rely on top-, mid-, and bottom-funnel assets to influence those decisions, but while those assets have informational value, they don’t do much to improve the buying experience. They don’t spark that peak moment.
Know who’s great at creating peak moments? Your marketing team.
In marketing, we spend every day inventing new words, visual expressions, and experiences. And they’re all about sparking that key moment when someone feels like a company understands them, or sees a complex situation with newfound clarity, or suddenly realizes that there’s a new and better way to solve an ongoing challenge.
Superior buying experiences require peak moments, and peak moments require creative power. That’s why your marketing team is your best bet for improving your customer experience.
These are just three ways marketing can lead the way in creating the superior customer experiences that boost your bottom line.
StudioNorth can help. We help enterprises such as Lenovo, CDW and McKesson leverage strategic insight and creativity to improve their buyers’ experiences. Curious about how we can help you?
Sources:
1 Harvard Business Review, “How to Create Positive Customer Experiences for Your Business,” March 2023
2 Salesforce, “State of the Connected Customer”, 2021
3 Forbes, “Top Customer Experience Trends In 2024”
4 McKinsey & Company, “What is personalization?” May 2023
