Many businesses need to move away from historic, ‘product-centric’ ways of thinking and working. (‘Solutions, not boxes’ as one of our clients put it.) Globalisation has had the effect of commoditising many product categories. To differentiate and create preference, businesses have to focus on the customer more than ever. We help clients humanise their brand, and achieve a more emotional reaction from customers. This involves looking at customer needs with fresh eyes. It means re-telling your story, and re-shaping your actions.
Customer journey mapping helps you to understand the (often complex) routes your customers are taking to purchase - and where the ones who don’t purchase are dropping out. This enables you to work out the role and importance of your channels and touch points at each stage. In turn, that enables you to create exactly the right content to nurture prospects through to purchase and repurchase. Benefit - the ability to deploy budget where it is most effective, and higher prospect recruitment and conversion.
Your customers will probably identify that you need to re-platform before you do. They may see your site as static, inward-looking, and no longer fit for purpose. They will be making comparisons with your competitors, and basing their views on their own personal online buying experiences. We take the pain out of re-platforming, so your organisation can be more approachable, visible and accessible to customers. (And indeed your future employees!)
If you’re finding marketing increasingly time consuming and expensive, we can automate much of the process of creating campaigns, managing data, and understanding audiences. This technology can make our clients more self-sufficient as well as releasing more time to manage and nurture leads. We audit your requirements, match the right technology solution to your needs, and implement the system within your organisation - even managing the training.
Customers now have access to enormous digital resources, enabling them to short-list effectively before even talking to a sales person. But many businesses still have sales and marketing processes that were designed for a different time. We replace ‘sales funnel’ thinking with ‘revenue cycle’ thinking. This realigns the different stages of the buying journey so sales staff can understand how prospects are moving through the cycle, and marketing resources can be targeted more efficiently. With a new, common set of goals both functions become more effective.
Marketers in B2B sectors know how to use the likes of LinkedIn and Twitter, but this activity has often evolved organically, lacking robust planning and methodology. The result can be mixed messages, problems reporting effectiveness, making this activity hard to manage and hard to optimise. Getting content and social strategy right is a ‘need to have’ if an organisation is to achieve its goal of engaging customers on a more human level.