Building B2B Omnichannel Strategies

Omnichannel Sales for B2B Businesses

Effective omnichannel sales strategies are critical to providing an exceptional customer experience and are a sure way to drive up sales and profit for sellers. In 2019, one study found that omnichannel marketing campaigns saw an 18.96% engagement rate, compared to a 5.4% engagement rate on single-channel marketing campaigns. This has exploded since, especially during COVID, to the point where businesses who aren’t prioritising omnichannel, risk getting left behind. The average digital touchpoints in one purchase has tripled from 2 to 6 which showcases the importance of having interconnected marketing and sales strategies in place.

Omnichannel has many different definitions depending on who you ask, and a lot has changed in the 10 years since it first emerged. In basic terms omnichannel sales offer a seamless shopping experience regardless of there they find your business or how they choose to make a purchase.

Defining Multichannel vs Omnichannel Strategies

My colleague Lucy, our Digital Marketing Headhunter for the UK, recently shared an article differentiating multichannel and omnichannel strategy, which in brief explained the following.

A multichannel strategy stretches across numerous channels such as a website, social media, and mobile. Each channel is separate and independent and has its own set of goals. This strategy requires the user to end their purchase on the same channel that they originally started their journey on.

Omnichannel builds on this to take it a step further and create a user experience that goes beyond the boundaries and limitations of multichannel marketing efforts. An omnichannel strategy aims to create a seamless and unified experience across multiple channels, generally improving the overall user journey. With 65% of consumers reporting that they start a task on one device and end it on another device, it’s obvious to see why most businesses are shifting towards this omnichannel approach.

Key Requirements for an Effective Omnichannel Strategy

Whilst omnichannel strategies have been widely adopted in B2C models, B2B buyers are also now expecting the same level of omnichannel service and flexibility as when they shop personally. They want to be able hop from channel to channel as they advance in their buying journey, quickly and efficiently. In fact, according to McKinsey & Company, a typical B2B buyer now uses an average of six different channels over the course of their decision-making journey. It’s therefore imperative that businesses get their omnichannel strategies right, but how?

Customer-Centric Engagement with a Holistic Approach is Key

To create a seamless and compelling customer journey, businesses need to put customers at the heart of their decision-making and omnichannel process. Extensive primary customer research can help guide businesses to create and provide a great omnichannel offering. During this research stage, you should review transaction logs, and deep dive into key insights to come to a clear understanding of customer preferences at each touchpoint and stage of the decision journey. From this you can build comprehensive, fully integrated customer profiles and manage relationships across all channels. Your Omnichannel strategy needs to encompass all channels and platforms to increase the number and frequency of customer interactions and broaden overall reach and relevance.

By meeting prospects where they are, and considering all of your output channels, you are improving the overall customer journey, leading to higher satisfaction, reduced churn, and more sales.

Identifying and Targeting your Best Customer Segments

A comprehensive view of your customer base is fundamental. This means pulling together all first-party data that you collect into one database, where you can stitch everything together and gain valuable insights into who is engaging with your brand and how. You should aim to build one integrated database with complete account profiles enhanced with behavioural and firmographic attributes. Good data can lead to more accurate lead generation. To collect and optimise the use of data, businesses should:

·????????Use multiple data sources to create digital lists of prospects and leads

·????????Use advanced data and analytics tools to create live dashboards to track customers and sales

·????????Create and utilise customised lead lists to support digital marketing and campaigns to increase conversion

Your website is a great source of information. By focusing attention on identifying anonymous site visitors, you are able to segment your data and identify key customer traits, behaviours, and characteristics. If you are able to match visitor IP address logs, with web cookies and mobile device IDs, you may be able to associate visitors with a buyer and company persona, helping you to connect online and offline channel data for better targeting and lead conversion. Again, all this information should be collated in one place.

Having rich account profiles can open audience expansion opportunities, so having a unified view of your audience so that you can perform a segmentation analysis is key. A segmentation analysis allows you to identify the attributes of your best customers so that you can draw conclusions and find “lookalike prospects”, which are potential customers with similar attributes to existing customers.

Engaging with Your Customers in the Right Way at the Right Time

You’ve probably already inferred that data is key to omnichannel marketing. Data gives you tangible insights into your customers behaviours which allows you to personalise messaging to specific leads at specific times n their journey, therefore leading to higher conversion rates and better ROI on your omnichannel marketing investments. Customers have a better experience when marketing is personalised, consistent, and based on up to date, clean data. This involves uniting online and offline methods such as digital campaigns, sales outreach, targeted email marketing, and event meetups.

Specific types of content and marketing should be sent depending on which stage of the buyer journey a prospective customer is at. If we split the buyer journey down into three stages, attract, engage and delight, we can then curate content for each.

At the attract stage, a business needs to use their expertise to generate conversations that then help to build meaningful relationships with prospects. This can include search engine marketing (SEM), blogging, and social media posts with accessible ‘how to’ guides and infographics showcasing key market data.

At the engage stage, businesses need to build on those relationships and provide more insights and solutions that align with customer pain points and goals. Key channels for this can include email marketing, retargeting and social media content that really addresses problems and solutions. Content might include free samples, case studies and recommendations, and comparison guides.

The final ‘delight’ stage is where businesses should excel and provide an exceptional experience that adds real value, empowers customers, and encourages those making a purchase to become a ‘raving fan’ of your business so they recommend you to others. Key channels to help businesses deliver this can include further email marketing and retargeting, as well as new methods such as live chats and chatbots, loyalty programmes and exclusive content or discounted entry to industry events

Cross-Departmental Collaboration

Working closely across different functions in the business is key to success, especially with omnichannel marketing where it is crucial to keep everything, and everyone aligned. Agile, cross-functional teams could, for example, include marketing, sales, development, and project management. Weekly meetings that involve someone from each of the key departments can help speed up decision making, and problem solving and avoid any roadblocks and delays in delivery.

Starting with the Right People

Building a great strategy, starts with hiring the right people. Omnichannel strategies require businesses to attract or develop the right talent and talent from different backgrounds who can all work together.

Maxwell Bond are the award winning recruitment partner of choice for tech and digital hiring across the UK and Germany, with proven results in reducing time to hire, cutting recruitment costs, and identifying top talent who are not on the active market.

If you’re looking for exceptional talent to drive your omnichannel strategy this year, get in touch for more information about how I can support you with candidate attraction, hiring, and retention.

Alternatively, if you’re looking for your next role, browse current vacancies on our website.