Have you seen The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook?

This comprehensive and practical guide to the latest ideas in customer-focused marketing hands you over 200 packed pages of strategy, best practices, do's and don'ts, practical know-how, facts and figures, and ideas to optimise your marketing strategy, boost sales, market share, increase ROI and profit.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)

6 Ways to super-charge B2B customer experiences

Current events are influencing the B2B buying process

"A year ago today, the world was in a very different place," said Michael McLaren, Global CEO of Merkle B2B. "Recent events have accelerated the need for organizations to adapt and grow to survive. To better understand these shifts and improve the B2B buying process, our annual research provides B2B marketers with the guidance needed to ensure their experiences fulfill consumers' rising expectations."

Conducted by B2B International, Merkle B2B's insights group, the comparative study provides an in-depth look at the effects of pandemic-driven change for B2B organizations and revisits the four B2B Superpowers established in last year's report: Reliability, Understanding, Enrichment, and Pre-Eminence.

Through interviews with 3,505 buyers of B2B products and services spanning over 6,000 recent B2B purchase experiences, B2B International asked buyers to retrace their steps along the way to identify which key factors mattered most at each stage of the decision-making process. While the four Superpowers remain, their core ingredients have shifted in importance.

The new report, "The New Shape of Superpowered B2B Customer Experiences," explores the six newly elevated ingredients, enabling marketers to create personally relevant customer experiences across the entire journey and influence a B2B buyer's decision with the right information, clarity, and benefits. It then dissects the differences in brand performance within these six essential ingredients across several audience groups, including industry verticals, regions, and generations.

Simon Calvert, Chief Strategy Officer, Merkle B2B, UK said, "Through this research we found that brands that deliver fully across the six newly important ingredients are 80% more likely to see increased spend from their customers in future. We also found that the gap between this year's winning and losing B2B brand has narrowed significantly. So, it is now even more important than ever to understand the blend of ingredients that make the difference between success and failure."

Key findings from the report included that:

• The customer experience gap is closing between leading and lagging brands with performance scores narrowing by 51% since 2020.
• While six of the ingredients that make up the Superpowers have elevated in importance, three have lessened in importance, and nine remain as important as ever.
• Buyer expectations of speed and agility have increased rapidly
  44% of decision makers now agree that "it takes far too long to make a purchase from most of our B2B suppliers," up significantly from just 28% in 2020.
• It is vital brands have a progressive approach, with 67% of B2B buyers agreeing that "it is increasingly important that the B2B brands we work with offer both positive social and business value."

Have you seen The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook?

This comprehensive and practical guide to the latest ideas in customer-focused marketing hands you over 200 packed pages of strategy, best practices, do's and don'ts, practical know-how, facts and figures, and ideas to optimise your marketing strategy, boost sales, market share, increase ROI and profit.

Learn the insider's tricks and techniques to turn every customers into a 'super spreader' for your brand. It's better than free advertising. Once you start this ball rolling, your brand can grow rapidly through word-of-mouth, advocacy, influencers, and customer loyalty. Super-charge your company's marketing strategy, build up your market share, and make more sales through repeat business and customer loyalty.

Find out what works - and what doesn't - and who's succeeded, and how they did it. See how the world's top brands keep their competitive edge against all odds.

The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook walks you step-by-step through the techniques, metrics, reporting, analysis, marketing models, technologies, tools and innovations for successful marketing strategies - both traditional and emerging - with expert guidance from thought leaders in every major market. Find out the best ways to gather, analyse, and act on customer data to increase profitability, build your brand, empower your customers, beat the competition, reduce churn, and increase customer profitability. This is a marketing book you simply can't afford to be without.

This book aims to hand you all the facts, figures and research data you need for the best decisions for a more profitable, more engaging marketing strategy. It also highlights all the facts, forecasts and trends identified by our experts from the global Marketing Factbook's vast database of market data, news, studies, research and articles, and presents you with an invaluable library of ideas and practical support you can call upon at will.

With The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook at your side, you'll have instant access to a true goldmine of easily adaptable and up-to-date strategies, walk-throughs, trends, research and market data, plus all the supporting arguments you need to build a solid, profitable marketing strategy.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)