How to Boost Customer Engagement with Your B2B Marketing Initiatives

If your B2B marketing efforts too often feel as though your brand is shouting into the void, it can be easy to become discouraged and change tactics frequently in hopes of increasing engagement and conversions. There’s a better way to market, and learning how to engage B2B customers is easier than you’d think—especially with the help of a Rockford digital marketing company like Cain & Company.

Understanding Customer Engagement

What’s customer engagement? Many forms of marketing and communications are one sided. Customer engagement encourages interaction, turning that one-way communication into a dialogue between business and client.

Customer Engagement Benefits

Customers engage with your brand in several ways. These can be summed up as CX, or customer experience, which is includes your customer service, any resources you place at customers’ disposal, your marketing comms, and the touchpoints in your sales funnel.

B2C marketers have long known and embraced the benefits of customer engagement. It’s time for B2Bs to catch up. Skeptical? Consider the following benefits:

• A better understanding of your customers’ needs, motivations, and pain points leads to an improved customer experience.
• Better CX leads to improved loyalty and trust.
• You gain useful feedback that lets you continually refine your messaging and processes.
• That, in turn, creates a feedback loop that boosts brand image and positive sentiment.
• All of this adds up to a quicker customer journey for new prospects and existing customers alike.

Improving Customer Engagement

So how can you boost engagement? There are a few concrete steps worth taking.

Leverage Data

Effective marketing begins with understanding. Market research helps you better understand and reach your customers. But don’t stop there; ask yourself: how well do you understand your customers’ customers? Understanding their customer journey can give you valuable insights into your own clients’ struggles. In turn, it also helps you to engage in effective thought leadership, reinforce the relationship between your sales and marketing teams, and in doing so, effectively strategize for the longer term.

Embrace Contextual Targeting

What else can you do with the data you’ve collected? Consider contextual targeting. Unlike behavioral targeting, which serves ads based on past search, purchase, and web activity, contextual targeting uses machine learning to display advertising that’s a natural fit for the site(s) a person visits. Where the former can seem unsettling and intrusive, the less-obtrusive nature of the latter (and the fact that it doesn’t rely on cookies, which a growing number of browsers and software can block) makes click-through more likely.

Choose the Right Customer Engagement Tools

There are more ways than ever before to encourage and leverage customer engagement with your brand, among them:

• Content Marketing: Content marketing increases credibility and establishes thought leadership. Equally to the point, it gives you something effective with which to feed the multi-headed beast that is your online presence.
• Social Media Marketing: Social media marketing allows you to facilitate and guide the discussion around your brand, values, and products, making it a useful tool for marketing and public relations strategy alike.
• Embracing the Human Element: It’s a truism that people buy from people. Making your brand more approachable or using techniques like account-based marketing (ABM) can make your brand more personal while retaining its professional edge.
• Smarter Use of Smarter Tools: Marketing automation streamlines many essentials, from email newsletters to social media marketing. But make sure you’re using its tools—especially market research, sales funnel automation, metrics, and more.
• Solicit Direct Feedback: Case studies, white papers, and other collateral that require a higher degree of customer input can be a highly effective form of social proof. But if you’ve taken the time to cultivate solid relationships with your clients, they’ll be happy to shout your brand from the rooftops.

Customer Engagement and Digital Marketing in Rockford, IL

If you’re finding it difficult either developing or staying on track with a customer engagement strategy, don’t guess. Get help from a company that specializes in B2B marketing for manufacturing. Cain & Company is proud to put our experience and marketing expertise at the disposal of manufacturing clients of all sizes.