How to build a B2B marketing omni-channel system?

Improving the conversion rate from leads to wins is very important for B2B marketing. How should it be done specifically? This article shares with you several methods to improve the conversion rate of live broadcasts. At the end, it also analyzes important application tools. I hope it will be useful to you.

This article is mainly divided into three parts.

1. To B marketing customer acquisition system construction
2. Improve the conversion rate from leads to wins
3. How to optimize enterprise marketing ROI

1. Construction of To B Marketing Customer Acquisition System

1. Typical marketing system of SaaS companies

The typical marketing system of a SaaS company can be divided into five parts: Demand Gen, Strategic Communication, Product Marketing, Customer Engagement, and Sales Engagement. The marketing system shown above is applicable to different companies in different situations. For example, for companies in the early stages, not all business lines may be established. But Demand Gen (customer acquisition) is important for all companies. Therefore, for early-stage companies, it is recommended to prioritize building customer acquisition business lines.

Demand Gen:

• Content marketing: such as new media operations and other content marketing
• Digital marketing: such as online advertising, natural traffic diversion, hacker growth, etc.
• Strategic Communication:

For companies in Series B and later, Strategic Communication is more suitable. Some technology companies are easily attacked by public opinion, but SaaS does not have such a problem relatively speaking. However, the introduction of PR in the later stage is also very important.

• Social Media & Community
• PR/AR/GR
• Brand and creativity

Product Marketing:

For technology companies, if the target audience is the business line audience or the audience who does not understand technology, the Product Marketing business line is more important. Because it can identify the current users of technology products, the value they provide, and their target market positioning.

• Market Analysis
• Product Management
• Product Market
• Product development

Customer Engagement:

For some companies that have high requirements for customer renewal rates and cross-selling, the Customer Engagement business line is more important. Carry out the operation of old customers through customer contact.

• Customer Contact
• Customer Loyalty

Sales Engagement:

Sales Engagement is used to cooperate with the sales team to carry out subsequent conversion and acceptance work. Including marketing, etc.

• Domestic sales
• Market Operations
• CRM Management

2. Typical customer acquisition methods of SaaS companies

The typical customer acquisition methods of SaaS companies can be divided into Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing. Inbound Marketing has low cost and high ROI, while Outbound Marketing has higher cost but is more targeted.

There are many ways to do inbound marketing, and channels such as official websites and apps can all be used, but there must be a unique point of entry for traffic, and other points of entry must be connected to the unique point of entry. Evaluate the quality of leads and grade the leads based on the depth and frequency of unique leads and interactive touchpoints. Early stage company leads may be fewer. But for later-stage companies like Sensors, the marketing team does not have time to process all the leads, and a tiered nurturing mechanism is needed for the leads.

If the budget is limited, the market requirements cannot be too high. Currently, the two most effective channels verified by Sensors are the official website and content marketing. For SaaS companies, the official website is very important. First, it can showcase products, business scenarios, and business capabilities. Second, the official website has a lot of CTA design. Content marketing etc. is also very effective. Sensors has its own media matrix, including official accounts, Zhihu, etc.

Although EDM in outbound marketing seems outdated, it is actually quite effective. In EDM design, Sensors not only sends a thank-you email upon registration, but also provides different nurturing emails for different leads in the later stage.

In order to improve the effectiveness of paid promotion, in addition to the optimization of promotion strategies and creative design, the more critical thing is the landing page of traffic, such as the official website. If the closing is not designed well, the bounce rate will be higher and customer retention will be lower.

Sensors Marketing’s customer acquisition system can be divided into major categories: sales leads, distribution leads, and cultivation leads. If it is a paid search engine traffic, demo demonstration, or door-to-door demonstration channel, sales can follow up directly and enter the CRM allocable lead pool. If customers are acquired through channels such as events, outbound calls, EDM marketing, content marketing, etc., they will enter the lead cultivation pool. At the same time, different cultivation methods are selected for different channels. Customers are graded and scored based on their attributes and behaviors. Once they meet the A1-D4 levels, they can enter the allocable lead pool for follow-up.

Regarding customer classification, Sensors has its own evaluation system, which is mainly based on customer attributes and customer behavior. There are three main customer attributes: the first is to look at company-related information, such as whether it is the target industry and the size; the second is to look at the contact person, such as whether the contact field information is complete and whether he is the decision maker; the third is to look at the purchase stage. Customer behavior scoring is mainly divided into three points: the first is interest and intention, the second is CTA, and the third is recent behavior. After the grading is completed, the clues in levels A1-D4 will be allocated. Clues that fail to enter the classification process are returned to the incubation pool.

2. Improve the conversion rate from leads to wins

Regarding the cultivation process, there are two key points: the first is to complete the target customer field information so that sales can determine whether it meets the characteristics and requirements of follow-up; the second is to guide customers to generate CTA with purchasing intention. For early-stage companies, the marketing role can complete the work of introduction and evaluation, and sales can follow up later.

At the same time, Sensors has set up domestic sales positions to check whether the leads are qualified and to carry out manual cultivation work, such as checking whether the customer has a budget, whether they have decision-making power, the degree of match between their needs and products, and whether they have reached the purchase stage where they can follow up with foreign sales. After inspection and artificial cultivation, domestic sales are transferred to foreign sales, thereby shortening the foreign sales cycle and improving sales efficiency.

During the cultivation process, there are several KPIs to refer to:

• The quota of export pipeline. For example, if we want to achieve 30 million in sales this year, based on the previous conversion rate, assuming it is around 33%, we will need a 90 million business opportunity pipeline. The gap between the current market cultivation leads and the existing export pipeline is what market cultivation needs to be responsible for.
• The clue recovery mechanism, recovery process, and recovery efficiency.
• Market sales gap forecast and sales commitment cycle forecast.
• There is a feedback mechanism for the quality of leads to optimize front-end acquisition.
• Target completion assessment and efficiency improvement assessment indicators.

The following chart shows the indicators that the market needs to pay attention to. When setting goals at the beginning of the year, they can be reasonably and scientifically quantified:

3. How to optimize corporate marketing ROI?

The depth of tool application determines the efficiency of communication with the market. Companies with maturity level 1 generally have EDM and CRM. Most Chinese SaaS companies are at maturity level 1. Companies at maturity level 2 have added website data tracking, landing pages, lead scoring, and user cultivation (with their own mechanisms). Currently, there are relatively few companies at maturity level 2 in China. Companies at maturity level 3 add mobile marketing, social marketing, and search marketing. Companies at maturity level 4 will add market planning, market resource management, and marketing ROI analysis. The company can evaluate the stage it is in and clarify the work to be done in the next stage.

Below, we analyze some of the more important tool applications:

1. Landing page optimization

• Clarify optimization goals (conversion rate/bounce rate/lead volume/conversion path)
• Page framework and structure tuning (design check-list)
• Peak-end effect (be sure to give customers excitement when launching the official website to deepen their impression, such as the company's style)
• A/B testing and data analysis (use A/B testing when making major product or path adjustments to shorten the conversion path)

2. Content Marketing - Benchmark Customer Screening

Benchmark customers are not entirely based on screening criteria such as "big brand, high popularity", "leading company in the industry", and "large contract amount". Sensors selects four major characteristics of benchmark customers:

• The demand scenario is highly matched with the product/service
• High potential for large-scale replication in the target market
• The customer has good business capabilities and an open mindset
• It costs a lot to make sure your customers have a clear understanding of your positioning and expectations. But once you create a company that meets these four characteristics, you will have a large amount of content marketing materials, and at no cost.

3. Visualize and label benchmark customers

Although data is an important criterion for judgment, marketing cannot only focus on data, as data cannot explain whether it has an impact on the user's mind. Decision makers have different decision-making styles, preferences, and focuses, so different content should be adopted for different styles. Content marketing is like a thousand Hamlets in the eyes of a thousand people. Content marketing also has many humanistic elements and is a combination of science and art. At the same time, marketing personnel must meet with customers and gain an in-depth understanding of their characteristics and the company's products.

4. The Gap between Target Customers and Benchmark Customers

The benchmark customers set up by the company often have size and industry gaps with the target customers. There are mainly four types of differences between target customers and benchmark customers:

• Low dimension beats high dimension: the target users are large companies, while the benchmark customers are small and medium-sized companies. The key to defeating high dimensions with low dimensions lies in the value it provides to large companies and what benefits it can bring to the companies.
• Homogeneous group: scene empathy. For the notification group, it is necessary to clarify the specific usage scenarios, and it is best to have experience in competing services.
• High dimension attacks low dimension: dimensionality reduction attack. It is relatively easy to defeat low-dimensional objects with high-dimensional objects.
• Alternative audiences: differentiated highlights.

5. Material collection and content production

When it comes to content production, the first and most important thing is that the content must be true, and content marketing requires an understanding of many details. Start with benchmark companies’ creative questions, define key information, embed keywords and set copywriting style standards. As for the content production mechanism, the main channels include product scenario applications, customer liaisons, account managers, successful product managers, and sales service details. Finally, the accumulation of content libraries is also very important. There will be a certain overlap between customers, and similar content can also impress different customers. The content library can improve efficiency.

6. To B content format selection and effect evaluation

In the classification of content types, Sensors believes that the ones with high quality traffic include: PR, in-depth cases, white papers, research reports, infographics, course videos, and live broadcasts.

7. Quality content evaluation dimensions

• Effectiveness: memorable, consistent with business strategy, consistent with product positioning
• Confidence: objective, credible, clear
• Resonance: trendy, influential, relevant

8. Outcome indicators

• Reading column indicators: original article opening rate, sharing rate, like rate, and comment rate;
• User indicators: number of new followers, net increase in followers, cumulative number of followers; user-related information such as gender, etc.; user source-related information such as public account search, etc.
• Clue indicators: number of content downloads and registrations, etc.
• Brand indicators: Baidu Index, WeChat Index, Toutiao Index; news collection volume; official website natural traffic visit UV, etc.

9. Case: Cultivating and promoting sales, To B live streaming marketing

During the recent epidemic, live streaming marketing has been very popular, but the conversion efficiency of many live streaming is relatively low and does not meet expectations. In order to improve the effectiveness of live broadcast conversion, Sensors has the following three experiences:

• Connect data from multiple business platforms: Check the data status of each source channel.
• Sales scenario: Sales invitation posters identify different salespeople and customers. After a customer is introduced, the person in charge of sales is notified for follow-up.
• Hierarchical cultivation mechanism: collect customer WeChat IDs and recommend valuable content.

Author: Yang Lanqin

Source: Sensors Data