A brief discussion on refined operations in the ToB market

This sharing mainly elaborates on the refined operations at the two levels of customer acquisition and conversion, which is often referred to as the market operation part.

So what does refined market operations mean? It's the customer.

1. The value of the ToB market: customer acquisition, conversion promotion, and branding

Regarding the value of the ToB market, I think it lies in three aspects:

1. The first is the well-known customer acquisition, which continuously brings potential buyers for products and services.

2. The second is to promote conversion. Through sales toolboxes, marketing activities, content, etc., the entire life cycle of potential customers from registration to closing an order can be influenced to promote the conversion of potential customers into paying customers. A good market can greatly shorten the sales cycle.

3. The third is brand building. I have heard many interesting discussions on this point before. Comparing the brand building of toB and toC companies, it is believed that people in the toC market understand brands better. Regarding this issue, my opinion is that toC corporate brand building is completely different from toB. For toC companies, brand means traffic, and traffic means sales. Brand building is a market behavior that can quickly bring in transactions, and it is bound to involve a large budget. Due to the complexity of the ToB decision-making chain, the brand awareness brought by pure market exposure cannot directly lead to orders most of the time, because it also requires products and services, and the coordination of various links before and after sales. If one link fails, it will affect the final purchase. ToB brand building is not only a marketing behavior, but also the construction of corporate culture. When market share is not too high, market actions that can quickly bring business opportunities have the highest priority. We can see that many mature Fortune 500 ToB companies generally invest in social responsibility, which is actually to shape a brand image of responsibility and trust. For most early or growing toB companies, they need to think about the company's vision and value, integrate it into the daily operation process, and wait for time to slowly ferment.

This sharing mainly elaborates on the refined operations at the two levels of customer acquisition and conversion, which is often referred to as the market operation part.

So what does refined market operations mean? It's the customer.

Let’s take a look at the most basic operational logic of ToB enterprises. I summarize it as “recruitment”, “training”, “transfer” and “retention”.

"Recruiting" means acquiring customers, bringing traffic and attention to the company through paid promotion, content, activities and brands. After directing traffic to the brand site, attract retention through rich Call to Action guidance. You should know that no matter how simple a ToB product is, it is impossible for customers to purchase it directly after reading the introduction or article. There will inevitably be a certain amount of attention and guidance in the follow-up, so it is crucial to leave contact information and make free secondary contact with customers at any time.

Then comes the "nurture". Traditional marketing departments are usually only responsible for leads, and they directly throw the list they get to sales. But this situation is relatively rare now. In more cases, the marketing department screens and cultivates leads through manual and automated methods. When a customer meets certain criteria, such as the company position fits the profile, the needs can be met by our products or services, and is considering purchasing and other similar conditions, it will be given to the sales department for further conversion. The stringency of the conditions depends on the salesperson's throughput.

"Transfer" refers to the coordination and cooperation with the sales department. That is to say, even if the customer has been handed over to sales, the marketing department still has the responsibility and obligation to incubate and educate this lead. As you can see from here, what I am talking about today is the ToB market where the market cannot close orders. Now there are also many SaaS products that close orders directly in the market. The gameplay is different, and their market operations must also take into account product operations.

The last part is “retention”. After customers complete their purchase, we need to provide them with continuous services to help them succeed, ultimately leading to repeat purchases and even word-of-mouth recommendations. This part is led by the customer success department and assisted by the marketing department.

Based on the underlying logic of user operations above, there is a framework for ToB enterprise market operations. Here I will explain to you using Linkflow’s own operating framework.

The first step is marketing and customer acquisition. Linflow’s main customer acquisition channels are Baidu SEM/SEO, information flow advertising, article content, exhibitions, and self-organized salons. We have also purchased some third-party data products to expand our customer base and form our customer acquisition matrix.

After customers notice us, we will guide them to our official website and WeChat. I believe these are also the two brand sites that everyone uses most frequently. Attract retention through trials and consultations, become the first-party customer data that the company can repeatedly reach, and continuously influence customers through valuable content and rich forms. The content we often use for cultivation is industry solutions, customer cases, marketing materials, etc., which are distributed through articles, online classes, emails, communities and other methods and channels.

Once key events occur or activity levels are met, the SDR will manually follow up and communicate with the customer to determine their needs and intentions again. Those who meet the conditions will be created as leads in the CRM, and those who do not meet the conditions will continue to be incubated, and the cycle will repeat. After the leads are created in the CRM, customers will still be influenced by the market and interact with them. At this time, the marketing department needs to inform relevant sales of the customer's key interaction events in a timely manner to jointly promote paid conversions.

2. Marketing and Customer Acquisition

The essence of marketing acquisition is to attract the attention of target customers through valuable content in precise channels and make them potential customers of the company. Marketing acquisition can be simply divided into four aspects.

The first thing is to clarify the customer profile. Who is our marketing target? Only by knowing both yourself and your enemy can you win every battle. The basis of all market actions is based on the understanding of customer portraits. Otherwise, no matter how much you do, it will be in vain. Then comes the content planning. What kind of content and format can convey our value and impress our target customers? There are also obvious differences in content demands at different customer stages. Once we have the content, we need to see what platform to distribute it on. We need to know what channels our target customers are accustomed to using to obtain information. Finally, we guide the customers who interest us to where they can be carried and digested.

We who work in marketing may not use many complex and professional ToB products in our lifetime. LinkflowCDP is a Martec field product. It will be much better for me to understand customer portraits. Generally, understanding customer portraits can be done through the following interviews and surveys:

1. Conduct questionnaire surveys on customers

2. Conduct one-on-one interviews with customers

3. Internal interviews: Sales, customer success team, and company executives

4. Analyze and judge based on historical data

5. Third-party data analysis report

Through the above research and interviews, the information about customer portraits obtained should include the following:

1. Demographics

2. Company/Job Description

3. Behavioral characteristics

4. Budget range

5. Communication channels and method preferences

6. Content format preference

7. Pain points, challenges, needs and desires

Of course, not all data must be complete to be called a customer portrait. As long as the information obtained can support subsequent operational decisions at this stage, it will be sufficient. Linkflow focuses more on company/job description, content preferences, pain points, challenges, needs and desires, etc.

With the general information of the customer portrait, you can set up role cards for target customers and concretize the customer portrait in a real and easy-to-understand way. Let colleagues in market operations build an understanding of target customers, so that there will be no deviation in the output of their work.

The information on the customer's role card is roughly as follows:

The second step is to specify the content strategy based on the customer persona. What does the content include? Erin Kassan said something very well in "The Elements of Content Marketing Strategy" that I would like to share with you: in the Internet field, any valuable information can be called content.

With this understanding, I will briefly sort out the possible content forms:

Once you have content, you need to distribute it. Enterprises need to continuously operate and explore to create their own content distribution matrix.

Own channels: Common ones include one’s own official website/blog, WeChat public account, self-organized or co-organized activities, email marketing, WeChat customer service number, social groups, corporate accounts opened on information platforms such as Zhihu, Jianshu, Toutiao, short video platforms, etc.

External channels: promotion platforms, free submissions and paid soft articles in vertical media, current industry summits and exhibitions, targeted invitation closed-door meetings in cooperation with vertical organizations, cooperation with industry opinion leaders, resource exchange partners, etc.

Next, you can combine the above content and distribution channels to match appropriate content for target customers at different stages and reach them through their preferred methods and channels. Here I roughly divide customers into the following stages.

During the attention stage, the marketing department needs to reach and influence a wide range of public domain traffic through various event marketing, soft articles, article submissions, disseminable books or white papers, and even speeches. The content at this stage needs to be spreadable and have more value output. The public domain traffic here is also screened, and the platforms and channels that target customers will pay attention to. Taking Linkflow as an example, Zhihu/Jianshu, industry summits, and other industry vertical media are all relatively good channels.

During the visit and registration stage, we mainly focus on our official website and WeChat public account. The content mainly describes our solutions, products, and scenarios, and attracts registrations through free trials, demo applications, and data downloads.

From the active stage to the business opportunity stage, we will reach and influence through more focused industry solutions, case introductions, product demonstrations and other content through salons, live broadcasts, emails, communities and other means.

Finally, from order to recommendation, it is more about using product operation, best practices and other content to help customers quickly get started with the product and achieve success. As mentioned before, this is mainly influenced by the customer success department, with cooperation from the market.

While a large amount of content is being produced and laid out, what needs to be done simultaneously is the tracking of the effectiveness of the content.

On the one hand, by tracking data, we can understand which content and channels are preferred by target customers. On the other hand, when the leader questions the role of content, although it may not bring in orders immediately, it would be great if the traffic and even leads it brings can be tracked. In fact, there is already a very mature UTM system to mark and manage sources. You can use related tools or ask IT for help. In terms of tracking, we benefit from Linkflow's ability to set up QR codes and links with parameters. We can set tracking links for the content we deliver, and clearly record the sources of traffic and registrations.

The last step in customer acquisition is where to receive and digest the attracted traffic.

In addition to the common official websites and WeChat public accounts, there are also communities, customer service personal WeChat accounts, etc., which are the more common front-end traffic pools for ToB. In particular, the customer service WeChat account carries out one-on-one communication with high-quality and active customers. With the increasing number of potential customers, this WeChat account is also a very accurate content distribution platform, which can influence customers in a more direct way.

But as there are more traffic pools, you will find that customers are scattered and data records are incomplete, so you need a backend customer management system. It carries potential customers from all channels of the enterprise, records the complete customer conversion path, and has the most comprehensive customer information and interaction data. And carry out refined management and outreach on this platform. This is the greatest value of Linkflow to B2B companies.

3. Operational conversion: providing personalized operation strategies for customers with different labels

After talking about marketing and customer acquisition, let’s talk about refined customer operations, that is, providing personalized operation strategies for different customers. How to distinguish different customers, this is what labels can help us with. ToB companies can generally develop customer labels according to the following categories: industry labels, position labels, demand labels, value labels, life cycle stages, etc. How detailed you want to be here depends on your company's own resources, and you can choose the most distinctive labels to set. For example, industry labels and demand labels. I remember when I was serving a ToC client before, I mentioned customer tags. The client gave feedback saying that this thing was great but we didn’t have enough content operations support. In the past, we only needed to produce one article for WeChat push, but now we have to produce at least 3-4 articles simultaneously. Our resources can't keep up. This situation is not so acute for ToB. We don't need a lot of content for the same type of customers. A few essential articles are enough, and the content will not change frequently. As the accumulated content library grows, we only need to package and push targeted articles.

In addition to tags, there are many key events, such as applying for a trial, visiting the quotation page multiple times within a certain period of time, etc., which also need to be recorded. They are key information that reflects the degree of customer intention.

With an understanding of the customers, we can sort out the operation and incubation processes of each link and automate them through Linkflow. Generally, there are not too many people in the marketing department of an enterprise, and operation itself is a job that requires manpower. If some processes cannot be automated, it will be impossible to achieve precision.

Here are some of the operational processes we ourselves will be involved in. You can sort out the possible processes according to your company's situation. Here are a few examples:

Registration follow-up process

This is the process that has been running on our official website. If a customer submits a trial form, we will notify the relevant customer service through WeChat for Business and send a feedback SMS to the customer to inform them that the trial application has been received and we will contact him as soon as possible. Delay one day and send another welcome email to seize the honeymoon period and deepen the brand impression.

Email precision marketing, clever use of AB testing

This is email marketing for customers with different labels, such as sending case solutions to customers in the brand retail industry. We will also conduct AB testing on titles and content, and use the returned data to understand the content preferences of target customers, continuously optimize content, and increase open and click-through rates.

Sales collaboration to improve customer response rate

By connecting to CRM, customers who meet the lead profile will automatically be created as leads in CRM. At the same time, key market behaviors will be synchronized to CRM in a timely manner to create follow-up tasks.

The so-called refined operation of customers is carried by each operational process and detail. We have accumulated more than 20 automation items in daily operation, and there are even more during activities.

4. Operations without data analysis are not good markets

The closed loop of refined operations is data analysis. There used to be a famous saying in the marketing industry, "I know that half of my marketing budget is wasted, but I don't know which half." Now this sentence is no longer so accurate. Through data tracing, we can know very clearly what value each marketing budget brings.

Here is a brief list of some data reports that B2B market operations generally look at, including those for customer portraits, marketing activities, and analysis of different platforms such as official websites and WeChat.

I believe that every market is maintaining its own reports. There are many commonalities and differences, but data analysis is now a necessary skill in the market. Data can be used to continuously adjust operational strategies and prove the value of the market internally. This part of the content is a big topic that can be discussed in depth, so I will not expand on it here.

Finally, I want to say that the devil in market operations lies in the details. Marketers should have a continuous learning attitude, constantly optimize and update their cognition, and communicate and discuss more.

Author: Linkflow

Source: Linkflow (linkflowcdp)