How to increase user operations for ToB during the COVID-19 epidemic?

Before the Spring Festival, I met with the marketing managers of several ToB companies. When talking about the performance of various companies in the ToB circle this year, we reached a consensus that no one can have an easy time when the nest is overturned. Even many companies we are familiar with have quietly gone offline in the past year. According to ITjuzi data, a total of 338 new economy companies were closed in 2019.

Closing is just the final result of stopping loss, and not closing will not necessarily be better.

After individual layoffs were reported in the news, more layoffs were actually happening quietly. Thousands or even more companies, under pressure from growth and capital, have to implement internal "slimming down" in order to be able to "survive the winter" safely. Coupled with the black swan event of the COVID-19 pandemic, this winter currently looks more severe than previous financial crises, and the only thing that can save companies from getting through this period smoothly is good cash flow.

Cost cutting is a last resort, and the key to maintaining cash flow still depends on the growth of performance.

The current environment requires that growth methods must be more efficient and powerful, and we need to enter the entire user life cycle to find growth points. Growth is not just about attracting new customers. We will find more and more easily in the later stages that after accumulating a certain amount of existing leads, sales and SDRs will try to attract new users every day, but the speed at which new leads are added cannot meet the sales demand for placing orders. What should we do at this stage?

This brings us back to what we often call the mining of existing users/leads. The customer leads in the lead pool are retained in the CRM after being called once. Have we given up too many rich mines by not mining them? There is always a back and forth in love. Emotional buying and selling based on love at first sight is basically impossible in the B2B field. Therefore, sales leads also need to be cultivated slowly through multiple communications.

1. The two legs of business opportunity growth: harvesting and nurturing

One of the typical characteristics of ToB business is the need for continuous user cultivation. We provide a complete set of solutions that can solve customer problems.

For ToC products, when users have demand, they just need to open Taobao/JD.com to place an order, which is a personal decision. For ToB product services, maybe today users only know what your product does, which is already very difficult for you, but current users have no demand. There are many reasons for this, because ToB is a team-based decision, with large amounts and long procurement cycles, and the selection of products and services will be affected by many factors.

For example, the organization has not yet developed to the procurement stage, there is a lack of unified understanding within the team, or the budget priority is insufficient, which may be the reason for not purchasing at the moment.

But if you don’t purchase now and reject your potential customers, does it mean that you have no chance? If we review the orders, you will find that the order cycle is actually very unevenly distributed, some taking several months, and some even a year.

Why does this happen? Because users are beginning to understand you and maintain a good interactive relationship with you, when one day users form strong demands, or the company develops to a certain scale, or early lead users switch to a new company, this will reactivate the demand, and they will have a strong purpose to purchase from you. This is what we call the typical feature of ToB business: user cultivation.

We divide users according to their maturity level. Users are distributed in different stages. Some users know our products for the first time, perhaps from friends or search engines. Some users are already in the project establishment stage, and some are still looking for solutions. Where users are distributed depends on their understanding of the current entire solution, which can also be simply understood as the user's level of expertise.

At this point, we have two routes for business opportunity growth:

1. Convert (harvest) user leads that are in the purchasing stage into commercial products;
2. Let those who are still in the process move forward in their maturity (nurturing).

For users at different stages, the corresponding content matrix will also be different.

For example, for users in the first stage, the content we need to deliver is aimed at brand awareness, while users in the second stage often need to know how to break through.

Harvesting: The goal of harvesting is to achieve more conversions from traffic. We improve the efficiency of lead acquisition through various methods such as landing page optimization, search intent acceptance, and form funnel optimization.

Cultivation: Through marketing automation or content outreach combined with tagging, we let users know more and more about us, while waiting for users' needs to be triggered consciously or unconsciously.

We have already done enough with these digital marketing technologies in the execution details of our daily business, including focusing on conversion rates and paying more attention to content marketing, and we are also trying hard to do so. But we will slowly discover that we are just doing what we should do.

But how can we make these business actions more efficient and smarter? iResearch Ark proposed the intelligent user operation methodology at the beginning of this year. When we apply the intelligent methodology to ToB user operations, there will be a qualitative leap in efficiency and effectiveness. Intelligent user operations can take a step forward in harvesting and cultivating, rather than just doing what you should do.

2. Intelligent user operations for B2B

First, let’s talk about the concept of user operation, which is quite rare in the B2B market.

In the eyes of many people, user operations are mostly ToC games, because there are few specific ToB teams that can globally control the entire life cycle of the leads. Once converted to SQL, it becomes the responsibility of sales. Before SQL, it was the responsibility of marketing, so these two teams rarely conduct global user operations.

However, as far as I know, many teams have extended the management of leads to the sales end, so user operations in the B2B scenario refer to the management of the entire user life cycle from browsing the website (touchpoint contact) to transaction renewal.

The user life cycle in the ToB field can be divided into the following six stages:

Public domain traffic, landing, conversion, activation, high-value users, and signing.

To put it simply, the practice of iResearch Ark's intelligent user operation methodology in the ToB field is to promote the step-by-step downward flow of users according to the above six stages of the user life cycle through data-driven.

Intelligent user operation: With users at the center, by quantifying key behaviors in key scenarios in the user journey, the user life cycle stages are divided and the population is segmented. Operational goals are formulated for different stages of the user life cycle and different segments of the population. Differentiated services are provided to different user groups through automated tools and contact methods to achieve operational goals.

Throughout the entire conversion process, we have been thinking about how to make users more willing to continue the experience until they discover the core value of the product; in different links, how can we empower user operations with intelligence to make customer acquisition and cultivation more efficient?

01. Public domain traffic stage, ToB user life cycle

In the public domain traffic stage, we focus on where our target users are. It is worth noting that automatic labeling should be done when acquiring public domain traffic.

The so-called automatic tagging means that when acquiring customers, we must consider subsequent user operations and ensure that we can obtain a large amount of user tag information during the registration process.

For example, what is the user searching for, what is the user's position, and through what activities did the user come in? These tags can all be recorded through UTM and entered into the user's various databases when the user registers.

It is necessary to record visitor tags during the traffic stage, and a series of smart pop-ups and content access in the later stages of operation require accurate identification of users.

For example: If a user comes in from public domain traffic, we can obtain his search intent, and then store the search intent in the database when the user registers. Later, when we send mass emails or make personalized recommendations, we can be more accurate. More accurate content will naturally get a higher open rate.

02. Landing stage, ToB user life cycle

When visitors arrive at our website (ToB applications rarely have APPs), the landing page is the first point of contact between the visitor and the product. In the past, when we were acquiring leads, we paid close attention to the conversion rate of the landing page. We used heat map analysis and funnel analysis to optimize the landing of traffic, allowing more users to complete the Call To Action on the landing page.

But we overlooked one link, that is the welcome. How is the reception of traditional user operations? The pop-up window in the lower right corner will tend to be aimed at new user guidance and basic Q&A. What should be the welcome form of intelligent user operation?

We can understand the popularity of intelligent user operations through the three links of measurement, segmentation, and reach:

• Measurement: We need to identify new and old users. For a B2B website, users often come to our website to learn or research. If a new user guide pops up every time, it will be a bad experience.
• Segmentation: In this link, there can be multiple segmentations, such as identifying new users and old users (multiple visits), and determining needs based on the user's search intent;
• Reach: Based on the segmented population, different welcome pop-ups can be customized and provided. Personalized pop-ups are very helpful for users to land successfully.

03. Conversion stage, ToB user life cycle

Conversion means that the visitor officially becomes our lead, that is, from visitor to registered information. At this stage, we need to focus on the conversion rate and use funnel analysis to optimize the overall conversion rate of users from the landing page to the form page and then to the form submission.

In the conversion process, we always think about how to make users more willing to complete the registration, and promote the form conversion rate by optimizing the form and increasing the form guidance. However, intelligent user operation can make the conversion process smarter. Here we still divide it into 3 steps to explain how intelligent user operation helps optimize conversion rate.

• Measurement: By measuring user behavior, we can locate the keywords through which users enter the website, and also know which landing page users come to the registration form from;
• Segmentation: Segment users with different needs and users of different industry solutions;
• Reach: Provide personalized guidance text and CTA buttons based on the groups of people with different needs segmented above.

At the same time, at this stage, there are two beneficial smart user operation ideas: first, for users who hesitate in the form stage, such as those who stay for more than 20 seconds, consider whether a pop-up window can be used to resolve user concerns; in addition, we can save and group this group of people, and use tools such as GuangDianTong and information flow to conduct targeted advertising marketing.

04. Activation phase, ToB user life cycle

There is a magical behavior in ToB websites. Through the user behavior analysis of iResearch Ark, you will find out what behavior makes users find the value of the product and are more willing to visit again and again. The magical act of one of our customers was to create a report in the Demo (creating a report is an act in the Demo). Any user who creates a report in the Demo will discover the value of this product and be more willing to continue exploring. Even SDRs will have a much smoother experience when conducting customer follow-up visits.

During the activation phase, we should aim to remove obstacles that prevent users from reaching the point of creating reports. The era of "good wine needs no bush" is long gone, not to mention that the ToB business itself is relatively complex. How can we allow users to overcome layers of obstacles and reach their destination?

Through Analysys Ark’s user behavior analysis combined with online research, we found that the reason most users are unwilling to have a deep experience is that they cannot understand it and have lost interest. Therefore, the activation strategy we developed is to use workflow to provide users with proactive delivery guidance.

• Measurement: Find users who have successfully registered and obtain the industry selection, career selection, and keyword search fields during registration.
• Segmentation: Segment the successfully registered population in different industries, segment the population based on different occupations, and segment the population based on different solutions (keywords).
• Reach: Under iResearch Ark's intelligent user operation, workflow is used to set up an automatic triggering mechanism for new user greeting emails, that is, the greeting email is triggered immediately after the user successfully registers. The content of the email is set as how to download, how to experience the Demo and other related tutorials. At the same time, different customized white papers and content push are provided based on different user groups. If the opening rate of the first email we send to users is low, we will also set up a resending strategy. For example, if the user does not open the email for 3 days, we will resend the email a second time.

Such automated and customized content will make users more willing to experience the function in the Demo, thereby promoting users to develop in a more mature direction.

05. High-value users, ToB user life cycle

For the ToB field, what are high-value users? Those are the "users" who are very likely to become our "customers". These users will have many commonalities and characteristics in the early stages. What we need to do is to tap out the high-value users and at the same time cultivate all users to develop into high-value users and even customers.

General users → High-value users → Signing customers

• Measurement: High-value ToB users have many common behaviors. For example, in the past 30 days, a user has been deeply involved in the website and Demo, experiencing it multiple times and experiencing multiple contents at the same time. This shows that the user is interested and obvious, so we should find this user. Similarly, if a company has multiple employees coming to the website to conduct research, it means that the user maturity has developed to a very advanced stage;
• Segmentation: Select all the users with high frequency of access in the past 30 days, and find out the cases where multiple users of a company access the site based on corporate email addresses;
• Reach out: Synchronize the personnel list to SDR for priority processing, or make targeted and precise offline meeting invitations.

06. Signing stage, ToB user life cycle

During the signing process, we focus on the user's product usage. The more deeply the user uses the product, the more likely they are to sign a contract. We can provide timely feedback and warnings based on users' product usage, and provide in-depth services to users based on their behavior.

• Measurement: Understand the actual status of user product usage through user usage frequency, usage function points, etc.
• Segmentation: Identify highly active users and silent users based on their usage depth.
• Reach: Provide successful user services both online and offline. Send targeted product manuals and best practice cases to users online, and actively visit customers offline to solve their business problems, so as to maximize the renewal rate.

Intelligent user operations play a very important role at different stages of the user life cycle. For ToB, user operation is no longer as simple as conversion rate optimization and content mass distribution. User measurement based on user behavior, user segmentation based on user attributes and behavior, and personalized, configurable, and automated content reach can all improve the quality and satisfaction of user services.

The above content is a simple summary of the ideas for To business based on the intelligent user operation solution proposed by iResearch Ark.

Conclusion

Intelligent user operations play an intelligent role at the bottom layer of the entire process of user interaction with us, allowing us to make user operations more efficient. We have also productized this methodology and launched the iResearch Ark Intelligent User Operation Product Suite, which mainly consists of three parts. We can use "intelligent analysis" to measure users, "intelligent portraits" to portray and segment user views, and "intelligent operations" to conduct content marketing and user reach.

Intelligent analysis includes 12 major analysis models, including funnel analysis, retention analysis, heat map analysis, etc. commonly used in ToB.

Smart portraits include user portraits, user tags, etc.

Intelligent operations include valuable Workflow configuration, multi-channel reach and effect verification, etc.

For specific functional needs, you can explore in the iResearch Ark Demo. We believe that no product is perfect. Although the functions are limited, the industry-specific applications beyond the functions have unlimited possibilities.

I know that many customers have explored and practiced iResearch Ark's intelligent user operation suite and have achieved remarkable business results. Our growth team is also using Analysys Ark’s intelligent user operation suite to conduct user operations for Argo.

Argo is a free intelligent user behavior analysis platform. They hope that more users can use Argo for free.