7 Surefire Ways to Create Effective B2B Customer Communications
Trying to stand out in the world of business can be hard these days, particularly in the B2B world, where everyone has a high-quality product to offer. However, the product cannot sell itself, so one way to stand out is to look at your B2B customer communications methods. Although customer communications and CRM have gained significant clout for how effective they are in marketing. This is mainly on a B2C basis, with many advancements being made in how these companies communicate using omnichannel strategies.
So what we can do is look at the ways in which we can take some of these ideas and strategies, and bring them over to our B2B world.
With this in mind, here are our 7 surefire ways to create effective B2B Customer Communications.
1 – Make sure that every interaction is relevant
If you are bombarding your current mailing list or social media accounts with quick attempts to generate sales with little success. Perhaps it is time to simply take a step back and assess the relevancy of your customer communications. Making sure that every piece of content or communication that you send out is relevant, will mean that you are always providing value to your customers and potential leads. Remember how annoying it is for you when you receive annoying marketing emails with little relevance to you or your company’s needs! So stop and take a look at how you can keep every interaction relevant and you should see a big improvement in your customer interactions, long term.
2 – Audit your communications
When you are communicating with customers, particularly over email and social media, it is important that you are able to audit and keep everything in line with legal and regulatory processes. Whether this is through an organized spreadsheet of previous communications, or through auditing software this is an important step. With auditing software such as Producer, you will be able to respond to both internal and external auditing requests quickly. This means that you can spend more time crafting effective communications instead of worrying about keeping everything organized and within regulations.
3 – Ensure feedback
When you are a B2B business, which often relies on repeat business and maintaining customer relationships, it is really important that you are there to receive feedback and can take this feedback on board. Whether it is through a customer services page or otherwise, you need to listen to your customers and their needs. What this will do is make your customers feel listened to, and help to create repeat customers and brand advocates. Being seen to take on board customer feedback is a great way to generate new customers as you are building company trust. So don’t forget to take that feedback on board.
4 – Use relevant platforms and talk in the language of your audience
Another way to build effective B2B customer communications is to look at the platforms you are using and their relevance to you as a business. As a B2B business, some of your popular platforms may be LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, or Twitter. Each of these platforms requires a different tone of voice and not all of them may be relevant to your business. For example, Twitter may not be suitable for your business if you are not going to be posting several times a day. You also have to create bite-sized content on Twitter, which is different from LinkedIn or Facebook where articles and longer posts tend to do better. Crafting a different tone of voice for each platform but keeping it relevant to your business can be tricky. Using software such as Conductor to craft a proper omnichannel strategy could be the answer you are looking for. This software enables you to choose your platforms and how you are going to promote your brand on each of them. This is all done on one neat platform where you can easily find all the information you need for each platform and its effectiveness. Your customers will also be able to choose their preferred channels for communication making your job much easier.
5 – Create consistent content that is relevant
Going back to relevancy, as well as picking relevant platforms, it is important to make sure that the content being posted on these platforms is relevant.
When you have multiple teams creating content or communications, it can be tricky to keep everybody on the same page. Making sure that your teams collaborate and are able to get the relevant work from each other at the right time is a delicate but vital balance that must be struck. For example, if the sales department has a vital email about a new sale that has quickly been decided. They will need the support of the design team and others to create the perfect piece of communication to promote this. Using creative collaboration software such as Designer will enable your whole team to collaborate effectively on one platform. All relevant documents can be stored as templates or shared with the relevant people depending on permissions. This makes creating consistent B2B customer communications easy for you and your team.
6 – Create an online community/FAQ area
Many customers prefer to be able to sort out any issues that they find themselves. This is simply human nature and who can argue with that? Sometimes the best way to support your customers beyond customer service helplines or chatbots is to simply find the common issues that may occur with your product or service. You can then create clear solutions for these on a FAQ page with detailed descriptions of how to sort out this issue. This will also free up your customer service team as they will then receive fewer calls regarding the same three issues. Also, having an online community can help with this as some of your most loyal customers may be available to assist with any issues that your newer customers could be having. This is a win/win scenario really!
7 – Be consistent/automate your outgoing communications
Making sure that you create consistent outgoing communications can be a long process. For example, developing and creating physical letters and documents to send is tedious and time-consuming. You also open yourself up to a high percentage of human error and little issues that could make all the difference in securing a potential new lead. Using a hybrid mailing software such as Hubmail for customer communications is a great way to solve all of these issues at once. Because it is a hybrid solution you are not solely reliant on your team to create, produce and send off your B2B customer communications. This frees up their time to focus on other things. Time is money they say and this is an easy way to save money in the long run.
So there you have it, there are 7 ways to create effective B2B customer communications. Here at Sefas we believe that it is important to simplify the process of customer communications as much as possible. Our HC Suite is a service providing 5 separate pieces of software all in one. This will make everything so simple and easy that you will wonder how you survived without it before. To find out more about how our HC Suite can help your B2B Business, please get in contact today.
Adam Turner, Marketing Manager, Sefas UK