5 Ways to Revolutionize Your B2B Digital Experience

Summary

Synopsis:

The importance of providing a B2B digital experience that keeps pace with changing client expectations
Four best practices to enable your teams to deliver excellent B2B client experiences
Approaches to improving digital client experience including omnichannel strategy

Economic uncertainty, the consequential rise in client scrutiny and expanding buying groups (INFUSE Voice of the Buyer, 2024) have made delivering a high-quality digital experience a top priority.

With 80% of clients believing that the client experience (CX) a company provides is as important as its products and services (Salesforce, 2023), crafting an engaging and client-centric digital experience is vital for engaging the buying committee and demonstrating the unique value of the products they are considering.

This article breaks down five ways to improve your B2B digital experience, including how to orchestrate omnichannel strategies to ensure consistent and compelling messaging.

Why the B2B digital experience is changing

In addition to increased scrutiny, changes in the demographics of B2B decision makers have influenced the importance of providing an optimal digital experience.

Millennials and Gen Z buyers account for 66% of senior B2B buyers (Forrester, 2023), meaning that the majority of senior B2B buyers are most likely digital natives. These decision makers prefer independent research and rely on a variety of content to inform their purchases—consuming an average of five to six or more pieces per buying group member (INFUSE Voice of the Buyer, 2024).

This greater reliance on content indicates the need for high-quality content creation aligned with the stages of the buyer journey and specific roles of decision makers involved at each stage of the process.

The evolution of the B2B digital experience is also being driven by the value millennial and Gen Z decision makers place on the ability to communicate seamlessly across multiple channels. Indeed, the 2023 Zendesk CX Trends report found that 73% of clients prioritise solutions and partnerships that allow them to communicate through various channels without restarting the process.

Personalisation is another critical element of high-performing digital experiences. According to Gartner, 86% of B2B buyers expect companies to provide personalised experiences. This demand for personalisation highlights how digital experiences are changing and aligning more closely with B2C buying experiences.

Prioritising UX and CX strategies is therefore also key to reducing friction across the buyer’s journey to enable personalised, cohesive digital experiences that build trust and loyalty.

What is user experience (UX)?

User experience is a methodology for developing experiences (usually digital) that are satisfactory for users and enable them to achieve their goals. As a result, it can be utilised to guide the development of websites, design elements, and even content across marketing channels.

Benefits of UX for B2B companies:

Improved brand perception: Ensuring user-friendliness and memorable design contributes to a positive first brand impression, supporting demand generation.
ROI: Effective UX design can increase ROI by improving conversion rates and client retention, streamlining development, and reducing the need for costly updates.
Competitive advantage: Given the prevalence of buyer-led research, UX can help companies stand out from the competition by providing superior usability.

Drive your buyer engagement with six UX optimizations

What is CX?

Although UX plays an important role in enriching client experiences (CX), the two initiatives differ in focus and goals. For B2B organisations, CX is designed to allow clients to achieve their goals. As a result, CX strategies are commonly led by client success (CS) teams to improve client lifetime value (CLTV) and deliver a strong brand experience.

On the other hand, UX contributes to the overall digital experience by ensuring websites, or applications are user-friendly and engaging. This seamless digital experience is a crucial aspect of CX, as it helps build trust, reduces friction, and supports client retention by enabling clients to navigate and interact with digital platforms effortlessly.

The next section outlines the best practices to adopt in order to deliver an exceptional digital experience.

3 best practices to prepare your teams to deliver an excellent B2B digital experience

Creating a seamless and impactful B2B digital experience is essential for securing competitive positioning and fostering long-term client relationships. The best practices outlined below are a foundation for developing exceptional client experience (CX) across your digital touchpoints.

Before developing a digital experience strategy, organisations should:

Align teams

Ensuring that sales, marketing, and CS teams are aligned is crucial for creating a seamless client journey across multiple platforms and touchpoints. Given the critical role of each team in supporting this journey, unified processes are essential for delivering consistent messaging and a quality experience. Establishing rapport across departments and shared KPIs (interlinked with UX and CX) can help achieve this aligned brand vision, driving better overall performance.

Anchor team commitment

Building and maintaining a team dedicated to creating and maintaining a satisfying client experience is essential. This can be supported by establishing processes that recognize and reward team commitment. These can include rewards celebrating achievements in line with set goals to motivate team members. Developing a company-wide culture based on striving for client success excellence helps to ensure clients are delivered a satisfying experience, and rally teams behind a shared vision.

Understand client needs

Client demands are diverse and ever-changing. Conducting research, fielding client feedback, and collecting insights from your sales team regularly is, therefore, a critical strategy for building accurate strategies.

Understanding the latest needs of decision makers helps revenue teams to tailor communication to combat uncertainty and demonstrate the effectiveness of the solutions offered.

Gathering insights on preferences and uncertainties also informs:

Channel strategies: Feedback helps to identify the most effective channels to reach decision makers. Understanding where your clients spend their time and prefer to receive information allows you to optimise your marketing channel mix and associated spending.
Personalised outreach: In the case of granular insights, findings can be leveraged to craft personalised outreach efforts that resonate with specific buying committee members. By understanding their unique needs and pain points, you can highlight your expertise and ability to fulfill their business priorities in a compelling and relevant way.

Craft client journeys that promote conversions

5 ways to revolutionize the B2B digital experience

Once you have established a solid foundation of processes, you can leverage them to refine key areas of your digital experience and boost the performance of your efforts.
This includes managing your marketing channel mix across the buyer’s journey to ensure a seamless experience that leverages content and messaging to highlight the unique value of your offerings.

Below are five strategies for delivering a strong digital experience that resonates with your buyers and drives revenue opportunities.

#1 Map the buyer's journey

A well-designed buyer’s journey enables prospective buyers to navigate to seamlessly conduct buyer-led research and make informed decisions.

With B2B client's preferences shifting toward independent research, designing a client journey that provides adequate content for each stage and different decision makers is essential.
Namely, according to our research, 40% of participants consumed four to six pieces of content, while 21% consumed seven or more (INFUSE Voice of the Buyer, 2024), demonstrating the importance of high-quality content creation.

This has been compounded by an increase in the number of buying committee members as buyers combat greater uncertainty. The different roles each member plays as the account progresses through the buying process necessitates creating content aligned with specific members and how they influence the decision making process:

Here are some key elements to mapping the buyer’s journey:

Research: Collect data from clients, research, interviews, and surveys to understand buyer preferences. Use this data to establish common demographics, pain points, and crucially, their preferred channels. Activating the right channel mix is imperative for building a buyer’s journey that resonates with your target audiences.
Create and test buyer personas: Based on the collected data, build representations of your ideal clients. These should include information such as age, job title, industry, and company size. Test and evaluate your personas by comparing them with data on client behavior gathered through social listening and feedback.
Content: Leverage your data insights to create content for ideal buyer personas in line with their role and stage of the funnel when they are involved in assisting the process (see next section for more detail). This content should also be appropriate for the channels that you have found to be effective at the research stage.
KPIs: Analyse performance against your KPIs to identify problematic parts of your sales funnel and further refine your buyer’s journey.

While crafting an ideal buyer’s journey is important, remember that this should not be prescriptive. In order to be successful, buyer’s journeys must remain flexible to suit the preferences of buyers as they evolve.

After all, the central component of an effective buyer’s journey is providing a seamless and consistent experience across each channel and stage.

Drive conversions by creating compelling client journeys

#2 Implement an omnichannel marketing strategy

Developing a diverse marketing channel mix is the process of developing and implementing strategies for every touchpoint with potential and current clients. While there are several approaches, omnichannel marketing is by far the most sophisticated.

Considering that the average number of touch points has increased to 16 per decision maker (and 640 per buyer’s journey), and the majority of buyers value the ability to start on one channel and continue on another, providing a unified digital experience is more important than ever (6sense Research, The Buying Experience Study, 2023).

Given the emphasis on multiple channels and touchpoints, omnichannel strategies are positioned as more effective than alternative approaches.

Before implementing your omnichannel strategy:

Determine which channels to prioritise based on the data on your target audience, client personas, and analytics.
Outline how each channel contributes to the buyer’s journey you have mapped and implement channel-specific approaches based on their role.

Once you have identified your primary marketing channels and orchestrated them according to your buyer’s journey, align your content strategy with your channel mix and buyer personas. Below are content recommendations for each funnel stage:

After creating content, distribute it appropriately through your chosen channels, while ensuring a consistent voice and branding across your omnichannel strategy.

This is a central component of forming a uniform digital experience and solidifying a positive brand impression. Maintaining brand voice also contributes to communicating your brand values across all channels. In short, leveraging the unique features of each channel will help to maximize your reach and engagement.

Guide the development of your omnichannel strategies with these INFUSE Insights resources:

5 Steps to Establishing a Compelling Omnichannel Presence

Omnichannel Marketing vs Multichannel Marketing: What is the Difference?

#3 Optimise UI/UX design

Your website serves as your channel hub, and often, the final destination for traffic driven by your omnichannel marketing strategy (even when leveraging content distribution).

In addition to providing valuable content, your website should deliver an intuitive user experience that minimizes friction and secures positive first impressions.

The importance of UX is especially evident in the B2B market, where website content and design should appeal to the preferences of multiple decision makers and support independent research by providing seamless and user-friendly website navigation.

Essential components of optimising UX:

Improve website performance by compressing images, using content delivery networks (CDN), and minimizing the use of script-heavy features.
Simplify navigation by designing an intuitive site structure, using clear and descriptive labels, and implementing a search function.
Utilise responsive design principles to ensure that the website scales well across different devices and screen sizes.
Streamline forms by reducing the number of fields, including auto-fill, and providing indicators of progress in multi-step forms.

Increase client lifetime value by enhancing your website user experience

#4 Be human

According to the Zendesk CX Trends Report, 60% of consumers have chosen one brand over another based on the expectation of client-centricity of services they would receive. Furthermore, buyers are on average considering 4 vendors, while each vendor adds two additional decision makers to the buying process. (6sense Research, The Buying Experience Study, 2023)

As buyers are more likely to choose client-centric brands and evaluate multiple vendors simultaneously, prioritising personalisation and connecting with prospects on a human level can help businesses stand out from the competition.

Below are 4 strategies that can be used to boost client centricity and support personalisation at every touchpoint:

#5 Evolve the buyer journey and show it

Continuously monitoring and optimising the B2B digital experience is crucial for maintaining quality and supporting better performance.

This ongoing, cyclical process ensures that your approach remains aligned with evolving client expectations.

Below are three methods to inform your digital experience optimizations:

Analyse lead intelligence: By collecting data points on potential clients, lead intelligence gives organisations insight into prospects' behavior and ways of adapting digital experiences to align with changes in preferences.
Evaluate previous campaigns: Assessing past performance enriches lead intelligence by providing insight into how different segments of your audience responded to campaigns. For example, webinar promotion on LinkedIn targeting managers performs well, you might prioritise investing in more paid social media campaigns, as a demand generation strategy.
Assess demand performance: Monitor engagement metrics, conversion rates, and other KPIs to evaluate your buyer’s journey and identify drop-off points. This can also help to uncover CX areas that could be optimised to improve your demand generation strategy.

Clients are another great source of feedback that can be leveraged to guide improvements.

In addition to incentivized surveys, collect feedback through:

Client councils: Establish client councils consisting of key clients who provide ongoing insights and feedback, and organise regular meetings to discuss product reviews, service feedback, market trends, and strategic initiatives. Client council members typically include long-term, high-value clients and industry leaders who offer valuable perspectives.
One-on-one interviews: Conduct interviews with clients to gather in-depth feedback. Interviews allow for a more personalised approach and can uncover nuanced insights that surveys might omit. Furthermore, interviews are used to obtain a detailed understanding of client needs and expectations, enabling you to refine your digital experience further.
Sales and customer support: Hold regular meetings between marketing, sales, and customer support teams to ensure all feedback is shared and discussed. Synchronizing teams allows organisations to combine qualitative insights from direct interactions with quantitative data from marketing analytics, creating a cohesive strategy for elevating the digital experience.

Support this function by establishing a cross-functional committee including representatives from customer success, sales, marketing, and IT departments.

This group can arrange regularly scheduled review meetings to assess performance metrics and discuss feedback. This structured approach ensures that the entire organisation is aligned in its efforts to deliver the highest quality B2B digital and buyer experience.

Finally, any notable improvements in their digital experience should be communicated (especially if prospect or client-driven). Notifying clients of user experience improvements demonstrates client-centricity and dedication to adapt to meet their expectations.

Below are channels best-suited for sending updates on your digital experience:

Email newsletters: Send regular updates to clients highlighting new features, enhancements, and optimizations.
Website announcements: Use your website’s blog or news section to detail changes, ensuring they are visible to all visitors.
Webinars and online events: Host webinars to demonstrate new features and improvements.
Social media updates: Share updates on LinkedIn company pages to reach a broader audience and encourage engagement by communicating the upgrades in digital experience. This can also be achieved by promoting content marketing published on the website that highlights optimizations.
Personalised emails: Send targeted emails to specific clients or segments, detailing changes that are most relevant to their use case.

Key takeaways

Here are the essential insights to help you revolutionize your B2B digital experience:

Modest economic growth, increased client scrutiny, and heightened CX expectations have made delivering high-quality digital experiences crucial.
Crafting an engaging, client-centric digital experience helps buying groups navigate the buying process in line with their needs and preferences, leading to higher conversion rates and ROI.
Aligning goals and KPIs across departments is crucial for delivering an optimal B2B digital experience.
As client preferences continue to change, companies should collect data to further improve their B2B digital experience. Improvements that are implemented should be communicated to build trust and demonstrate client-centricity.

Our INFUSE demand experts are available to craft rich, digital experiences that resonate with your prospects and build a strong foundation of brand and demand to drive conversions.

Contact our team to revolutionize your client experience and set your brand apart from the competition