More Effective Digital Marketing

The shift in B2B buying behavior means more customers conducting more of their purchasing and research online, but it also means that many customers prefer to interact with you digitally as well. While digital marketing will never replace real one-to-one relationships with your customers, it can help you become more efficient at reaching your customers in the ways they actually prefer.

The cornerstone of a proactive and effective digital marketing campaign is the ability to leverage your ERP and CRM data. Many distributors take the easy way out and simply blast out generic offers to their entire database. This is because they find it too time consuming to bring their customer data together in a way that is actionable. SMP makes it easy to use to segment your lists to make targeted offers to the right customers at the right time.

SMP tracks and provides easy access to important customer data that allows you to quickly create precise lists. What used to take hours or even days now takes a matter of seconds to quickly create a new list based on any parameters you choose and then create a new marketing campaign or call list.

Here are some examples of distribution marketing campaigns that are both more cost-effective and more successful when run through SMP’s effective digital marketing.

Updating Customers on Product Information

Customers look to you for your product expertise. Unfortunately, most distributors distribute product information in very old-fashioned ways, like sending out ads and flyers. This one-size-fits-all approach to marketing doesn’t differentiate you from your competitions. Even worse, your customers may learn to ignore your emails since they rarely provide information they want.

A better idea would be to approach a smaller, targeted group of customers with unique messages. This is difficult to do without a distribution CRM system. With SMP, you can easily profile new lists and send out emails for specific updates. For example, you instead of blasting out an advertisement about a new part from a manufacturer, you could first profile a list of customers who have bought similar parts from you in the past.

SMP then makes it easy to go to the next level with your sales team and create follow up activities and calls based on the same lists. This means your messages are working together from both sales and marketing and you’ll have a specific follow-up plan inside your CRM system to manage and measure.

Save Money Acquiring New Customers

SMP can help you reduce your customer acquisition costs in many ways through more efficient sales and marketing.

• Improve your conversion rates with better bid and quote follow up, more personalized attention and better sales activity tracking
• Shorten sales cycles by analyzing customer data and behavior and planning follow up activities
• Spend less time pursuing prospects who are not likely to buy and more time on prospects with frequency, large order sizes and profitability
• Spend less time on administrative tasks like reporting, time tracking and endless spreadsheet management and more time selling.
• Easily rank your customers by profit, order size and more to determine who to approach for referral business
• Examine past purchases to find ways to create added value for your best customers

Obtain a Bigger Piece of Customer Spend

It’s just a fact that customers make purchases from our competitors. How do we gain a bigger share of their spend? Improving your product mix with each customer involves much more than just analyzing which complementary products they might purchase together, although such an analysis is a good place to start. You need to understand your customer profiles so that you know you are comparing the right customers purchasing behavior.

When you understand your customers segments, you can understand which customers buy products “A,” and “B,” together to generate a consistent and deeper analysis of who is buying product “A,” but not product “B.” If you’re not comparing the right customers to each other, it doesn’t matter if your report card shows a gap in their product mix because they may have much different motives for their purchasing behavior. SMP makes it easy to do this analysis on a regular basis and create trackable activities in your CRM system.

Change Customer Behavior Based on Data

Part of being a trusted advisor to your customers means showing them opportunities to improve their own businesses by working more closely with you. It’s important to have regular conversations about the trends you are seeing in the marketplace with your customers to help them stay current. It’s even more powerful to share those trends with good-looking data visualization based on real customer data.

Sharing data about how other customers are saving money by consolidating their purchases and orders could encourage other customers to follow suit. Sharing data about support calls and other engagements compared to your averages could demonstrate ways to leverage your company’s resources that they may have never considered in the past.