Everyday millions of consumers shop online with retail giants whom have tirelessly worked to optimize the formula of effective B2C marketing. As a B2B company, here at Corinium we learn a lot from B2C consumer behaviors and utilize those characteristics to enhance our client journey; whilst appreciating the significant differences in needs from our own B2B customers.

The B2B Buying Cycle

Over the past few years we’ve worked to actively improve our buying cycle for our clients and in this piece, I will highlight some of the learnings we have put into practice, but by no means perfected. We’re on this journey with you, and will continue to optimize and improve based on experience and feedback.

Whether you find us through a search engine, an online advert, partner website, email or come direct we want to ensure that we are proactively making your life easier. Providing clear, relevant information where and when you need it.

The buying cycle for a B2B customer is much less impulsive than a typical B2C transaction – though the expectations for a seamless process are just as high. Often there is analysis to be completed on ROI, sign off procedures and various pieces of red tape before a customer can purchase a ticket to join us at one of our events. We understand this, and expect it.

Our websites are our storefronts and all types of consumers want the information to be clear and readily accessible to help them on their buying journey. However, there are ways we are taking it a step further and offering various collateral to help our customers break through the red tape and help their internal sign off processes.

We do this through a variety of methods – you’ll notice across our European and US portfolios we’ve added downloadable agendas; providing a great way to examine the content, sessions and speakers to ensure relevancy to your role. Taking it a step further we’ve recently offered the option of a ‘Convince Your Boss’ template to document the event, it’s benefits and what impact your attendance will have on your organization, because we understand that your time is valuable and so is time out of the office.

Relationship Building & Personalization

We ask our customers and prospects for some key information when downloading content across our websites; often first name, last name, email and company.

Why? Ultimately, this is for the same reason as your favourite online retailers! Personalization. Using these pieces of information, we can offer personalized follow ups and begin our process of building a relationship – and if you want to know who we are, visit the ‘Meet the Team’ section on our website where you’ll see names, photos and contact details.

Developing from this base layer personalization, we’ve also introduced our ‘Corinium Bot’. If a customer is struggling to find an answer to something quickly, often the speed of response has a huge impact especially when they are close to making a purchase. Our online chat bot directs queries and questions straight to the event team – ensuring a quick response.

… and for those who don’t want to talk to a bot, or one of the Corinium Care Team via messenger or online, we have our wonderful delegate registration colleagues who will be more than happy to help over the phone!

Segmentation

Throughout the multiple touchpoints we offer across web, email and phone we collect a few vital data sets – a key piece of information here is ‘industry’. Our portfolio of events covers many specific industries and our flagships are cross-industry.

By collecting this information, we can tailor the content you receive to not only make it personalized, but make it relevant. That’s the tip of the iceberg of segmentation here at Corinium with a worldwide operation and many event verticals!

We’re humans too

We have had a number of people say they are very surprised when they realize they are talking with a “real” person via our Corinium Bot, because they’re so used to an automated and scripted system.

As marketers we have a whole host of tools and techniques to make our interactions both human and efficient. But, as a consumer, all that’s really important is a simple buying process and responsiveness communication.

The faces you see on our website aren’t just faces, the names you interact with on chat or email aren’t just names. We are the people you will see on site at the event. We are Corinium.