Navigating the Customer Engagement Maze: 4 Challenges B2B Customer Marketing Teams Face

The Power of Customer Marketing: Driving Business Impact and Shaping the Experience

In today's B2B world, customer engagement is constantly evolving. While customer success and account management teams traditionally handle existing clients, customer expectations have skyrocketed. Every interaction counts, and companies are tapping into the growth potential of their existing customer base by bringing marketing teams into the mix.

Enter customer experience marketing. It's all about crafting targeted experiences that resonate with existing clients, uncovering upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and scaling client relationship nurturing. Getting it right is key to improving customer experience (CX) and unlocking growth. But here's the kicker: it's not as easy as it seems.

The Complex Reality of Customer Engagement

Forward-thinking companies invest in understanding customer pain points and delivering added value. However, many B2B companies stumble when it comes to effectively communicating with existing customers.

After a deal closes, the conversation shifts. It's no longer just about selling. Customer success, support, product teams, and account managers all vie for the same contacts' attention. This creates a crowded landscape where crafting a winning experience becomes challenging.

Key Customer Marketing Challenges Hindering Engagement

Customer marketing teams need to navigate this complex environment while meeting high expectations, fostering loyalty, and driving growth. Let's dive into the roadblocks they face.

4 Customer Marketing Challenges:

1. Conflicting Priorities with Customer-Facing Teams

Goal divergence is a common issue. For example, when customer marketing focuses on upselling, customer success teams prioritize adoption rates, and account managers push for immediate price increases. This misalignment can lead to overlooked opportunities and poorly timed communications. Customer marketing teams often have to adapt to other teams' timelines, raising the question: whose KPI and which company priority will take the hit?

2. Battling for Message Consistency and Brand Integrity

Multiple teams engage with customers, each interaction reflecting the company's brand. When messages aren't consistent, it can snowball, hurting both revenue and reputation. Customer marketers often become unofficial "brand police," but in reality, every employee is responsible for the brand experience.

Inconsistent messaging can take many forms: an off-tone individual communication, a marketing email sent to a customer with an open support ticket, or an upsell attempt when satisfaction scores are down. These missteps can create confusion, frustration, and a lack of trust, potentially leading to lost business and damaged future prospects.

3. Scaling Personalized Customer Experiences

Today's customers expect personalized, relevant interactions and in HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing Report it says that “90% of marketers say personalization boosts sales”. Given this information, why aren't more companies providing personalized experiences? For B2B companies, scaling across various industries with multiple use cases is challenging. Moreover, segmentation isn't just about industries and audiences; it's also about where each customer is in their journey – onboarding, continuous adoption, or approaching renewal. This multi-dimensional approach to personalization adds complexity but is crucial for meeting modern customer expectations.

While the complexity of personalization presents challenges, internal organizational challenges add additional complications to implementing this strategy; ultimately hindering growth. Communication silos and misaligned objectives often force customer marketing teams to fall back on generalized connections and mass campaigns. Personalization is crucial to success and this one-size-fits-all approach misses opportunities to address specific pain points or highlight relevant solutions, potentially overlooking valuable upsell or cross-sell possibilities.

4. Lack of Customer Knowledge and Reporting due to Data Silos

Data is king, and existing customers provide a wealth of it for B2B companies to leverage – usage patterns, support interactions, engagement metrics, and more. This information offers deep insights into customer preferences, pain points, and behavior over time, underpinning every customer marketing strategy. According to Gallup, “71% of B2B customers are at risk of taking their business elsewhere” and the way to retention is customer intelligence and data.

Most B2B companies have a robust tech stack for digital customer connections, but this can create its own roadblocks when it comes to analytics. Juggling interactions across websites, communities, support portals, training systems, in-product messaging, and independent communication channels often results in data silos. Consolidating this data is often a manual, taxing process that's frequently overlooked, leaving companies without a holistic view of customer interactions and preferences.

Overcoming the Challenges

Despite these hurdles, there are solutions to get back on track and fix the fragmented digital customer experience. The key? Start with the customer. Shift from pushing company agendas to delivering a cohesive experience.

To address these challenges, companies need to focus on creating a customer-centric digital experience. This approach can help:

• Unify the overall customer journey and enhance engagement

• Exceed customer expectations through personalized interactions

• Deliver unique insights and identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities throughout the customer lifecycle

The first step is committing to understanding the customer, creating tailored experiences, and embracing continuous improvement. Look for a system that allows you to be present at the right place and time, captures feedback, reports on customer behavior throughout the journey, and enables teams to monitor and adapt to changing customer needs.

We like to solve challenges:
Enablix can help. Our customer portals enable companies and customer marketing teams to deliver personalized digital experiences at scale, strengthening overall relationships and custom journeys. This solution streamlines internal communication across customer-facing teams, driving alignment. Plus, a centralized repository gives you the data you need to grow. Enable customers at scale with customer enablement software.