“We are in this together.”
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, we have heard this refrain quoted quite often. As we did with other moments of despair and tragedies. We saw with 9/11, the financial crisis of 2008, and the numerous natural disasters of hurricanes and floods neighbors helping neighbors. People from all walks of life getting to know each other for the first time. Neighbor meeting neighbor for the first time.
To the point where we heard more of this:
“I can’t imagine leaving my neighborhood now. Not after all we’ve been through. We’re all helping each other out. It’s a special place to be.” – Van, 43 years old construction worker, Houston, TX
Through the common bond of shared experiences and helping each other, people’s sense of value for living in their chosen neighborhood went up. Creating a strong bond of loyalty.
While the world of B2B can be perceived as lacking in warmth and perhaps even superficial at times, there are tremendous opportunities to create bonds of loyalty between two B2B organizations. It is, after all, the dream of many B2B leaders to forge such connections with buyers.
Increase Value With Buyer Insights
One cannot forge a bond with another without getting to know that person. Similarly, a B2B organization cannot bring value or forge a loyal bond without knowing its buyers at an in-depth level. Let us take a look at seven areas of buyer insights that can help lead to unshakable loyalty:
Community
People, in personal social or business settings, thrive on being part of a community. The desire to interact and share has become stronger as socially-oriented technologies become more intertwined with our daily lives. B2B leaders should seek insights on how to create value and loyalty through community-building.
Stories
Gaining insights into what buyers really care about helps with creating stories that resonate. Stories help buyers connect with the value that companies can bring to their situations. Such connections produce loyalty.
Innovations
Continuous innovations in not only products but also in service and experience help build value and loyalty with buyers. B2B organizations that consistently seek insights into how buyers are engaging with their products, services, and experiences are also consistently innovating on behalf of their buyers.
Enable Journeys
Buyer insights can help B2B companies to know how they can help buyers to navigate their own internal journeys. Providing enabling knowledge and capabilities that help buyers reach goals and solve problems. Enabling buyers in a positive way leads to loyalty.
Interaction Experience
When buyers find their digital interactions with B2B companies to be user-friendly, informative, and most importantly, relevant, then values are built. Gathering insights into how to design buyer interactions becomes critical to their overall experiences. Rewarding overall experiences creates loyalty.
Personalization
Depending on the type of product or service, the degree of personalization can vary widely. However, insights into how buyers perceive personalization can open the door for creating more value. And build loyalty through creative personalization that was unseen before insights were gained.
Anticipation
When gathering buyer insights through the use of qualitative research methods, B2B companies can be in a position to anticipate buyer needs. More significantly, they can be in a position to enable buyers to plan their next steps. Creating immense value and a loyalty bond hard to break.
Buyer insights into these seven areas can help B2B leaders in marketing and sales to draw a tighter connection between value and loyalty. They are really both sides of the same coin. We are often apt to think of value and loyalty in mutually exclusive terms.
One way to increase buyer value and create unshakable loyalty is to act upon insights that reveal the strong bond that exists between them. If the terms “value” and “loyalty” had voices, they would surely state – “we are in this together.”
Communication with buyers is very important. In this Covid pandemic, many sellers lost their customers just for not keeping the community. So it is very much important to keep a good relationship and increase the communication so that sellers can also increase their values.