Getting the Ball Rolling with Customer Adoption in B2B Global Ecommerce
The B2B shopping experience is irrevocably transformed. After years of being spoiled by the superior customer experiences being offered by the B2C brands they shop with, B2B buyers are now increasingly expective the same treatment in their professional lives.
According to recent research, 80% of B2B purchases are impacted by a client’s customer experience, with just 20% of B2B buying decisions determined by price or product. With 73% of millennials now participating in the B2B buying process, these people also are bringing their expectations and experience from interacting with B2C ecommerce brands to their B2B roles.
This means that the age of the rep and the sales call is on the way out, and the day of seamless and personalized ecommerce experiences is on its way. B2B sellers need to be ready to meet these updated expectations or risk being left in the dust.
The New B2B
The average B2B buyer today will conduct on average twelve online searches before making a purchasing decision. This means that B2B suppliers in today’s market need to prioritize SEO and targeted advertising like never before. Your brand needs to become infinitely more discoverable online.
A recent study of B2B buyers found that nearly half [49%] of respondents used the Google search engine when seeking new products and services in their professional lives. However, as anyone who has been paying attention to the goings on at Google will know, things are about to change drastically at the world’s most popular search engine – especially regarding the way third party cookies are used to help businesses better track and manipulate users’ online activity.
Most would assume the answer to the question – what is the most popular internet browser in a business setting? – to be Internet Explorer/Edge as they are the ones which come packaged with Windows. However, it may surprise you to learn that the answer is the same one which is most popular with casual users – Google Chrome.
"The lack of a reading mode makes sense for a company that earns its keep through web ads, since reading modes hide them,” said PC Mag. "It does, however, have multiple user profiles, meaning different users of the same computer can have their own browser settings, history, and favorites. The browser finally caught up with others by adding a Share icon to the address bar that eases sending sites via social media or email, and recently got a search result sidebar similar to that in Edge.”
That means the B2B world stands to be just as disrupted by the news that Google is removing support for third-party cookies from its proprietary browser as their B2C counterparts and will need to adopt a new and hybridized marketing model if they hope to reach this new generation of buyers online.
Customer Engagement
If B2B brands want buyers to adopt their ecommerce portals in this new environment they are going to need to put the work in to build a database of first-party data and use that information to target advertising at the companies – and buyers within them.
In the short term this will mean building detailed customer profiles of the sorts of businesses you want to attract and then searching for more information on specific brands which fit those descriptors and adding that data to further augment your database. It will mean reaching out to your existing customers and soliciting information about what they expect from their B2B interactions in 2023 and taking that into consideration. Information such as whether they want to be contacted directly by sales reps or be left alone to research purchases themselves.
Remember, if 80% of B2B buyers are being guided by experiences, that still leaves 20% who are still mostly concerned about price and product. Statistics can be useful at showing us general trends and can guide our decisions to investigate new ways of doing business, but they should not be confused for the absolute truth.
The best way to determine which approach is right for your business or niche is to conduct your own research into your own customers and leverage that data to, not only build targeted ad campaigns which don’t rely on soon to be defunct third-party data, but also learn more about the expectations of B2B buyers in that space.
Final Thoughts
The nature of B2B ecommerce is changing. Brands who want to succeed in this unfamiliar environment need to find the nest approach for the industry/ies they serve and build detailed first-party databases which will help them encourage engagement from an increasingly technically savvy audience.
The evolving nature of the B2B ecommerce landscape is sure to be part of the conversation at B2B Online Chicago 2023, being held in May at the Marriott Chicago Downtown, IL.
Download the agenda today for more information and insights.