Bulls-eye B2B Customer Targeting on E-commerce

Introduction

The buying and selling of goods and services through online are called e-commerce whereas business-to-business or B2B e-commerce can be defined as the business which is conducted through online between companies rather than between a company and individual consumers Traditionally customer acquisition strategies in B2B is done through a variety of traditional and offline techniques such as tradeshows, exhibition, speaking session at seminars, industry events, breakfast briefings, trade publications and whitepapers. B2B purchases are usually big basket size or transaction amount. It makes the decision making more complex. The main user process for B2B when making a purchase are research and multi-criteria decision-making. The process dominate the B2B user experience. The focus on customer experience also arises because B2B customers now interact with company through varieties of  touch points through multiple channels and media, resulting in more complex customer journeys.

B2B Customer Targeting

The rise and adoption of new technologies transforms the relationships between business and customers. The growing importance of the Internet to B2B customer purchasing decisions has motivated B2B merchants to market digitally through new media and digital marketing.  The customer is a person who making the purchase on the e-commerce platform and other role in the organization that making or influence the purchasing decision making.  B2B market size are smaller compared to B2C provides the opportunity closer and more personal relationship between buyers and sellers. The relationship of buyers and sellers become much closer in B2B e-markets, which collect information from many of them. The Internet allows customers on B2B e-commerce who making the purchase decisions with more easily fund information to make a well informed decision. It is important for B2B company to know and aware how and when the customer getting about performing the purchase. It becomes of paramount importance to be able to define variables that trigger this momentum to optimize the business performance.

Technologies also change the way marketing is done. In comparison with the traditional customer acquisition, digital marketing requires the businesses to have more knowledge in reaching out and targeting the right customer in customer acquisition activities. Marketing cost optimization and to boost business performances in modern marketing analytics, it is essential for business to optimize the digital marketing cost by improving the user acquisition activities with better segmentation and targeting. Customer segmentation provides better understanding of the customers’ characteristics at a detail level and enables the company to provide differentiated marketing strategies to meet the customers’ needs. On the other hand, customer targeting identifies promising customers and company can allocates marketing resources on them to increase sales and profits. Customer targeting is, to a process to identify the prospects that are most likely to become customers to the company. However in improving the customer targeting the platform needs to analyse and formulate a better targeting by understanding customer better.

Given the increase of technology adoption, B2B ecommerce platform need to adopt and apply digital and integrated marketing technique which requires new customer targeting method. The complexity and multilevel decision making of the B2B purchasing, makes in crucial to understand the purchasing process and needs for the purchaser and the actual decision maker in order to maximize the B2B customer targeting.

B2B versus B2C user journey

User journey for B2B and B2C customer on e-commerce platform is different. Main differentiator is B2B customer decision making in purchasing is more complex that B2C.

Leveraging on User Centered Design (UCD)

User-centered design which focuses solely on users can provide a better understanding of users’ persona and needs. User-centered design is a set of tools to help businesses focuses on the user, gather information about users and their needs. When a system is created using user-centered design principles, company can measure the outcome using evaluation methods from usability and user experience (UX) to determine whether the system was successfully meeting user needs which will gives better understanding of business’s customers and potential customers persona and needs. However, user-centered design is commonly use in optimizing the digital marketing performance in B2C e-commerce. Applying and optimizing the user-centered design on B2B e-commerce will provides a better understanding of customer targeting which in turn will benefit the business.

Research focus

I want to focus on researching a way to improve customer targeting in B2B market segment for e-commerce. The idea is how do we gather the information on the complexity of purchase decision making for B2B and use it to improve the purchase conversion.