Understanding the customer journey – and your internal team’s journey – is critical in B2B industries like 
manufacturing and distribution. The marketing manager plays an important role in the B2B eCommerce journey at both manufacturing and distribution companies. She is most interested in how marketing efforts directly impact both online and traditional sales efforts.
She may run campaigns and assist with promotions as well as help with SEO and other advertising mediums to drive traffic and engagement.
Connection Between Marketing Efforts
Part of her job as a marketing manager is to look for new ways to drive traffic to her site using content and other marketing efforts, while attempting to attract new customers in addition to existing ones. She may oversee the production and management of content, be responsible for advertising efforts, and take the lead in driving traffic to the site. She wants to reduce the redundancy of some of her tasks and streamline her marketing efforts with a marketing automation solution. It’s important that she can tie that marketing automation system to promotions, offers, and other content she is producing. It’s critical that she is able to connect all the marketing avenues she is managing to ensure that the information she presents to each customer is relevant. The ability to integrate the various systems she uses with her CRM will be instrumental in helping her manage her customer data and tying all those experiences together.
Measuring Success and Tracking Results
The future of commerce is all about driving engagement to a site and being able to create connections between every customer experience. The marketing manager wants to know which campaigns she’s running that are resonating and which ones are leading to conversions. She wants to know where the disconnects are happening and why. She is constantly thinking about SEO and how to generate more leads and more opportunities. It’s important to her that she find ways to get people onto the site and perhaps order samples or request more information. She wants to engage in some way to feed those opportunities to the sales team. The ability to track and validate that her marketing efforts and budget allocations are driving results is crucial to accessing her success.
A 360-Degree View of Data
Having extensive customer data is crucial to a marketing manager. Driving prospects or customers to a site is one thing, but once they log in, she loses visibility. How can she continue to monitor and guide that person’s journey? How can she understand if those people are truly abandoning their carts, or if they’re actually fulfilling their order through a traditional salesperson, or checking out as a guest?
She needs a way to connect all the customer data possible to understand these buying journeys to figure out how she can continue to serve her customers. She’s interested in an easy way to manage SEO, pay-per-click, and other marketing activities that are directly tied to commerce activities. Perhaps she wants to see what content a customer accessed before deciding to purchase or not. Maybe she needs the ability to view what other site activity that customer had before their decision. Giving the marketing manager a global view of customer data will help her streamline her campaign efforts, find disconnects in the marketing strategy, and better target content and promotions to customers.
Interacting with the Marketing Manager
What She Does
- Has the responsibility to drive traffic to the site and increase conversion rates
- Looks for ways to drive more traffic to the site using content and other marketing efforts
- Uses both digital and traditional marketing efforts to drive awareness about her business and get people engaging with the site
What She Needs
- The ability to market to existing customers as well as attract new ones
- A way to tie her marketing efforts to driving traffic to the website and measure success
- Defined KPIs that help her validate her marketing efforts and budget
- To drive more leads to her business to increase sales
Where You’ll Reach Her
She is usually at her desk working within a CRM or commerce system.
What You Can Provide to Make Her Job Easier:
- The ability to conduct marketing campaigns that are aligned to content, product, and promotions on her commerce site
- Access to a customer and prospect database that allows her to market
- An easy way to manage SEO, PPC, and other marketing activities her website
- The ability to create landing pages that support her marketing efforts
To learn more about the other roles involved in the B2B buying process and how you can improve their experience, check out our guide The People of the Manufacturing and Distribution Buyer Journey.
