Be innovative

Use social media

Practice reciprocity

Price it right

Establish authority

Appeal to emotion

Most B2B buyers say marketing and sales communications they receive have improved in recent years - but there's plenty still wrong. See what B2B buyers say about your messages.

Business-to-business (B2B) marketers often face a dilemma. They are aware that digital marketing can be more cost-effective than traditional marketing, but at the same time they need to deliver leads and so typically have little opportunity for experimenting with digital.

Messaging apps aren't just for messaging anymore. Check out the 5 best messaging apps marketers should use today.

The number of mobile messaging app users worldwide is still growing at a significant rate

The next generation of social technologies is beginning to transform the way people communicate and work with each other, according to a new survey.

"What’s the best messaging app for your business? That depends on who you want to reach and where in the world they live.

• WhatsApp
• Slack
• Facebook Messenger
• WeChat
• Kik
• Line
• KakaoTalk"

With the rise of messaging, the traditional approach of forcing people to fill out forms and following up via phone or email is losing favor.

In order to optimize for long-term growth, marketing and sales teams need to adapt to changing customer communication preferences.

The future of lead generation might not be entirely form-less, but it seems likely that messaging will play a more and more significant role. And thanks to bots, using messaging for lead capture campaigns is not only possible, but scalable.

• How does this solution solve an existing problem? 
• How does this solution provide a competitive advantage? 
• How does this solution make the customer a visionary/market leader? 
• How does this solution enable a significant value exchange? 
• How does this solution represent an exclusive opportunity? 
• How does this solution increase performance and productivity? 

Viber has more than 800 million active users.

Telegram is one of the newest messaging apps on the market, but it has been one of the fastest growing messenger apps. It has more than 100 million users worldwide, with 350,000 signups daily. Although it’s not very popular in the US and other English-speaking countries primarily dominated by Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, 

Facebook Messenger has over 1 billion MAU. That is a lot of people to reach out to! Unfortunately for my fellow marketing specialists, Messenger doesn’t have many marketing opportunities just yet, although the general trend seems promising and Facebook has been testing out new advertising features recently.

Simply put, the customer needs to be the primary design point for your content strategy – and your website will be the right place to foil content devils with great execution details. Buyers spend more time online researching and buying products, which means your content marketing practices must keep pace.

Nearly 80 percent of companies spend less than 30 percent of their time and budget on customer retention-focused messaging and content, according to Corporate Visions' State of the Conversation Report, "Customer Retention and Renewal Messaging: Mission Critical, But Missing in Action."

What's more, the report found that 42 percent of respondents say their companies invest less than 10 percent of their marketing budgets on renewal messaging efforts.

Interestingly, the survey reveals that nearly 60 percent of B2B professionals don't think the messaging for their renewal conversations should differ from their customer acquisition messaging—a finding that flies in the face of recent Corporate Visions academic research, which found that the messaging strategies that work best for winning new customers are not effective for securing renewals.

Last month, the European Commission announced proposed changes to the ePrivacy Directive, a set of rules that regulate how companies collect data online about residents of EU member states. The new proposals will bring messaging, email and voice services under this banner, forcing such platforms to seek the explicit consent of users before being able to use their data for advertising purposes.

At the moment, messaging platforms are largely ad-free—Facebook Messenger allows sponsored messaging, but only if a brand is already part of an open conversation with a consumer. Given the scale and reach of these platforms, there’s clear opportunity to do more. But regulatory changes may curtail any grand plans these platform providers might have to expand marketers’ options.

But no matter how much time you spend on positioning, you’ll fail to do it right unless your positioning statement makes a benefit claim that solves an important customer problem. You can claim a position by using your positioning statement as the central theme for everything you do in marketing. But only if you repeat your position so often you get sick of it. That’s because the decision making part of the brain notes as important claims that are repeated and remembers them.

Lack of repetition – common to many of the 24 websites I examined – is one of the biggest positioning mistakes B2B software and technology marketers make. They come up with a compelling claim on their home page, but never use it again or repeat it anywhere on the website.

1. Segment out Your most Dedicated customers
2. Find Your Product’s Key Benefit to your most dedicated customers
3. Discover Your most dedicated customers’ signup Intent
4. Crowdsource Your Product Description from your most dedicated customers
5. Put the product description, intent and promise on Your Homepage

"How to Get Started With Real-Time Communication

• Live Chat on your Site
• Messaging support
• Chatbots

How to Get Started

• Make a comprehensive communication plan.
• Set up a dedicated service team.
• Empower frontline employees.
• Set up communication guidelines. 
• Play together with your other channels.
• Track key metrics."

Learn how 1:1 messaging has evolved and discover why marketers should be paying more attention to today's messaging app ecosystem.