Telco Industry Spotlight: How marketing can help you address customer challenges

Welcome to the first in our Telco Spotlight series.

Each article in our series will shine a light on the most common industry challenges and showcase how a savvy marketing strategy can help your telco business:

• Raise awareness
• Generate leads
• Support your customers

To get us started, let’s take a look at how you can solve customer challenges through your marketing…

How marketing can help you address customer challenges

The COVID pandemic forced many B2B companies to adopt a digital-first approach to selling. Research shows that just 20% of B2B buyers want to return to in-person sales. So, it’s never been more important to reassess your B2B marketing strategy to ensure your content is relevant to the needs of your telco audience.

Below we’ve highlighted ways your marketing and communications can not only address the problems your customers face but also highlight how you as a business can solve them.

Customer problem: Cloud migration

Solution: Case study

With more telecom companies looking for third-party solutions to provide a fast, reliable, and cost-effective move to the cloud, a case study is the perfect sales tool. A case study is basically a story that showcases how your solution solved a problem for a client. As well as highlighting the value you bring to customers, they add credibility to your brand by showing the results.

With 41% of B2B customers agreeing that case studies are critical to the vendor evaluation process they’re a marketing must-have. Plus, there’s the added benefit that asking existing clients to take part strengthens your client relationship and helps to cultivate brand ambassadors.

Problem: Remote working

Solution: Marketing campaign

85% of those currently homeworking want a hybrid approach of home and office working in the future. To facilitate this, companies will need to adopt technologies that allow remote working. Whether you offer hosted telephony services or customer service automation, a dedicated B2B marketing campaign to promote your products will help pinpoint your value to the market.

The key is to think big and run an integrated campaign on multiple channels. Research has shown that multi-channel B2B campaigns see a 24% increase in ROI on average, and integrated campaigns on four or more channels outperform campaigns on one or two channels by 300%.

Problem: Cybersecurity

Solution: Blog

The increase in remote working during the pandemic has led to an increase in criminal activity online. In fact, it’s believed that COVID was the world’s largest-ever cybersecurity threat. A blog is a great way to position your business as a thought leader by, for example, highlighting the best practices for safeguarding and securing data. Business blogging can lead to:

• 55% more website visitors
• 97% more inbound links
• 67% more leads each month

Plus, online content has a moderate to major effect on nine out of 10 B2B buyers’ purchasing decisions.

Problem: Increased regulatory scrutiny

Solution: Infographic

Since the advent of GDPR, businesses are required to protect customer’s personal data and privacy. One way to perfectly illustrate how you protect data across multiple communication channels is an infographic. In an age of shorter attention spans, infographics are eye-catching and scannable, which makes them preferable to reading long passages of text. About 50% of the brain is dedicated to visual functions and we process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. In other words, a picture paints a thousand words.

Infographics are also more shareable – perhaps due to the fact they’re quicker and easier to digest and pass on to friends than text – which can help strengthen your page ranking on Google.

Problem: Personalised customer service

Solution: Social cards

In the absence of face-to-face customer service, customers crave a personalised experience online. Social media cards are one way in which you can target customers with specific messages. Also known as social previews, they let you select the image, title, and description that show up on social media platforms so you can tailor the content you share to your audience.

When users click on the social card they’ll be taken to your chosen webpage. Having control of your social presence in this way lets you ensure your social marketing stays on brand and boosts engagement – businesses using Twitter cards get 18% more clicks, 89% more favourites, and 150% more retweets.