Navu was proud to sponsor the Forrester B2B Summit North America this year, and we had a great time doing it! Between the speakers, conversations with fellow sponsors, and of course countless discussions with attendees, it’s safe to say we packed a lot of learning into just three days. Here are our biggest takeaways from each of those groups.
From the Speakers: Customer Obsession
The theme of the conference was “Customer Obsession”, and there was certainly a lot to talk about! The short version was very simple: Focus on what the customer needs and wants, and everything else will work itself out.
For us here at Navu, the relevance of that notion is twofold. First, there are the businesses that rely on our Guides to tell different stories to different subsets of their visitors. Are these users (predominantly marketing teams) gaining value that they can’t get elsewhere? How are they actually using our product, and how does it compare to our expectations in the design phase? Truly understanding our users’ needs is one of our core values, and it was affirming to attend sessions that drilled deep on how and why it matters.
Second, there are the end users. While they aren’t our clients directly, they are the ones who actually engage with our Guides. It’s easy to get caught up in what our customers want, but in the end our success depends on their customers. We focus a lot on things like customizations and analytics for our users, but the B2B Summit was a great reminder that we can’t lose the forest for the trees. It’s the end user that’s at the core of our product, and properly understanding them is at least as important as anything else we do.
From the Sponsors: AI Isn’t Everything
AI is certainly a hot topic, particularly among the many sponsors joining us in Austin. Some had pivoted or incorporated AI into their products, and of course a handful were designed to feature AI as a core of their business. But for many more, they were facing a very tough question: Can this enhance our business, and is it something our customers really want?
As a conversion rate optimization solution, it’s certainly a question that applies to us. And there is always a fear of being left behind if you don’t embrace the latest new technology. But in conversations with other sponsors, it was interesting to hear how many expressed reservations about AI’s applicability to their specific business. At least for now.
For us, our approach has always been to keep things simple and understandable. That means marketers are picking the right content for the right visitor, and we make it easy to surface that content. We really don’t like the notion of a black box where you don’t know what’s happening on your own website.
Don’t mistake us for Luddites, though! There are countless potential applications for AI in the B2B website space, and we intend to help our customers get the most out of the work they’re doing. Using AI to generate web pages for very specific audiences? Navu can make sure they get in front of the right people (and only the right people).
From the Attendees: Conversion Consternation
Our booth had the slogan “A Simpler Solution to B2B Lead Conversion,” and boy did that get folks talking. Converting leads is by nature a complex problem, especially in the B2B space where there could be 10-20 touchpoints before even entering an email address.
When conference attendees came to chat with us, we heard a familiar refrain: “We put all this effort into getting the right folks on my site and creating a good experience for them, and then they left. Now what?”
There’s no one answer to that question. Landing page builders are a great option to provide an initial first experience, analytics tools help marketers better understand visitor behavior, and a well-executed ABM strategy can certainly be a viable way to keep a narrow focus.
But no marketing team can do everything, and it can be overwhelming trying to figure out the best allocation of the limited time and budget you have available. Navu’s approach is to make Guides for specific parts of your audience (solutions, verticals, campaigns etc.) and then surface them throughout the user journey every time they come back. But it doesn’t exist in a vacuum!
We believe in complementing a marketing team’s existing efforts, maximizing the value you get out of your custom landing pages, email nurture campaigns and more. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to B2B lead conversion, so we try to meet our visitors where they already are. By keeping things simple, our hope is that B2B Marketers like the ones we met in Austin will get a lot more value out of their marketing budget, and a lot fewer headaches.
