There’s a new B2B buyer group in town, and they’re young, smart, and savvy. Is your business meeting millennial buyer demands?
Goodbye boomers, hello millennials. It’s long been discussed that a time would come when boomers retire and the millennial presence in the workplace grows. Well, that time is now.
Born between 1981 and 1997, millennials represent America’s largest population and account for 25% of the workforce, a growing figure.
Perhaps most important to note is that today, 73% of millennials are involved in B2B purchasing decisions. How B2B companies sell must keep pace with new buyer demands, especially as it relates to ecommerce experiences.
Let’s take a look at the habits of this new buyer group, and their B2B ecommerce expectations.
Online, pre-purchase researching
Fiercely independent, millennials will come to you when they’re ready to buy. Meantime, they’ll get informed about your product or service offerings themselves, via online research.
Citing internet search and vendors’ websites as the top two means of researching products and services, the first step in the millennial buying process involves scouring the web. In fact, they’ll be more than halfway through the buying process before they even contact someone at your business – if they contact you directly at all. Seventy-four percent of millennials say that buying from a website is much more convenient than buying from a sales representative.
Forget cold calling – digital presence is key when appealing to the new buyer. Adopting a B2B SEO practice, blog and thought leadership strategy will ensure that your company ranks when millennials come looking for your products or services. Using marketing automation tools, you can track how millennial prospects consume content, enabling a data-driven marketing approach that responds to buyer behaviors.
Demand for Amazon-like experiences
Listing Amazon as the most essential app that they can’t go without, millennials are heavy Amazon users. Here are three practices that this ecommerce conglomerate models that your B2B business can adopt as well:
The simple online checkout process
Abandoned online shopping carts are a fatal flaw. Amazon combats this issue with a one-click checkout process – and so can you. The average large-sized ecommerce site can gain a 35.26% increase in conversion rates through better checkout design.
Personalization
From logging into your own account to recommended products based on past site behaviors and conversions, Amazon feels personal. When B2B enterprises display personalized product and service assortments too, average order sizes are proven to increase.
Advanced search
As Amazon collects customer information, they tailor search results to end-users preferences and needs. By adopting this feature, your B2B organization can make it quick to find what the user is looking for, ultimately driving conversions.
The digital customer experience matters
Today’s new B2B buyer has redefined great customer experiences. The overwhelming majority of millennials prefer to make transactions online, and organizations are rising to the occasion: 3/4 of B2B firms are already upgrading their ecommerce platform or plan to within 3 years.
Is your B2B enterprise considering digital transformation? Get the complete guide to buying a B2B digital commerce platform here.
