Richard Mabbott GyroHSRs group head of planning talks about how it pays to get closer to your customers.

In interviews conducted across a range of industry sectors, 83% of chief marketers said they are investing more in building or sustaining relationships, with existing customers, with 65% claiming to have increased their focus on loyalty marketing as the full effects of the credit crunch start to be felt. No-one had reduced their focus on brand loyalty and loyalty marketing schemes.

At GyroHSR we have certainly seen this shift in focus. Our B-to-B clients are talking to us about CRM and Loyalty, asking us to apply the experience we have gained through working with leading consumer brands like Shell and Virgin Atlantic to their own unique set of business challenges.

Any successful CRM and loyalty strategy will follow some core principles, irrespective of industry or geography. Some solid data work and segmentation will always help to define priorities in terms of marketing investment and focus, identifying most valuable segments and most promising opportunities for cross-selling. Lifecycle planning helps to build the relationship over time and crucially creates alignment with the sales, account management process and channel approach. Direct communication channels such as DM and Email then deliver the right messages to the right customers at the right time. All quite straightforward on paper but we know that data can often be a challenge for B-to-B marketers in implementing such strategies. The channel model of many businesses, a lack of quality 3rd party lists and limited in-house experience all contribute to this problem.

Luckily new technologies are helping to alleviate these issues, providing opportunities for B-to-B marketers to build different kinds of relationships with customers; relationships that go deeper and are built more on the customers terms. Recent figures from EIAA forecast that over 80% of marketers will increase the proportion of spend in digital channels in 2009 and 2010. The shift to digital channels is enabling B-to-B marketers to get closer to customers, listening to them, talking to them and involving them more closely in future developments.

With these objectives in mind, GyroHSR developed Unite (www.unite.nokiasiemensnetworks.com) for Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN). It is the first online community in the communications infrastructure industry and the online hub of a broader Thought Leadership programme. The Unite community facilitates peer to peer discussion across the industry and NSN customers, the media and even competitors are now connected through the property. Other B-to-B brands are similarly pushing the boundaries. Dells IdeaStorm (http://www.ideastorm.com) concept actively seeks to involve customers in the product and service development process, innovatively and effi ciently gathering customer insight and requirements at the same time.

These ideas and others like them are great examples of how to get closer to your customers. They result in your target audience spending more time with your brand, becoming more emotionally involved, more likely to use your products and services again and more likely to talk about you and recommend you.

And because this is digital, the activities that your hard earned marketing dollars result in will be absolutely measurable and accountable. In times like these, thats exactly what you need.