If you are a B2B marketer and your leaders ask, "What is our marketing strategy for the future," this post is for you. B2B marketing is tough. No offense to my B2C peers, but the B2B world has much smaller populations of buyers, the path to purchasing is often complex, insights into customer behavior are foggy at best, and there are chasms of difference between B2C and B2B marketing budgets. An effective strategy has to do more with less and remain focused.
Because of this, many B2B marketers find themselves inheriting what marketing did in the past, which is often advertising placement, graphic design, or sales content production.
These aren't strategies and aren't helping your organization compete and grow. If you are struggling to bootstrap your B2B marketing organization into 2024 - and beyond - this post is an essential strategic outline that pairs B2B customer problems with key strategies to address them.
1) Problem: Businesses View Themselves as Unique | Solution: Invest in Digital First Personalization
Businesses live in their industry every day and don't view their business as the same as their competitors. They want solutions to their unique problems and don't believe in "one size fits all." To address this, investments in personalization technology are an essential part of your strategy. They will enable your business to create highly tailored customer experiences, from product recommendations to personalized messaging and content. The key to personalization will be data and a digital-first approach. Businesses must collect, analyze, and utilize data to understand their customer's needs and then use that information to create customized experiences online. Why digital first? Because that is where customers are spending the majority of their time researching the answer to their problem. Artificial intelligence and machine learning will be critical in achieving this level of personalization at scale.
2) Problem: Buying Decision Groups are Growing | Solution: Normalize Account-Based Marketing
According to Gartner, the average B2B Buying Group is 12 - 23 people, spans across functions, and each role has differing needs. Account-based marketing (ABM) is essential to today's B2B marketing strategy as it focuses on targeting individual accounts rather than casting a wide net with generic messaging and content. By targeting specific accounts and decision-makers within those accounts, businesses can create more personalized and relevant experiences.
The use of ABM will require businesses to deeply understand their target accounts and the decision-makers within those accounts. If ABM is new to your business, start with a process to quantify and target your highest-value accounts. From there, invest in the research to deepen your understanding of your top accounts and their decision-makers. Then, you start creating materials and strategies to address their specific needs.
3) Problem: Nurturing Customers on a Budget | Solution: Implement and Integrate Marketing Automation Tools
Marketing automation allows businesses to streamline their marketing processes, reduce manual tasks, and improve efficiency. Rather than people calling up prospective prospects or "leads," it uses decision trees to nurture prospects through automated communication based on their behavior. This allows sales and marketing teams to use their time and budgets wisely. The use of marketing automation starts with a platform such as Marketo, Marketing Cloud, or Braze, then integrating these with other systems and tools, such as CRM systems, content management systems, and analytics tools, to provide a complete view of the customer journey.
4) Problem: Customers Will Give You 2-Minutes for Free | Solution: Make it Easy and Create a Visual-Centric Content Engine
Let's face it, many B2B offerings are complex, and companies often need help to break them down so they are easy for a customer to understand. From my experience, you have about two free minutes to land an idea that will get your additional investment of time (e.g., 5 minutes to read something, a 7-minute video, or a 15-minute meeting) or dismissed. Pair this with the fact that half the human brain is used to process images, and there is no doubt that any content you create has to be compelling both in the message and in visually making the complex simple. Video and straightforward graphic-based written content is the path to success here and is what has the most success with B2B buyers. These two formats allow businesses to convey complex information in an easily digestible format.
The trick is you can't just create one or two visually based pieces of content a year. You need to create an engine that produces ABM and personalized (see 1 and 2 above) content across multiple channels. AI can help cut down the cost and time needed to create content, and humans (your marketers) can then take this content, get it ready for the external world, and then reduce, reuse, and repurpose it - turning one piece into many.
5) Problem: Customers Don't Want to Interact with People Unless They Have To | Solution: Remap How Sales and Marketing Work Together
This idea will not be popular with my friends in sales, but no one wants to be sold to. This is why B2B buyers spend 45% of their time researching independently and just 17% of their time meeting with suppliers. Now some organizations will look at the above and say, "How do we grow the 17% of the time they meet with us," but I would argue this is what you want, not what your customers want.
Instead, rethink how sales and marketing interact with your customers throughout their buying journey. If you visualize a funnel of marketing feeding leads for sales to close, consider how marketing and sales will interact with customers throughout different stages of their journey.
Make specific actions to bring sales and marketing together as equally essential elements of a shared commercial process, where digital and in-person interactions happen early on, at the close, and after the sale.
This change is cultural and will start with Sales and Marketing leadership agreeing that customer buying touches both sides of the business and are equally valuable. From there, aligning their goals and objectives to achieve results and cascading that down to the organization is essential to stay ahead of how B2B buyers want to buy.
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