The unpleasant fact that a lot of firms do not discuss is that most of their B2B marketing money is being used to talk with individuals who will never become customers.
Look at your current pipeline for an instant. Out of all of the leads from last quarter, how many of them are students who downloaded your whitepaper for a school report? Your competitors gathering intelligence? Job seekers? If you’ve ever had the experience of exporting your leads to a spreadsheet and feeling sick to your stomach, this article is for you!
In just three years, B2B marketing has evolved more than in the preceding ten years combined! The number of stakeholders involved in making decisions has increased. The majority of the research that the buyers conduct occurs before they ever contact anyone in sales. The old way of creating a gated PDF, collecting download email addresses then sending them unsolicited email after unsolicited email doesn’t only fail, but actually harms your brand.
Now let’s create a new foundation! This document explains how your B2B marketing strategy can create pipelines in this quarter and continue into future quarters. Everything from account-based marketing to B2B demand generation to real-world tactics that you can implement to make an immediate impact!
What Makes B2B Marketing Different (And Harder)
Selling to businesses is very different from selling to consumers, and the most common error we see is treating the two sales processes the same.
For example, a consumer may buy a pair of shoes in a matter of minutes, whereas a B2B buyer typically takes anywhere from 4-9 months to purchase software. In a B2B transaction, the B2B buyer will have to gain approval from multiple stakeholders, including procurement, finance, IT and the CFO, all of whom will want to know how their purchase can be justified.
Emotional connection is still present, though; in B2B/A, the emotional connection must be encompassed by a great deal of professional risk.
You have to become the safest option available. If you can provide information that illustrates that you are safe, your ability to develop and build relationships with the entire purchasing committee on an ongoing basis, from a variety of channels and without any direct contact with an actual sales associate, will continue to grow throughout the purchasing process.
Building a B2B Marketing Strategy That Holds Up
Many strategies do not fully take off; instead, they get off to a poor start because much of the foundational work is overlooked. Before spending a single rupee on advertising, ensure you have the following three items in place first:
Define your ICP with brutal honesty.
“Companies with 50 to 5,000 employees in any industry” is not an ICP, but rather a wish. Think about your best customers; those who have a history of closing fast, remaining long-term and expanding within their organisation. What are the key characteristics and traits they exhibit? Industry, revenue band, technology stack, trigger events, etc. The answers to these questions will identify your ICP.
Map the full buying committee.
The person who downloads your piece of content is not the person who facilitates your contract. Thus, for each type of buyer (the end user who is focused on the daily pain they have, the economic buyer who is focusing on ROI and the “blocker” who is concerned about risk) – you will likely have different types of messaging when conducting your B2B digital marketing activities.
Pick a measurable revenue goal, not a vanity metric.
“Raise brand awareness” is not a specific enough goal; however, “Generate 40 qualified opportunities from enterprise manufacturing accounts by Q4” is. All other planning efforts should ladder back to attaining that goal through an effective B2B marketing strategy.
Once you have these foundations completed, the rest of your channel selection process is fairly straight-forward. If you do not have a strong foundation, each of your channels will underperform; therefore, you will not understand why they are all underperforming.
Account Based Marketing: Fish With Spears, Not Nets
If your average deal size is several lakhs then account-based marketing (ABM) has to be the backbone of your program and not just a side project.
The reasoning is quite straightforward. Rather than generating 1000 random leads and hoping that a few fall into your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) you should target 100 – 200 accounts that closely match your ICP and message them intentionally. For example, create personalized LinkedIn campaigns based on that industry, provide content that highlights specific compliance challenges that your prospect must deal with and contact them four or five times before the sales team reaches out to them.
The reason ABM works so well is that it mimics the way in which enterprise deals close – through a relationship built among all members of the purchasing committee over time. Based on our client work at Oxper, we have seen that generally, ABM will produce fewer leads than traditional B2B lead generation programmes but will also produce many more opportunities-to-close (OTC) for each lead generated. Therefore the trade-off is well worth it.
One caveat to be aware of is this: ABM without alignment to sales is nothing more than costly advertising. If your sales organisation is not targeting the same account lists with the same messaging, then do not call it ABM. Call it what it really is – targeted advertisement with an additional step or two involved in generating and closing an opportunity.
B2B Lead Generation vs B2B Demand Generation: Stop Choosing Sides
Marketers have strong opinions regarding gated content. There are those that insist gated content is dead while others cling to their MQLs as validation of their belief in lead generation. Both points of view miss the point.
B2B demand generation creates buyers through ungated podcasts, truly helpful LinkedIn posts, and teardown videos that give a VP the feeling of “these people understand my problem.” Due to not being able to cleanly tie much of this back to revenue, this type of demand generation worries CFOs. Do it anyway.
Conversely, B2B lead generation captures buyers through using demo request forms, using ROI calculators, and utilizing retargeting campaigns that leverage the existing intent of the consumer, converting it into a conversation.
Businesses that are presently winning the race to buyer conversion utilize both types of generation, in order. B2B Demand generation warms the market, subsequently B2B lead generation captures that demand. If your B2B lead generation is declining, it is rarely an issue with your forms or your ads. It is because there is a lack of demand upstream to capture. When you fix the top side of your pipeline the bottom side will fix itself.
SEO and Content: The Compounding Asset Everyone Underfunds
Paid advertisements will only continue while you continue to pay for them; on the other hand, SEO works on your behalf continually, even while you’re sleeping, which is why so many impatient leadership teams fail to invest sufficient resources into it.
With B2B Marketing, things are different; searching for keywords isn’t about volume. This means that a keyword that may only have 90 searches per month like “OHC compliance software for factories” could be worth more than a keyword with 9,000 searches, because each one of those 90 searchers is an individual with intent and money to spend.
To find out what type of content to create, and how to cluster that content together, you need to know what problems your buyers are actually facing (as that’s what they’ll be searching for): i.e. comparison pages, pricing pages, how to choose pages, etc., as well as an honest description of where your solution is not the right fit for them.
It’s also a surprise to many that the last point listed above can build more trust with your potential customers than ten case studies, thus converting much better.
Make sure to also have a website built for conversion; having a strong organic presence on page one of search engines is not going to do you any good when your visitors land on a slow, confusing website. Conversions, site speed, and overall user experience are not projects that are part of your B2B digital marketing; they are what B2B digital marketing is built on.
Performance Marketing and Automation: Where Efficiency Lives
Paid channels still play an important role in B2B growth marketing, but now the focus of marketers has shifted from using a broad reach to targeting accurately.
LinkedIn is still the top platform for B2B marketers with high intent to buy; when combined with account targeting in an Account based marketing approach, it offers the potential for high returns from paid ads. Google Search continues to be an effective source for capturing buyers who are already looking for solutions and who have high purchase intent. Surprisingly, Meta/FaceBook also offers great results for both retargeting and for expanding to lookalikes at costs that are lower than most B2B marketers expect. The one discipline that separates profitable accounts from money pits is ruthless measurement and management of cost per opportunity and not using cost per lead as a measurement.
Finally, automation is what ties everything together by allowing marketers to create lead scoring systems that automatically establish when an account is sales ready. Nurture sequences can be developed based on historical behaviours rather than by using the same message in the same email on the same day to all leads. CRM hygiene provides sales with such confidence in marketing’s data that they will make the necessary adjustments to their own processes. None of this is glamorous; however, they all build on each other.
Why Growing B2B Brands Partner With Oxper
Two decades of working in this industry reveals that the majority of B2B marketing failures are not due to poor ideas but rather due to fragmented execution. For example, the SEO firm doesn’t communicate with the paid media contractor. The ad campaigns had nothing to do with how the website was built. There isn’t one person responsible for the entire funnel.
Fragmentation is why Oxper was founded; as a 360° B2B marketing agency, we manage the full growth machine from under one roof: Account Based Marketing Programs, B2B Lead Generation, SEO, Performance Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Marketing Automation, and the Web and UI/UX to enable conversion across all channels.
One team. One Strategy. One responsibility: your pipeline.
Our clients do not come to us for impression reports; they come to us for opportunities for their sales team to close. If you are wanting that kind of relationship with a B2B marketing agency, let’s have a conversation.
B2B Marketing Rewards the Patient and Punishes the Scattered
There isn’t a single technique that exists or can provide success for any B2B marketing – and anyone who sells you one is lying. Instead, the way to create success in your B2B marketing campaigns in 2023 requires you to have:
- A sharp ICP definition,
- Account Based Marketing campaigns targeting your most ideal accounts,
- B2B Demand Generation to create leads for your Account Based Marketing campaigns
- SEO working quietly in the background compounding over time as a long-term tactic
- Automated marketing platforms keep everything running smoothly.
Start by identifying the weakest link in your current B2B marketing strategy and fix it 100%. Then move on to the next weakest link.
Alternatively, you can skip the trial-and-error phase completely and book a free Growth Consultation with Oxper. We’ll provide an analysis of your current B2B Marketing Strategy, show you exactly how/where your pipeline is leaking, and provide a detailed, step-by-step outline of how to fix them as quickly as possible. No fluff, and no 40-slide presentations; just a clear, actionable strategy.
