Enhancing your B2B marketing strategy in a digital performance era

This post is sponsored by OC Digital.

Process: Digital has turned B2B marketing processes on their head

Marketing departments and marketers in the past relied heavily on their customers or internal sales teams for industry trends or information, but today there is a wealth of information online.

Data shows that about 82% of B2B buyers will head online to research before making a purchasing decision. If a company fails to show up during that research period, then you’ll already be behind.

In addition to that, a larger organisation’s purchase decision may require the involvement of six to seven key personnel. This means that not only does B2B marketing need to reach many “information hunters” out there, but must also reach across each organisation, touching everyone and anyone that may sway the final purchasing decision.

Adding to the challenge is the pool of people or organisations that a company can potentially do business with is likely to be far smaller than B2C organisations. It may extend only into the hundreds, or even less.

However, the positive is that a company may just need to achieve two or three high-value B2B sales per year; unlike B2C, where you’ll most likely need hundreds or thousands in sales volume due to a lower project quantum.

For any businesses, whether in Singapore or globally, operating in today’s diverse marketplace, being on top of their game and staying one step ahead of the competition in one’s B2B marketing strategy is a necessity.

Performance: Digital metrics become the new norm

Traditionally, B2B marketing only relied on lagging indicators for proof of success – sales figures and revenue, to be precise. With the advancement of marketing automation and analytics, marketers can now live by a whole new set of metrics. Terms such as click through rates (CTR), clicks, impressions, active monthly users, unique visitors – terms conventionally used by B2C companies – now form the new and common vocabulary in a B2B marketer’s dictionary.

There is now more precision in tracking performance, meaning that companies can get a clearer overview of how marketing dollars invested are used positively to achieve a higher ROI.

Ensuring the right message shows up to the right person at the right time in the buying cycle is the critical factor to success. Although this may sound common sense and easy, it is a lot of hard work, and to get it right, is an even tougher process which I believe most B2B marketers reading this would agree with as well.

Essentially, there are three key areas B2B marketers should focus on:

1. Target audience persona

As a B2B marketer, one must be very clear about the target audience for your product or service. Who do you need to reach and convince? In the B2B purchase cycle, often the buyer’s persona will most likely go together with a job description (such as purchaser, procurement director, IT manager, financial controller, etc).

Just be very careful not to simply fall prey on relying on the job title segmentation alone. Be flexible as there could be another persona that may prove equally or even far more important.

For example, potential buyers may fall under a persona that is independent of their actual role within the organisation. An example was a B2B company that provided team management software in the form of a SaaS model. The objective of the company was getting individuals to start using the product for free over a trial period of one month. These individuals then got hooked and started inviting other team members to use it too.

Eventually, it became interesting for all team members, and the company was encouraged to invest in the service. In such a scenario, the buyer personas would look very different to strictly the job-title based ones (for example, IT manager or procurement managers).

Take your time to put some proper thought into your personas. You need them to help guide the decisions you are making, including what content you need to produce.

2. Use real-time data and social media ads

In this pandemic era, it is imperative that B2B marketers react to changing commercial behaviours in real-time as much as possible. If you post a digital ad and not many people are engaging or reacting to it, then one should make a swift decision to analyse and quickly adjust. This “immediacy” in digital marketing allows B2B campaigns to be more effective than in the past.

Contrary to some beliefs, social ads can work well for B2B businesses – if they’re interesting, work-related and targeted to the right audience.

In these types of ads, you’re not selling your product or service directly like in a B2C service. In fact, it’s not necessary to even talk about your company being a solution provider. Instead, focus on providing helpful content the target audience really needs right now. Results have shown that such ad content drives higher and more qualified B2B leads compared with ads that simply reiterate service offerings.

3. Lead generation and nurturing

Always remember that your website should be your main lead-generation machine. It’s where the action should be happening, showcasing all your offers, benefits and USP of your B2B solution.

Spend time improving and enhancing it. Always remember, it should “not always be about you”, but instead on the person visiting it, otherwise you may lose out on a lot of potential leads.

Focus instead on: “What is interesting to a visitor”? B2B buyers will only care about what awards your organisation has won or accolades achieved when they have reached the decision-making phase of the buying journey. More importantly, buyers will want to know if your organisation can do a particular job well and can deliver on those promises.

Lead nurturing is sometimes the most neglected component as companies invest heavily on “driving leads” and focusing on “closing the lead”, this in-between stage can often be forgotten as many leads generated may not immediately lead to a successful closure.

Lead nurturing if done well, and consistently, can lead to immense opportunities. This ensures that you stay in touch with the contacts in your database – and proper segmentation and qualification are the key ingredients here.

Sending everyone on your contacts list the same template email will be a total waste of effort. B2B marketers should instead segment lead databases and send out highly targeted and customised emails which will produce the warmest or most qualified leads for your sales team.

Finally…

Every B2B company and marketer will face different challenges, and depending on the stage your business is at and the industry you are in, you may want to focus more on one than the other.

But the truth is, all that has been discussed are equally important. I hope you’ve found this interesting and if you wish to get more help in your B2B marketing efforts, feel free to reach out to us. 

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About OC Digital – leading digital marketing agency

Being a top contributor in the digital marketing industry in Singapore, OC Digital is also an official Google-certified agency, Facebook, and TikTok marketing partner. Together with our team of experienced and passionate digital all-stars, we serve clients across both B2C and B2B industries. The online success of our clients is our key priority; thus, no challenge is too great for us. Contact us at hello@ocdigitalnetwork.com or drop us a PM on Facebook.

The writer is Benny Ong, managing director and founder, OC Digital.