B2B marketing leaders consistently tell us that marketing strategy ranks high among the processes they would most like to improve. Yet how exactly to go about this is another matter entirely. In some cases, there’s a lack of clarity about what marketing strategy means. In other cases, critical inputs to strategy formulation are lacking, keeping marketing out of step with other revenue-generating functions and the overall business objectives.

What are the most successful B2B marketers doing this year? Heading into Q2 of 2021, research-proven insights about business decision-makers can have large implications for your B2B marketing strategy. It’s never too late to pivot or adapt when you make optimization an ongoing priority.

There is no argument that when a B2B buyer begins their journey, they start online. All the research and data points are right: the journey starts with search, and oftentimes with a solution or vendor in mind. Do you know what else B2B buyers do? They search for information even when they’re not in a buying cycle, which is a problem because most tools don’t know the difference. Here’s what you need to keep in mind. 

In an age of the compelling images and short, snappy sentences, the e-book comes across like a dinosaur. It’s just a few thousands words of tightly-packed information, backed by a few charts and graphs. Yet it remains a vital tool in converting a prospect into a customer in the B2B marketing world.

That lead you are trying to reach has to make an “informed” buying decision. Getting that person to purchase will require time, effort and facts. Here the e-book delivers, as B2B customers are looking for authoritative sources to inform, confirm and validate.

“The B2B audience is ideal for e-books, particularly during WFH [work from home] time. Candidly, we’re seeing a higher likelihood of someone spending time absorbing long-form information when their boss isn’t walking past their desk every half hour,” said Adam Smartschan, Chief Strategy Officer at Altitude Marketing, a B2B agency. “B2B buyers are doing more and more research as budgets tighten – helping them along with solid, useful content is a great way for marketers to prove their company’s worth.”

Slow, but well aimed

Like everything in marketing, knowing your target audience is half the challenge before making the pitch.

That means looking at any data compiled from past interactions. Consumer testimonials, surveys and third-party data can be used as source material, noted Jeff Taylor, VP for Media at influencer and performance marketing agency Viral Nation. SEO and keyword search are also useful, added Altitude’s Director of Content Marketing, Jeff Kotran. “But additionally, you must determine what industry publications – what stable of blogs, newsletters and forums – do they visit to learn about the problems their business has and how to solve them?”

Account-based marketing plays a critical role in the growth of many businesses across a variety of industries. However, many marketers often rely on ABM when it may not be the best fit. In addition, what worked for account-based marketing even just a few months ago, may not be the most optimal strategy for marketing today.

In this article, we’ll explore how account-based marketing has changed over the years and whether or not it should be your focus. We’ll also explore in detail the many factors you need to consider to do ABM right.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) isn’t new

While reading a book called “No Forms, No Cold Calls & No Spam” by Latané Conant, I came to the realization that many vendors try to position ABM as a $40,000 technology stack problem.

The book dedicates quite a few pages to the ‘customer-centric stack’ and argues that because you’re now able to know when someone is in the market for a solution like yours [via IP lookup or 1st or 3rd party intent data], you don’t need to “spam” them.

Here’s the irony though— even though potential customers may be in the market for a solution like yours, you still need to deploy the traditional sales/marketing strategies to convince them to make a purchase.

While it is true that technology has enabled us to create more personalized & relevant experiences for prospects & allowed us to target people in very specific ways, it can also quickly approach the point of diminishing returns.

The marketing industry, like most industries, like to invent new terms to recycle old concepts. And in the case ABM, that’s exactly what has happened. Account-Based Marketing has in fact been around since the 1940s. When sales made a list of logos they wanted to sell, or the list of ‘dream customers’ to close. In those days we just called it sales.

The role of the CMO is amidst a major transformation especially with the pandemic pushing towards a digital-first focus. The role of the CMO isn’t easy, to begin with however this past year has made it increasingly difficult. On average, CMOs are the shortest-tenured members of the C-suite. Companies all around the world are dealing with growing customer expectations, smaller budgets, adjusted customer priorities, and the CMO is set to take responsibility for how well their company deals with those pressures.

If a content strategist leads a conversation with “I think this will work,” or “I like this topic,” you must stop them right there before any content is actually created. Content based on gut instinct isn’t going to cut it in an account-based marking (ABM) campaign. The digital marketing strategy relies on data and analytics in order to effectively nurture high-value prospects. On the other hand, if a content strategist begins a sentence with “I’m writing this because the intent data is showing us…,” listen closely; their content plan of action is not only informed, it has a much better chance of engaging target accounts and helping push your campaign toward its end goal.

We often think of marketing messages as springing from serendipitous breakthroughs, big ideas that come in a flash of creative brilliance. And that may be true, sometimes. But like many aspects of B2B marketing, message strategy can be developed—and improved—by following a proven process.

B2B companies make three big mistakes in their messaging:

1. They fail to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Their message sounds the same as the others. And worse, it’s filled with hackneyed buzzwords, like “transformation,” “innovative,” and “leverage.”
2. The target audience doesn’t care about the seller’s main claim. Either the claim fails to express a benefit that solves a pressing target audience problem, or it merely says what they do (like, “we’re a cloud computing company”) and leaves out the benefit altogether.
3. Their main claim isn’t used consistently. They use a shotgun approach. For example, their main claim may jump out on their home page but never appear again. They fail to use the power of repetition. It takes at least 10 impressions before your target audience will notice your message. Also, neuromarketing tells us that the decision-making portion of the brain notices the repetition of a few keywords, earmarks them as important, and thus remembers them.

Differentiation is essential if a company has any hope of claiming a position in its market. Your goal is to create a message that is both unique and important to the target audience. A message strategy consists of a positioning statement, three to four support points and as much detail as necessary to communicate a compelling, comprehensive story.

Lead generation, the process of identifying and nurturing potential customers, continues to be a major challenge for marketers in 2021.

The biggest reason behind it is that competition in every field is growing every day, and to get a significant number of leads, a business needs to stand out from the crowd.

But here's a fact: lead generation isn't about finding a "secret sauce" to help in the generation of tons of leads. Instead, it's about exploring the tried and tested methodologies to create the most practical combination of strategies based on the objectives and target industry. And determining the most appropriate methods can massively transform your overall revenue.

What is B2B Lead Generation?

In a nutshell, lead generation is the art of attracting and capturing your target audience's interest in a product or service for developing a sales pipeline. Lead generation lies in the second stage of inbound marketing. The inbound marketing process goes like this:

Attract → Convert → Close → Delight

Lead generation occurs in the second stage after your target audience has been attracted to your brand, and you're ready to convert them into your customers. For example, if a social media post attracted someone to visit your website, and then your website's content influenced the person to provide their email to you, that person would be considered a lead. And once you have the email address, with a proper strategy, you may end up turning that lead into an actual customer.

In fact, our recent ‘Experiences Customers Want’ report found that 74% of businesses have accelerated their investment in online experiences as a result of the pandemic, with 76% claiming their online offerings saved their business. We expect these trends to continue in 2021.

High on the priority list when it comes to online is adaptable content that can be structured and organised to create customised and personalised experiences. In a world where marketers are constantly pivoting their strategies due to the ever-changing COVID-19 situation, they need to be able to surface new products and get to market quickly with relevant offers and having an agile content strategy in place is imperative to achieving this.

Defining ‘content agility’

The term content agility describes a brand or organisation’s capability to optimise the end-to-end process of delivering customer experiences at scale. To become more agile, brands must remove the technical bottlenecks often associated with delivering content at speed.

This will mean getting several things right – from having the right tools and technologies in place to building a great author experience, so that content authors and agencies can deliver and update online experiences fast.