Tag Archive for: B2B marketing

Why is using customer data in B2B marketing important

A new four letter word seems to have taken over a lot of minds these days. It’s called DATA. When it comes to B2B marketing, it is something whose importance cannot be undermined. The four letter word has become absolutely essential to running a successful marketing campaign. If you’re missing out on mining your company’s data to help fortify your B2B marketing efforts then you’re missing out on innumerable resources that are readily available to you.

 

The use of data not only aids in better defining your target audience but also helps you to attract higher quality leads as also assists in personalizing your marketing, allowing you to build long-lasting and stronger relationships with the businesses you’re targeting.
The following are a few examples of how the use of data can benefit your B2B marketing strategy.

Augmenting data from various sources
When you collect first hand data from the interaction that you’ve had with targeted businesses, it is known as First party data. It could anything from their purchase history or their history of downloads from your site like eBooks or white papers. This kind of data is extremely helpful in targeting leads using email marketing.
But there is one other point that you need to keep in mind and that is augmenting the use of first party data with that of third party data. Now third party data is data that is collected from outside providers, which means it’s data that you haven’t collected from your users.
Third party data comes handy if you wish to better understand your customers’ wants and needs. This in turn allows you to create more accurate buyer personas. So when you actually get down to creating buyer personas, please remember to consider customer demographics, psychographic characteristics, values, pain-points, motivations, goals, favorite brands, and preferred channels of communication.

Segmenting and personalizing
By poring over both first party and third party data, you’ll not only be defining your target group but also be able to segment them so that you’re not just marketing towards one of your potential target audiences. Remember, it is a possibility to have more than one target audience.
To elucidate our point, let’s look at startups and medium-sized enterprises. They both fall into the business category but at the same time they have very different pain-points and will require different messaging. Generally speaking, startups would be more interested in some issues such as affordability, whereas medium-sized enterprises would be more interested in reliability.
You can divide your marketing using the data you have collected so that you can personalize your marketing energies more, such as by directly targeting startup companies with a particular email while directly targeting mid-sized companies with another. You can meet their specific needs using this method.

Targeted marketing
It will come as no surprise to you when you start applying the data you have collected from customers, you will notice that your target base shrinks to quite a small number. This does not necessarily mean lesser sales.
This is turn is a good practice because when you focus on a targeted audience, you generally have a much higher success rate. Whereas with a broader target, you’re probably wasting your resources on businesses that won’t be interested in your products or services.
If you look at it closely, you will realize that targeted marketing only helps you go a long way and establish new relations. It’s not just that the use of data can help, it’s that not using data can actually be detrimental to your marketing efforts. By ignoring your consumer data, your message will end up falling on deaf ears, which means a big part of your marketing budget is going to waste.

Debunking the myths of B2B marketing

When we, as an agency meet clients, we are more often than not met with questions that are cringe-worthy. When clients want to dig deeper and want to know, “Which of these designs has skyrocketed our competitor’s sales?”, we want to say that along with the design, there definitely was a strategy in place coupled with content as well as creative.

So, we decided to give it a shot and come up myths around B2B marketing and try to solve them in laymen terms for everyone out there.

We at Sellosphere design, create, curate tonnes of campaigns, lead generation programs, and creative assets each month, and we can humbly say that our sphere is that of a fair amount of expertise and domain knowledge. And even though each and every one of those deliverables is culled out from actionable data and deep insights. We believe or definitely would love to believe that our work is customized for each one of clients. It’s not a cookie-cutter solution that we are making available to our partners. We look at our client’s objective, do a proper research of our target audience, and only then do we offer solutions

 

It would be sort of utopic to think that agencies like ours have a bag full of ideas, and our task is simplified to just picking and selecting one or a few more ideas from the bag to suit the client’s needs. Another point that needs to be noted is that best practices, even those that have a proven track record, are not in the least an absolute case.
There is nothing in the world including marketing that works 100% of the time. For every accepted norm and guideline in B2B marketing, there is at least one outlier, one organization, one campaign that has gone against the tide and done well anyway.
Another aspect and an important one is that consumer behaviour is never the same. It is constantly changing. Technology evolves and transforms its surrounding. What worked half a decade ago might or might not work in today’s day and age.
As marketers, we need to evolve and change with the time too. If we just decide to go with the flow and do what has already been done, we might not reach a great height any time soon. We need to take lessons from history, not necessarily replicate them all the time. We need to take risks. We need to think out of the box. And we need to become that one organization that everyone looks up to and wants to copy!

Some pointers you can consider as you climb up the B2B ladder.
Embrace transparency
Investing more in social media
Make an emotional connect with the partner
There is definitely room for silly creativity on B2B marketing
B2B marketing is not too different from B2C marketing

How is B2B marketing getting transformed?

B2B sales are not what they were half a decade back, it is definitely on the verge of a revolution. There are a number of trends completely redefining what it will take to be a market leader over the next few years.

 

 

What was effective some years ago has already lost its sheen or is steadily fading away to give way to newer concepts and ideas. And there are some potentially powerful tactics that have been overlooked for long that need to be relooked at and employed for better sales and marketing.

For example, a lot of fast-growing companies are now using advanced analytics to profoundly improve their sales productivity and drive double-digit sales growth with marginal additions in their sales teams and cost base.
Also with the radical changes in buyers’ preferences, with buyers being more content-driven, tech-savvy, and comfortable engaging via myriad channels, the tables have definitely turned. This has led to the rise of a new breed of sales leaders who bring technical expertise and a strategic mindset. This is also giving sales organizations a makeover, with a sharp drop in field sales and marketing, and rapid growth in inside sales and analytics teams.
So what are the channels that marketers have been using?

One of the most universal B2B content marketing practice is blogging. According to research undertaken, the numbers revealed that 79% B2B companies have a blog.

And this shouldn’t really come across as a surprise because blogs are the core element in Content Marketing. And as the market reveals, statistics have a story to tell:

97% more inbound links are generated by regularly blogging companies. This leads to higher search engine ranking and a higher likelihood of being found.

Along with other SEO strategies, blogging 2-3 times a week can lead to a 177% traffic increase.
B2B companies that regularly blog generate 67% more sales leads than non-blogging companies.
Though there are enough proof and even consensus among marketers that blogging is productive, there are also areas where views differ.

Marketers now think differently about email marketing, event marketing and some other domains such as a mix of inbound vs. outbound marketing tactics

With regards to email and event marketing, it mainly is about the execution that was the bone of contention for marketers. So, even if using email marketing with rented third-party lists for a Lead Generation doesn’t yield great results, maybe using it for lead nurturing will throw up surprising outcomes.

And with event marketing, it is another ball game altogether. While marketers whined about the high cost of live events, they also accepted that events often result in some of the highest-quality leads.
Lastly, when we come to inbound vs. outbound marketing, four out of five study participants said they were trying various mixes for the coming year—with an even split between planning to do more inbound and less outbound, and those planning to do the opposite.

Looking for other options such as Partner Marketing Programs
Even though partner marketing programs were overlooked and not used widely, there is suddenly a huge wave of interest in it as marketers claim now.

With benefits
like:

  • Reaching new audience
  • Expanding brand awareness
  • Aiding with SEO
  • Driving website traffic
  • Enhancing reputation