What I Know About Driving Growth in B2B Marketing
In today’s post, I wanted to quickly go over some of the fundamentals you need to understand when tackling marketing your products to other companies. I’m not sharing these because I know all the answers to every B2B problem - I share them because I myself need reminding when I’m in the trenches. How do you get back to basics?
In my 15+ years experience in B2B marketing, I’ve never once encountered a problem that was solved in the exact same way. Selling high-ticket items to businesses doesn’t work that way. For instance, some industries are still ripe for content marketing, and some have grown weary of it. Some products require a massive amount of sales enablement effort, and some practically sell themselves once you find the right audience.
There are, however, a few eternal truths that I do know about B2B marketing. Let’s start at the beginning.
Brand Building vs. Lead Generation
There are two areas of focus for a B2B marketer. It’s almost impossible to get away with just performing one of these without the other for very long.
“Brand Building” is the first type. Branding, or “Brand Building”, creates future demand, rather than near-term sales. It creates name recognition and allows you to be in the consideration set the next time your audience is faced with a purchase, which could be next month or five years down the road.
If done right and with a healthy enough media budget, it can even get your product notoriety within your industry. This is the type of marketing work that creates buzz, and over time, will become the biggest driver of growth, period.
That is, if your company lasts long enough to reap the benefits. Many clients I work with are start-ups, so leaning hard into branding is difficult with limited funding, and intense pressure to sell. That’s where the second type of B2B marketing comes into play.
“Sales Activation” is also known as lead generation in B2B circles. It’s also known as demand generation, which is unfortunate because this type of marketing isn’t really that great at building real demand for your product. (See Brand Building for this.)
What lead generation is great at is building lists of possible prospects - people that match at least some of the criteria of your perfect buyer. These lists of people can then be marketed to with increasingly product-centric messages across search, social, display, and email advertising.
It’s typically done with a niche content piece that is so specific to a problem that it automatically “outs” the recipient as having that exact problem. This “problem” is, of course, the one that your product solves! Tada!
Qualified leads can come relatively quickly with this strategy, but will typically take extra legwork from a sales team if you haven’t put effort into Brand Building as well. Most B2B buyers simply won’t trust a company that they only heard of 2 weeks ago.
This is why you need to put effort and dollars into both types of marketing and clearly explain to your internal stakeholders the difference.
2. The Funnel Messaging Basics
If you’ve spent any time at all in a B2B environment, you have some understanding of the marketing and sales funnel and it’s basic composition. While I won’t go over it again, I do want to go over some things that I’ve learned about what messaging works best, where.
The top of the funnel messaging is typically broader, more generic messages meant to pull a large swath of prospective customers into your marketing web. People at the top of the funnel are typically “out of market”, meaning you don’t have any evidence that they are ready to buy your product currently. And, because the buying cycle in B2B is so long, it’s typical to include non-decision makers in this audience, because as time goes on, they will move closer to decision-making status. Ideally, by the time they have garnered that promotion or new job, they know your brand name well and have positive sentiments towards it.
Messages here can be more emotional, less logical, because you’re not asking the target to buy your product yet, you’re simply asking them to remember your name and perhaps join your email list.
The bottom of funnel consists only of people who have shown behaviors that indicate that they are in the market for your product. The targeting is tighter, and the messages are much more rational.
3. Predict Growth in 60 Seconds
According to The B2B Institute (an incredible resource for supporting data), Reach (and more specifically Share of Voice) is the greatest predictor of overall growth potential. That’s because the more people that recognize your brand name and message, the higher the number of consideration sets you will be a part of.
It’s a numbers game, and the end goal isn’t to win every deal, because you can’t. The goal is to be in as many consideration sets as possible.
To grow, your share of voice MUST always be larger than your current share of the market. This seems logical, but I’ll be honest, math doesn’t always come easiest to marketers (present company included!).
B2B marketing is challenging. It’s messy, it’s more unpredictable than consumer marketing, and it takes a lot more effort to get off the ground. Consumers love unique and homespun products, while B2B Buyers expect you to already be scaled, professional, and pristine in your communications and products.
However, if you can learn, explain, and practice these simple truths of B2B marketing, you’ve given yourself a leg up than some marketers require years to grasp.
