What is Next-Generation B2B Marketing?
Based on our decades of experience of B2B marketing, the analysis from our community of the best and worst of the sector, and our recent experience in creating a new operating model in VOLUME we believe these are the key value creators in Next Gen B2B marketing:
A human, natural and conversational approach – Easy to say, easy to be overlooked on an organisation chasing short term lead generation and sales but communicating with people you want to buy from you in a conversational and natural way is – weirdly – a way for B2B brands to stand out and be memorable.
Aiming for Fame – Professor Byron Sharp of the Ehrenberg-Bass institute is famous for his studies of marketing effectiveness and the books How Brands Grow. These tend to focus on consumer / B2C examples but as he wrote in a study of the marketing of professional services “We’ve heard it all before, “services are different. Yes, they are, but the important question is how much do the differences matter for marketing strategy? The answer is not much.”
The study shows that the effective marketing of B2B service brands has more in common with FMCG’s than you might think with brand fame, and being memorable both critical factors for growing sales.
Content builds community – For many B2B brands, both big and small, startups and established, the purchase journey has multiple stages, and multiple decision makers. So it can be a long-term game with many players. Understanding the information needs and personal motivations of these potential customers or clients is a good start. Considering them as a community is even better. Developing useful and meaningful content for, and with, that community is better still. Be generous; arm your community with the insight they need, enable them to consult with and inspire each other. Create something people want to be part of, given them good reason to join in, and make it easy for them to do so.
Personal relationships, delivered digitally – The 2020 lockdown has accelerated changes in the way we work and communicate with each other – and some experiences have been better than others. Think of the switch to video conferencing, the pivot to digital events; the best ones are those that consider the features and limitations of the digital experience and design the experience accordingly, rather than trying to replicate face to face. This is a key principle of next-gen B2B marketing comms.
Whole funnel approach – From Saas / scaleups to established brands practising ABM B2B businesses of all sizes and ages benefit from planning and integrating activity across the entire customer journey and sales funnel. From the tech-enabled sophistication of serving sequential, personalised content across multiple platforms according to stage in journey and behaviour to the simplicity of building brand fame to increase branded search, next-gen B2B marketers are taking a whole-funnel approach.
The behaviour is the message – What’s your purpose? Your values? Your value proposition? Positioning? Does your marketing behaviour provide consistent proof of these? If your message is one of speed, how does your marketing bring this to life (other than making the claim in copy?) Are you fastest to respond to industry news? If you are a challenger brand, disrupting a sector, how does your behaviour challenge the marketing norms? In short, be what you say you are.