While there are currently over 15 must-have social media marketing tools that promise any business the ability to deliver the right person, the right message at the right time. As a specialist B2B marketing agency, Demographica strives to take it a step further, helping our clients go beyond that.
In marketing and business, good insights are like Fabergé eggs – rare, fascinating and in many ways, mythical. Most strong strategy does not evolve without a powerful insight to lead it, and robust research backing it up.
In B2B marketing, creating a seamless B2B customer experience can be a key differentiator or justification for a premium. Just how many brands get this right is unknown.
At the start of every year, we sit down with our B2B clients and take some time to think about what the year ahead will bring for us – personally and professionally. Some of our thinking is idealistic and some is based on our experiences. After the last two years, both those types of thinking have their own unique challenges, with unpredictability influencing them far more than it did when we sat down to plot the way forward in 2019.
Given ongoing global market uncertainty, a lot of talk in the B2B space over the last six months has centred around positioning. With many of the CMOs I’ve spoken to across industries, verticals and categories – all looking for ways to stand out from their competitors.
The current pandemic and its impact on office culture has, unsurprisingly, brought about a renewed focus on the employee experience. Here, themes like hybrid work models and occupational health and safety, are under more scrutiny than ever before. It’s clear that a (cue trend word) VUCA-volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous – macro environment has produced a crux point for change for both employers and employees.
I recently came across an article entitled “Why the sales funnel is the cockroach of marketing concepts”, written by Tom Roach. In it Roach makes several thought-provoking observations about how the sales funnel came to be, its limitations and further suggests an adaptation to better fit the landscape of marketing today. This in turn led to me questioning how the sales funnel is in fact used specifically within the B2B marketing context.
Sales enablement provides sales teams with everything they need to sell as the point of focus, and is a major point of priority for many in the B2B space. In contrast, buyer enablement is an outside-in approach which makes it easier for buyers to buy.
Sales enablement is a major focus for many in the business-to-business (B2B) space, with a focus on providing B2B key account sales teams with everything they need to sell. The converse is buyer enablement, which is a shift from making it easier for salespeople to sell to making it easier for buyers to buy – an outside-in approach.
As B2B marketers, we often get caught up in controlling the B2B buying process because we treat it as a linear journey, with predefined touch points. We often try to control what content we deliver, when in the journey, as we chart the paths we’d like prospective customers to follow.
Creating customer value is a key driver for both business survival and business growth. If we consider that the perception of value is often made up of a lot of variables like product quality, price, customer experience and competing alternatives, to name a few, it makes sense to understand what matters to customers. Customer centric B2B is table stakes, and for customers this is no longer optional. This makes putting the customer at the centre of your world not only important, but essential.
In light of what went on in 2020, it’s no surprise that so many B2B marketers have been making safe choices. There’s been plenty of consolidation, a fair amount of contraction and a lot of maintaining the status quo. But the trend I’d really like to see for 2021 in the B2B marketing space, is B2B marketers taking more chances.