It’s no surprise that lead generation is the primary objective for all demand generation marketers, which often results in little to no focus on brand awareness in B2B organizations. But what happens when your lead pipeline starts to dry up? Building brand awareness takes time to ultimately fuel your pipeline, and the buyer’s journey continues to evolve with ongoing market shifts.
More than 70% of the buyer’s journey today is completed before a sales engagement. Decision-makers are conducting most of their vendor vetting and research into potential solutions independently – often now at a rapid pace to keep up with distributed workforces and virtual workspaces. Despite consistent effort and communication from technology brands, IT and business professionals usually have their minds made up by the time they connect with vendors. How can you break through the clutter?
A B2B lead generation process should involve mapping the buyer’s journey and building content around it – a journey that starts with awareness. A user that is familiar with and trusts a brand is far more likely to engage with all of the customer touch points. Marketers should activate both awareness and lead generation campaigns with intelligence driven marketing that targets buyers who are “near market” and “in-market.”
Understanding the Buyer’s Journey
The buying collective involves 6-8 people on average, each with their own unique priorities, must-haves, and brand preferences. Even if a brand is able to influence one decision-maker, the effort can have little effect on the end result. With conflicting voices, a long vendor-vetting process, and shifting business priorities, many sales opportunities end in no decision.
Here are some tips to fuel your pipeline and convert prospects that are in-market to purchase:
- Connect Early: Vendors need to connect with the right decision-makers early if they want to overcome this challenge. By understanding business-level intent, marketing and sales teams can overcome the one-sided buyer’s journey and help decision-makers through the process like never before.
- Pinpoint and Engage In-Market Businesses: Rich quality and diversity of data gives you deeper visibility into how buyers are researching technology. Use a combination of first-party and third-party data to help drive conversions throughout the buyer’s journey, maintain a strong sales pipeline and ultimately drive revenue.
- Convert with Full-Funnel Content Marketing: Create a variety of gated and ungated content that educates and/or solves a pain point for key decision-makers.
Fuel Your Lead Generation Pipeline with Brand Awareness Campaigns
Defining the target audience is the key to aligning resources, creating relevant content, and establishing channels of communication for promotion. A creative content marketing plan that addresses content gaps, considers market trends and provides value helps to determine top, middle, and bottom of the funnel content that drives conversions.
Generate impressions and interest by investing in connected and contextual content development and social media campaigns prior to running email marketing, referral programs, and extensive intent-based ABM campaigns. A 360° awareness action plan helps with easy brand recognition that enables purposeful engagement with more in-market accounts.
Higher brand impressions result in increased trust and eventually referrals that ultimately culminates into a greater marketing success. The gradual development of brand value can be witnessed through the analysis of an increase in repeat visitors and average session time.
Takeaways
Both brand awareness and lead generation campaigns are crucial in driving the business forward. A foolproof marketing strategy must initiate plans for awareness campaigns and subsequent intent data-driven marketing to build a strong pipeline and generate better returns.
Learn more about increasing your brand awareness through efficient content marketing campaigns in our blog Content is the king and distribution is the queen.