Editorial
The Gist
- Embrace technology wisely. Use tech to support strategy and fill gaps, avoiding over-reliance.
- Customer-centric approach. Focus on understanding and speaking the language of your customers.
- Collaborate with sales. Align marketing and sales strategies based on customer data for a cohesive experience.
Lately, being a B2B marketer feels like the ground is constantly shifting beneath your feet. Tried and true B2B marketing strategies are being pressure tested by changing customer behaviors and emerging technologies like generative AI.
Yes, marketers are capable of automating and measuring more. Yes, it’s scalable. But, are they relying on AI and automation at the high cost of isolating customers? Do prospects and customers truly feel that your products are built for them and personalized in a way that meets their needs? These are the questions we need to ask ourselves to be customer-first when it comes to B2B marketing strategies.
There’s a better way to balance the art and science of marketing in a digital-first workplace. For example, to focus maniacally on the customer by providing bespoke experiences — even across multiple personas and market segments. This happens when we bring automation and personalization together in a meaningful way.
Let’s explore simplified B2B marketing strategies to succeed at building for the masses, but personalizing your message for the select, especially when efficiency and the customer experience are top priorities.
Related Article: Using B2B Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Business
3 B2B Marketing Strategies That Work
1. Embrace Technology, Only if It Fills the Gaps
In other words, test how technology supports your strategy, and don’t be afraid to make a change when it isn’t working for your team. It’s easy to obsess over a certain technology like AI and immediately rely on it as a crutch. But the risk of doing this far outweighs the reward. Instead, be thoughtful and ask yourself what it is you're wanting to accomplish with the technology and how you can fix limitations across the team with it.
As you evaluate new tools, it’s important to be explicit about what success looks like for your team when it comes to your B2B marketing strategies. If a certain technology can’t help you meet your objectives, then don’t buy it or continue using it. What else could help you be successful: a new hire, a consultant, or an agency? A shift in strategy or mindset?
It’s also important to consider the exact niche a certain technology might help you fill. While I wouldn’t outsource my entire content development operation to ChatGPT, I would encourage my team to use it to A/B test dozens of headline options for an email campaign.
Technology doesn’t need to be revolutionary, and it rarely is. Rest easy in knowing that sometimes, it’s evolutionary. The interesting challenge is to see how technology can complement your team’s efforts so you can apply a human hand to personalizing the experience for your different target audiences in a way that feels customized.
Related Article: The B2B Buying Journey: 4 Ways to Speed Things Up
2. Keep an Eye on the Competition, but Both Ears Open to Customers
Be competitive aware, not competitor obsessed. A far more productive use of time is to double down on understanding your category more broadly and actually talking to customers.
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Nobody articulates your company’s value more than your customers do. Approach your sales and customer success and support teams for qualitative insights to understand the language customers use, how they describe your product in their words, and how they decided to choose you instead of your competitors. When you aggregate those insights across dozens or hundreds of customers, you can come to some clear conclusions for how you should go to market at scale.
My team finds tremendous value in reviewing quarterly win-loss deals reports, which contain details on competitors, but more importantly, context on decision drivers, ICPs, recommendations and flagged opportunities.
Then think in terms of messaging pillars based on your customers’ actual language, and back those pillars up with the product features that support them. Sprinkle those across blog posts, sales collateral, branding, ads, website, PR messaging and everything in between. Your brand should ultimately tell a unique story of business ROI that will resonate with your particular audiences and differentiate you from competitors.
Related Article: Brand Differentiation: What's It Look Like in B2B Marketing?
3. Use Data to Build a Bridge to Sales
It’s no secret marketing and sales teams are often in conflict with one another. Sales has high expectations that marketing will deliver qualified leads, but that’s not always the case. Marketing has good intentions to drive more leads, but doesn’t always listen to sales’ feedback.
But there’s a better way. Build your marketing and sales strategies together based on customer data. Agree on your core ICP and customer buying signals. Consider your sales team a key partner in agreeing on your lead scoring, routing, content and nurture strategy as they’ll deliver the best real time feedback.
While it’s unrealistic to customize every single message for every prospect, here’s an opportunity to rely on automation and data to create what feels like a custom experience across sales and marketing. Consider what you can learn from behavior across your website, or within a demo or product experience. From there, it’s much easier to test, validate and scale what feels like a personal experience — from a simple chat interaction at the top of the funnel, to routing the right lead to the right salesperson at the bottom of the funnel.
This type of team collaboration is the ultimate way to incorporate both advanced marketing technologies with intuition and experience from your sales team. Ultimately, both teams are responsible for giving the prospect and customer an experience that’s backed by trust, empathy and partnership.
Related Article: Revamp Your B2B Playbook for Smarter Marketing
Optimizing B2B Marketing Strategies for Enhanced Customer Connection
In a tough economy where prospects and customers want to self-serve yet also connect with a human, it’s hard not to get reactionary against competition or become overly reliant on technology with your B2B marketing strategies.
Instead, focus on deeply understanding your customers and speaking their language. Rely on the right technology to help you optimize that message and scale the personal experience. And above all, think of yourself as a true partner to sales by coming together around the data to deliver a delightful customer experience.
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