MARKET VIEW 28
Michael McGoldrick
ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF MARKETING
B2B Customer Acquisition: The role of human engagement in a world of digital-first enterprise marketing
Sales and marketing must embrace a system that prioritizes a more insight-driven approach. Putting the right tools in sales leaders’ hands can help them capture a single view of their customers to act quickly and effectively on crucial opportunities.
How can data help with human engagement in enterprise marketing?
Whilst there has been a remarkable shift to digital purchasing environments, buyers are still very much influenced by personal experiences. Today’s empowered and digitally savvy buyers want open, intuitive, personalized experiences that seamlessly move between digital and human interactions. As businesses look to better their efforts to meet these ever-changing buying preferences and target their priorities, they must also help them overcome additional hurdles in the purchase process. This includes removing friction and complexity from the buying journey to speed up the process.
Sales and marketing must embrace a system that prioritizes a more insight-driven approach. Putting the right tools in sales leaders’ hands can help them capture a single view of their customers to act quickly and effectively on crucial opportunities. At the same time, this approach enables sales and marketing teams to collaborate seamlessly together and ultimately win.
Similarly, much of today’s conversation revolves around linear, top-down campaigns, where a target account is placed in a marketing or sales play, operating within siloed platforms and technologies throughout the buyer’s journey. The result is often antithetical to the desired buyer experience and puts individuals into an undesirable linear campaign that assumes all buyers progress through the funnel at the same speed. In actuality, B2B buying does not play out in any predictable, linear order. Instead, buyers engage in “looping” behaviours during a typical B2B purchase, revisiting multiple buying stages at least once. Buying stages do not happen sequentially but rather simultaneously. Addressing this reality requires rethinking how sellers and marketers engage with accounts.
Intelligent buyer experiences and responsive engagement across channels have always been the top criteria for mature, high performing, omnichannel sales and marketing orchestrations.
How should enterprise sales teams make virtual selling interactions more intelligent?
Intelligent buyer experiences and responsive engagement across channels have always been the top criteria for mature, high performing, omnichannel sales and marketing orchestrations. Synthesizing data across multiple sources, eliminating tech and people silos, and taking a collaborative approach can give sales and marketing teams a deeper understanding of what buyers need and where to deliver it. Offering consistent, relevant, and responsive connections to prospects and customers wherever they interact with the brand is the real role of sales in today’s digital sales and marketing environment.
While data-driven organizations get signals from their data, insight-driven organizations turn those signals into actionable insights to drive tangible business outcomes, at scale. Yet, much of the technology on the market fails to support the enterprise cases in two ways: it's not readily available across the enterprise, and it lacks the nuance and detail necessary to satisfy more sophisticated use cases or even context to support personalization at scale. Today, enterprises have data spread across lines of business, teams, geographies, and platforms.
We live in a global, multilingual world where large-scale success means reaching markets outside our home country or language community. As a result, enterprise sales and marketing solutions increasingly must leverage data in languages other than (American) English. This includes capturing actionable insights in multiple languages with full geographic context to indicate buying centre locations, as well as marrying this intent data with predictive analytics to prioritize accounts and identify the next-best action across all channels.
B2B marketers need to know how business decision-makers are spending media time to place advertising flights in the most advantageous business and personal contexts.
How should businesses adapt their enterprise sales and marketing to address the generational shift?
We do see the digital generation growing accustomed to ignoring ads and, at the same time expecting to be entertained. But, regardless of generation, advertising to B2B buyers and buying groups, is different from advertising to consumers. It needs to be done with consideration for the nuances of a business audience in a professional context and B2B buying motions. This is becoming more and more challenging, with the bar being raised higher and higher every year.
Audience insights help B2B marketers make better media buying decisions and minimize wasted advertising spend. B2B marketers need to know how business decision-makers are spending media time to place advertising flights in the most advantageous business and personal contexts. They also need to know how B2B buyers think and act toward advertising, so they don’t waste money on irrelevant ads or ads that aren’t likely to have any influence. Media budgets should be large enough to span a variety of ad formats, including display, video, and audio, to meet B2B buyers where they are frequently spending their time.
It's not just millennials that have trimmed out advertising. Research all points to the same thing, most of the time, B2B buyers respond to ads without clicking. Digital advertising can influence the attitudes and behaviours of various B2B audiences, but B2B digital advertising and paid media strategies have long been encumbered by the deficiencies of analysing impressions, clicks, conversions, and costs to optimize performance.
When it comes to tactics like display advertising, there is a focus on legacy-based metrics, like clicks or impressions.
MICHAEL MCGOLDRICK
Associate Director of Marketing
MRP PRELYTIX
How can businesses measure marketing success?
Marketing attribution doesn't exist in a single platform; it exists across all platforms. More than a superficial view into a platform or econometric assumptions of smaller attribution systems, the enterprise requires the delivery of a critically important and complete picture of engagement, sourcing data from surrounding sales and marketing systems. It results in reporting of these target account activities, enabling them to drill down from global results to individual programs to a specific target account. This level of rich attribution is the only way to provide the correct revenue accountable environment for the revenue generating side of the business to justify and optimize their platform investments.
There are often misconceptions, especially when it comes to ABM, that executing a segmented lead generation program is equivalent to an ABM strategy. And when it comes to tactics like display advertising, there is a focus on legacy-based metrics, like clicks or impressions. Looking only at the components of advertising that drive click-through and conversion rates at the lowest cost has always been a flawed approach, right from the start — when digital interactions became trackable, and marketers and media agencies were tasked by their clients to drive direct responses because they were so easily measurable. B2B marketers must rethink their digital marketing strategies, shifting from a flawed optimization model focused on quantity, ratios, and costs to a maximization model focused on efficacy, amplitude, and value.
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