Abstract
- Let's change our perspective. For sustained success, B2B marketers need to focus on long-term strategies rather than short-term gains.
- Emphasize differentiation. Clear, proven differentiation in your marketing will double your effectiveness in leads and brand building.
- Leverage thought leadership. Invest in inspiring thought leadership and stand-out content to build memorable brand awareness.
Marketing is constantly evolving, but sometimes things change so quickly that it's hard to know what to prioritize.
It's a sentiment echoed by B2B marketing guru John Miller, who recently said that the established playbooks he helped popularize over the past decade and that previously worked well for B2B marketing strategies no longer work.
Buyers ignore AI-driven advertising clutter
The oversimplified version of Miller's argument is that buyers, faced with a deluge of low-quality noise, have become disinterested and unimpressed by marketing content. And of course, this is even more true now that customers are overwhelmed with AI-generated garbage. Today's customers are doing more independent and anonymous research on what to buy, which is very hard to track.
This is consistent with our findings that B2B buyers are becoming increasingly independent and self-reliant, with a significant proportion of buyers preferring to gather information on their own before engaging with a salesperson (or at all).
Shifting focus: Building brands, not metrics
Miller says this means marketers need to think longer term than “performance” when it comes to their B2B marketing strategies, focusing on creating a brand and engaged audience. They need to provide a valuable idea to entice customers to subscribe to their communications.
I try not to talk about playbooks. What works for one business won't necessarily work for the next, despite what many marketing technology providers seem to promise. If there was a perfect template, everyone would be using it. But there are some golden rules that work for everyone.
So where does this leave us? As always, opportunities abound.
Related Article: Mastering B2B Marketing Strategies in the Digital Age
2024 B2B Marketing Strategy Playbook: Build your brand, not your leads
If there was a marketing playbook for 2024, it would look something like this:
1. Brand Advantage
Marketers should strive to build strong awareness and brand associations for mid-term opportunities (demand generation) and long-term opportunities (brand building). This is your best bet if you do nothing else. Why? A Bain & Co/Google study found that 80%-90% of buyers have a list of vendors in mind before they do their research, and of those, 90% ultimately choose a vendor from that list. If you're not on this list, you're fighting for the leftovers.
2. Lead Focus
Marketers shouldn't spend a lot of time and effort generating leads that are in the market. The 95-5 rule says that only about 5% of your target market is ready to sign a contract. This varies depending on what you're selling, but it's always a small number. By the time you find someone in buying mode, they've likely already created a shortlist (see point 1 above). After all, it's sales' job to generate these leads. Marketing is not the same as sales support.
3. Brand awareness
There are many ways to build brand awareness: invest in truly inspiring thought leadership, produce valuable content that stands out amongst similar content, leverage advertising, PR and events across multiple mediums and platforms. Your content should default to open-ended (remember, your goal is to make your brand memorable and visible, not a lead generation attempt).
4. Content Influence
Create content with a purpose. The key is to focus on moving your customers from ignorance and apathy to the beginning of attitudinal and behavioral change. Customers should be able to recall your brand easily, but in the right context. Your content should make your customers' lives easier, help them make progress on important initiatives (often called “Jobs to be Done”), and show them that the opportunities to make change outweigh the risks.
5. Strategic Differentiation
Proper differentiation and meaningful uniqueness are the foundation of success, so don't start before you're ready. Research we commissioned comparing the most successful B2B marketers to their average peers reveals that true differentiation makes marketing more successful overall.
For example, technology companies with a clearly differentiated position (which is important to test with customers and compare against competitors) are twice as likely to be in the most effective group across lead generation, demand generation, and brand building. The results are even more extreme in professional services, where differentiation is typically harder to achieve.
6. Proof of brand building to C-suite executives
Note: This one will be hard to attribut e, but there is now very solid research that can be shared with senior management to show that brand building is effective. This was pretty much settled a long time ago, yet marketers still have a hard time justifying this approach to executives.
Related article: B2B Marketing Strategy: Become famous simply
Final thoughts
One example is this LinkedIn post from Katherine Pomfret, who intentionally ended her career by dropping the microphone: She writes, “I can never explain social media to one more CEO. I can never explain the power of brand to one more investor. I can never face one more interview where I'm asked, 'How can we get results faster for two-thirds of the budget?'”
After all, the focus of B2B marketing should always be tied to growing the business, because that's what CEOs and shareholders care about. Everything else is pretty much icing on the cake.
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