B2B marketers often deal with a ton of administrative and routine tasks. Reporting meetings, logging updates into spreadsheets, and writing follow-up emails. These come from all sides: processes, tools, and the market itself.
This takes a lot of time and energy away from the marketing team to do what matters most: get high-value leads that convert.
As more disruptive technologies and workflows emerge, it is more important than ever to find straightforward methodologies that bring real results.
In this article, we’ll look at six fundamental B2B marketing tips that can help grow revenue in today’s landscape without crazy workarounds and fancy techniques.
1. Create in-depth buyer personas for guiding content strategy
Brands create different kinds of content to reach and engage with their B2B audience. It includes blog posts, guides, emails, etc., that talk about the buyer’s pain points and expectations.
When creating this type of content, B2B marketing teams consider the buyer’s persona, also known as the ideal customer profile (ICP).
In general, most marketing teams in the SaaS world follow a common format while creating an ICP. This includes parameters like job titles, industry, company size, challenges, and goals.
You can reach your audience by just focusing on these data points, but going the extra mile can pay dividends. Additional details like personal motivations, decision-making criteria, and usage preferences can significantly enrich your B2B buyer personas.
You will finally know your audience instead of just identifying them. This can streamline your content strategies around it as well.
For instance, if a niche prefers eBooks over explainer articles, you can create those. This will send the message that you care about your audience and are willing to do extra to help them.
Other insights you can glean from learning more about your audience include their content consumption habits and preferred communication channels, the topics they are more interested in, the things they would like to stay updated about, the format of the said content, and the way they consume it.
This understanding of your audience will allow you to build and deliver personalized purchase experiences to your buyers. They can look at your products and services from their own perspective, thanks to the tailored content you created.
Read more: 6 Effective Tips for Delivering Personalized Product Tours
You can consider various direct and indirect methods to collect data to enrich your buyer personas. Direct methods include surveys, interviews, and focus groups, where you ask questions directly to better understand your audience.
Indirect methods require you to track them across the Internet through cookies and analyze their behavioral data. This can also help you understand their psychographics.
2. Develop custom campaigns for top accounts
The top accounts are the high-value accounts that significantly bump your revenue. These are often enterprise or large business clients. They have many users or extensive requirements, which usually translate into a big fat paycheck.
A B2B marketing team aiming to close these accounts should create deeply personalized campaigns. Whether it is emails, newsletters, eBooks, or videos, it must revolve around the pain points, preferences, and ambitions of these high-value prospects.
It is also pivotal for B2B marketers to focus on revenue potential, partnership opportunities, and market influence when approaching these accounts.
Of course, running account-based marketing (ABM) strategies can be more resource-intensive considering their need for attention to detail. At the same time, it is worth it as bagging these clients can significantly boost the recurring revenue of B2B businesses.
To get started, create in-depth content in various formats for these accounts. Apart from engaging them appropriately, this will also enhance your understanding of their needs, enabling you to craft better product and service packages.
The number of accounts you decide to target determines the nature of your ABM strategy:
When you create customized offers, engage primarily with the decision-makers. This will streamline the customer acquisition process and give you a great opportunity to build a personal relationship with the lead.
Finally, to make your ABM efforts more impactful, you can offer these high-value accounts a live, in-person demo. You can show how your offerings can exceed their expectations while providing a delightful experience.
A personal touch at every step can help B2B marketing teams close huge deals, ultimately boosting revenue growth.
3. Run automated multi-touchpoint campaigns
We’ve highlighted the importance of learning about the B2B audience before marketing your products and services. This involves collecting data to learn about their pain points, expectations, and preferences.
This data is collected when your audience interacts with your brand through various channels, such as social media, websites, and email. The associated tools often come with native data visualization features that display the audience’s information concisely.
Most of the tools used in the B2B marketing tech stack offer analytics in their customizable dashboards. Whether you want to know the efficacy of your emails or blog articles, there is an integrated dashboard that will tell you.
Even though these tools increase the effectiveness of individual tasks, collecting data from all of them is hectic. It can take hours to days to build comprehensive reports from these tools.
This is just half the battle
B2B marketing teams then need to analyze the numbers to derive insights about their audience. These insights will guide their upcoming campaigns and strategies.
When metrics are fragmented across various tools, you are always operating in a reactive mode. Teams will always respond, not take proactive actions, and get ahead of the curve.
What makes this worse is that after so much delay, you might have already lost the opportunity to convert a lead.
Yes, building a single source of truth can be helpful. A customer data infrastructure that brings data from various sources together is immensely beneficial to B2B marketers.
But what’s better is setting up rule-based triggers in automation tools that will perform the necessary actions as well. For instance, a marketing automation platform like Encharge can trigger a “Thank you” email to a B2B prospect who downloaded a whitepaper.
Setting automation like these can run B2B marketing campaigns quite efficiently, particularly if you use multiple tools.
Encharge offers a comprehensive marketing automation solution for B2B teams. You can connect your existing tools in minutes, without writing any code, and start setting triggers.
You can send emails, nudges, and notifications to your audience based on their actions. Additionally, the tool also brings user behavior information from various sources to one place, enabling you to engage more appropriately with your audience with effective personalized messages.
4. Make decisions based on real-time data and predictions
In the previous section, we talked about how the current workflow around marketing reporting can be costly. Defining triggers based on user behavior can solve this problem for brands.
However, marketers still need to write reports to communicate with stakeholders and board members. Individuals who work in the company, but are not directly involved in the marketing workflows still need to see the broad picture.
Furthermore, senior marketers or Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs), who usually don’t run campaigns themselves need visibility over marketing revenue metrics.
Making strategic decisions on an organizational level requires easy access to all the real-time data. B2B marketing teams and external stakeholders need to know how campaigns and workflows are performing.
If all the marketing campaign and workflow performance data is readily available, decision-making will be fast and accurate. Additionally, forecasts based on this data can point B2B marketers in the right direction.
For instance, let’s say that a particular landing page is converting a lot of visitors. And the software predicts that you will get double the leads if you quadruple the page visits. This can motivate you to promote the page through pay-per-click (PPC) ads.
Tools like Revlitix, Microsoft Power BI, and Supermetrics are a few of the many great options that B2B marketing teams can consider. These software bring the key performance metrics (KPIs) from other apps in your tech stack.
With the help of preloaded or customized machine learning models, you can predict the performance of the current campaigns. The business intelligence solutions will look at the real-time data and let you know where the numbers may go.
Teams need to be careful while implementing these solutions. Keep in mind that the quality of forecasts in these predictive reports depends on many factors. The quality and volume of data, the number of parameters considered, and how well you understand your audience.
A good rule of thumb is to use these tools as a single source of truth and interpret their predictions as directional. This will make your strategic meetings more streamlined as you will have all the insights and a few suggestions on the table.
5. Be as helpful as possible on social media
Social media platforms like LinkedIn and X offer a great opportunity for B2B marketers to connect and build personal relationships with their target audience. Whether it is engaging on their pages or sending messages, these channels allow you to deliver value like no other.
Although one might argue that competing for attention on social media is quite challenging, there is still a rather unexplored tactic: helping people.
Most content on your social media feed is about the person or the brand that posted it. These messages often give the impression of “Look how amazing our brand is” or “Check out the features that we offer”.
Such content might be great for increasing brand awareness but falls short when it comes to connecting with a B2B audience. This phenomenon can also be seen in outreach messages. Marketers often pitch to their prospects in the first interaction itself!
By keeping your social media strategy centered around your audience, leads, and customers, you can stand out. B2B marketers should use these channels to genuinely help potential buyers rather than try to make a quick buck.
Start by following individuals who fit your ICP and engaging with their posts. Whenever they air their frustration, complaints, or suggestions, interact with them as a friend. Share your thoughts, ask their opinions, and tell them how you can relate to them.
Being understanding will get you far ahead than being convincing. Your voice will be respected and notifications from you will be welcomed.
This method can work wonders when you are implementing ABM strategies for high-value enterprise clients. As you slowly build a relationship with the decision-makers, you can suggest a live demo or a free trial of your offerings.
6. Invest in influencer partnerships
Influencers is an umbrella term that refers to individuals who are widely respected, authoritative, and credible in the industry. In many cases, they can be subject matter experts too. Collaborating with influencers can be highly beneficial for B2B marketing teams.
Apart from leveraging their reach and trustworthiness, teams can also learn quite a lot from them. Things like audience preference, the direction of the industry, and the market conditions are a few things that these influencers can shed light on.
It is not uncommon for B2B marketers to simply hire influencers who will recommend their products or services to their audience.
However, it may work less effectively with a B2B audience. B2B buyers, for instance, conduct extensive research before making a purchase. As a result, they can easily spot a commercial partnership.
A better, long-term alternative is to work with these influencers. As mentioned earlier, they do bring a wealth of knowledge along with their followings.
While approaching these partnerships, allow them to analyze your offerings and business model critically. This will help both parties to learn about each other’s expectations and goals.
Moving forward, work with the influencers to produce B2B marketing content, particularly interactive ones. Webinars, QnAs, live streams, and podcasts with experts and thought leaders are usually good bets. To increase your brand visibility, you can also leverage influencer reach by creating co-branded merchandise and streamlining it with print-on-demand.
It is crucial to be mindful that influencer campaigns can get expensive in terms of money and time invested. Carefully monitor the impact you are making through these collaborations. Look past the vanity metrics (views, followers, etc.) and focus on the revenue metrics (MRR, CAC, etc.) to get a comprehensive view.
Wrapping it up
The B2B marketing world constantly evolves in terms of processes, tools, and markets. Teams can stay ahead of the curve by enhancing their work. This can empower them to consistently generate high-value relevant leads that convert to boost revenue.
In-depth research to learn about a target audience, creating personalized content, and setting behavioral automation can save B2B marketers a lot of time and energy.
Moreover, being helpful on social media and working with authoritative and credible influencers can increase your brand’s trustworthiness.
Above all, it is crucial to make decisions that are backed by real-time data.
