B2C Marketers! Put Those “Engagement” And “Love-Based Journey Designs” Down

Those are for closers only…Like B2B Marketers.

B2B marketing leaders are advancing their capabilities for prospect and customer understanding and optimizing segmentation and targeting along a buying process.  They are also extending themselves into “post purchase” relationship marketing techniques to pick up additional revenue, an area once largely reserved for their B2C counterparts.

In fact, B2B marketers have actually been outshining B2C marketers with investment in data-driven analytics and fierce attention to the bottom line.

For example, our most recent CMO survey revealed that among all marketers:

• B2B marketers were more likely than B2C marketers to invest in centers of excellence around analytics.
• B2B marketers invest more in analytic marketing talent, tools and data.
• B2B marketers were more likely to know how to monetize the data they gather to sell to customers and sales channel partners.
• B2B marketers were more likely to be higher up the organizational chain of command— one layer from the CMO, compared with 2.5 layers in B2C organizations

Because of this focus, B2B marketers anticipate the biggest budget increase in 2016.

With these budget increases, and to address shifts in marketing responsibility, B2B marketers are extending their capabilities making aggressive use of advanced analytics such as predictive lead scoring and programmatic advertising to find likely buyers, new buyers and to target groups of buyers and individuals within named accounts. High-performing B2B marketers are optimizing inbound techniques leveraging the natural synergy among relevant, authoritative content, search and social media by mimicking the language of these target audiences. They do so even if it challenges the structure, style and tone of their own marketing content. Why? Because they are gaining the skills and the data to prove it closes deals.

Over the years,  I have seen a fair amount  of “B2C envy” from B2B marketers who wanted to make use of multichannel techniques, advanced analytics and have access to customer data with which to engage with their audiences… now it is B2C marketers who are peering into bottom-line B2B marketing techniques with covetous eyes.

These techniques (something that B2C Marketing counterparts have had access to for a longer amount of time)  are leading to an emerging Account Based Marketing (ABM) approach and a big topic for Gartner for Marketing Leaders this week.