Today’s economic headwinds make it all the more tempting to try new advertising platforms, explore new “shiny” products, and revisit your original B2B marketing strategy.
For conservative or risk-averse marketers, trying something new can be intimidating. Here are key considerations before expanding your B2B portfolio.
Assessment of your readiness for change
B2B marketers tend to be conservative when it comes to trying new marketing tactics, and rightfully so.
The vast majority of advertising platforms are designed for B2C or DTC initiatives.
But with their unique target audiences and complex sales cycles, B2B marketing requires different strategies and platforms explicitly tailored to their needs.
Most B2B companies also spend more on traditional marketing (magazines, radio, TV and outdoor furniture to name a few) than they do on digital advertising.
If you’re in a very traditional, risk-averse business, you’ll have a hard time weaning your business away from “true and tried” methods.
Here are two questions to ask to determine if your company needs to think about change and diversification:
Are you currently achieving our business goals? If the existing approach is not effectively contributing to the desired results, it indicates the need to change and diversify marketing tactics. Is your sales team satisfied with the work of the marketing team? This question indicates a mismatch or gap between marketing activities and the expectations or requirements of the sales team. This misalignment can make it difficult to generate quality leads and affect overall sales performance.
The third “question” to ask is a statement.
Let’s say sales says, “We need more leads,” and the only action indicated is, “Let’s increase the budget and keep doing the same thing.”
In this case, the company must evaluate the effectiveness of current strategies and explore opportunities for diversification to better support sales goals.
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Always start with your audience
After recognizing the need for change, marketers must analyze their target audience. This involves understanding:
Where they spend their time, both during and outside of office hours. The kind of content that resonates with them. Your position in the marketing funnel.
While there are tools and publications available to provide insights into how specific users interact online, recognize that not everyone has access to such extensive resources.
In such cases, a simple and cost-effective method to determine the presence of your target audience on platforms like Reddit or LinkedIn (you can do this with all major platforms today) is to upload an email list to advertising platforms.
This allows you to compare match rates, indicating the overlap between your ideal person and the users of these platforms.
Another approach is to install the ad pixel from the ad platform you’re considering (which is free) on your website and wait for the audiences to fill.
By monitoring traffic and engagement, you can learn about the quality and relevance of your audience.
In cases where you see a significant amount of low-quality traffic to your site, implementing two different triggers can help gauge the total number of website visitors compared to contact forms.
By placing one trigger across your site and another specifically on key confirmation pages, you can estimate the number of spam or unqualified leads expected from each platform.
With these methods, you can gain valuable insights into your target audience’s online presence, engagement, and potential lead quality, even with limited resources.
This data can inform the decision-making process and guide the allocation of marketing efforts towards the most effective platforms and channels.
Design the appropriate measurement and test plan
Designing the right test and measurement plan in B2B marketing involves a systematic approach to ensure accurate assessment and actionable insights.
First, define clear objectives for the test, identifying the specific outcomes or knowledge you want to achieve. This could include:
Improve lead generation. Optimization of conversion rates. Evaluating the effectiveness of a new marketing channel.
Next, identify key metrics that align with your goals (ie, click-through rates, conversion rates, cost per lead, or ROI) to serve as benchmarks for measuring test success and provide useful information.
During the implementation phase, continuous monitoring and measurement is essential. Track test performance in real-time and collect relevant data.
Tests are often stopped because they may not generate many leads. But not all e-commerce platforms are designed to generate leads or sales.
If the user you’ve acquired is OK but not ready to engage with sales, that doesn’t mean it’s failed.
It just means you need to re-engage that user and move them to the next step in the B2B buyers journey.
Adopt a culture of innovation
This decade will be critical for B2B marketers, as success or failure will depend on their ability to adapt to a rapidly changing environment.
Many will succeed by challenging themselves and embracing innovation, while others may falter, especially if they resist this ongoing change.
A significant change is expected as B2B mobile traffic expected to exceed desktop traffic.
This raises an important question: Is your website and funnel ready to handle the influx of mobile traffic?
Privacy regulations are also shaping the use of customer data. It is essential to have a contingency plan in case you need to stop using customer lists to meet unexpected changes in compliance.
Another crucial consideration is whether you have a dedicated testing budget separate from your regular marketing campaigns.
Are you actively using this budget to experiment with different tactics, or are you using it repeatedly for the same marketing approach?
As the landscape evolves, B2B marketers need to stay ahead of the curve.
Adapting to mobile trends, addressing privacy concerns, and adopting a culture of testing and innovation are key factors that will determine success in this dynamic environment.
By proactively addressing these challenges, marketers can position themselves to grow and take advantage of opportunities.
“Diversification is one component and, in some cases, a very good start to value creation,” Pearl Zhu said.
The B2B space is changing faster than ever, and unless we diversify when it makes sense, we won’t be able to beat our competitors or achieve our goals.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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