A customer-centric business-to-business marketing strategy: 7 steps

If you still send the same marketing messages to a wide audience across platforms, you're losing revenue. B2B buyers today want a customized experience based on their needs, industry pain areas, and customer journey. Generic campaigns are outdated.

Audience-based planning unlocks marketing-driven revenue. This method segments target customers and prospects into different audiences rather than mass-promoting your items or services. You may then tailor messaging, content, and channel strategies to each audience's priorities.

Audience planning benefits

Salesforce's State of the Connected Customer reports that 75% of customers demand more personalized experiences as technology progresses. Revenue-generating marketers must think beyond first-name variables and campaigns to “CFOs in New York at companies with $15 million in revenue.” Personalizing multi-channel marketing efforts requires becoming specific about where prospects are in their customer journey, what industries they belong to, what pain points they are experiencing, and what product or service(s) will connect with them at this moment.

Planning by audience and customer path ensures marketing funds go to accounts most likely to buy. According to a 2021 Ehrenberg-Bass Institute analysis, just 5% of B2B buyers are actively shopping for new services every quarter, and the average buyer cycle in B2B marketing is six months to five years.

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This approach can help you focus your targeting efforts to:

Who is ideal client?

Which stage of the buying journey is that consumer in?

Which messaging is most effective?

The selling staff receives better leads, and your relationship with them as a resource improves.

Discover why audience development matters

How to plan audience-based marketing

Starting audience-based plans is easier than you believe.

First, agree on sales targets and team roles.

Goal planning may look like this:

Leadership: Shares sales growth targets and year-long priorities. Information about company size, important buyers, industries, pain issues, commonality, and other factors that can distinguish excellent leads from bad.

Marketing leadership: Communicates how marketing will assist sales goals and chooses important projects, programs, content, and assets.

Demand generation: Develops, implements, and reports on all major strategies to apply marketing goals to lists, audiences, channels, and tasking opportunities.

Step 2: Collect all accounts for each sales goal.

If you can help, this may include known and unknown accounts, not people. Consider these queries: Can you access non-database accounts that may be interested in this product/service? Based on Sales data, which CRM accounts have no history or involvement with this product/service yet would fit?

What accounts have heard of this product/service but not yet bought it? Which clients could cross-sell or upsell this service?

Your target list should include all of these accounts, but keep them divided by customer journey stage. Each list may need additional marketing touchpoints or journey-stage-specific messages. Grouping these by campaigns or lists in your CRM makes it easier to report on success metrics that match their journey stage (e.g., increasing awareness is important for accounts that don't know you, while opened opportunities are important for accounts in the funnel).

Step 3: Create advertising lists

Account-based marketing platforms help here. Now is the moment to adopt a platform like this or one that can assist you determine intent. After identifying all the accounts you want to target, you may create an advertising plan like this:

All accounts: Get social media adverts regardless of purpose (to increase intent). Accounts with keyword intent: Get journey-targeted display ads to raise awareness.

Step 4: Make an email list

With Gmail and Yahoo!'s recent revisions, this step must be taken carefully. First and foremost, your email list must only comprise email system records that have shown interest in this product/service through previous interactions.

Such intent can be identified by:

An intent-based tool can indicate account and person subject intent. Previous campaign experience (e.g., webinar).

Website visits related to this topic.

They qualify for one-time email campaigns, not newsletters. Give them something useful they won't be startled by.

Add them to a future target list for people interested in your product/service if they convert on your offer. Discover how to send more emails and build your list.

In Step 5, interested accounts with unknown people

“Can’t we get the key buyer from ZoomInfo?” Potentially, but not sales-ready. Content syndication can drive new conversions if you know an account is interested but don't know who is engaging. In this example, you can leverage your target account list to attract key customers to your marketing funnels with helpful content or a webinar tailored to their problem areas. This lets you pitch to an engaged target account employee without pushing sales too early.

Explore 5 content marketing ideas for balancing ‘push’ and ‘pull’

Step 6: Transfer to sales

Your nurture structure should encourage target account buyers to join marketing nourishes tailored to their needs. They can find a contact form, chatbot, or person on your website when they're ready to buy.

But what about others? Other firms may operate outbound on some accounts. Here you can create lists to track trigger events. These could be company milestones, engagement minutes, contact scores, or page hits. Documenting this unique selling team trait is important.

Through proactive audience segmentation, you may tailor follow-up steps to where they are in the customer journey, how their industry talks about your product/service, and/or their pain concerns. Thus, your sales team is more likely to discuss the lead.

Step 7: Improve reporting

CRM users understand the single campaign source field difficulty. It believes a single campaign “converted” your lead into an opportunity, although most customers interact with your brand differently. Putting the accounts you want to target into a campaign or list (remember Step 2) allows you track which ones have had opportunities for your service/product. There will be two layers of campaign success reporting:

Campaign in CRM campaign attribution field.

Your actively targeted accounts, even if your marketing efforts converted to opportunities through non-digital channels.