Dynamics of B2B Marketing in 2023 – Perspective and Definitions

Revisiting the basics to understand the target audience, the marketing plan, buyer personas and the buyer’s journey in the modern era

The dynamics of B2B marketing are changing rapidly and so are the modes of conducting business. If you are part of such a set-up or an aspirant, you must have questioned yourself about how well you understand it

You can call it the thumb rule of marketing or the primary assumption, but the main objective behind any marketing plan is to ensure brand awareness and sales enablement. And even before you start with your awareness and sales campaigns, you need to define those whom you are willing to sell.

The target audience dilemma

So, the first step for you is to figure out your target audience. In simple terms, you need to define a group of people/entities who are likely to be interested in your offerings. In the future, they may probably buy it as well. Now, defining the traits, psychography and demography of these sets of people/entities is an entirely different exercise. It is backed by market research, keyword analysis and consumer behaviour studies. We will discuss them in detail in other posts to follow.

Moving forward, the groups you just defined will either consist of individual customers or business entities. This target audience (groups) will form the very basis of the marketing strategy that you choose to deploy. This is the stage where you must be sure about the different audience sets you want to target.

Next is to distinguish the approach you will take to reach out to each of these audience groups. For the scope of this post, we will focus only on the audience groups defined for business entities, and not for individuals.

The advent of B2B marketing plan

Now, that you know about your target audience, the next you want is to reach them.

And so, it is time to devise a marketing plan! My favourite part, to be honest. Some salient features of this plan would be content, communication style, tonality, pitch, medium and messaging.

Your marketing plan should be able to provide answers to some of the basic questions in general. They are:

• What are the business objectives I want to attain?
• How am I going to communicate with my audience?
• How do I position my brand for my audience?
• Where will I target my audience?
• Why will my audience believe me? What is my USP?
• Which all assets (marketing collateral) do I need?
• What kind of an experience my audience will go through while interacting with my brand?
• How will I generate leads?
• How will my buyer’s journey be?
• What is the marketing budget I will need for my plan?
• How will I measure my plan’s effectiveness?

Also read: 19 highly effective marketing assets to drive B2B engagement in 2023

This is the stage where teams set their marketing goals, devise measurement mechanisms, plan human resources, infrastructure requirement, the team structure, investments in software & tools and most importantly, the workflow.

After finalizing your plan, you will need a strategy to implement it at every tactical level. It is?the strategy that you will devise to enable this sale directly to business entities which are known as B2B marketing (i.e. business-to-business).

Here, Hubspot?defines B2B marketing as:

B2B (business-to-business) marketing refers to any marketing strategy or content that is geared towards a business or organization. Any company that sells products or services to other businesses or organizations (vs. consumers) typically uses B2B marketing strategies.

The entire concept of B2B marketing is primarily focused on targeting gatekeepers and secondary decision-makers. They are the ones who take purchase decisions either on behalf for their entities. They could be purchase managers, quality control experts, marketing managers, IT hardware specialists, subject matter experts or even infrastructure planners. These are the people who are responsible for converting a business entity/organization into your customer.

The buyer persona/Psychographic classification of your target audience

Your potential buyers behave in their unique ways, and it is equally important to serve them based on their needs. So, our next step is to try and further categorize them based on detailed audience research for their behaviour and qualitative traits. The underlying importance of this exercise is to create a fictional character out of the business entities with granular qualitative details about them. To get authentic & workable data, you must treat your target entity as if it is a real person. It is this detailed profiling of the business entity/people which is known as the buyer persona. Some of the typical information a buyer’s persona consists of are:

Personal info

Starting from name, where the person hails from, marital status, number of children (their age and names), lifestyle, interests, educational background, thoughts & causes one cares for, social quotient, etc. are some of the data points you need to find out. The idea is to know your potential buyer and his/her unique personality traits as much as you can. It is possible that you will not be able to find all the information mentioned. Try and get as much as you can, something is always better than nothing.

Professional info

This section covers data points such as job title, roles & responsibilities, career path, industry, skills, certifications, colleague endorsements, projects, professional achievements, reporting boss, team size, what a typical day looks like, etc. Any professional details which can help your marketing and sales teams to strike a need-based conversation with the prospect is a welcome data point here.

Values and fears

Values and fears could be instilled in a person as a personality trait or it could be because of the decision-making position one is in. It is a bit complex as compared to the two sections above. Often, there are no direct answers here and a lot depends on how you interpret the data. It requires deep-dive secondary research and thorough web scraping to locate the digital footprints of your prospect. Scanning through social media platforms, blogs, comments, interviews, and status updates can help identify these values and fears. Being a marketer, you now would understand your prospect on the scale of their strengths to vulnerabilities and can tweak the messaging while crafting campaigns for them.

Goals and challenges

Just like every individual, your prospects have their own personal/professional goals to reach. Try to find out what are they. How have they prioritized it? What challenges are they likely to face? Can you help them overcome their challenges? If yes, then how? It will be easier to devise sales pitches and battle cards for your sales team if you can get answers to these questions.

Where are they

How do your prospects get information? How are they communicating? Which all media do they consume for information? Do they belong to any association or group? What social media platforms do they use? Which all events and conferences do they attend? How do they spend their day? Any relevant hobbies and interests? These are just some of the data points which will help you target your prospects better.

Pain points

These are the problems your prospects’ business is facing. It could be an infrastructure problem, software, a tool, cost management, speed to market, etc. You can only offer your prospect a foolproof solution when you know about their pain points. Check out your prospects’ end customers’ reviews about their products and compare it with their competitors. It gives a good insight into where they are lagging and so, even if they do not realize the problem at hand, you can magnify the same and offer solutions to fix those. Alternatively, if you are following the RFP route, the pain points of the prospect will be mentioned in the document itself.

The buyer’s journey

It would not be wrong to say that an effective B2B marketing strategy is one which entices these individuals (prospects) to take favourable purchase decisions for your product/service.

Moving on from strategy, there is a logical path, a complete process of converting a lead to a prospect and then to a customer which is called the B2B buyer’s journey.?This fictitious journey path enables you to educate your prospects about your offerings to make them aware of it, help them evaluate it viz-a-viz alternatives & competitors and to finally arrive at a purchase decision. Here, Hubspot?defines the buyer’s journey as:

The buyer’s journey is the process buyers go through to become aware of, consider and evaluate, and decide to purchase a new product or service.

A generic interpretation of this journey consists of three stages, namely:

Awareness stage

At this stage, the prospect gets to discover the symptoms of a problem or a new opportunity. They are in an exploratory research phase where they try to understand the depth and scope of the problem at hand, define it and give it a name.

Consideration stage

By now, the prospect has clearly defined and named their problem or opportunity. Next, they are committed to exploring different options, methods, and approaches to find a solution to the problem/opportunity.

Decision stage

Because of research & education at each stage, now the prospect is clear about the method or approach they intend to take. By this time, your prospect is compiling a list of vendors who offer services to solve their problem. This compiled list is further shortened to finalize the vendor from whom they are going to buy the solution.

It is to be noted that at each stage, the prospects are looking for information across the web. This is the time when they are exposed to your marketing assets (collateral). It could be via paid campaigns, social media shares, blogs, sales presentations, data sheets, whitepapers, organic reach or even emailers which can help them discover your content. And hence, the type, tonality and pitch of your content must differ at each stage.

Your buyer’s journey can have more than three stages

Depending on the nature of your business, the buyer’s journey can accommodate multiple intermittent stages as and when defined by the marketer. There is no thumb rule that limits the number of buyer journey stages to three.

With unique business offerings and the entire experience of the selling process, each organization can define its buyer’s journey stages and map its leads and prospects to it. It also provides flexibility to the marketer while defining audience sets. They can accommodate a different style or medium of communication. It also helps teams while drafting content for their marketing assets.