Six Trends That Can Help B2B Marketers Impact Business Growth

It’s no secret that marketing has dramatically changed. What you do as a marketer has become ever more so important in differentiating your company, and ultimately in growing your business.

If you’re a marketing leader or a part of a marketing team in a manufacturing company, here are some marketing trends you’ll need to embrace in order to effectively impact your business:

1. Measure metrics that matter to your business.

Gone are the days of marketing without results. But marketing doesn’t have P&L responsibility, and most current metrics are soft metrics that are not tied to the business’s bottom line. That means the marketing team’s success is often measured by anecdotal evidence.

When you think of marketing metrics in the B2B realm, you’re thinking of impressions, clicks, click-throughs, visits, likes, mindshare and the like. These are  important metrics, but they don’t measure business results.

Focus on metrics that matter to your bottom line. Measure metrics like customer numbers, sales growth, increase in prospects, and leads. Create models that can help you tie your marketing initiatives into business-focused results.

2. Align sales (business development), marketing, and customer support.

It’s a competitive free-for-all out there. Most likely, products like yours have similar versions sold by many others. That means it’s becoming nearly impossible to compete solely on product quality and/or price.

Customer experience and relationships matter more than ever. Understanding of your customers’ needs prior to purchase, their purchase criteria, and downstream activities after purchase are very important to providing a meaningful experience to your customer. 

Align your teams—like Sales and Customer Support, which come into contact with the customer and often don’t work directly with marketing teams. Get all of those teams on the same page so they can learn from one another to orchestrate a great brand experience.

3. Building your company brand is not enough. Help your executives and salespeople grow their personal brands, too.

Your company’s brand matters. But at the end of the day, people do business with people—which means the individual brands of your executives and salespeople matter, too. You can help build your company’s brand by developing a social media strategy with components designed to simultaneously build your team’s individual brands.

A positive social experience with a member of your team is a positive experience with your brand.

4. Stop with the stand-alone campaigns. Start agile marketing.

When it comes to marketing initiatives, most go like this: development of a plan, then production of necessary creative elements, followed by the campaign launch, and finally measurement and evaluation of results after the campaigns have run. There are many challenges with this type of approach. A couple that hurt marketing effectiveness are:

• Your budget is spent and accounted for up front—you have little to no budget to adapt to changes after implementation.
• Most campaigns are larger, short-term campaigns that don’t span the full year, which leads to sporadic efforts and results.
• Campaign effectiveness is measured only at the end of the campaign, which doesn’t allow for quick response to lagging results.

Think about agile marketing, instead. It’s focused on responding to change and adapting to it in real time according to a contingency plan. The primary goal of agile marketing is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of marketing that solves problems and creates value. Continuous testing and measurement are built into agile marketing. If you switch to this kind of approach, you’ll consistently obtain better results.

5. Mobile usage matters more than you think.

B2B buyers use devices interchangeably to conduct transactions and research. Identify how and when you can provide context-specific messages and calls to action to your prospects and customers. If you make sure your content is optimized for mobile based on context, you’ll be better equipped to truly meet your customers’ needs.

6. Don’t go it alone.

You know and understand what needs to be done. Your team consists of smart marketers, too. But going at it alone can only get you so far given the rapid and ever-changing communications landscape. Internal marketing teams can easily get in the habit of doing the safe thing. There are benefits in working with outside resources— they’ll give you other valuable perspectives and challenge your status quo. And an outside consultant can often drive your idea further internally, simply because others in the organization may not assign as much weight to initiatives coming from the internal team.

Strategically partnering with a marketing partner who is a good culture fit to your team can often be the best way to further your efforts.

Marketing’s new role

Effective marketing isn’t solely about getting your message in front of your customers. To drive business results, todays marketers must take on a role that directly impacts your business's bottom line. Start by re-thinking how your marketing function works, tie marketing measurements to business results, and align key leaders and teams that impact customer experience.

This post first appeared at: https://www.imaginasium.com/Thinking/Imaginasium-Blog/February-2017/Six-Trends-That-Can-Help-B2B-Marketers