B2B Marketing Strategies: Insights from Mario Peshev on Making Marketing the Hero

After an extended break, we're back with The Digital Beat Brief and in this edition, we’ll dive into one of my favourite realms, the world of B2B marketing. I’m delighted to have Mario Peshev with us, a thought leader in the B2B/digital marketing space, and the author of the insightful book “MBA Disrupted”.

As CEO of DevriX and Growth Shuttle , Mario oversees a portfolio that generated over a billion page views and $400 million in GMV in 2023. Mario specialises in enterprise MarTech solutions, advanced SEO, and business advisory services through Growth Shuttle, guiding founders and executives on scaling and digital transformation. A columnist for Entrepreneur and Forbes, he translates market trends into actionable strategies for CMOs and B2B leaders. Needless to say, the man is busy.

In this interview, we’ll explore how Mario applies the principles from his book to refine and optimise B2B marketing strategies, ensuring that companies not only survive but thrive in the face of disruption. We’ll also look at the impact of technical SEO, data-driven marketing, and the complexities of multi-touch attribution, areas where Mario’s expertise shines.

Mario thanks for taking the time to do this. I’ll jump straight into it:

Your book “MBA Disrupted” emphasises the importance of data-driven decision-making. How do you apply these principles to refine B2B marketing strategies, particularly in optimising campaigns and content for better performance?

I’ve always been a strong believer in continuous and incremental improvement - getting 1% better every single day. My computer science degree has shaped a mindset of data analytics through a scientific approach we apply on a day-to-day.

In 2023 and 2024, there’s been an overwhelming demand in our Experimentation as a Service plans at DevriX, a heavy push toward testing new markets, channels, personas, pricing plan, and even brand new offers for our portfolio of clients. You’d be surprised how an enterprise business ends up pivoting to low-ticket offers, community businesses, mastermind-driven sales motions after a few months of successful tests.

“MBA Disrupted” covers leadership and team dynamics in unconventional settings. How do you lead B2B marketing teams to think creatively and break away from traditional marketing molds?

We challenge ourselves with critical thinking and creative disagreements. Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why” is a great primer of seeking purpose and understanding the underlying reason why consumers buy - pain points, fears, uncertainty, doubt, desires, aspirations, and hesitations.?

With the overwhelming amount of AI-driven regurgitated content, we double down on creative thinking. When someone zigs, we zag, zug, and zong to stay sharp. Our content teams rely heavily on fresh data reports, social commentaries, influencer opinions, conference talks - unique conversations that drive the business forward vs. common best practices that chatbots provide with a click of a button.

How can B2B companies build resilience in their digital marketing strategies to adapt to economic shifts and market changes?

Heavy experimentation, diversification, omnichannel marketing are some of the key aspects here. The landscape has shifted and currently moves fast. What worked 2 years ago no longer does. Algorithms adapt and change, reach goes down, new players emerge. We maintain a series of playbooks across 12 channels and always prioritize 3 that work well, and keep others on autopilot. Every couple of months, new players rise as we hit saturation on existing channels - and so we shift the focus accordingly.

Executive teams, including founders and boards, should be actively involved through thought leadership and internal leadership. Strong command of AI is important both as a defensive mechanism (understand what the market leverages on a day-to-day) and as a force to upgrade internal teams and automate SOPs.

Given your experience with large-scale WordPress platforms, how do you ensure that your technical SEO strategies align with the complexities of B2B sales funnels and long buying cycles?

The good news is that technical SEO tends to be pretty compliant with usability, authority, front-end engineering best practices. There are deviations here - extremely creative designs are content-light and don’t provide a ton of context to search engines, or duplicated landing pages used for paid ads may cause link building collisions or cannibalization when indexing. Understanding these nuances and building strong content pillars keeps B2Bs on track and continuously scaling.

What are some advanced technical SEO techniques you’ve implemented to improve the visibility of B2B websites in niche industries? Can you share specific examples from your work with enterprise-level clients?

Several initiatives played a strong role over the past year:

• Content updates - fresh content is taken with a priority AND likely hasn’t been crawled by chatbots and provided for free.?
• Data samples - we infuse content over updates with subject matter expert quotes and opinions, recent reports, podcast interviews, and more.
• Programmatic SEO - while this has the tendency of getting spammy at times, we still keep expanding content for local SEO or industry-specific pages by building pages at scale and supplement with AI and automated ongoing updates.
• Stronger content pillars - a combination of ongoing updates, skyscraper content, deleting irrelevant content, shaping relevant data clusters, and cross-linking intentionally.

• What are the most consistently critical KPIs you track for B2B marketing success, and how do you adjust your strategies based on these metrics?

These vary across different clients (between B2B SaaS, fintech, publishing and non-profits, we track different ones). But we stay close to revenue, profitability, channel efficiency, ROAS, CAC payback periods, and self-reported attribution.

Considering the large amount of conversations happening in DMs, internal Slacks, forwarded emails, we pay close attention to prospects and their self-attributed confessions.?

How do you integrate data analytics into the iterative process of refining marketing strategies for B2B clients? Can you provide an example of a campaign where data-driven insights led to a significant pivot?

Our stacks are fairly diverse, from simple GA4 builds with heatmaps and screen recordings through Supermetrics or Databox to BigQuery builds piping a large number of ETLs with Looker or Tableau.

Some of our accounts move millions of paid spend every single month - so ensuring that campaigns are successful depends on self-driven performance across campaigns and customer LTV and our proprietary data pool of success stories in our portfolio. We also keep track of other signals such as brand search queries, social followers, and public social/group mentions discussing content, podcast interviews, conference talks, industry reports.

Given your extensive background in B2B digital marketing, how do you ensure that your analytics frameworks accurately reflect the complexity of B2B sales cycles and customer interactions?

In terms of marketing automation tracking, we blend lead attribution with self attribution due to the long sales cycles. This is the key aspect in understanding which channels perform well and shouldn’t be neglected. As podcasts have been referenced more often than not, I started my own recently - and non-public conversations have been going on ever since the very first episode.

This isn’t showing up in any marketing automation software due to the so-called “dark social” aspect that we pay close attention to. We build our own AI tools for competitor research and problem analysis, infuse them with public social feeds and conversations, and add common client concerns from lead forms and sales calls on top. This fuels our experimentation framework with A/B tests and landing page experiments that end up converting better at the end - and even shape up new offers when common problems arise.?

What are some of the most common pain points you see when getting stakeholder buy-in for a strategy that may not be popular or may have many critics? What advice would you give to get people on your side?

Ongoing experiments or “thought leadership” don’t solve a specific problem that executives can measure - so there is a natural pushback from founders and boards. Regarding experiments, we showcase success stories internally and demonstrate channel discovery and offer development based on bold experiments that cost a few grand a month.

A $50M B2B that’s in decline, ends up realizing the importance of staying on top of their game in a pool of AI-driven startups and indie creators eating up marketshare by listening closely to customers. Using Kodak as an example of failed innovation also helps - they could have nailed the mirrorless camera market if it wasn’t for being stubborn back in the day. Or Nokia. And many more.

Thought leadership is a conundrum too. But lack of trust in organizations requires more public voices online and closer relatability to executive teams. When we address the fact that the Google founders are back on board and working directly with their teams in this era of disruption and innovation, plus we provide content development and delivery for busy executives, this overcomes the common obstacles.

How do you approach multi-touch attribution in B2B marketing, and what challenges have you faced in implementing a reliable attribution model?

Other than relying heavily on self-attribution, we mix this in with traditional qualitative and quantitative research. Existing customer research, industry data, mass surveys, organized ICP interviews help with gathering critical data on ICP preferences, channels they trust, networks they follow, podcasts they listen to, newsletters they subscribe to. Which informs paid media decisions or internal content development.

Running continuous experiments and measuring on a regular basis shows a shift in self-reported attribution and prospect conversations over sales calls. Even though lead enrichment helps, it’s biased toward first click or last click, and often gets overridden with long-term deals. But enriching data with SiteStop or RB2B is helpful to validate more signals and capture more private data across our resources.

What advice do you have for all of us working in start-up and SME B2B marketing teams?

The past 2 years have been extremely groundbreaking - very few innovations of this magnitude have happened over the past 30 years (such as the Internet, laptops, mobile devices, social networks, paid ads). Staying on top of this tectonic shift until the global market normalizes is pretty important. AI is becoming integral for every single marketing team on the planet - and building the right toolkit that will remain in the next 2-3 years is still shaping.

Running continuous experiments internally is the only way to stay relevant and not miss out on critical channels for the organization. The 80-20 principle is a good rule of thumb re: budget allocation, 80% on proven channels and campaigns and 20% on new channels, experiments, sponsoring podcasts or newsletters, time spent on reddit or Quora, and other unusual channels for the organization.

Stay close to customers, organize industry events, listen in during networking events and keep track on customer problems. All repetitive problems are up for grabs if you’re creative enough to shape up the right start to end journey with your product.

Finally, can you tell us a little more about DevriX and how you’re supporting your clients?

Aside from the Experimentation as a Service plans that I mentioned (and didn’t even exist as a standalone service up until 18 months ago), we provide full-funnel martech consulting and delivery for B2B organizations across the world.

This start with strategic consultancy, GTM evaluation and audit, roadmap development, and ongoing execution - including platform development, lead enrichment, building tools and quizzes to capture demand and solve problems quickly, ongoing experiments, data-backed systems, and more.?

ROI is our north star and we aim to keep revenue headed north with profit optimizations as the main driver. Through tech delivery, automation, internal tooling, and effective playbooks, we yield better results with strong teams, limit excessive ad costs, empower internal marketing teams to deliver more for the same or less time, and increase overall team satisfaction in eNPS reports.?

I'd like to thank Mario for his time and hugely insightful contributions. I urge you all to follow Mario on LinkedIn, YouTube, and get a copy of his book. You can find out more about Mario on his website here.