As personal and business environments continue to blend, B2B marketers must learn from their B2C counterparts how to effectively market to individuals within their target accounts. They should use individual actions to inform the B2B buyer journey, says Stacy Greiner, chief marketing officer, Dun & Bradstreet.
It was not that long ago that the business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) marketing motions were neatly siloed. You reached consumers at home and sold to business decision-makers in offices. The past year — with shifts to working from home and moving to almost an entirely digital marketing model — has created an inherent overlap in work and personal lives. With many employees now using personal IPs and cell phones and having work shipments sent to home mailing addresses, it is becoming more difficult to separate business from personal interactions.
While B2C businesses are accustomed to reaching buyers in their personal worlds, it becomes a complex system to navigate for B2B companies who have to decipher which actions should be deemed “personal†and which are relevant to business purchases, find ways to reach buyers who no longer report to a physical office, and cut through what have become very noisy digital channels. Not to mention, with the proliferation of digital channels comes a proliferation of global privacy regulations.
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So how does a B2B marketer delineate between which online actions their prospects are taking in the course of business and which they are taking as a consumer? With customers engaging across an ever-expanding number of digital channels, how can marketing teams deliver a personalized and consistent customer journey using the most effective omnichannel campaigns? And what actions do B2B marketers need to be taking now to prepare for this “new normal†of remote work while still being compliant with privacy and other regulations?
Embrace Online Window Shopping
Our increased time at home over the past year has naturally increased our time online, with the Wall Street Journal reporting an increase of nearly 30%Opens a new window by late 2020. The blending of our personal and work lives means we are just as likely to be using our personal device at 10 pm browsing for a car as we are browsing solutions for the latest challenge at work. We have long heard the Forrester statistic that 67% of the B2B buyer journey happens digitally. Our nearly all-digital lives have significantly increased this number.
B2B buyers are expecting more ways to self-serve before they purchase. They want to be served relevant content, have questions easily answered, and make critical decisions mostly based on online research. Smart marketers are looking for creative tactics to speed the buyer along their online journey by interacting with the right content at the right decision phase to shorten the length of the buying cycle. Many B2B marketers are tapping into the increased digital signals in the form of intent data to provide insights into customer purchase intentions to take appropriate actions at each stage of the journey.
The increased digitization of the buyer journey has also led many B2B companies to accelerate their ecommerce strategies, turning online window shoppers into customers. While B2C companies have robust ecommerce infrastructures built over decades, the same cannot be said for many B2B businesses. B2B companies should rise to the challenge of simplifying traditionally complex buying motions to emulate the efficient shopping experiences paved by consumer ecommerce.
Break Down Digital Siloes
The rush by B2B marketers to shift budget from offline to online channels created a rapid proliferation of new content and digital tactics in use. These channels are often executed by different teams or even external agency partners. As buyers increase their time online, they are met with an increased volume of a brand’s message, but the distributed execution can mean messages served are out of sync with where the buyer is in her journey. Even worse, a privacy violation could occur by not recognizing a buyer’s opt-out selection across channels.
To mimic the B2C marketing process, with personalized content and timely outreach, B2B marketers must have the right data to be able to customize and align their tactics with channels accordingly. Capturing and managing high-quality first-party data is critical for opted-in information about prospects. Reaching buyers across digital channels that are keyed off of personal email addresses or device IDs requires blending this first-party data with third-party data to build out a 360-degree view of your buyer.
Teams must then devise a way to organize and share that data across the business. By having a common customer data platform, pairing that with incoming insights from intent data, and using tools that allow automated orchestration throughout the journey, the B2B marketer is getting closer to offering the same customized experience buyers are used to seeing in their consumer purchase journeys.
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Engage Across the Buying Group
Selling B2B is complex, with multiple stakeholders weighing in and longer buying cycles than in consumer sales. A digital marketer trying to reach consumers is usually putting their ad in front of the decision-maker. The fact that a typical business purchase could involve multiple decision-makers in multiple buying units throughout the company is just one reason the path to conversion is often more challenging.
To get the kind of holistic execution discussed above, you need to identify who makes up the buying group. This means you need to connect individuals to the accounts for which they work using a unique and persistent identifier that connects the individual decision-maker to the account.
In retrospect, it is not surprising that the line between B2C and B2B marketing would begin to blur. People spend many hours online each day in both a personal and professional context, and this persona can shift from minute to minute. The pandemic may have been the catalyst for accelerating change, but we are likely to find that the consumerization of the B2B buyer is here to stay.