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Today’s B2B buyers are calling the tune

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Today's B2B buyers are calling the tune

B2B marketing is a dance between the marketer and the customer.

The decision to buy is never easy, so the marketer must cater to the potential purchaser’s desire for more information, providing it until the right moment comes to convert the prospect into a customer.

But technology will not play the same tune this year. The tempo has changed. The music is different. And the dance steps are faster.

The marketer and customer once did the tango. Now they are doing the twist.

Yesterday’s waltz

Things that used to work are being discarded. “Traditional sales calls are fading into the background,” said Lisa Ohman, COO of SEO solution Ubersuggest. Affiliate programs might drive sales with just five to 10 percent of membership. “The rest is noise and overhead,” she said.

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“As with any industry, tactics and techniques fall in and out of favor.” Said Dennis Shiao, founder of B2B agency Attention Retention

“Five to seven years ago, two of the trendiest tactics for B2B marketers were infographics and SlideShare…These days, marketers still create infographics, but not nearly as frequently as before. SlideShare seems to have become irrelevant, sadly.” Shiao said. The first infographic got a lot of attention, but a single infographic today is hardly noticed in a flood of many.

“The lack of results is a big reason why tactics fall out of favor,” Shiao said. “Tactics that continue to produce results do not fall out of favor. One example might be well-written, longform blog posts, though achieving success with these is more challenging today than it was in the past.”

“The ebb and flow of channels and tactics are strange; they go up and down, yet rarely ever die” said John Wall is a partner at analytics firm Trust Insights. “Digital ads are getting less effective as privacy has become a higher concern,” he said, “and prices going up at the same time.”

Read next: Why we care about B2B marketing

Today’s whole shack shimmy

It would be cynical to say that new technology merely empowers one to do the same old thing in a new way. The cow path is paved with such gold bricks of foolishness. The challenge is on the marketer to figure out how to find a way to use new technology that plays to future strengths. Take video.

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“I’d use a broader term for the category, which is ‘multimedia,’” Shiao said. “It encompasses slide-based webinars, audio podcasts, application screen shares and more… multimedia content should complement written content… For me, however, the sweet-spot combination is a high-quality written article with YouTube or Vimeo videos embedded adjacent to the copy.”

“We’ve found that for many organizations written content is most common early in the buying process and video is closer to the moment of purchase and used for post purchase, but this is different for every product.” Wall added.

Written content is great when someone is looking for information, but video can explain value, Ohman said. “I don’t need the article. Show me.”

Social media is another avenue of approach, but it must be more than being a place to dump content.

Ohman sees an opportunity to take social media to the next level. “Don’t talk about yourself. Get someone else to talk about you.” Here creative partnerships come in handy as “people are looking for social proof.”

“LinkedIn is always our first choice for B2B.” Wall said. “The fact that it’s business first, and there are paying customers who are doing recruiting [there], makes it an entirely different thing than social networks that are built around only advertising, which then creates incentive for clickbait and other sensationalism.”

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“While B2B companies need to claim their brand handles and have a presence on the major platforms, start by picking one or two to focus on.” Shiao said. “On Twitter, a tactic I found successful is finding Twitter chats in your industry. A Twitter chat happens on a specific day and time (around a particular hashtag) and usually lasts for an hour. Participate in the chat from your brand’s Twitter handle. Relative to all your other Twitter activity, the engagement from these chats can go through the roof.”


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Learning new steps without missing the beat

So what can B2B marketers do? Despite all the change, marketing fundamentals remain the cornerstone of practice.

 “Adopting new technologies is always a challenge, on one hand you have to learn how to effectively publish on the new platform…and then you have to have marketers who can effectively communicate through copywriting and compelling content, which is an art in itself.” Wall said. “For B2B marketers, do everything you can on the product marketing side. This will give your content more credibility, and help you better communicate value.”

“Get back to the basics, which has nothing to do with a change in thinking or a new technology. It’s about understanding your target audience.” Shiao said. “I often say that my wife knows me better than I do. B2B marketers should strive to know their audience better than they do. This comes from studying and observing them and it also requires engaging with them (e.g., having meaningful conversations). If you know your audience better than they do – or even if you know them as well as they do – your content and campaigns will be all the more effective.”

People struggle with new technology and the change it brings. If a current technique is producing conversions at two percent, why risk a new technology that can produce a five percent conversion — or zero? Sometimes it pays to try a manual technique on a smaller scale to produce and measure change, then understand how the customer used that new information in their journey to purchase.

Ohman related best practice this way:

  1. Personalization. “Be scrappy about it.”
  2. Encourage your people in lead generation and sales support to bring in the human experience.
  3. Drive value. Even if you provide value at the risk of “sharing the secret sauce”, do it anyway. It may unlock new levels of opportunity.
  4. Data. Data. Data. Data. Data. The more you find useful, the better.

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About The Author

William Terdoslavich is a freelance writer with a long background covering information technology. Prior to writing for Martech, he also covered digital marketing for DMN.

A seasoned generalist, William covered employment in the IT industry for Insights.Dice.com, big data for Information Week, and software-as-a-service for SaaSintheEnterprise.com. He also worked as a features editor for Mobile Computing and Communication, as well as feature section editor for CRN, where he had to deal with 20 to 30 different tech topics over the course of an editorial year.

Ironically, it is the human factor that draws William into writing about technology. No matter how much people try to organize and control information, it never quite works out the way they want to.

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MARKETING

Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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More promotions and more layoffs

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More promotions and more layoffs

For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.

The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.

Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes

Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643. 

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Here are the median salaries by role:

  • Senior management $199,653
  • Director $157,776
  • Manager $99,510
  • Staff $89,126

Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.

One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%). 

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Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.

Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams

Employee turnover 

In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”

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Men and Women

Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540

This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.

In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.

Methodology

The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents. 

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Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.

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