The buyer journey has fundamentally changed. And, many buyers feel overwhelmed.
Today’s buyers have access to nearly unlimited information about you and your competitors from websites, peer and product review sites, social media, and email outreach.
It is information overload. Only those B2B vendors that cut through the noise to personalize value really capture any mindshare.
That’s why top marketing teams have shifted from a “marketing-first” to a “buyer-journey-first” lens on all marketing strategies and activities.
Our series on modern marketing will cover 5 key practices to move from an inside-out marketing-first strategy to an outside-in buyer-journey-first approach.
1: Personalizing Your Brand Experience
Traditional marketing strategies focus on broad branding, but buyers want a personalized brand experience. They want to understand specifically what your brand means for them as a buyer with very specific goals, in a very specific role, and with clear segment peers. Modern marketers connect their brand positioning to field positioning for everyday buyers.
2: Personalizing the Website Experience
Marketers often focus their website on positioning your product and company while trumpeting company achievements. However, B2B buyers want to know “what it is in for them” to talk to you and they want to be able to answer that question in one click on your website. Modern marketers boost web engagement and conversion rates with individual pages that speak to specific goals or use cases, buyer roles, and industry segments.
3: Personalized Storytelling Through Content
Marketers often organize their content strategy around content types (e.g., blogs, infographic, stories, webinars) as well as the volume of content produced. Whereas modern marketers focus on using content to personalize stories about value. The volume of content matters a lot less than the quality of storytelling. Every single content asset is evaluated against two questions: Does it connect to a story about value? And for whom?
4: Personalized Demand Generation
Traditional marketing focuses on campaigns – digital ads, outbound emails, events, SEO Campaigns – to drive awareness and then engagements. Campaigns are siloed, targeted at specific buyer, segment or behavioral demographics and measured for engagement into a marketing qualified lead (MQL) that can be converted into a sales qualified lead (SQL). In a modern marketing approach, campaigns are interdependent with engagement across campaigns, activity personalized to each buyer’s intent and activities.
5: Personalized Engagement with Intent Data
Concluding the series, we will examine the strategic use of intent data to personalize engagement. We can really only provide “the right messaging and content at the right time” if we understand and respond to the real-time data and signals from customers.
Follow along here and join the conversation on “5 Key Practices of the Modern Marketer.”