Companies treat websites as billboards. Customers want them to be real-time conversations.
This is where B2B marketing is heading; marketers grew accustomed to saying the same things to everyone at once because there has historically been no good alternative.
Today, however, analytics platforms dominate the digital space. For example, this website puts nine trackers on my computer, according to Ghostery, the browser plugin I use to watch the companies that are watching me.
Nine trackers is actually pretty tame for a news publisher. Buzzfeed uses uses 13 tracking scripts. Huffington Post uses 14. Forbes.com, 17. WSJ.com, 19. Fortune’s website: a staggering 25. Vox.com, even more: 27. (These numbers change based on variables I won’t pretend to completely understand.)
This is the world we live in now. While intrusive, the liberal accessibility of browsing data should empower B2B marketers to offer a customised experience that is unique to every website visitor. Companies will, in my estimation, use the data’s powers for good instead of evil.
To get to this point, the conventional approach to B2B marketing needs to cycle through two stages. First, it needs a coordinated upgrade of the technology stack it uses to deploy marketing tactics.
Then, it needs to tweak content strategies.
Since marketing is a crucial element of any startup’s success, and because B2B platforms are where money is flowing towards today, this evolution should mean something to most entrepreneurs and investors.
1. The tech stack: B2B Vs B2C
Consumer marketing, at least in the digital environment, involves reaching a demographic with a message that’s likely to appeal to them. For instance, I’m a 35-year-old guy who lives in Manhattan and plays basketball four times a week.
My buying patterns and search behavior reflect this, and there are numerous data analytics firms that have this information for sale so that lifestyle brands can put their ads in front of me when I’m online.
Every signal a consumer makes digitally is captured and retained somewhere, up for sale to practically any brand that wants it.
What makes the B2B marketing environment different is that it does not demand that the marketer reach a demographic. Instead, it demands the marketer reach multiple people who work in the same corporate department, over and over, since enterprise purchasing decisions are almost always made by committees.
Nevertheless, B2B still relies on signals, and lots of them. The web of signals B2B marketers value are significantly more complex than what consumer marketers deal with because they involve so many different variables.
This is what’s driving massive improvements in how B2B companies assemble their marketing stack. Though there are plenty of exceptions to this rule, B2B has been comparatively slow to embrace programmatic buying, third-party data, and other resources that either find or use those signals.
As it becomes more obvious that those technologies do bring significant value to the table, this is changing, fast.
2. Content: News, with bias
'All companies are now media companies' is a well-worn cliche to marketing insiders. It’s also an oversimplification.
All companies have always been media companies if one defines 'media' as any instrument that facilitates mass communication. Companies have advertised for millennia, for example, and ads are a distinct form of media.
What the cliche above means is that the integration of multiple media forms is in vogue among corporations today. News media is often on one side of this integration.
Audiences can block ads and delete email and ignore cold calls, but news is one thing - perhaps the only thing - they won’t reflexively ignore. So companies are beginning to coat their ads, marketing, and content with a thick veneer of news.
We’re a long way from brands winning Pulitzers for news reporting, but I do think marketing is headed in the direction of prioritizing news values over marketing messaging.
In 2008, when one of my account teams self-published news for a B2B client because their event was closed to the conventional press, we got some attention for being ahead of the curve. Now, this tactic is routine.
The marriage of marketing and news can be an awkward union, but it can also pay big dividends because it’s more sustainable than other options.
3. The next level: The ubiquity of personalisation
Content that can’t be ignored, fed into the right stack, can give any B2B company an edge over competitors. The next phase is a customised experience for every website visitor, where the website is responsive to the wants and needs of every person who visits it.
Imagine a B2B website that knows where each visitor works, what they do, and whether their team is a current user, a prospective client, or deep in the company’s sales funnel.
That company could drive engagement by showing that visitor case studies of how competitors use their product or service. It could stream relevant video. It could immediately know what content to show and what content to restrict based on who that visitor is.
This is both technically possible and operationally feasible. Soon, this kind of personalised experience will be ubiquitous in the B2B sector.
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