Each year, the divisions between B2B and B2C buyers become less distinct. While both groups still maintain a unique set of characteristics, their shared attitudes toward marketing are becoming more closely alligned, particularly regarding digital advertising. Gartner expects that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels. For B2B marketers, this means it’s time to get serious about learning from B2C.
Media consumption has become ubiquitous in our daily experience, which means we’re all feeling overloaded, over stimulated, and more selective than ever about which content we engage with. Are you home? At work? It doesn’t matter; our psychology toward the barrage of messages, ads, and offers we receive is the same. We end up distracted and numb.
Enter “A2A” marketing: a hybrid of best practices pulled from both industries that, when implemented properly, creates efficiency in marketing and sales tactics to engage with the modern decision-maker no matter where they are. While most of the learning’s flow in one direction, (B2B has a long road to modernization) marketers on both sides would be wise to refine their approach based on their counterparts’ successes. To put it bluntly, the adoption of the “A2A” approach could determine whether your B2B business still exists in the next 10 years.
On that note, let’s dive into the digital ecosystem further with a focus on the technology that powers it: MarTech. As of 2022, most B2B companies don’t have a MarTech stack, and the ones that do often feel plagued by internal red tape or operational silos that prevent them from leveraging the technology to its full potential. To prove that MarTech can work, B2B CMOs will have to stand their ground while trying to convince their fellow executives of the facts.
In forecasting B2B budgets for 2023, Insider Intelligence/Marketer found that B2B MarTech spending will hit $6.59 billion by the end of the year and exceed $8.5 billion by 2024. B2B growth will outpace B2C. This figure is up significantly from 2020, where B2B spent on only $4.75 billion. That’s a big jump. But tech is only half of the equation in an effective stack. The other half requires securing another (more difficult) type of buy-in people. Finding internal stakeholders who believe in the efficacy of the technology, and who are willing to champion it within their teams, is essential to achieving results. Invested and well-trained salespeople + MarTech = unprecedented revenue growth.
Let’s talk about salespeople. Like all people, they come in two varieties: (1) open-minded or (2) close-minded to change. Unfortunately, time waits for no one. So, eventually, we all must embrace the changes driving our industry forward or face being left behind by those who will. In the case of B2B sales, the future is “Omni-channel.” Imagine that instead of manually logging calls, notes, and emails for a prospect, you had a lead profile that showed a timeline of their lifetime interactions with your company. Imagine that instead of manually logging calls, notes, and emails for a prospect, you had a lead profile that showed a timeline of their lifetime interactions with your company.
With this knowledge, you can engage with them on the channels (and with the messages) they prefer instead of fishing for answers their online behavior has already provided. With this knowledge, you can engage with them on the channels (and with the messages) they prefer instead of fishing for answers their online behavior has already provided. With Omni-channel, salespeople just sell and let the marketing automation and analytics sort their prospects into hot or cold. Pitching that idea to resistant salespeople is how you get them to buy-in and their buy-in is For B2B leaders stuck with begrudging, resistant salespeople, here is a bombshell from McKinsey: Buyers are more willing than ever before to spend big through remote, or online sales channels, with 35% willing to spend $500,000 or more in a single transaction (up from 27% in February of 2021). Seventy-seven percent of B2B customers are also willing to spend $50,000 or more. critical. Omni-channel isn’t a condemnation of personal selling, it is personal selling plus automation done to perfection.
So, A2A broadens B2B’s strategic approach, and MarTech supports Omni-channel sales to make more money for your business, but what do these things specifically offer the buyer that make them so superior to a traditional approach? One word: personalization. Personalization helps nurture cross-sell and up sell opportunities with existing customers because it communicates that their value isn’t summarized by an account ID and a generic stack of purchase orders (even if that is the financial bottom line). According to Forbes34% of marketing decision-makers plan stop treating your brand like it’s “just business” and engage with new and existing customers through end-to-end personalization that makes their accounts feel like real relationships. o increase the budget for customer engagement headcount by 10% or more.
Dark Social” is a new term this year, but it describes a phenomenon (a problem, really) that existed with marketing analytics long before the term was coined: attribution. But which f you said, “No clue…” you’re on the right track. platforms are they deciding on? Does anyone have a guess? In the beginning, we were concerned with cross-channel attribution.
B2B marketers only had to track the conversion path of a customer across two to three platforms and devices. Now, we have upwards of seven to ten touch points where customers make decisions, and most can’t be tracked at all. These include emails, messaging apps, private online groups, etc.
Our salvation: Data, data, and more data. In the end, a solution to “dark social” is really a debate over internet privacy. While staying abreast of legislation, we will recommend that B2B marketers collect what is available to them, and use the security of that robust data infrastructure as a guide into the uncertain future of an evolving space.
Some things never change. There will always be an emphasis on product quality, credibility, trust, and personal service in B2B buyer relationships. But isn’t it interesting that three of the five top answers respondents gave were based on their ease of experience and flexibility within digital channels? These simple changes to marketing and sales infrastructure really can make a difference, and they do. We’ve seen it first-hand with our clients.
