B2B marketing is often seen as different from B2C marketing, and for good reason.
Businesses in the B2B sphere typically view marketing strategies as a cost instead of a measurable investment. They often struggle to measure ROI and therefore face difficulties in budgeting correctly for growth and scale, leaving them stuck in what's a traditional model.
What those businesses fail to realize is that if they were to tap into the attribution and tracking capabilities of today's digital marketing tools, they would be able to understand the contributions of B2B marketing efforts all the way down to the revenue—even in long-running sales cycles.
An investment mindset can help businesses spend their B2B marketing budget more wisely and develop an actionable and scalable B2B marketing strategy.
What Is an Investment Mindset?
An investment mindset is, quite plainly, a business mindset. In marketing, an investment mindset means looking at and investing in various marketing activities as a way to grow and scale your business.
It means creating campaigns that take into account demand capture and use it to boost the chances of audiences' discovering your product or service. It also means understanding what factors are triggering demand and learning how to generate, not just capitalize on, demand.
In previous eras, B2B marketing campaigns were built as isolated shots in the dark. Now, tools are available to fuel our B2B marketing strategies with valuable data. Marketers can develop a detailed, data-driven understanding of who audience members are and which specific actions people take that lead to the best results for us.
A tailored B2B approach requires a more connected team. Sales and marketing teams will need to align on strategies to devise a more integrated customer journey. Working in tandem will help jointly define target audience segments and de-anonymize potential clients. In other words, it enables teams to peer inside the workings of target companies and understand who might be in the market for a solution.
With an investment mindset, the target audience becomes more knowable, and the target becomes smaller and smaller until your team can strike reliably and consistently.
How Can B2B Marketing Teams Use an Investment Mindset to Drive Growth?
An investment mindset helps B2B marketing teams make more effective marketing strategies.
Make your efforts measurable and client actions attributable, and you gain a level of control over your budget that you didn't have before.
Here are three important considerations.
1. Think about de-anonymizing rather than generating leads
When using B2B digital marketing strategies to get to know potential buyers, focus on revealing high-value prospects rather than generating new leads out of the blue.
De-anonymization means understanding which target accounts are engaging with your content, down to individual decision-makers' activities, such as spotting a lead's LinkedIn comment or noticing engagement with a particular kind of content online.
De-anonymization gives you a broader but also more specific context; it shows you which people are most likely to buy your product. You're going after relevant interest, not any old interest, with customers who are more likely to convert.
2. Focus on understanding cohorts
A deep focus on cohort analysis powers B2B marketing attribution. Cohorts are groups defined by specific characteristics—which channel they come from or which actions they've taken, for example.
B2B customer journeys often have longer sales lifecycles; it can take weeks, months, or even years for B2B customers to move through the sales pipeline and eventually convert.
Instead of trying to connect marketing spend to monthly revenue, analyze what specific cohorts are doing and conclude which channels are working (and which aren't). Revenue and ROI will build within those cohorts as they move through the sales funnel.
3. Tie together Marketing, Sales, and CRM data
A more integrated team and a more integrated approach to data allow you to qualify and convert relevant interests into opportunities.
Marketing messaging must be tightly correlated with a potential lead's position in the customer journey. By connecting CRM data to your digital marketing strategy, you can ensure that calls, follow-up emails, and content can be made personal, relevant, and aligned with a customer's journey.
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B2B digital marketing may not share every similarity with B2C marketing, but it can certainly benefit from using some of its tactics. Instead of seeing marketing as a one-off cost block, B2B marketers should use the attribution and measurement tools at their fingertips to unlock the ROI perspective that B2C marketers are used to.
More Resources on B2C Tactics for B2B Marketing
Three Things B2B Marketers Can Learn From B2C Marketing Strategies
How the Best B2B Marketers Think Like B2C Marketers: Five Strategies to Emulate
