Aman Ghataura discusses breakthroughs in the B2B marketing landscape and some practical strategies to address the risks that come with them. Ghataura is Head of Growth at NUOPTIMA and Alphagreen Group. NUOPTIMA specialises in scaling health and wellness e-commerce brands, in a sector where advertising is highly regulated. Alphagreen Group encompasses a collection of brands in the health and wellness sector.
What have you noticed about ecommerce trends in B2B marketing?
Business-to-business (B2B) marketing is one of the earliest adopters of technology-focused initiatives in the increasingly competitive marketing scene. Approximately 60% of B2B transactions are expected to continually shift from experience-based to data-driven selling by 2025, intensifying the need for B2B companies to divert their focus online.
While the past few years of massive e-commerce development are a fantastic opportunity for this industry, there are challenges still around the corner. With the looming recession in the global economy, a substantial hike in ad costs and reduced attribution ability from major bidding platforms, marketers are being forced to get more creative when it comes to driving audience attention.
What new B2B trends are you excited about and why?
Demand generation is an exciting approach to bidding goodbye to typical attribution models and instead focusing on supporting the consumer.
Generating interest in products or services involves education, guidance and brand narration elements. We help our partners figure out their business’s pain points, why they matter, and what makes their brand the best solution. That way, prospects become more sophisticated and ready to convert as they walk through the final stages of the marketing funnel. With a powerful strategy to foster brand awareness, you can attract new leads while maintaining a loyal client base.
We’ve increased the number of impressions and inbound enquiries through content published on LinkedIn that centres around business pain points and uses best practice SEO. This organic strategy is delivering tens of thousands of impressions. Though harder to measure the impact of this top funnel, our content is regularly mentioned on lead calls.
We’ve also had excellent results through webinars for Venture Capitalists and Accelerators (organisations that offer mentorship, capital, and connections to investors/business partners). Approximately 10% of attendees will reach out proactively for further discussions at the end of these events.
Keep in mind we have a 3-month sales cycle, so many within this 10% will not be ready to buy. We nurture potential leads who have shown interest through organic posts and well timed email campaigns that warm prospects towards investing in our solutions.
What are some of the challenges in B2B Marketing?
B2B business clients tend to be highly lucrative because they often engage in bulk, long-term transactions. So when it comes to B2B marketing, the budgets are massively increased as you ought to spend more to acquire higher lifetime value (LTV) customers. However, that means tests have to run on bigger budgets, so the risks are slightly higher compared to B2C.
However many digital channels, from blogs to social media, have introduced new possibilities to connect with a more extensive customer base. Embarking on a multi-channel approach to maximise limited marketing budgets can be a recipe for success.
Businesses in 2022 are flooded with new ideas and platforms to capitalise on when promoting products and measuring the success of their marketing efforts. While these innovations are often exciting and massively useful, keeping pace with incremental changes can overwhelm some businesses, and for B2B marketing, there’s another layer of difficulty to consider.
Omnichannel attribution is challenging and can make it difficult to determine budget allocation. With higher price points of B2B products and more people involved in the sales decision, tracking business client journeys can become convoluted.
We use different channels to monitor and analyse customers throughout the multi-step sales journey. It enables us to understand each channel’s value in order to decide where budgets are best allocated. This isn’t always easy in a B2B setting.
Demand generation channels such as LinkedIn and Twitter are self-attributed, allowing us to ask the lead where they came across our services. Lead capture channels such as paid social advertising provide data through the ad platforms. We then use multistep scoring via active campaign and website tracking to view the engagement on our site and participation of our webinars, etc.
Proven tactics in the current landscape?
Several factors can influence the success of a B2B marketing strategy. We use technology to keep pace within the industry, and to best evaluate our marketing funnel. IP tracking can help provide an extra layer of analysis on website visitors.
Attribution is labour intensive, but there are a number of tools that can handle this task, such as Clearbit and LeadFeeder. The right tools have saved us time and resource.
This includes tools for data management; which is the lifeblood of any marketing campaign. Data management helps measure the effectiveness of marketing activities and ROI, so it’s crucial to collect accurate and consistent data. It prevents us from implementing strategies that don’t actually work.
To establish proper data collection and management, we set up data quality standards that are relevant to our business. A clear understanding of our data enables us to better organise existing campaigns and to evaluate data quality metrics that impact our marketing in relation to our business.