B2B marketers today are very aware of how demand generation can benefit their business and their marketing objectives. Despite this, demand generation is rarely approached in the right way, with many B2B marketers under-appreciating – or entirely avoiding – some of the most fundamental elements of a successful demand generation strategy.
How can marketers today enhance their demand generation strategies and take their approach to the next level?
B2B marketers today are very aware of how demand generation can benefit their business and their marketing objectives. Despite this, demand generation is rarely approached in the right way, with many B2B marketers under-appreciating - or entirely avoiding - some of the most fundamental elements of a successful demand generation strategy.
How can marketers today enhance their demand generation strategies and take their approach to the next level?
In this blog, we'll explore the areas of demand generation that are often looked over, and how these can be improved to better enhance your demand generation approach. This includes:
· Looking at who to target within an organisation - Understanding the decision making unit enables questions to be answered all the way up the decision tree with your approach.
· Account-Based Marketing (ABM) brings your Sales and Marketing teams closer together. Aligning teams better around a single set of target accounts will deliver better account-level ROI. We'll take a closer look at the strategies companies are favoring.
· Analyzing the 5 key triggers of intent data will help businesses gain a better understanding about digital buying behavior, and help companies move away from legacy 'in market' models.
How to Improve the Quality of Leads Coming into your Business
Everyone knows identifying a target audience is important, but more important is the traits in that data you are looking for. If you have an existing customer base, this is the best way to start.
In line with knowing what your most rewarding customers look like, you also need to know what the least rewarding look like. Look introspectively at what customer demand suit your internal capabilities. Long-lasting relationships are what will benefit your business foundations and generate lasting customer value, therefore as well as understanding the cost of acquiring a new client and the financial reward, forecasting best fit for a long lasting relationship, will mean avoid just a short term benefit.
Modelling Your ICP
Once you have your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), you are then in a position to model your ICP. The modelling of your ICP increases your opportunity in the market. Using firmographic data - like company size, turnover, install base, vertical, industry, etc. - will allow you to identify what your total addressable market. However, if you can understand more about your buyer behavior, you can extend this further, to buying cycles.
Behavior from research, who are those influencers that gather opportunities, who then evaluates those opportunities and what do they need to see to put forward suggestions to the decision maker and budgets holders, who will see the biggest direct benefit of your service and how can you approach that to show each decision phase what they need to see.
Predictive Intent leverages this knowledge to identify patterns or similarities to inform future trends, actions or behaviors. You can look at the features of your best leads, target accounts, and customers, and then model lookalikes that are highly likely to engage with your content and convert into ROI.
Predictive Intent leverages this knowledge to identify patterns or similarities to inform future trends, actions or behaviors. You can look at the features of your best leads, target accounts, and customers, and then model similar audience that are highly likely to engage with your content and convert.
Don't Focus Only on the Budget Holder
We understand that businesses want to target the person that can Yes or No instantly - but in reality, this is difficult to achieve. Demand Generation embraces the fact that a purchase touches many different parts of that organisation and although the budget holder may have the final decision, making sure that the stakeholders have also been considered in the approach takes into account the internal team.
Decision making isn’t linear - rules exist to protect people, business and buying process. If you fail to acknowledge the rules exist, you are limiting your sale potential. Budget holders can sign off budgets within limits, especially when you are looking at enterprise, and normally it requires an internal business case and tiered investment sign off.
Recent research highlights that the DMU now includes an average of 6.8 people. An approach that recognizes a matrixed organisation is paramount in todays world. Even if you can sell to the decision maker, if the team isn’t incorporated into the decision process then it is unlikely to have longevity.
Once you accept that the decision making unit is more than 1 person, it allows you to concentrate on how you communicate better with the people making the decision. You can model that around what the decision making unit looks like for your product and split them out into buyer personas.
Buyer personas will have different needs and buying signals. By developing your communications to include answers to all the question that each of those audiences may have, you are preparing your approach for a more matrixed structure. You might not be able to reach all of these people cohesively or simultaneously, but then you are arming the people that you are reaching with the knowledge they need to share with internal stakeholders.
Target the Prospects Your Sales Team are Targeting
In some business there might be a culture where Marketing want to do their own thing and generate leads that the sales team then don’t follow up on - but this is not effective for successful demand generation.
It is critical for demand generation that you are able to align the effort of 2 business areas to achieve 1 goal - reaching, engaging and converting a prospect.
ABM is just another form of targeting, but by aligning the 2 teams around accounts then it is easier to establish and track goals against those accounts. It is not a new approach,
Which ABM Approach Should You Use?
There are three branches of ABM strategy - Businesses can use one-to-one, one-to-few or one-to-many approaches to vary their strategy and improve the opportunities for success. That success can be achieved by focusing efforts on a small number of targeted named accounts, or approaching a market or industry segment that can vary from dozens to thousands of targets.
· One-to-one targets specific individual accounts and uses personalized messaging - this is ideal if you operate in a local market or appeal to a fixed range of businesses.
· One-to-few uses a specialized target account list that is based on predictive analytics or industry knowledge to define likely candidates.
· One-to-many identifies a total addressable market based on a wider scope or industry-type data broken down by likelihood of conversion.
Our research shows that 70% use either a one to few strategy or a combination approach.
Building Your Target Account List
Fundamentals to building your target account list are company size, industry and annual spend. But there are a range of tactics, depending on the needs of the marketing organization and the target clients, that can be adopted to build on the targeting approach to drive maximum success and return on investment.
Predictive analytics tools are a firm favorite, with 55% of marketers leveraging this technology, while 53% use tailored content strategies and 52% use behavioral data. All of this demonstrates the importance and need for the right insights and strategy to drive the right tools. Without a solid foundation of understanding their customer base, marketers are ill-equipped to launch an ABM strategy. The popularity in implementation has clearly been accelerated thanks to the accessibility of such technologies - but the strategy should always drive the tools. Tools are an enabler.
ABM is a journey and all organisations are at a different stage of maturity. Taking it step by step and keeping the principles of marketing and sales alignment at the core of your decision making will ensure a scalable, effective strategy.
· Create your target account list through customer insight, including all the relevant decision making personas.
· Consolidate this knowledge and overlay it with additional insight around behavior to understand patterns against accounts.
· Model target account list against similarities within the data.
· Engage a key set of accounts from Marketing and Sales.
Don't Expect People to Tell You if they Are Ready to Buy
The landscape now allows intelligence to be gathered on an audience which, if utilized effectively, means you don’t need to ask people if they are in market.
But when you look at the content they consume, you can significantly reduce the need for high investment against highly qualified leads and in turn allow you to use knowledge to build a relationship with an audience while you know they are in-market.
Utilizing Intent Data
Intent is broken down into 5 key elements:
1. Searching intent - this is directly capturing the interest from the search engine through search queries.
2. Browsing Intent - this is where a user has an interest in finding out more on a topic area and will utilize many different sources to drive more knowledge around this topic area.
3. Action Intent - A level down from browsing you can look at interactions. This is about understanding and recording the steps a user takes around your digital channel eco-system. By taking in the multiple touchpoints a user goes through before even wanting to connect with your brand, savvy marketers can adapt their strategy to deliver optimized content experiences that increase the probability of conversion or a sale. This can be referred to as digital body language or digital footprint.
4. Firmographic - Looking at the company level and aggregating these individual intent signals together, we can get a picture of what each of the accounts in your CRM / MarTech are most interested in. You can then react accordingly with your campaigns. Outside of the individuals within the company, you may also want to explore account-based data around organizational features.
5. Predictive - The previous 4 types of intent data are based on historic and real-time data. Predictive intent leverages this knowledge to identify patterns or similarities to inform future trends, actions or behaviors. For example, a spike in engagement with content about DDoS attacks, who are in the retail industry, above 1000 employees, with ecommerce job titles. Or you might look at which specific pieces of content have been engaged with by a type of persona you use and target the most popular piece to those of that particular persona that haven’t read it yet. Once you know this, you can look at how to jump on this trend and target others who share nearly all of these features and expand your reach into those highly likely to be interested.
Knowledge is in the Engagement Types
60% of HR, Marketing and IT professionals leave a digital footprint - engagement at digital events, with vendors, on content sites, viewing webinars and downloading white papers. These are all demonstrations directly from the user highlighting that they have an interest around a topic area.
If asking a prospect if they are “in-market”, the answer is far more likely to be 'no' simply because they want to make their own assessment and not have a decision made for them. Utilization of data resources through first and third party intent will provide this information for you AND give you the ability to predict the next areas of interest.
Final Thoughts
Understanding how to approach audience mapping will speed up the decision making process, easily align the outputs of your teams to improve conversion rates, reduce spend, and increase the likelihood of converting real in-market prospects.
About Inbox Insight
At Inbox Insight, we are B2B Marketing Experts specializing in Content Amplification. We are the gateway to Insights for Professionals
With a community of over 3.5m senior professionals across IT, Marketing, HR and Business Management, we have the visibility to greater understand how users are engaging with content and visualize patterns and trends in buyer behavior. Over 1000 brands and industry experts contribute to our platform, providing high quality thought-leadership in whitepaper, report, article or infographic format.
We run a suite of products connecting content to in-market audiences, utilize multiple channels to drive engagement on a single and multi-touch level. Data-driven insights sits at the core of what we do- we build up a picture of our communities and give them access to more of the content that they are looking for. Building immersive content experiences around these 3 key elements to audience mapping drives a stronger more engaged prospect.
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