In just a few years, the demographic and habits of the B2B buyer have changed beyond recognition. According to Hanne Tuomisto-Inch, Senior Industry Head of Finance at Google, 27% of B2B buyers who used search were 18-34 year olds in 2013. In 2015, that age group represents 46% of B2B buyers and the number of searches they perform has increased six-fold. And, if you were to analyse those searches, 60% of those B2B buyers only go on to research 1 or 2 specific brands.

Furthermore, the use of search and social media has increased noticeably over the years. In 2009, six out of ten C-suite executives were conducting more than six searches a day. In 2015, a recent GlobalWebIndex (Q1 2015) report revealed that 79% of business leaders have a Facebook, YouTube and Twitter account and social networking was the most active area of growth. Furthermore, a B2B customer will regularly use six interaction channels throughout their decision-making process.

The above points demonstrate how critical digital’s role is in the B2B marketing. If used effectively, digital can reach a younger demographic of B2B buyers who increasingly use mobile to facilitate eCRM, marketing automation and measurement.

How can B2B brands implement digital successfully into their marketing programmes?

A successful marketing program is one that generates awareness, leads and increases sales through customer acquisition, engagement or growth.

It’s the plethora of social channels, the demand for constant content and increasing complexity of balancing owned, earned and paid-for channels that makes digital such a headache for marketing teams.

Below are six points every B2B marketer must consider when implementing digital into their marketing strategy:

  • Align your teams: How are your marketing, sales, agencies and delivery teams working together? Are business goals and processes aligned? Is there a commitment to digital in resource and budget that will see the digital work through to reaching your business goals?

  • Create clear goals and KPIs: Goals should be realistic, stretching, tangible and specific.

  • Know your audience: How do your B2B buyers use digital – what are their digital media habits, website journey, email, social and search activity? Given your audience’s profile, their purchase behaviour, network and digital media habits, where is your activity best focused?

  • Strategy: Align your audience and the purchase cycle with: content, social, search, digital marketing, CRM, marketing automation (or direct email campaign) and offline activity like events. How can you utilise digital platforms and creative ways of using social media to best reach your audience and stand out?

  • Think content first: Relevance is everything as people don’t ‘consume’ content, they use it – for personal interest, social currency with friends and colleagues, to get ahead at work and to get things cheaper, faster, better. Content will shape your campaign, support it and help you prioritise for mobile. Tailor your content for social and also for your sales teams and brand ambassadors within the business as well. Most importantly, how you maintain the relevance, timing and consistency of content in an always-on world will be key.
     
  • Monitor, test and learn: Constant monitoring of performance – not just in dry stats but quality of response and conversations. Always ask yourselves these two questions: How are you building relationships with your customers? What content, email, and contact strategy hypotheses can you test? What channels are most cost effective?

What metrics can B2B brands use to measure digital marketing ROI

The effectiveness of digital marketing can be far reaching. BT saved £2m a year moving over 600,000 contacts from its call centers to social media channels. US Company, AGCO, can attribute $10bn of sales through connecting its business to farmers on social media. IBM’s Wimbledon work in 2014 created 84,201 web views, 144 press articles, 1,638 downloads and doubled their Twitter reach with 13,625 mentions.

For each of the above companies, targets in terms of awareness, lead generation or cost efficiencies were met. There are so many tangible measures– reducing cost of customer service, conversion tracking and attribution, audience reach, lead generation and so on.

The real question then is not what metrics you should be measuring but also what metrics would be the most meaningful to you? Beyond all the web analytics, page views, depth of engagement, etc. – what’s the real measurement and what does it mean most to your business?

Implementing digital into your B2B marketing does not need to be a tiresome and unrewarding exercise. Know your audience, create engaging content, set clear, realistic (but stretching) goals and give your organisation clearly defined KPIs and business goals. Once you have these in place, it’s vital to monitor, test and learn from your activity. If you can do the above effectively, then digital marketing will have a direct impact on the commercial success of your business.

 

By Drew Nicholson, CEO of OgilvyOne dnx. 

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