Common misconception in B2B marketing
In today’s B2B landscape, traditional marketing funnels no longer cut it. Your buyers are sophisticated, unpredictable, and often take a nonlinear path to purchase. This guide will walk you through building a B2B marketing function that aligns with the real buyer journey, influencing decision-makers at every stage to drive measurable revenue growth.
1. Start with a GTM Strategy That Aligns with Sales and Leadership
A robust B2B marketing function begins with a well-defined Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy. But this isn’t just about targeting broad audience segments; it’s about ensuring alignment across leadership, sales, and marketing.
Key Components of a GTM Strategy:
- Revenue-Focused Goals: Set objectives that are directly tied to revenue metrics and pipeline velocity.
- Market Segmentation: Identify your focus markets and clusters where your message will resonate most.
- Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): Develop a precise ICP based on the real needs and challenges of your target audience.
- Messaging & Narrative: Craft a narrative that associates your product with strategic challenges faced by your audience.
2. Invest in Deep Customer Research
To influence the buyer journey, you need to understand it first. Conducting thorough customer research gives you invaluable insights into what drives your customers, how they think, and what their key pain points are.
Five Key Areas of Focus:
- Buying Triggers: What motivates them to search for a solution like yours?
- Research Process: How do they evaluate vendors, and what information matters most to them?
- Decision-Making Process: Who is involved, what influences their choice, and what questions are top-of-mind?
- Product Value Impact: Identify KPIs and goals that your product can improve and highlight measurable changes.
- Education Preferences: Where do they go for industry insights, and who do they follow for guidance?
Pro Tip: Regular interviews with Champions (those advocating for your solution) can reveal key insights into their buyer journey and potential roadblocks.
3. Understand and Map the Buyer Journey
Unlike B2C, B2B marketing is about influencing a buying committee, not just individual decision-makers. To resonate, you need to map out each step of the journey based on the roles and motivations within your buying committee.
Steps to Map the Buyer Journey:
- Identify Key Roles: Map the journey for Champions, Decision-makers, Influencers, Blockers, and Power Users.
- Digital Touchpoints: Analyze each digital interaction with potential buyers across channels.
- Combine Insights: Merge account owner feedback with customer research to visualize the journey in a way that’s specific to your ICP.
Remember: The B2B buyer journey isn’t a straight line — buyers may skip stages, loop back, or go through certain phases more than once.
4. Build Core Marketing Programs Aligned to Each Journey Stage
Your B2B marketing program should address multiple stages, from awareness to post-purchase expansion. By aligning marketing efforts with the buyer journey, you can ensure that your strategies resonate with each stage.
Core Marketing Programs to Develop:
- Awareness Creation: Use tactics like social proof (reviews, testimonials) and thought leadership to capture attention.
- Demand Generation: Run campaigns to trigger active interest and high-intent signals.
- Internal Enablement: Provide content that makes it easier for Champions to advocate for your product within their organization.
- Accelerate Time-to-Value: Post-purchase, create onboarding and education programs to ensure a smooth adoption process.
- Upsell & Cross-Sell: Use case studies, additional insights, and demos to show how you can add further value.
Effective Marketing Tactic Examples:
- Case Studies & Testimonials: For the awareness phase.
- Product Demos & Webinars: To help prospects visualize your solution in action.
- ROI Calculator: Aids decision-making by demonstrating potential business impact.
5. Assign Roles to Drive Each Marketing Program
For a marketing function to truly influence the buyer journey, roles need to be clear, collaborative, and complementary. This requires cross-functional collaboration to cover all stages of the buyer’s journey.
Roles to Consider:
- Demand Generation: Drive awareness and early interest.
- Content Marketing: Create content tailored to each phase of the journey.
- Sales Development Reps (SDRs): Engage high-intent leads and guide them through key decisions.
- Customer Success & Account Executives: Foster retention, upselling, and customer advocacy.
- RevOps: Ensure smooth operations and data-backed insights across marketing and sales efforts.
Cross-functional teamwork is key here: Marketing and Sales should work as a single team to drive pipeline and revenue.
Final Thoughts: Making Your B2B Marketing Function Buyer-Centric
Building a B2B marketing function that aligns with the real buyer journey requires a shift in perspective. It’s no longer enough to simply drive leads through a funnel. Instead, every role within marketing, sales, and customer success must work together to influence, enable, and accelerate the entire buying committee.