It’s September, which means the back-to-school season is in full swing. While many may be sending children off to school rather than attending, the season always feels ripe for refreshed thinking, attitudes, and strategies. That’s why we’re introducing the “Back to basics” blog series. Over the coming weeks, we’ll dive into basic marketing best practices and strategies to help you reset your thinking and reinvigorate your campaigns.  

Let’s jump into our first installation of this series, focused on B2B marketing best practices.   

We've become accustomed to hyper-relevant marketing in our day-to-day lives. Instagram ads are a great example – these ads know exactly who we are and what we’re interested in, serving us relevant content on a feed that users of the social media app enjoy scrolling through.  This level of personalization, though, is not often replicable when it comes to B2B marketing. 

Because B2B companies sell to other businesses, it can be easy to forget that real people – the people who make up the brands you target – are the recipients of your message. Understanding your audience is critical to any marketing strategy. If you don’t know who you’re speaking with, how can you share targeted messages with them? Rule number one: know your audience. Beyond that, here are five best practices of B2B marketing. 

1. Align with sales. 

The ultimate goal of any B2B marketing campaign – or B2C for that matter – is to increase brand awareness to drive sales. Yet too often sales and marketing teams work in silos, sharing information back-and-forth without actionable insights or guidance. Marketing needs sales to understand the ins and outs of customer challenges and goals. Sales needs marketing to drive awareness, increase the pipeline, and create collateral that resonates with target buyers. If each team creates processes that facilitate information sharing in a meaningful way, the business will succeed.   

2. Invest in your MarTech stack. 

Post-pandemic, digital transformation is no longer a competitive advantage, it’s table stakes, which means your marketing campaigns must be digitally-driven to be effective. Consumers want to receive personalized messages from brands that are targeted based on their needs and behaviors. At the same time, they want brands to strike a balance between leveraging their data to create personalized campaigns while not coming off as knowing “too much.” Investing in marketing technology that enables you to capture user behaviors, tailor messages based on interests, and easily launch, manage, and optimize campaigns – while approaching the data lifecycle ethically – will be critical. You’ll have to invest in a tech stack that helps you achieve your goals as you grow and your audience’s needs change. Additionally, automation is key. While delivering the right message is critical, it’s equally important to ensure marketing efficiency by deploying MarTech that enables you to automate workflows, generate leads, and build programs without manual hassle. 

3. Enhance your data strategy.  

Speaking of your tech stack, many technology investments will provide you with more data on your audience. This data can be used to build a story that engages and delights customers. In today’s world, first- and zero-party data are often most effective because it’s the information you collect directly from your owned channels and consumers themselves. This could be data like their behavior on your website, previous purchases, or survey feedback. More data means more targeting, more optimizations, and more insight into your customers’ needs. However, leveraging data should never come at the expense of good storytelling. 

4. Personalize your messaging. 

We personalize messages to our target audience for B2C marketing, so why wouldn’t we for B2B marketing? In this space, job titles, business functions, and seniority are important differentiators that could influence how you engage a customer more so than demographic details such as age or location. Defining your target personas, identifying their specific pain points, and tailoring your message based on their industry will help you drive ROI for your campaigns.  

5. Capitalize on moments in time. 

Similar to personalizing your messages, recognizing important moments in time for your audience can help engage them. For example, if you aim to sell your products or services to a retailer, you’ll want to identify when the busy retail seasons are, such as back-to-school or the holidays. During those periods, it’s unlikely the retailer will rip and replace their technology or processes in a major way – they won’t want to disrupt operations. Recognizing this, you could create a B2B marketing campaign in the winter or springtime as a lead up to the fall season. Your customers will appreciate that you understand how the industry operates, and you’ll be connecting with them at a time that’s ripe for a purchase. 

In many ways, B2B marketing best practices are similar to those followed in the B2C world. By knowing your audience and what makes them tick, you can create personalized messages that are data-driven, aligned with the sales team’s goals, and capture the nuances of your audience’s needs.  

To learn more about how Acoustic can aid in your B2B marketing, get in touch with us today.