For decades B2C marketing ran circles around its B2B neighbors. When it came to attribution, ROI tracking and campaign optimization, B2C teams had it made. The B2C world is one of numerous small purchases that create more data to analyze; short sales cycle that make campaign measurement less complex and individual decision makers that make influence more direct.
B2B marketing, on the other hand, has to grapple with six-figure deals, long sales cycles, and buying committees of 5-25 decision-makers. Multi-touch marketing campaigns create further silos which prevents companies from seeing a full picture of their buyer universe and getting the most return from the various marketing efforts.
But All This Has Changed
B2B marketing is benefitting from an explosion of data and new technologies to leverage it. Marketing automation, CRM and web analytics — once the Holy Grail of all marketing and sales systems — have become the norm. Marketers who are looking to get ahead of their competition and respond to increasing lead generation and pipeline creation demands need to adopt predictive intelligence technologies to tackle the tremendous complexities of B2B marketing.
Our CEO’s favorite example is whenever she searches for her favorite pair of Ferragamo shoes. Suddenly ads of red Ferragamo shoes and email offers appear from multiple vendors, trying to take advantage of the narrow window of opportunity in which Amanda will make her purchase.
Imagine this same process in the world of B2B marketing. The digital footprint Amanda leaves when searching for pumps, pales in comparison to the treasure trove of information created by an enterprise IT team researching, over a period of 6-9 months, a networking solution or a marketing operations team selecting a marketing automation platform.
Predictive Intelligence: The B2B Marketing Advantage
To take advantage of all these digital footprints, B2B marketers have to be able to connect the information in their CRM, MAP, and web analytics tools (1st party data) with the time-sensitive, behavioral activity of prospects taking place outside their four walls (3rd party data). Because tying together billions of rows of dynamic data — structured and unstructured — is complex business, marketers are turning to predictive intelligence solutions like 6sense to do the work for them:
By marrying data across from your system with your buyers buying signals across the internet marketing teams can:
- Prioritize their prospects using time-sensitive data to determine who is likely to buy first
- Discover net-new accounts and contacts who were not on their radar at all — greenfield opportunities
- See a complete picture of all the accounts and contacts classified by buying stage
B2B marketers today have the opportunity to pinpoint who is in market, when, what product they’re interested in and how much they’ll buy. B2B is about to leave B2C in the dust, and it will be the data-driven marketing teams that do it.
How is your team becoming data-driven?
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: Finally…B2B Marketing Beats B2C
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