BY Kathy Crosett
Are your accounts reaching their B2B target audience? When B2B marketers launch a campaign, they typically target more than one audience. Bombara data indicates that most B2B marketers reach between two and five audiences. More marketers are using a buying group persona. That’s a good strategy as our research in B2B BuyerSCAN shows that buying groups are increasingly common.
How to Identify the B2B Audience
Creating the right persona can help your account stand out. Many marketers use job titles or role information (65%) to identify potential buyers. With additional resources, sellers can target buyers based on firmographic data — such as annual revenue and where they operate. Technographic data can help to build a profile based on the software that prospects use.
How Do Your Accounts Reach the B2B Target Audience?
Identifying the audience is a good first step. But understanding what advertising formats influence these buyers is critical. This information is available for over 200 B2B buyers types with a subscription to AdMall.
Media sellers also need to know when to encourage B2B marketers to run campaigns. Bombara analysts report that most marketers are spending a big part of their ad budget in the awareness stage (42%). The rest of the budget goes to the consideration stage (30%) and the decision stage (28%).
In a perfect world, with an expanding ad budget, businesses would make changes to their ad spending strategy. In particular, 30% of businesses would opt to increase lead generation/performance campaigns.
How are ad spending priorities changing?
Besides putting a greater emphasis on AI, 11% of B2B marketers will increase spending on CTV and upper-funnel programmatic media to generate more leads.
They’re also adjusting their media mix. In the next year, budget allocation will be:
- Events/trade shows 16%
- Paid search 13%
- CTV/streaming 11%
- Paid social 9%
- Programmatic display/native 10%
- OLV (online video) 9%
How are B2B audiences engaging with content?
B2B buyers aren't just checking out advertising. They're also reviewing content. One of the indicators of campaign success is a conversion, such as a download of provided content or research. How soon after a prospect downloads content should your clients be in touch? NetLine research suggests a nearly 48-hour window is appropriate. Prospects need that amount of time to review your content.
The most popular content for B2B prospects recently has been on-demand webinars. This preference makes sense as prospects want to see content on their schedules. Interest in on-demand webinars increased 46% over the previous year.
In addition, report downloads are up 15.9%.
Data points in webinars and reports help B2B buyers make an initial list of vendors they plan to reach out to.
Analysts believe buyers are closer to making a purchase decision when they download the following types of content:
- Trend books
- Play books
- Case studies
- Newsletters
- Infographics
The need to produce quality content can be overwhelming for your accounts, especially when they are trying to launch and sell new products and services. Position yourself and your team as expert content developers to increase your opportunities.
But buyers struggle with the concept of which content to trust. In the Buyer Experience Report from 6sense, analysts founds that buyers are often 60% through their purchase cycle when they reach out to sellers. Their research has yielded a preferred vendor. 77% of the time that vendor will win the deal.
Buyers are also hesitant to try out a new vendor during times of economic uncertainty. Nearly 35% of respondents in the 6sense survey indicated that using an incumbent or a conservative choice vendor was partly the result of not wanting to increase risk at this time.
What is the two-part buying process?
6sense analysts point to a two-part buying process – the selection phase, about 2/3 of the buying time and validation phase – direct engagement with sellers 1/3 of the time. Without quality content, your accounts won’t be considered in the selection phase.
What can they do to improve the outcome? Their content should address the following concerns:
- Prove a better tech fit
- Offer a better price
- Show how to meet security/compliance
What measurement problems do B2B marketers encounter?
Your accounts must measure prospect engagement to know whether their investment is working. The current campaign measurement strategy includes many familiar metrics.
- Conversions 46%
- Clicks 38%
- Revenue generated 34%
- Impressions 26%
These data points can tell your accounts how well a specific campaign did. But it’s much harder to compare results across campaigns if they happened on different platforms. The chief complaints include:
- Inconsistent metrics 66%
- Platform silos 66%
How do B2B marketers define success?
Team members in an organization don’t always agree on what success looks like. 67% of survey takers say marketing leaders at their business monitor results. They may have a definition of success that’s different from the 53% of businesses where the executive team is checking out the data points. Overall, only 39% of B2B marketers believe their measurement efforts qualify as advanced.
The B2B target audience has never been easy to reach. But creating the right persona, buying the right ads and providing authoritative content can help your account stand out.
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