Chris Mattingly | Associate Strategy Director
In the B2B marketing world, we often hear about the complexities of the sales cycle and the challenges of reaching target customers. It’s no surprise that creating messages to impact audiences across our “Eat. Move. Live.” categories often involves knowing a buyer’s journey with multiple touchpoints and more than one decision-maker.
Forrester’s recent 2023 B2B Brand and Communications Survey states that 54% of surveyed B2B marketing and brand leaders plan to increase digital/website program budgets over the next year. This is why broadhead comes to the table with digital strategies, website creative and customer insights ready to do the heavy lifting for our B2B clients.
If you are currently thinking about where to put your B2B marketing dollars and are not sure how to invest in your website and digital strategies, consider the following:
The lift is real
Brand-centric strategy (tailored to target audiences) thrives in the digital space. Digital strategies allow for amplified messaging when and where it can be most effective, and your website can support your sales teams — but only with the right creative and content in place.
Self-guided journeys need signposts
Digital touch points are critical to meet the needs of the B2B buyer’s journey which relies heavily on independent research and is often self-guided. Website user experience and content is a crucial doorway for a customer, and often their first impression of your product and service. In our experience, these journeys may vary in time and scope — it can take days, weeks, months, or years for our clients’ customers to complete the sales cycle. Ease of navigation through complex digital content such as white papers, case studies and product specifications are crucial to supporting this audience.
Digital can (and should) differentiate
B2B messaging and content is up against the distractions of your customer’s daily life and needs to be just as engaging as content they are receiving from consumer brands and ever-present content creators. While there is no better way than digital marketing to get your B2B content and creative messaging in front of the buyer, you have to invest in it to get it right. The value in including emotion and investing in creative is high, even in cases where decision making appears to be based on purely rational thinking around highly technical products.
In one case study, we saw the measurable benefits of focusing on the humans involved versus the technicalities of our client’s product. While we all can agree they are an industry leader offering the latest technology and innovation in their commercial equipment, their customers responded to messaging which showed our client understood the human factor involved – an insight we could not have gained had we not been able to test the messaging.
To get data, you need digital strategy
With the right analytical tools in place, your digital marketing efforts can tell you which way the wind is blowing and how to adjust. With data driven insights, that unicorn customer you never saw before suddenly becomes real and, more importantly, reachable.
Bringing it all together
As we continue to work with our B2B clients, we are less surprised to see that platforms like Snapchat and TikTok are as much, or even more, important to their audiences than other consumer-facing channels — something we recently discovered for a client and leverage to their advantage.
Our favorite challenge is positioning expertise where it can guide a complex journey, sharing an incredible innovation, and gaining confidence. We know the considerations, such as the risk to a brand that decides to shift into the digital space without knowing all there is to know about the customer journey and their audience, and we continue to build successful strategies that avoid the pitfalls of “too fast, too soon”.
At broadhead, our Engage model brings together disciplines that are intrinsically linked — like media, strategy, social, digital, data science, analytics, and public relations. We combine these teams under a common goal, and the results speak volumes for our clients. If you’re curious to learn more, let’s connect.