It's Complicated: Choosing the Right Campaign Strategy for Today's Complex B2B Buying Scenarios

Reaching the right target in B2B sales and marketing can be challenging, especially as more people are working from home on personal devices and at all hours of the day. Things get even more complicated when your buyer isn’t a person, but a group. The Forrester 2021 B2B Buying Study shows that more than 80% of purchases now involve complex buying scenarios such as:

• Consensus scenarios, where 95% of current purchases involve three or more people across two or more departments, and
• Committee scenarios, where strategic purchases include multiple people and departments across the organization and require executive oversight.

In line with this shift to buying groups, B2B sellers need to shift their approach to campaign targeting and audience building. If previous efforts focused on finding the right decision maker, now those same campaigns need to reach all of the members of the buying group, as well as those who have influence over the decision, even if they’re not the ultimate decision maker. Forrester points to this as yet another reason sales and marketing functions need to work better together – aligned with a purpose “to understand and engage with all decision-makers involved in making purchases.”

Speaking practically, how can this best be achieved? Here’s the strategy our team has seen work best for B2B campaigns in the changing market:

• Cast a wider net in the early campaign stages. Use firmographic data to identify accounts with characteristics that align with your buyer personas – these are the businesses that stand to benefit the most from your products or services.
• Use more targeted, refined audience strategies, such as intent data, in the later campaign stages, building upon early campaign learnings and insights to zero in on decision makers who are in-market for your offers now.

Often marketers restrict their potential audience by going too narrow during the early stages, thus missing out on connecting with all of the key decision makers in today’s consensus- and committee-driven buying scenarios.

Additionally, casting a wide net early in the campaign can reveal information about prospects that marketers wouldn’t know otherwise—information that can drive value as part of intent data in later stages. For intent monitoring to work, you need to know what to look for and how to define the online behavior (such as search engine queries, repeat website visits and content downloads) as buying signals that indicate a person is likely in-market. Early campaign results can not only inform this process but also the content and personalization you use in later campaign stages. 

B2B sales and marketing isn’t easy, by any means, especially as complicated buying scenarios have become the norm. But the right tools, along with the right strategy, can make all the difference. It starts with really understanding your audience and using high-quality B2B data with firmographics to define those characteristics. From there, intent insights can enable you to zero in on the right decision makers—all of them—to improve campaign ROI. 

Did you know? OMI’s high-quality B2B, SMB and medical market business contact data is available on the LiveRamp data marketplace, offering access to over 75 million decision-makers. More than 94% of our B2B contact data is matched to a LiveRamp digital ID, for unparalleled display advertising reach and accuracy display. Contact us today to learn more about building a custom audience and a winning campaign strategy.