5 Ways to Get More B2B Buyer Attention

It’s one thing to say your marketing is focused on the customer and it’s another thing to actually do it. While the last few years have put the customer—their experience, buying journey, personalized content and more—at the forefront of the marketing conversation, many marketers haven’t actually changed their approach.

It’s common for businesses to take a product-based marketing approach, which starts with the features of the product and works backwards to fit the product to the buyer. The buyer is an afterthought. On the contrary, buyer need-based marketing asks the question: what are my buyers’ pain points and how does our product meet those needs? The buyer’s need is the driving force in marketing efforts; the focus is on the buyer from the start.

If we really believe that the buyer is the focus of our marketing, we need to start putting the buyer first. Here are five ways to shift your marketing approach to keep your B2B buyers’ needs front and center, and ultimately, get a greater share of their attention:

1. Meet Your Buyer Where They Are

B2B buyers today are more likely to conduct their own research—and they have plenty of choices. Webinars, social media content, review sites, industry experts and peer recommendations are all regularly used in the buying journey. The number of channels that B2B decision makers use has doubled in the past five years, according to McKinsey. Having a buyer need-based approach should include omnichannel outreach as it benefits the buyer by providing the right information through the right channel.

2. Break Down Data Silos

It’s important to have a complete view of cross-channel marketing to ensure your prospects are receiving the most relevant information at the right time. But the truth is, many marketers struggle because data is stored and analyzed in various platforms. Data silos can be the result of human or technology disconnect, or often both. The Third Edition Salesforce Marketing Intelligence Report indicates more than 70% monitor and evaluate the channels separately, “rather than in one centralized place.” Breaking down data silos will better ensure your campaigns align with buyer needs, and that you’re not wasting your efforts.

3. Start with Quality Data and Keep It Accurate

Quality third-party data will always be the foundation of successful marketing campaigns focused on reaching prospective buyers. And as data grows in complexity and volume, maintaining an accurate database becomes more challenging. This heightens the importance of starting with high-quality contact data and ensuring it undergoes regular data cleansing to automatically purge invalid or out-of-date data without eliminating high-value prospect records or running the risk of manual typos. When your campaigns have quality data at the core, personalization is strengthened, allowing you to connect and engage with buyers more effectively – about the issues that are important to them.

4. Use Intent Data to Learn What Buyers Want

You can always ask your buyers what pain points they’re looking to solve, but some of the most telling insights into buyers’ needs may come from how prospective customers are searching for your product (or a competitor’s). Intent data can pull back the curtain to not only identify prospective customers, but also reveal why they’re in market and how your solution may fit their needs.

At OMI, the intent monitoring process begins with choosing custom or pre-selected keywords that will shape monitoring activity. When website visitors view digital content related to the keywords, the prospect’s online activity is considered a “signal” of their interest or intent to buy. Multiple keywords can be monitored simultaneously, enabling you to apply the findings across all of your prospecting offers (or products) at one time. From there, triggered, intent-based digital marketing can be executed using display, social, mobile, and connected TV using the Demand Side Platform (DSP) of your choice. As another option, you can also choose to receive our intent records for your own use across your digital marketing programs.

5. Use Intent Data to Personalize Content

Intent monitoring can also be used to drive the type of digital content a marketer sends -- via targeted ads, email, etc. Intent data enables marketers to better understand buyer needs and determine the content that best meets those expressed needs and interests, based on the keywords from their intent signals. It can also be used to keep your efforts focused on buyers that are actively in-market.

At OMI, we monitor signals continuously, and if a user doesn’t register a new signal within a two-week time period, they are dropped from the intent feed, as it is presumed they are no longer actively “in-market.”

Together with our partners, OMI monitors content views and visits across more than 10,000 websites including search queries on Google, Yahoo and Bing, resulting in more than 14 billion intent signals each week. We have buyers’ needs covered – from quality B2B contact data, to data cleansing services, and intent data that gives marketers better insights into what prospects want. The idea is to enable our clients to deliver marketing that’s buyer-need driven.

If you’re looking to get more attention from B2B buyers this fall and beyond, contact my team today.

 

Did you know? Over 75 million of OMI’s 80 million manager- and professional-level and above contacts are matched to the LiveRamp RampID graph, including 65 million records from our SMB and medical market databases. Contact us today to learn more about building a custom audience.