Why B2B marketing is crucial for business growth. A guide for CEOs, founders and investors.
- Jeremy Spencer
- Jul 8
- 4 min read
The capability of B2B marketing has transformed substantially in the wake of thousands of marketing technology tools (15,384 up from 150 in 2011[1]) that create new, highly cost efficient, scalable ways to target potential customers, moving marketing away from the old world of a support function that looked after the website, brochures and pens!
However, the plethora of new marketing tech and the wide range of new marketing disciplines that have emerged to capitalise on them, make the new world of B2B marketing complex and not well understood outside of the discipline.
The aim of this blog is to help non-marketers understand why marketing is so crucial to the growth agenda, as a first step to ensuring their own organisation is deploying marketing in a way that will drive the top line.
After 3 decades of taking a broad range of tech solutions to market, I believe there are 5 key reasons as to why B2B marketing is crucial for growth:
1. It creates more channels for more reach and more sales leads. It provides cost effective ways to spread the net wider, to capture new sales conversation opportunities, than a direct or in-direct sales team can achieve themselves.
2. It primes the pump to fuel sales and marketing channels, by developing compelling and engaging content, for critical stages across the buying journey.
3. It creates the brand awareness and brand recall that ensures you are shortlisted.
4. It satisfies the need buyers increasingly have for self-service in their buying journeys.
5. It facilitates better sales outcomes. It makes your selling efforts more efficient and effective, improving win rates, pipeline volume and deal velocity. It does this through better target customer data, compelling messaging and materials, and proactive support to help customers move through their buying journeys as quickly as possible.
More channels, more reach, more leads
Marketing complements sales team prospecting to generate leads utilising a variety of channels including website/search engine marketing, email, social media, PR, events, sponsorships and advertising. Many of these are relatively low cost compared to the cost of sales heads and can scale well to deliver good levels of ROI.
Fuelling channels with great content
Since the phrase “Content is King” emerged in the nineties, it still is very much the case, you need great content to get any kind of engagement with your target customers. From insightful thought leadership pieces to solution infographics to case studies and pitch decks, marketing builds the content that supports potential customers as their buying committee or decision making unit moves their buying journey.
However, with B2B buyers exposed to literally hundreds of digital touchpoints every day, content can’t just be created to satisfy a tick list of standard items. Crafting the right content that will capture attention requires:
1. A good understanding of the audience through the development of buyer personas.
2. Knowledge of relevant industry issues within which to position content, so it resonates as relevant and authoritative.
3. A good understanding of the buyer journey, so as to develop the right materials that help move buyers through it.
Making this happen requires careful content strategy development, focussed effort and investment.
Getting short-listed
Research undertaken by the LinkedIn think tank the B2B institute[2], suggests that only a small percentage of your target market are “in market” at any one time. i.e actively looking to buy a solution. In their research they suggest this is only 5% of your market. Regardless of whether its 5% or another figure, intuitively it makes sense that only a certain percentage have prioritised the need to purchase and have budget available.
Additionally research from the leading martech platfrom 6 Sense[3], in their buying journey research, estimate that 80% of buyers already have a preferred vendor in mind when they engage sellers.
Marketing plays a critical role here in building, developing and maintaining brand awareness with potential buyers, through activities such as PR, event marketing, sponsorships, social media and other digital outreach, so your brand is front of mind when a buyer does come into the market, increasing the likelihood of being on the shortlist.
Supporting buyers seeking self-service buying
With younger, digital native buyers coming into the market, buyers seeking to use self-service to complete tasks on top of their everyday job duties and the ready availability of digital tools for self-service to discover, evaluate and purchase, an element of self-service buying is here to stay a view backed in research by Forrester[4]. Marketing plays a crucial role in satisfying this buyer need as it typically owns the digital channels and creates the content self-servers are seeking at the various stages of their buying journeys.
Better sales outcomes
Marketing typically undertakes the ground work that enables your sales efforts to scale – undertaking market segmentation and ideal customer profile analysis to guide the focus for selling activity, whilst also creating the messaging, differentiated positioning and sales enablement training and materials, so key for effective selling. Finally, marketing’s work to build a credible brand and generate awareness helps build the trust buyers seek before completing a purchase with any sales team.
Building a marketing engine for sustainable growth
B2B marketing has come of age, no longer the support function it once was but a crucial engine for revenue growth. Building an effective engine though requires experienced leadership, specialist expertise and the tools, systems and data to automate and scale campaign activations. It takes time to put in place and requires investment and focus. Not an easy task for any organisation. However, approaches that provide fractional leadership and outsourced expertise and activation services on demand can provide instant capability in affordable bitesize chunks. This can provide a stop gap to start building demand quickly or provide more fire power to existing in-house marketing teams to accelerate particular initiatives. B2B Growth Marketing was set up specifically to provide such a range of outsourced marketing support. It can be blended and flexed to suit any organisation looking to grow. In my next blog I’ll explain how B2B marketing actually delivers growth.
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