B2B marketing strategy for the second half of 2019!

When you are in a hurry on the road, you should always stop and look back at the road you have come. This way you can be more sure whether the direction you are going is correct and whether your steps are still persistent.

Seven-twelfths of 2019 have passed, and various B2B companies have completed their mid-year reviews from business to internal capabilities. Looking back at the changes in the external market over the past six months, what interesting insights can be gained about the marketing of B2B companies, and how should they move forward in the second half of the year with more confidence? Today we are going to stew this topic~~~

1. Inventory of hot words in B2B marketing in the first half of 2019

In the first half of 2019, from offline to online, we found some interesting phenomena in the B2B field:

There is less financing information that goes viral on WeChat Moments.

B2B manufacturers are more low-key in their advertising;

Customer growth has become the boss's first challenge to the CMO.

But there is still little content and technology to help growth...

Before looking ahead to the B2B marketing trends in the second half of the year, let’s first take a closer look at the ins and outs behind these phenomena through several of the most frequently mentioned hot words.

In short, brand-effect integration means that brand effect and actual sales results can be achieved better synchronously.

It is easier to understand its rationality and necessity from the B2C field:

First of all, from Taobao live sales to Douyin influencers selling products, brand owners have seen the possibility of achieving brand communication effects and sales simultaneously. All of this is naturally first of all due to the development of Internet infrastructure today, which provides brands with the possibility to shorten the conversion path.

Secondly, consumers’ psychology is also changing. In an era of information overload and oversupply, brands can only maximize the value of all marketing investments by striving to complete sales conversions before consumers’ favorability and enthusiasm for brand exposure fade .

Finally, in a period of uncertain external economic situation, brand owners have tightened their budgets. It is not easy to make money, so they naturally hope to see more direct effects and returns on the money they spend. With the combination of this series of internal and external factors, product and effect integration has become a new challenge and goal for marketing functions.

With the changes in the media environment, especially the advent of the self-media era, there are more possibilities for customer acquisition channels; coupled with the rise in the value of the B2B industry, there are more players, all-round competition has intensified, and growth has become the top priority for B2B companies. "Growth" is not a simple goal, but a system of continuous optimization, so it must mobilize the resources of the entire company to achieve it. The marketing department, which has always been criticized for "only knowing how to spend money", has naturally been asked to make more demands based on growth targets.

However, since the B2B transaction process is generally relatively complex and the transaction cycle is relatively long, the division of labor and cooperation of multiple teams are involved from customer acquisition to transaction. Therefore, the "integration of product and effect" pursued by the B2B marketing function cannot be simply positioned as brand + sales conversion like B2C companies (at least the revenue target cannot be easily undertaken by the marketing function).

Instead, "effect" should be defined according to channels and tools. Leads, business opportunities, and sales may all become different effects corresponding to different market strategies. A one-size-fits-all approach is likely to cause marketing functions to deviate from the most critical goals, especially ignoring the cultivation of long-term markets (if you need an answer to this question, please leave us a message, and we may discuss this topic in a special topic later).

"Skill sinking" is ultimately just a means, so it must come from the requirement of "target sinking" of brand and effect integration that we talked about earlier.

In the last era of B2B marketing, the weapons in the hands of most marketers were mainly "PR, events and search engines". Therefore, in addition to a small number of inbound leads, the goals that the B2B marketing department could be responsible for were mainly process indicators, such as the number of publications, Baidu Index, number of events, number of people covered by the events, etc.

To achieve the goal of “product and effect integration”, B2B marketers first need to break the three-pronged skill structure and move into the professional deep waters that focus more on business understanding and operational capabilities. As mentioned earlier, this is the only way to achieve both brand goals and actual marketing results.

For example, when I joined a SaaS company in 2014, in line with the company's strategic goal of expanding its SaaS business, I took the initiative to set the "number of new business opportunities" as the most important assessment target for the marketing department, accounting for 60% of the total. Subsequently, a series of measures were taken, including optimizing search engine delivery strategies and restructuring website architecture to improve traffic conversion rates, systematically establishing a content system to expand organic customer acquisition channels, and launching a marketing automation system to achieve unified management of all channel leads and in-depth cultivation.

All of this posed new challenges to the capabilities of our marketing colleagues, who also had to face the challenge of introducing new capabilities and new talents and further improving the internal training mechanism.

Entering 2019, the feeling that "traffic is becoming more and more expensive" is becoming more real. However, the crueler reality for B2B marketing characterized by "precise customer acquisition" is that even if you are willing to pay a higher cost to develop new customers, each traffic channel will soon see the upper limit of traffic acquisition.

However, according to Forrester's survey data: 90% of the traffic leads of enterprises are wasted... By comparing the two, it is not difficult to find that for most B2B companies, wasting the traffic and leads in hand is a more fatal problem.

As a result, people in the B2B market began to realize that instead of spending all their time racking their brains over where to get more new traffic, it would be better to spend a little more time repairing the "broken bamboo basket" at home so that less of the traffic already obtained would be wasted. The concept of "private domain traffic" has thus been accepted by more B2B companies and marketers.

In terms of tactics, we naturally began to explore more about how to convert public domain traffic into private domain traffic to the greatest extent possible, and more importantly, how to convert private domain traffic into more valuable business opportunities and businesses through in-depth operations. It is not difficult to find that the acquisition and cultivation of private domain traffic still corresponds to the skill sinking of market functions mentioned above.

Summary: I have heard so much, but I still can’t do it well.

After a simple inventory, it is not difficult to find that there is never a shortage of new concepts and new terms in the marketing field, and the B2B marketing circle that is busy seeking breakthroughs is no exception. But “the flowers are so numerous that they dazzle the eyes”, after hearing so many truths, why can’t we do our jobs well? Is it because he was too anxious that he lost his composure, or is it because he wanted too much and was caught in a dilemma?

Looking back at our peers who have had in-depth exchanges with us over the past few months, although each company has its own "pain point", "sustained and healthy growth" remains the goal of all companies. Under the pressure of growth, most companies lack a set of B2B marketing system methodologies that are suitable for the current stage of their business development. The core behind this is of course capability. Enterprise development is a process of fighting monsters and upgrading all the way. Problems are meant to be solved, so based on our personal practice and experience in coaching several B2B companies in the past six months, we will make an outlook on the direction that B2B marketing functions should focus on in the second half of 2019. We hope to give some inspiration to founders and market people who are exploring.

II. Outlook for B2B Marketing Strategies in the Second Half of 2019

A while ago, a young B2B marketer left a message in one of our surveys, saying, "It's so difficult to achieve results in B2B marketing. Do we still have a future?" To paraphrase an old saying: The future is bright, but the road is indeed tortuous!

I often use a casserole to illustrate B2B marketing. To make the casserole tasty, it must be simmered over low heat. The clay pot is indeed slower than the iron pot, but the advantage is that it heats up slowly and cools down slowly. This is like the development of B2B marketing capabilities. It takes time to form the methodology and practice the most suitable approach for a company, but once an advantage is formed, it will take some time for others to catch up.

Therefore, if I were to give keywords for B2B marketing in the second half of 2019, I would give twelve words: think in higher dimensions, execute in lower dimensions, and focus on deep cultivation (Note: The first eight words were first proposed by me in a speech in April this year. Time is also a friend of the B2B industry, and one day it will witness the results of our efforts. Looking forward to the second half of the year, this proposition has not changed, but has gained more personal experience).

Thinking in a higher dimension means that we need to go beyond the narrow division of market functions to define the focus of our work, and instead focus on the capabilities that B2B marketing should build and the core goals that need to be paid attention to from the perspective of the enterprise life cycle. Stand with your boss and think what your boss thinks.

Practice sharing: Take a startup we coached as an example. At the beginning of the year, the company judged that it had successfully passed the seed stage (the company life cycle is shown in the figure below). Therefore, we planned the market functions in the first half of 2019 to sort out the core value proposition of the system products in accordance with the capacity needs of the run-up period, so as to provide the entire company with a unified blueprint for external education market and customer expansion. At the same time, the market must fully coordinate with the sales system to carry out market education. However, during the mid-year review, we found that the sales system's pace of advancing business lagged far behind expectations at the beginning of the year, and the sales conversion rate after acquiring new customers was very low. At this time, we recommend that clients stop and re-examine the assumptions made at the beginning of the year through case review and data analysis, study the market relatively conservatively, and put the two strategic priorities of target customer positioning and pioneer customer acquisition back on the agenda. What this means is that the most important thing for the marketing function is not to blindly expand new products, but to cherish every target customer in the library together with the product, sales and even the founder, to delve into the business scenarios, to work hard to win them down one by one, and then to gain a deep understanding of the target customers and to go through the MPF (market-product verification) stage more solidly.

It is important to do things right, but it is more important to do the right things!

Dimensionality reduction execution means sinking skills, consolidating the data foundation, and using data to drive the results of operational transformation.

As mentioned earlier, 90% of leads for B2B companies are often wasted. Why? Because the transaction cycle is too long, sales people will only focus on leads where demand is already evident and orders can be closed in the near future.

However, leads that cannot establish business opportunities in the current period are very valuable to the company in the long run, and they are also traffic that the company has gained with real money. Therefore, they must be cultivated intensively by the marketing team. If the marketing department wants to do this more meticulously, it must ensure that only the most valuable leads at the moment are output to the sales team. All of this work must be based on data analysis and monitoring, and must be supported by tools.

Therefore, in the execution phase, B2B marketing functions must be reduced in dimensionality, down-to-earth enough, use data to focus on details, and cherish every hard-earned traffic and lead.

Practice sharing:

Because a comprehensive marketing digitalization system involves many links in the front, middle and back ends, it is critical to plan a step-by-step roadmap according to the stage of enterprise development during the implementation process. For example, for a B2B company with a weak data analysis foundation, we planned a three-stage implementation path for their marketing digitalization process. The core goal of the first phase is to make data traceable for front-end channels that spend money every day, and to say goodbye to the stage of evaluating results based on one’s own ideas. The key tasks are to complete the following three tasks:

1. Ensure that the source of website data is traceable: organic + paid

2. Optimize the conversion effect of Baidu paid leads through different creative tests

3. Optimize lead conversion by optimizing landing pages and optimizing website conversion logic

This step-by-step planning breaks down a complex system project, reducing the psychological barriers and practical thresholds for implementation, while also making it easier to lay a relatively solid foundation for each step.

According to our personal experience, the process of marketing digitalization goes through roughly the following process: It takes one year to sort out and deploy a marketing funnel, and another 1-2 years to run through a series of internal processes and verify the basic logic. Only in the third or fourth year can we say that marketing digitalization is basically running smoothly and the level and value of data-based operations can be gradually deepened. For most startups, this process is indeed quite time-consuming and involves a lot of work. But if the foundation is not laid firmly, it is like pulling a broken cart. Even the fastest horse will not be able to reach the finish line. Therefore, there is no need to feel discouraged, the right solution is to take action.

Things that are difficult to do, doing them or not often means a huge difference between us and our opponents!

Resources are always limited. For some people, a lifetime is only enough to make a bowl of delicious noodles that will wow everyone. But when opportunities are everywhere, we tend to want more.

However, in the 1990s when the "diversification strategy" was most popular, countless cases warned us how dangerous defocusing caused by "expansion" is. Looking at the history of modern enterprise development, defocusing is almost a natural thing for many companies, which also means that staying focused requires us to make extra efforts.

B2B marketing requires more precision, so the focus must be reflected not only in strategy but also in tactical choices.

Specifically, in determining strategic goals, we must define the strategic goals of marketing based on what is mentioned in "upward dimensional thinking" and focus on the strategic keys of the company at the current stage. (For example: Should we acquire pioneering customers, expand new customers on a large scale, or maximize the value of existing customers?)

As for tactical choices, we encourage innovation and small steps, but ultimately we must do some subtraction based on data and results, and never do things for the so-called "sense of security."

In order to obtain more leads, I believe that many marketers have made various attempts, ranging from self-media, traditional media to third-party cooperation agencies in terms of channels, and from articles, print, video, activities to SEM in terms of forms, but in the end the data will tell us where it is worth focusing our investment.

At the same time, the complexity of B2B business determines that the capabilities of marketing personnel are very high. It is difficult for an enterprise to develop the capabilities required for each tactic to the extreme at the same stage. It is more conducive to developing key marketing capabilities and easier to see breakthrough results in a relatively short period of time by focusing on each one.

Practice sharing:

Take a B2B company we coached that is in a critical transition period as an example. Since the market-side customer acquisition channels still mainly rely on search engines, organic content customer acquisition is an area that the company urgently needs to break through at this stage. However, the original content team only had one person responsible for the operation of multiple content channels, and there was no actual breakthrough in the actual results. During the coaching process, we found that the original brand communication team was relatively mature, so we suggested merging the brand promotion and content teams. The goal is to achieve brand communication and content acquisition with synergy, and focus the current strategy of this module on the WeChat channel. Two months after the actual implementation, we saw from the data the effect of the reshaped content marketing system - the efficiency of customer acquisition and conversion on WeChat reached three times the previous level.

Of course, because each of the customer acquisition channels of B2B companies has an upper limit, every company will need to make more attempts in the future. But precisely because of this, the focus of B2B marketing should be to maximize the channels and strategies that can still provide incremental value at every stage.

Summary: Changing your mindset and focusing on deep cultivation requires investment and patience

We have been fooled for too long by those fleeting trends. It is time to settle down and focus on deepening the underlying capabilities of B2B marketing so that we can develop our own killer moves at different stages of the business. This is like practicing internal martial arts. If you don't spend time practicing, no matter how hard you try to achieve seemingly powerful moves, you won't be able to develop skills that shock the martial arts world.

However, focusing on deep cultivation is destined not to be an immediate result. Due to the complexity of B2B business and the overall market maturity, the growth of each organizational capability requires a longer time. Therefore, due to our lack of patience and investment, the development of organizational capabilities often becomes the biggest hindrance to the sustained growth of B2B companies.

As a consultant who has focused on B2B marketing practice and research for many years, I would like to say one more thing before I finish writing: the growth of B2B companies is a good friend of time! I call on everyone to calm down in the face of growing pressure, think slowly and act quickly, and lay a solid foundation so that we can build tall buildings. Let us encourage each other!

Author: Gao Yan

Source: Luandun Marketing” (ID: Luandunyingxiao)