Adventures in B2B Marketing, Episode 2: Finding the B2B Buyer

The b2b buyer is elusive, living on many screens, interacting with brands on their own terms, and at many different times of day. How can a b2b marketer find them? Madison Logic’s Sonjoy Ganguly breaks it down in episode 2 of Adventures in B2B Marketing.

Transcript: I want to start out today’s show with a fact. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 88% of B2B marketers currently use content marketing as part of their marketing strategy. That’s a big number, 88%. At the same time, only 30% of the same group say they’re actually effective at content marketing. 30% percent! That’s a big disparity. What’s going on guys? I want to spend today’s show telling that 30% how they can step up their content marketing game immediately.

Content is only as good as your distribution. You could have an awesome whitepaper, a kick ass video, a webinar that reveals the secrets of the universe…but if you can’t get it in front of the right people, it’s not going to do you any good. In our last Adventures in B2B Marketing I pointed out that 5-10 individuals are part of the buying committee and 46% of these are millennials. You need to be surrounding these people –ALL OF THEM—with your message.

Up until now, the primary way to distribute content has been through social channels: LinkedIn (still the king), Twitter, and Facebook. You can also launch a content syndication program, spreading your content into the farthest corner of the web. But do these scale? And do they scale to the right people? What’s your real reach?

Let’s take a time out here to look at targeted advertising. Targeted ads get you great scale. Your ads are in front of the right people. They’re surrounded by them. Re-targeting follows them around the web. It’s like Cheers, everybody knows your name. But now, you lack attribution. What does it matter if they know your name, but you don’t know theirs?

That’s why using data to drive targeted advertising and content marketing make for great synergy. Let’s break it down:

We’ll begin with INTENT. Intent data reveals a real-time picture of the marketplace. It IDENTIFIES WHO is researching WHAT and WHEN they are researching it. This insight is powerful in TWO crucial ways:

First, it helps you CREATE the content that will resonate the best with your prospects. If they’re researching cloud infrastructure, but ignoring cloud security you know better how to position your content.

Second, Intent, as we said before intent IDENTIFIES the accounts that are actually doing the research. What this means just knowing the companies isn’t enough, you need to identify all the people at those companies who are actively doing the research. With this info, you can precisely target your messaging to reach only those prospects that you should be talking to.

Content marketing is here to stay, but for it to work you have to go past social, past content syndication. Social’s not going away, it should be part and parcel of any content strategy. But content syndication alone isn’t going to cut it…as we have seen there’s no scale there. A content syndication program powered by intent-driven targeted advertising will delivers the MOST powerful return on your marketing investment.

For more information about how you can use account based marketing to pinpoint the individuals at the accounts showing the most propensity to buy, download Madison Logic’s whitepaper: Account Based Marketing: Targeting With Intent.