Digital natives: How to win the trust of Gen Z and Millennials
73 percent of digital natives are involved in B2B product or purchase decision-making, and about one-third are sole decision-makers. Learn how to win their trust.
Hey B2B marketers, we really need to talk about demand generation.
Yes, we need to generate revenue. And ostensibly, in order to generate revenue, we need leads.
But collectively we are suffocating our own marketing programs with an obsession over the wrong end of the proverbial funnel.
You see, recent research from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute and LinkedIn (disclosure: my employer) have codified an important if uncomfortable truth for many marketers:
Most of your B2B buyers—to the tune of a full 95% of them—are not currently in the market for your products or anything like them.
Why are you so obsessed with me: B2B marketing demand gen
Lots of B2B products and services have higher price tags, long buying cycles, and are the sort of purchases that businesses just don’t make (or change) on a regular basis. Which means that most of the advertising and marketing we create is touching the 95% of the market that is not ready to buy anything.
Why does this matter? Well… because most B2B brands are pretty terrible at doing the kind of marketing that the 95% of out-of-market buyers need: brand marketing.
We often recoil from brand marketing and paid media because it feels fluffy somehow. Superficial, not nearly serious enough for our very serious offerings, and hard to measure and quantify.
(And didn’t the digital age promise us that we’d be able to “measure everything”?) It’s exactly that sort of tactical overpromise and creative under-delivery that’s exacerbated a critical gap in most B2B marketing programs today.
The reality is that advertising – including the stuff you’re doing on social media channels and your content marketing programs – has its biggest impact on something called brand salience.
If you’re not familiar, brand salience is “the propensity of the brand to be noticed or come to mind in buying situations”.
In short, when someone is ready to make a purchase – especially a big and potentially long-lived one in B2B, we want them to not only know we exist – but remember our brand in that context.
We tend to ignore this critical concept in B2B, pretending instead that we can somehow “create demand” through our content and our media.
But our marketing doesn’t create demand, the customers’ needs do.
Which means our marketing has to instead address the most likely gap in the process: making sure they think of us when those needs arise.
Customer engagement for the modern customer.
Get the CX solutions HERE.
How B2B marketing can walk the marketing talk along a non-linear journey
B2B marketing demand gen obsessions create a plethora of issues – how do we fix them?
- By making sure our marketing is distinctive, memorable, interesting, and relevant to our customers, not just pleasing to our own teams or checking boxes of “value propositions”
- By creating content and media that’s reflective of the world our customers inhabit during the 95% of the time they don’t need us (which requires us to talk about ourselves a heck of a lot less)
- By designing for the long tail of marketing, understanding that tomorrow’s buyers are not likely to be today’s decision makers, and that building salience takes time so that when those buyers eventually enter the market, we’ll be there to meet them
The truth is that the marketing “funnel” is something we created as marketers because, well, it’s simple.
We like to think the buying process is linear (it isn’t), that people behave neatly and predictably throughout it (they don’t), and that we can create demand for things just because we need people to buy them (we can’t).
So the answer is that we have to have more realistic expectations of the power of our own marketing. We have to raise our eye level and think bigger, more broadly, and more creatively in order to truly win those storied “hearts and minds”.
And we absolutely must stop measuring marketing success in terms of campaign clicks, quarterly reports, and lead volumes alone.
The B2B brands who will win are the ones we’ll remember. Which means most of us have a lot of work to do. And if we do that work right?
We might even manage to take the boring out of B2B and give it oxygen again.
