The struggle for B2B companies is real when it comes to content creation.
Creation of content is extremely important in B2B space. Because of this, marketers are always trying to build content that resonates with the audience. One of the common challenges faced by almost every B2B marketers is ability to create engaging content.
According to a new survey conducted by Finite, a global B2B technology marketing community found that 35% of B2B marketers struggled to produce enough content to reach and engage with audiences in 2020.
People deal with people, and not machines. So, having a better understanding about your target audience, their industry, their challenges and pain points can help to speak their language better. So, what is the best way to truly understand your target audience?
Research can help B2B marketers in building engaging content. Be aware and understand where the target audience is heading towards. Be more empathetic and focus on building a relationship rather than trying to sell.
How research can add value in your marketing campaigns?
Research helps to uncover every available information about target audience and industry. Believe it or not but marketers who make effort to understand their audience are the ones who are able to develop target specific content instead on boilerplate content. Recent eMarketer shows digital B2B ad spend is up 22.6% from 2019.
Finding right data to close deals
Research helps you find all the little nuggets of information that might mean the difference between success and failure of your targeted marketing campaign. Marketers can engage with their target accounts better only if they have right data available with them. In addition to achieving refined, up-to-date and precise data helps B2B marketers by being more buyer centric. Buyer-centric in the sense that deep research uncovers requirements of their ideal customer profile companies.
Building personalized content
B2B marketing thrives on high-quality content. Building high-quality relevant content is only possible if you are well-versed with your target audience’s priorities and challenges. A higher level of personalization can be achieved when powered with proper research. Industry specific contents like videos, white papers, blogs, webinars can give an edge to B2B marketers trying to sell into large accounts.
Research comes in handy to build tons of personalized content that will help to drive traffic and engagement. B2B marketers need to create a segmented content marketing strategy with different goals for different content.
Balance between gaining trust and personal aspirations
Research helps in balancing these two aspirations that all sales professionals have. This is done through fueling understanding of the companies that the B2B sales team are selling into, which makes them understand what their target account care about and allows them to offer solutions that match their prospects priorities or challenges. Without research, salespeople are left only to guess what their prospects are interested in, and fall into a trap of not being able to establish a relationship.
Sharing how we been helping B2B marketers to launch hyper-personalized content for their targeted marketing campaigns
Having worked in the B2B space for quite some time now and offering research capabilities to the enterprise sales and marketing teams, we can assert that our research has been extremely instrumental for our clients. The insight reports build by our team for enterprise accounts have been used to prepare different forms of content for their marketing initiatives. Be it a video or a white-paper or a blog, our research can certainly add value to their ongoing campaign.
One of our clients is a $3 billion global tech company based out of California specializing in business communications. The tech company had listed out 50 enterprise accounts they wanted to sell into. A huge challenge on their part was the effort required to sell into each account being far more than what was internally available.
Our research analysts built a comprehensive insight report on each target account as defined by the client’s pipeline and priorities uncovering major business priorities and key challenges. The client was able to hyper-personalized all ‘sales’ outreach by aligning both sales and marketing activities across each account.
Final thoughts
Research is invaluable in B2B sales because ultimately people sell to people and this process demands research to fuel meaningful conversations and content. Secondly, research helps in finding the balance between gaining trust and personal aspirations. In addition, the complex nature of B2B sales does demand research otherwise leaves salespeople to fall into a trap of not being able to establish a relationship. Finally, research enables marketing teams to reach high levels of personalization with their target accounts through their content marketing initiatives.