David Sweenor, founder of TinyTechGuides, recently shared his experiences traversing deep tech to B2B marketing. Recently, David and Kalyan Ramanathan authored Modern B2B Marketing: A Practitioner’s Guide for Marketing Excellence which was published by TinyTechGuides. Collectively, the duo brings almost five decades of experiences across multinational conglomerates as tech experts and marketing leaders.

When asked what the motivation was behind their latest book, Modern B2B Marketing: A Practitioner’s Guide for Marketing Excellence, David observed that whilst marketing books are in abundance, there wasn’t any that encapsulated true B2B marketing practices in a single, digestible volume.

“You can find a book on just about everything. Brand marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, influencer, digital it goes on and on. But, we couldn’t find a small, digestible guide, that you could read in under two hours. We wanted to create something that was based on real-world experience, not theory, that illustrated how modern B2B marketing teams work together to bring products to market.”

Goodbye, corporate marketing. Hello, hyper-personalization

Traditionally, business schools tend to teach budding marketers the four “P’s of marketing – Product, Place, Price, Promotion. Gone are the days where companies are able solely rely on these rules to target their customers. As David pointed out, we are now in an economy where prospects and customers demand personalized experiences, and it’s all about the individual.

“Modern marketing teams now need to deliver content through hyper-personalization – to the right individual in the right channel, at the right time. If you don’t deeply understand your prospects, you’ll end up shouting in a digital void. So, the balance of power has shifted to the consumer rather than the company which was what we learned with the 4Ps.”

Back in 2007, research students found that consumers were exposed to an average of 98.5 ads per day. While this number is relatively small compared to the fabled “10,000 ads per day”, this number should have increased significantly in the past decade or so. With so much noise in the market, companies needed better ways to strategically engage their customers, and much more precision regarding B2B marketing given its typical, long-tailed sales cycles.

In B2B marketing, price and promotion are also downplayed, as companies compete to convince different decision-makers within the larger organization, and its buying committee that they can offer the right product, service or solution.

“In B2C (marketing), it’s about web traffic conversion, social engagement, and B2B, it’s more about lead generation and nurturing that individual and buying community through that process.”

So how does experience marketing* work in the B2B space? David postulated that experience-based marketing can be an outcome of portfolio marketing – which both Kalyan and himself had used as the core of how modern B2B marketing can be designed and executed.

A holistic yet elegant B2B marketing framework

Looking at marketing holistically, David and Kalyan distilled the best practices of B2B marketing into the following framework.

Image courtesy of TinyTechGuides

The B2B Modern Marketing framework developed by the authors is set against the buyers’ journey. Instead of the run-of-mill TOFU/MOFU/BOFU funnel marketers are accustomed to, we look at the journey in a cyclical fashion, laid out against the four phases of thought leadership & awareness, consideration, decision & closing, and adoption & upsell.

David added that advocacy (adoption & upsell) is often a critical stage where companies can double down on customer experience management, making sure that users within the organization understand the product, how to use it, and to advocate for its adoption within the larger community.

“If you look at customer relationship management software, like Salesforce, there are over 800 different vendors out there. When switching costs are low, how do companies differentiate themselves?”

When asked why Portfolio Marketing is at the heart of his framework, David explained that the people behind portfolio management or product management act as a “glue function”, like a conductor of an orchestra, to help ensure everything runs smoothly. These subject matter experts are the bridge between product development and sales and marketing. The next layer of influence is content marketing, where teams develop the right content to deliver in the right place at the right time, and overlaid across the entire framework is marketing operations to enable, deliver and measure.

Advocacy (adoption & upsell) is often a critical stage where companies can double down on customer experience management, making sure that users within the organization understand the product, how to use it, and to advocate for its adoption within the larger community.

“Think of them as the engine, systems, technology, process, and analytics that help you understand the effectiveness of your marketing.”

Room to grow for B2B marketing maturity

Whilst the framework that David and Kalyan developed can be a great starting point for marketing organizations to build their go-to-market strategy upon, data still plays an important role in ensuring that the right fuel is added to power the modern marketing machine.

Ensuring pristine data collection, management, and governance is a Herculean task, according to David. One of the key challenges as David illustrated, is the lack of coordination between martech stacks within an organization. Without ample investment in time and resources to look at solutions to create an end-to-end view, marketing will be hard-pressed to accelerate efficiencies across their portfolio marketing cycle.

You can purchase a copy of TinyTechGuides’ Modern B2B Marketing: A Practitioner’s Guide for Marketing Excellence at www.tinytechguides.com

SUMMARY

Companies must focus on engaging individual customers strategically, as the power now lies with the consumer. The authors introduce a holistic B2B marketing framework called the B2B Modern Marketing Framework, which follows the buyer’s journey in a cyclical manner, emphasizing thought leadership, awareness, consideration, decision, adoption, and upsell.