All ideas start with insight, and all great ideas require great insight. Insight enables you to see and understand what your audience is all about, and marketing without insight is like marketing blind. Many B2B organizations make educated guesses at what they perceive to be the wants and needs of their customers. However, true marketing insight is generated through carefully considered interpretation of business intelligence and financial data. It’s the stuff that’s gathered through the process of analyzing market research, together with everything already known about the target market. It provides vital information and data that helps us craft killer ideas and creative ways to communicate to our audience.
Strategy – Get Integrated
Marketing in the B2B space is not like marketing to consumers. I love Paul Dunay’s analogy: if B2C marketing is a sprint, then B2B marketing is a marathon. Let’s face it. We are living in an age of information overload. It’s a noisy landscape. That’s why it is so important for B2B organizations to cut through that noise with integrated marketing that’s both strategic and creatively crafted. In the everyday bombardment of messages and tweets, it is pointless to hope to stand out and be heard without consistently engaging our audience. An integrated B2B marketing strategy helps organizations successfully connect with their customers because it helps them get branded, get online and get social in relevant and meaningful ways.
Creativity is no longer just an embellishment to brand management. It has become a strategic imperative for creating killer content and a core driver of innovation and differentiation in a crowded marketplace. Creative thinking is drastically transforming online experiences by separating great content from mediocre content. Why? Because creating great content is hard. It’s not a creative writing or pixel pushing project. You can’t “just create something” out of thin air. Content creators know that great content involves so much more than “clever buzzwords” (if there is such a thing). Great content requires a balance between function and form, both written and visual, in order to deliver an experience that is both relevant and meaningful to the customer.
Planning and executing a marketing program is a good start, but how are the results measured? What’s working? What’s not? Accurate metrics involves consistent and persistent monitoring, measuring and adjusting along the way. The process becomes truly valuable when the right data helps make intelligent business decisions. A critical component to achieving the right data is testing. At Ad-Tech, last April, I learned that less than 30% of companies test their marketing. Those 30% saw their marketing ROI increase by more than 70%! That means the majority of companies rely on gut instinct and misinformation. No wonder marketing is perceived as an expense rather than an investment! When in doubt, test… and then test again, because testing illustrates what the customer really wants.
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