🛒 5 Tips for Marketing to the Modern-day B2B Buyer
Who are they? What do they want? And why should they care?
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Buyer Persona
🤷 Who the Hell is the Modern-day B2B Buyer?
Last Tuesday I was fortunate to be invited by Dan and Amelia to lead a talk in their Marketing Millennials Clubhouse room on answering a simple question:
Who the hell is the modern-day B2B buyer?
While the conversation naturally digressed onto other subjects - isn’t that always the way with Clubhouse? - there was a consensus that answering that question requires an understanding of B2C buying behaviour.
Why? Because the lines between the two camps are increasingly blurred.
You’ve heard the cliché before, but it bears repeating. You never market to a business; you market to a human. And that human - yes, the one buying enterprise software or construction equipment or professional services - doesn’t truly care about your tired-looking white paper.
They care about being entertained and educated. Same as consumers.
Below I outline five characteristics of the modern-day B2B buyer and provide examples of what you can do to make them give a damn.
Here we go!
#1. They’re Getting Younger
Almost three-quarters of those aged between 21 and 40 that work in B2B are involved in buying decisions for their companies.
What’s a snappier name for this group? You guessed it.
There are a few things that make them special. For one, they’re ubiquitously tech-savvy. 70% say they use social media every day compared to just 45% of those older than forty.
They are also time-poor, permanently online and increasingly struggle to separate their personal and professional lives. One minute they may be trawling through a tech spec, while the next jumping onto Twitch to watch a League of Legends livestream.
And as marketers, it’s our responsibility to try and capitalise on all of these factors to meet them where they least expect.
What Can You Do About It?
It is 100x easier to get seen via a channel none of your competitors is using than on the one that’s considered a default.
Why spend all your resources competing on keywords like everyone else, when not one of your competitors has launched a podcast? Is there much point in flooding your LinkedIn feed with blog content that just adds to the noise when Instagram is underplayed?
I’m not saying you should waste your time shouting into a void. I’m saying think hard on the platforms your customers may be using when they’re not at work. It’s in those places you need a presence.
This is something that my friends over at Trainual do so well. Check out this blog post I wrote on their work with the cast from The Office (US) last year and how it helped them net 20 million views across Facebook and Instagram and land 2,000 new accounts.
#2. They Use Social Media
This article got blasted on Twitter a few weeks back after it cited ‘becoming a social media manager’ as one of the best side hustles for 2021. Why? Because for an industry that generated $43 billion last year in ad spend alone, I think we can safely say it’s a little bit more than something you do in your spare time.
40% of millennials cite using social media to discover new products and services for work. This makes sense - they are the first demographic who entered the workforce with it already embedded as a core component of their day-to-day lives.
What doesn’t make sense is the number of B2B companies that have yet to hire a dedicated social media professional to act as their internal advocate for the channel as a legitimate avenue of business growth.
What Can You Do About It?
It’s not enough to just “be” on social media. My Gran has a Facebook account, for crying out loud. You need to do something meaningful with it.
Here’s an idea. Consider investing in helping willing participants from your workforce to build their own personal brands. After all, the people you employ should be your largest advocates. Provide the training and support they need to effectively wield these platforms to build their followings and, in turn, benefit from the halo effect.
Take SAP for example. In a given month they may post 40-60 times. Collectively their employees post 40,000 times. That’s tens of thousands of opportunities to massively grow your reach beyond your organic followers.
Employee advocacy is a booming trend in the marketing world - 91% of B2B buyers are active on social media, after all - and the bar is low in B2B to begin leveraging it. There’s not going to be a better time than now to get ahead.
#3. They Give a Damn
In an effort to maintain a perceived degree of professionalism - and perhaps a lesser degree of external pressure - many B2B brands have held out longer than their B2C cousins in taking overt stances on the political issues of the day.
But this position is untenable. Values matter more than ever. Almost all professionals aged between 21 and 40 believe it’s right for a company to enact meaningful changes in response to social issues - and, importantly, take action.
This has been accelerated by the highly politicised events of 2020. According to this report, there is a growing feeling of shared responsibility on matters like gender equality and diversity, protecting the environment and sustainability.
What Can You Do About It?
The answer is in the header. You need to give a damn about something and be vocal about what you’re actually doing to support it.
This should not be because you feel obligated to meet the expectation of a buyer or follow in the footsteps of contemporaries making moves. It’s because it’s the right thing to do. Every business should contribute something to make the world a better place and be clear about the steps it is taking in order to do that.
If you need inspiration, I highly recommend checking out this interview with Jennifer Tejada, PagerDuty’s CEO, on the steps her company has taken to combat racism and their vision for a better, more diverse industry.
#4. They Do Their Research Online
Younger B2B buyers want to be considered trendsetters. They like to experiment with new solutions, bring different answers to the table and 63% under the age of 30 cite wanting to ‘stand out in a crowd’ versus just 27% of their 51+ counterparts.
But while the need to be seen as a trailblazer burns bright, their desire for security and reassurance is still clear. They don’t want to take an unnecessary risk that could jeopardise their career.
Essentially, they want what you could consider ‘safe’ innovation. And that means they spend the most time exploring the widest range of vendors. And you know where 70% of this research occurs? Online, before anyone even picks up the phone to speak to your sales rep.
What Can You Do About It?
I consider the idea of ‘research’ on a spectrum. On the left side, there’s the expected, logical definition of the term, where a buyer is seeking out information on feature specs and pricing information. Lots of B2B companies are good at providing this.
On the right, there’s the emotional “this is a company worth paying attention to” definition. This is the place where your brand shines through and unfortunately where many operators fall short.
You may think - quite accurately, I’d say - that this spectrum could also be interpreted as a conventional marketing funnel flipped on its side.
Companies shouldn’t consider ‘research’ as just what a buyer can find on your website about your product or service. Everything you do at the top of the funnel to build awareness and grow authority contributes to their understanding of who you are, how you can help and, most importantly, why you’re different.
I haven’t seen it out in the wild yet, but I feel Clubhouse could be a fantastic tool for B2B companies to get on the radar of their potential clients. You can use it to share your brand story, secure product feedback, interview clients or industry thought leaders, run focus groups… the list is limited only by your imagination.
(Oof… was that was cheesy? You know what, I stand by it.)
#5. They Need a Little More Emotion
No, that doesn’t mean you should call up the receptionist of your target account and start spilling your guts out. But you should try and inject a little more passion into your TOFU marketing.
According to research from the LinkedIn B2B Institute, 77% of B2B creative is terrible. It has literally no impact on the bottom line. And this is a problem because great advertising is 10 to 20 times better at driving sales than crappy advertising.
This is money just left on the table.
I often get frustrated when I hear B2B described as “emotionless”. It couldn’t be further from the truth! If you buy a banana and you don’t like it, you throw it away and that’s the end of the story. Buy a product that costs potentially millions of dollars and affects the lives of thousands of your colleagues however… get that wrong and it’s your livelihood on the line.
B2B is emotional AF. In fact, a study from Google and CEB has found that B2B customers are significantly more emotionally connected with their vendors and service providers than consumers.
And that, my friends, is an opportunity.
What Can You Do About It?
Get creative. Marketing is the art of telling stories with a goal to persuade. We’ve been doing both of these things since we crawled of the primordial ooze, yet somehow at the peak of our evolutionary sophistication, B2B marketers have lost their way.
When preparing content, ask yourself a simple question - does this make me feel anything? If the answer is “weary” then it’s back to the drawing board for you, my good friend.
One of my favourite examples of phenomenal creative is from MongoDB, an open-source NoSQL database management program. Their mission was to create an ad campaign “for an audience that hates ad campaign” - developers - and the result is simply outstanding.
🍴 Nibbles
Check out this article from Claire Kennedy on how to effectively sell on social media (it features a totally acceptable amount of images featuring pugs - yes, the dogs - wrapped up in blankets.)
Was so excited to see one of my lockdown Twitter friends published in Adweek last week. Nicole issued a stunning and compelling rebuke to a recent Forbes article that diminished the role of social media professionals. A must-read.
📅 Upcoming
On Saturday 20th I’m excited to be giving a presentation on The 6 Strategic Marketing Mistakes B2B Companies Make - & How to Avoid Them for HelloMeets. You can sign-up here.
Pumped to be giving a presentation to the members of ContentUK on Thursday 25th February on building a killer content strategy that hits brand and revenue targets. Sign-up to the community and event here.
...…and here’s my podcast
Every two weeks I sit down with a marketing leader to lean how they hit their goals by thinking outside the box - and dig into how this can be applied to other B2B businesses. Here are a few of my most recent episodes.
2021 B2B Marketing Trends w/ A Bunch of Folk [NEW EPISODE]
What it Takes to Build a Successful B2B Community w/ Christina Pashialis
Tell Me Why… You Need Pop Culture in B2B Marketing w/ Brianne Fleming
Building a 10,000 Strong B2B Email List from Scratch w/ Sean Blanda
How to Use Instagram to Promote People and Culture w/ Nicole Tabak
You can also find the B2B Better on Apple Podcasts and almost all other podcast directories.
And that's it! See you next week.