We spoke with Dirk Wischnewski, CMO at B2B Media Group on B2B marketing and data management from an agency perspective.
What are some of the industry trends you are most excited about and why?
There’s a B2B shift from purely sales-driven activities (which doesn’t build on long term growth) to investing in online marketing tools that the B2C marketers have worked with for years.
The recent cancellation of trade shows pushed B2B companies to rethink their customer acquisition strategies. You have to engage potential clients early in the buying process in order to win. This includes being at the top of buyers’ minds and generating new leads at scale. In a hypercompetitive and fast-moving sales environment, successful B2B companies are active across the entire buying funnel including the right data, technology, and specialists.
How tough it is to work in this industry, and what advice would you give?
With less resource and rising complexity in B2B marketing, it’s very hard for B2B companies and their employees to handle new technology tools and get the most from data sources while advancing their marketing activities.
B2B marketing has moved at a much slower pace than B2C. It’s grown significantly in the past 2-3 years. With the cancellation of trade shows, budgets having shifted to support online marketing activity for lead generation.
From our experience, it’s more important than ever to invest in online marketing. This enables businesses to engage with the right audience at the right time. It’s also key to partner with experienced people who are capable of implementing the right tools to outpace the competition.
What are some of the pain points in marketing that you’ve experienced?
Despite the growth in online marketing, many companies – especially in the B2B world – don’t know where to find their potential buyers online, or bring in leads on scale to support their sales team.
Executing highly targeted campaigns that reach the right buyer and prompt the desired action is a common grey area. Clients want to avoid unwanted clicks on their ads. They also want to apply their data and learnings from previous campaigns when running news ones. As technology adoption increases and data becomes more intelligent and accessible, we expect these pain points to ease.
What’s a marketing achievement that you’re happiest about?
In the manufacturing world where target audiences are niche and specialist in nature, we recently supported Synapticon to reach over 50,000 relevant professionals with over 150,000 minutes of advertising time. By addressing the desired, highly-focused target group with the right advertising content, the company was able to identify, match with, and then reach its potential customers.
Running these campaigns across different touchpoints online – targeting people wherever they are in their buying or decision-making process – it’s essential for forming high-quality connections. This is ultimately at the centre of what good, effective marketing is today.
How do you improve your data in B2B marketing?
B2B companies need to start collecting their own data. It sounds obvious. But from my experience, the vast majority of B2B companies we work with neither collect data on how they managed to acquire existing clients, nor save data from their marketing campaigns or on their website visitors. This information can be extremely valuable when running campaigns because it enables the campaigns to evolve with improved targeting.
Ultimately, B2B companies can save money and time if they work intelligently with their data. Collecting the data properly can be achieved by using a data management platform. But harvesting it for future campaigns is something best left to specialists- companies that are highly experienced at applying first and third party data to targetted marketing campaigns at scale.