The Consumerization of B2B Marketing
In our daily lives we have come to expect the targeted , personalized advertising and content provided to us as we browse consumer sites like Amazon . com , rank and rate stores and services on Yelp , and interact with our social networks through Facebook and LinkedIn . Yet when it comes to being marketed to in a B2B context , we find ourselves continuously bombarded by the techniques , content and methods in an attempt to engage us .
As a CMO with purchasing authority , ( Note to Google crawler : please don ’ t index these keywords , I get enough spam as it is J ), I do actually review and read the emails sent to me , however I know I ’ m a rarity . What I notice is that the information is mostly generic , without any basic understanding of what my company does , what stage we are in our company ’ s growth , and what problems the company marketing to me feels like I would likely need to address .
Most B2B Companies Don ’ t Know Enough about Their Customers
There is an incredible amount of public information about companies today , available through sources such as LinkedIn , and quite frankly , the company ’ s own website . In addition , there is also a wealth of personal information , such as authored articles , speaking engagements , related and affiliated connections between the person who is receiving the email , and other organizations and peers in the industry . All of this data should be used by B2B marketers as input to formulating their campaigns , and let ’ s not forget the most important point , “ does the prospect really have a need and budget at this point in time to want to engage with you ?”
18 Strictly Marketing Magazine September / October 2016
Inundating prospects with emails when they are not ready to even consider your product is not only unproductive at best , but it ’ s annoying and may have the opposite of the desired impact .
So why don ’ t many companies adopt the same techniques as retails such as Amazon ? Why aren ’ t they doing hyper-personalization , and engaging with prospects in a manner in which prospects would prefer ? The reality is , despite advances in technology in the form of customer relationship management ( CRM ) and marketing automation ( MA ), companies are still struggling with getting a complete view of their prospects / customers across a growing number of internal and external sources .
A reliable data foundation is a pre-requisite to attempting such engagement and personalization . For large enterprises , many have attempted to use legacy , heavyweight disciplines such as master data management ( MDM ), which have yielded minimal gains . Investments in technologies have traditionally cost millions in software and hardware , as well as a significant services and implementation cost . And these technologies have been the responsibility of IT teams , with the business users still using traditional CRM and MA applications in their siloed pools of their view of the customer . The result ? Uncoordinated engagement with the customer and missing insights that could provide the details needed for hyper-personalization .