B2B marketers who have been finding success with account-based marketing can take this approach a step further by embracing behaviour-based marketing, a new WARC Best Practice Paper suggests.

The B2B buyer journey is rarely straightforward, often involving multiple stakeholders in different parts of an organisation.

What makes it even harder is that not only do marketers need to identify prospective buyers, these buyers are also probably at different stages of the buying journey and therefore responsive to different messages.

In How behaviour-based marketing can improve B2B marketing, Jon Clarke of Cyance, argues that a behaviour-based approach can help solve such problems by targeting the same customers, but when they are actively seeking to buy.

“By using hard data on prospects’ buying signals, marketers can understand where their customers are in the buying cycle,” he explains. “They can then study data in real time to find out who’s in active buying mode and target them with extreme precision.”

In many organisations, this may require a change of mindset – involving a shift away from volume-based mass marketing to drive lead generation to a focus on delivering a more concentrated number of very high-quality leads.

This requires strong leadership across both sales and marketing, Clarke advises. “However, by focusing on the shared objective of achieving greater revenues and longer-term customer lifetime value (CLV), it will bring the sales and marketing leadership behind one cohesive business plan.”

He proposes a five-step strategy to achieving this, beginning with the adoption of a structured measurement approach: this helps a business to identify its total addressable market based on the customer’s current or future value to the business and levels of engagement.

The creation of a framework is also essential: as well as highlighting where to focus more effort on prospects most likely to buy, this can indicate areas for a business to cut back on.

Sourced from WARC