B2B
Through best practices, case studies, interviews, and expert advice, ANA magazine's B2B department provides the strategic and tactical edge marketers need to attract, nurture, and convert today's always-on buyers.
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How to Fix a Broken B2B Marketing Automation Strategy
B2B October 18, 2023As they face increasing pressure to provide adequate returns, marketers need to establish clear guidelines for where to invest and ultimately prove the effectiveness of marketing automation. They also must implement test-and-learn scenarios to continuously optimize automation investments, cease lower-performing marketing activities, and personalize their marketing campaigns across multiple channels.
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How Marketers Feed Consumer Hunger for Travel
B2B October 4, 2023Christine Maguire, GM and VP of global business at Tripadvisor and board member at the U.S. Travel Association, says that to keep up with consumer travel demands these days, brands need to deliver seamless experiences, which increasingly requires technology, generative AI, and long-term thinking.
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Sharing Is the Major Ingredient for Revenue Marketing
B2B September 27, 2023While revenue marketing is ultimately about transitioning marketing from a cost center to a revenue driver, that doesn't mean B2B companies can ignore objectives like brand-building and bolstering the customer experience. Despite the inherent friction between the two, sales and marketing alignment is crucial.
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Widening the Pipeline
B2B September 13, 2023Pipeline marketing, or widening the sales funnel throughout every stage of the customer journey, is becoming a more effective way for B2B marketers to generate revenue, according to a recent study. But the process is not linear. It's more of an ecosystem, in which marketers need to be able to respond quickly with the right tools to keep wayward customers and prospects on track.
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B2B Brand-Building Is Having a Moment
B2B September 6, 2023"The B2B Marketing Benchmark" report released in June by LinkedIn and Ipsos notes a growing number of B2B organizations recognize the importance of branding, which they had previously relegated to the back burner. The report also found that three quarters of respondents plan to use or keep using generative artificial intelligence to aid marketing efforts.
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What's Keeping CMOs Up at Night?
B2B August 30, 2023The fifth annual "Marketing On My Mind" report from Brand Keys, based on a survey of more than 500 CMOs, offers insight into what's top of mind for marketers facing what the report calls a "perfect storm" of miseries. Inflation and a possible recession, as well as pressure over increased profits/shareholder value, top the list.
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B2B Marketers Embrace Intent Data
B2B August 16, 2023Intent data — which gathers clues that indicate whether individuals or companies might have an interest in a product, service, category, or topic — is giving marketers more confidence about communicating the value of their data-driven marketing programs to decision-makers.
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Brand-Building Is at the Heart of Customer Loyalty
B2B July 19, 2023Whether B2B or B2C, there's a growing onus on marketers to balance brand-building with lead-generation activities to spur customer loyalty and get people to feel good about their company. The strategy is not nearly as simple as it sounds.
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B2B Companies Double Down on Personalization
B2B July 12, 2023The findings from a recent McKinsey study, which polled 3,800 B2B decision-makers in 13 countries, found that market-share winners — companies that boosted their market share percentage by 10 percent or more last year — are delivering "a great omnichannel experience backed by personalized marketing."
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The Future of B2B Email Marketing
B2B June 28, 2023While email is still a marketing workhorse for B2B companies — 76 percent of respondents in a recent survey credited email marketing for the company’s success — many brands are struggling to find adequate resources and internal support and investment. Is AI the answer?
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More B2B Companies Go Big on Branding
B2B June 14, 2023The consumerization of B2B advertising has been developing for the past few years. But it’s only more recently that business-to-business firms have set their sights well beyond a fixed set of buyers, devoting hefty budgets to events that used to be the sole domain of consumer-facing brands.
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Are B2B Brands Out of Touch with Younger Buyers?
B2B May 24, 2023Compared to older buyers (read: baby boomers and gen Xers), gen Zers rely less on vendors and more on independent sources of information. To get in front of buyers doing their own research, B2B marketers need to devote more resources toward improving how their company shows up in search and amplifying positive mentions and ratings in analysts' reports.
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How to View B2B Customers Through a More Nuanced Lens
B2B May 10, 2023Peter Fader, a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, says B2B companies tend to lump too many customers and prospects together and fail to see those buyers who are the most serious about establishing long-term relationships. Changing the equation requires marketers to get a better read on the definition of customer lifetime value.
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B2B Marketers Face Increasing Pressure to Prove Their Worth
B2B April 26, 2023A recent study coproduced by Chief Marketer and One Trust presents a bit of dichotomy for B2B firms: Although marketers are being tasked with taming their budgets, nearly 80 percent of the study's respondents said their budgets were either increasing or staying the same this year.
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A Hybrid Approach to B2B Media Spending
B2B April 5, 2023Bruce Biegel, senior managing partner at Winterberry Group, says B2B marketers still lag behind their B2C counterparts when it comes to digital marketing spending. That's starting to change, albeit gradually.
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B2B Companies Should Listen to How They Sound
B2B March 22, 2023Voice assistants present B2B companies with an opportunity to bolster their marketing efforts, spread their creative wings, and develop new revenue streams. But in their pursuit of getting their message out via chatbots, marketers must be careful that they develop a consistent tone and can distinguish their brand from the competition.
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Rethinking Thought Leadership
B2B March 8, 2023B2B marketers tend to focus on the quantity of their thought leadership content, rather than the quality, which discourages potential buyers. Hiring journalists, videographers, and other talent versed in storytelling can help turn the tide.
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B2B Buyers' Appetite for Webinars Is Growing
B2B February 22, 2023Amid the pandemic and people working from home more frequently, demand for webinars and virtual events has surged in the past few years throughout the B2B sector, per a new study. But potential buyers don't sign up for webinars and/or online conferences to hear a sales pitch, so it's crucial that marketers develop valuable, thought-based content to include in their programming lest they alienate their customers and prospects.
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Improving Relations with Local Partners
B2B February 15, 2023The pandemic has altered the map when it comes to where people spend their money, with more and more dollars flowing locally. Brands can easily tailor a national message to local markets, of course, thanks to geotargeting and other online tools. But a new study shows that national brands tend to underinvest when it comes to guiding local partners about how to improve their online marketing strategies.
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For B2B Ad Creative, Playing It Safe Is Getting Awfully Risky
B2B February 8, 2023Saul Colt, founder and CEO of the Idea Integration Co., watched as B2B clients put their ad campaigns on hold during the pandemic. Only half of his business came back in 2021, so Colt decided to shake things up in 2022 and took a big financial risk, hiring 17 cartoonists and comic writers formerly of "MAD Magazine" and "The Simpsons" to beef up the agency's creative muscle and widen the field of prospects to pitch.
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