B2B marketing leaders target buying groups as part of a winning strategy

B2B has become a buyer’s market. As a B2B marketer, it’s no longer about your sales cycle, it’s about your customer’s buying cycle.

All this is the result of pre-existing trends which were turbocharged during the Covid pandemic. Buyers are doing more research online, and for longer. Their main source of product information is no longer a salesperson, and purchasing decisions are increasingly made by a cross-company committee.

This is the context for new research Adobe has carried out in conjunction with London Research. The Case for B2B Personalisation report* shows that successful B2B marketers are moving away from targeting individuals or using account-based marketing. On their own, these approaches can be either too broad or too narrow.

Instead, they’re concentrating on the groups of senior individuals who oversee purchases that can run into millions of pounds, euros or dollars.

These buying groups are now the dominant force in B2B purchasing. As one head of marketing interviewed for the report told the report authors: “We need to have consistent messaging across the different personas we’re talking to inside a company, but customised to the needs of each persona. We have various personas as customers and as buyers. They can be from marketing, they can be from HR, they can be from IT, even from sales.”

What the buying committee needs

The two main differences in marketing to a buying group– rather than an individual or an account – relate to increased knowledge and greater scale. You need to know who all the committee members are, and what information they need from you to influence their choice. Then you need to create tailored content for each of them, and distribute it so they’ll find it.

In other words, it’s the new, modern approach to revenue marketing. And increasingly it’s what successful B2B marketers are doing. The research compared the behaviours of B2B marketing leaders (the top 25% most sophisticated in our survey) with that of laggards (the 15% least sophisticated). We found that a third (34%) of B2B marketing leaders focus their activities on these buying groups, and this compares to only 19% of laggards.

The challenges of a buying group-based approach

The challenges facing marketers looking to adopt a buying group-focused approach are significant. Our survey respondents told us that legacy software platforms are the greatest barrier to creating more personalised B2B customer experiences. Others include fragmented data, difficulty proving the business case for investment, lack of sales and marketing alignment, and the inability to produce personalised content at scale.

All these issues are linked, of course. Companies that struggle to make the business case for investment in a buying group-based approach are also likely to have technology that hasn’t been updated or replaced recently. They’ll also struggle to align their sales and marketing teams if the C-suite doesn’t think it’s important to do so. And while generative AI promises to revolutionise the creation of personalised marketing content at scale, siloed data means you’ll fall at the first hurdle. As Courtny Edwards-Jones, Senior Marketing Operations Manager at enterprise software company Zuora, told the researchers: “From a marketing operations and martech perspective, data quality is critical. Before you even get into using AI while curating automated journeys, if you have incorrect data or data inconsistencies, you will not be able to implement personalisation in a way that’s going to have impact and drive growth.”

Investing for success

Businesses adopting a buying group strategy are turning to technology to solve these problems. Leaders are much more likely than laggards to have technology that supports a buying-group focus. They’re also far more likely to rate their technology platform highly for other relevant B2B use cases, such as include experience optimisation, every-touch attribution, contextual personalisation, generative AI, and contact acquisition.

Leaders are also 40% more likely than laggards to spend significantly more on marketing technology over the next 12 months. They realise it’s the only way to personalise marketing communications at scale.

Robert Nicholson, Director of Digital Marketing, Data and Analytics at recruitment firm Robert Walters, highlighted the difference AI can make.

“When you realise you’ve got to write five hundred intro paragraphs, or source thousands of different images for just one email, and you’ve got to do that every week, you don’t do it.” he said. “AI means it’s now much more feasible to create that personalised approach.”

Adopting a buying group-based approach to marketing is inherently a more resource-effective method for generating higher-quality sales opportunities, shortening sales cycles, and maintaining alignment across internal revenue teams for a better customer experience.

Please visit the Adobe website for more information about how we can help you target buying groups more effectively.

* The full report – The Case for B2B Personalisation – is now available for download. More information about how Adobe can help you transform your B2B marketing can be found here.

https://business.adobe.com/fragments/resources/cards/thank-you-collections/ajo