Three Opportunities B2B Marketers Must Seize During 2021 Planning
2020 has been laden
with challenges for companies, but when I think about the current state of the
B2B marketing landscape, I realize this year has also been setting the stage
for much-needed improvements.
As
companies continue annual planning for 2021, we have an opportunity to reboot
businesses and accelerate progress in the direction we've known—for years—we
need to go toward.
Here are
three mission-critical concepts to carry into your annual planning this fall.
1. The B2B-B2C divide has vanished—connect the dots with data
The
professional world's gradual shift to remote, more-flexible working
environments was kicked into hyperdrive by the COVID-19 pandemic, and there's
no going back.
Nearly three-fourths
of CFOs expect to permanently shift at least 5% of their workforces to
remote environments. Meanwhile, some companies—including Twitter, Square, and
Facebook—are pushing to make the move a widespread, enduring option.
Workers
who have spent even a portion of the past few months in a new work-from-home
situation can tell you that the blending of personal and professional spaces
has significant implications for how they structure their days, environments,
and even their fundamental daily mindsets.
Such
dramatic shifts—the pros and cons of which depend on the individual—have vast
implications for consumer journeys in both the B2B and B2C marketing worlds,
particularly in how marketers think about audience data.
We
need to stop communicating with "consumers" or "business
professionals." We're communicating with humans—complex
individuals with equally complex daily schedules and shifting mindsets. We need
to apply human-level insights into understanding such complexities and
identifying the moments in which those individuals are emotionally ready to
hear from our brands.
Traditional
dayparts no longer apply. An insurance executive today is just as likely to be
helping her son troubleshoot a virtual learning Zoom call for school at 2 PM on
a Wednesday as she is to be thinking about the CRM needs of her organization.
Likewise, the general manager of a major retail banking operation isn't
necessarily unwinding from his day at 8 PM on a Friday evening. He might well
be cranking on his PowerPoint presentation for Monday's board meeting.
Today,
if you're going to build a strong customer journey, understanding the mindset
of each individual in the moment is everything.
2. Embrace the merging
worlds in predictive marketing
Marketers
are now living and working in a predictive world. Leading brands are using data
to make better decisions about communicating with and serving their customers.
That
is the essence of predictive marketing, a movement that has become all the more
vital in today's strained economic environment, where marketers are tasked to
find new efficiencies within their media plans. Data is no longer just an
asset; it's a living, kinetic thing from which real-time insights can be
derived and acted on. The only way to do so effectively and to truly optimize
experiences is to combine human intelligence with artificial intelligence.
The
best predictive marketing puts a personal understanding of each individual at
the heart of a company's media planning and buying. Advances in data and
technology over the past decade have brought that vision to life for many
businesses. The problem, however, is that those strategies have typically taken
into consideration only half of each individual—the personal half or
professional half.
It's
time to break down that dichotomy once and for all.
3. Treat mobile as the
foundational platform it is
The
context in which B2C and B2B brands communicate with prospects and customers is
now a blended reality in which any given hour for a target audience member
could include a conference call with a client, a laundry-folding session, and a
break to fix an eight-year-old a snack. That reality requires a new approach to
data-driven marketing.
Today,
a B2C brand needs to supplement its knowledge of customers according to their
professional lives, while a B2B brand needs to extend its knowledge of
customers through their personal details and preferences. For marketers on both
sides, that means figuring out how to find and manage new attributes within
their CRM. On the B2B side, it means a fundamental reorganization of
data—including rethinking the importance of previously coveted information,
such as a person's direct dial at work.
These
days, mobile phone numbers are the ultimate identifier for bridging the record
gaps between a person's personal and professional profiles. After all, a
person's mobile phone isn't just a path to calling them directly; it's a
foundational platform for connecting via numerous channels, at any time of day,
and thus driving direct commerce.
The expectations of today's consumers and business customers for personalized experiences have been heightened in a world where the devices around them recognize and adapt to them as individuals. They expect their marketing experiences to follow suit.
For
years, people have given marketers a pass for treating them as two separate
entities—a personal version and a work version—because they, too, physically
separated those elements of their lives. But, suddenly and irrevocably, that
time has come to an end. Today's reality is one where we don't separate our
personal from our professional selves. We are simply our human selves.
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