The Changing Face of Buying Behaviours and B2B Marketing Strategies in 2022

From sustainability to voice search – changing buying behaviours that will evolve our B2B marketing strategies for good…

B2B marketing has undergone a significant shift change over the last couple of years, partially because of the pressures of the global Covid lockdown and buyer behaviours changing thereof.

Reliance on the traditional telemarketing agencies and sales networking at events and exhibitions have naturally decreased, with more returns being seen from digital marketing campaigns.

As we move into 2022, there are a few buyer behaviours we would like you to consider before you devise a campaign plan for the New Year….

Buyers are now searching for solutions to their problems online and often ask Alexa or voice search devices to do the searches for us. This trend is seen less in B2B searches and more relevant for retail clients, however, it’s only a matter of time before the trend catches up.

What does this mean for you?

We suggest you prepare and optimise your website for voice search, Google snippets and answers to commonly asked questions via website content becomes important.  When it is becoming more important to consumers, the trend will follow in the B2B world as we become more accustomed to these behaviours in our day-to-day life.

• ‘Think With Google’ estimates that some 89% of B2B researchers use the internet in their research process, and 55% search for business information on social media.  So, what does this mean for you?

• Search visibility – Your web presence and visibility for relevant search terms is hugely important. Also, the lines between social media and website content are blurring, so social media planning should really be a critical component of your SEO strategy going into 2022.

• Make your pages informative – The user is looking for unbiased information to be able to make an informed decision and you can only win by adopting a content strategy that fulfils a prospect’s need for information. If for example, a prospect is looking for a software solution, the decision to buy from you will be based on; features of the product, how they can buy from you, will they be supported after they buy from you, transparency of your pricing model and most importantly, has anyone else used your product/service and have they achieved similar goals to this customer.

• References and reviews – References and reviews are helpful in establishing your credibility and convincing a prospect to buy from you.

• We are all conscious buyers – An independent study commissioned by SmartestEnergy reveals that 81% of consumers are increasingly favouring brands with a commitment to environmental sustainability. What does this mean for you?

Whether you are a software provider, a holiday letting website or a business consultancy, please make sustainability part of your marketing strategy. You can create a simple plan of how you pledge to be more sustainable as a workplace and as individuals within the company.  For inspiration, read how we at Predictable Marketing are doing our bit as a business towards sustainability.

Content is everywhere; but not a word to read.

Yes, we are constantly bombarded with content from all sources – email, social and digital platforms.  But rarely do we find a piece of content that is authentic and gives us more information about a topic than we already know. Although content is everywhere the need for authentic content has never been greater.   What does this mean for you?

• Create informative content
• Create content formats that make information easy to digest
• Visual content is important
• Where the content is delivered is important too
• There is also a shift towards digital entertainment which means that gamified content is received a lot better
• More emphasis on digital experiences means website usability and experience will be more important than ever.

As with creating more authentic content, personalisation and approachable tones will become a necessity. Not only is customisable content a must, but crucially as a population, we are at a time in history, where due to the global events over the past two years, we have all been through something at the same time; meaning we are connected in ways we haven’t been before. What does this mean to you?

While topics may be sales or process-based, some humour and shorter, snappier language won’t go amiss with your recipient when their workloads may have increased and the need for lighter content or email marketing is welcomed.

Enterprises are moving away from email as the main communication channel to more collaborative platforms like Teams, Slack, Asana, Trello, Monday.com, Zoom and the likes.

What does this mean for you?

Marketers will need to innovate email campaigns so they render well on these platforms. If you have some downtime in your schedule, we suggest you take that time to familiarise yourself with the platforms you may not have used before – as it’s likely in 2022 you will.

Marketing Strategies to Succeed in the Final Year Quarter 

The last quarter of the year is a busy one for many businesses. Not only do the retail and hospitality sectors ramp up their efforts ahead of the holidays, but software and technology businesses are also looking to finish the year strongly. Sales teams around the world are working frantically to close deals ahead of the start of a new year. The past two years have been particularly tough for businesses, but with the looming threat of Covid-19 and lockdowns hopefully behind them, they are looking for a strong finish, propelling themselves into 2022 in a good position.  

With so many pressures already on the sales team, it is important to have a strong marketing strategy in place to support them.   

Here are four ways how marketing can help you achieve your annual sales goals:

Identify the Quick Wins  

Marketing or demand generation functions can help in generating new leads and supporting the sales team, however with quarter 4 being so pivotal for businesses, sales efforts are focussed on closing the deals already in the pipeline and new lead generation and prospecting can take a back seat. 

Although in this last quarter of the year, it’s less likely that a new, bluebird deal will emerge and close. We therefore recommend looking for quick-win opportunities that could be triggered by the calendar year-end pressure. Putting our software, B2B marketing, thinking hat on, we’re talking about product end of life service and support or thinking of special discounts that you can offer on products.

Replicate Successful Demand Generation Campaigns 

Another option is to replicate past successes.  In order to achieve your sales goals, it’s vital to analyse where your past successes came from. That is why it’s important to use the data and experience you already have to its maximum value. You can pull a massive amount of analytics from nearly all your marketing channels and your CRM system. Marketing teams can help put together campaigns, based upon this data, which will give them insights into which sector to target, with what message and through which marketing channel. 

This data can help paint a picture of what worked and what didn’t, allowing you to dig into what engaged your audience and what they ignored. This data will be vital for planning content to use throughout this quarter. By analysing pieces of content, which format it was sent in and what elements made it click with your audience will help you make your campaign click with your target market.  

If your customers have the budget or regulatory pressures to meet in the calendar year, try timing your campaigns with it to gain some quick wins.  What does a sales team love more than a prospect that is under pressure to buy! 

If You Want Success, Emulate It

Don’t be shy in following the path of a successful competitor campaign. For example, we have been working on a campaign around supply chain automation for a UiPath partner. This campaign has generated 10 qualified sales opportunities within a month of running. If you can service the supply chain market why not try a similar campaign with your offering.

If your competition is particularly successful in a campaign, can you identify what made that campaign successful and replicate it with your own unique offering?  Where it is not recommended to just copy what they have done, you can isolate elements of their work for your own plans and leverage a market trend.

Set and Know Your End Goal, What do You Want Your Jan 1 2022 to Look Like  

Your marketing and demand generation efforts now, will not only give this calendar year a final push but will also create a pipeline for 2022. Hence, when formulating your strategy for the last push of 2021, it can be helpful to think about how your objectives will set you up beyond December 31st. Look ahead now to the 3rd of January, when most of us will be returning to work, how do you want your pipeline to look? What kind of leads do you want to be chasing? What are the sales goals you would like to achieve? Picturing this now will help you streamline your aims for the coming few months and help you achieve this.  

Set Your  Marketing Calendar  

The coming few months can get filled up very quickly. In between national holidays, the run-up to Christmas and family commitments, it can leave little room in your potential lead’s diaries. It is therefore important to plan your campaigns out in advance. Be mindful of what your potential customers might be up to at that time and target them when they are more likely to engage. Try to catch them earlier within the days and weeks before they get too bogged down with their own work. If you are unsure of when is best to target your leads, try a few different times, from early in the day to just after lunch or the last few working hours, you may be surprised what time works best for you.  

If you have the time, it might also be worthwhile attending a few in-person or online events. Especially now that face to face or hybrid events are back! October and November, in the business world, see a surge of events and racing for business awards. While don’t recommend splurging on PR and events, evaluating and being present at events where you have an opportunity to meet your customers should never be ignored. Just make sure you are double jabbed before you say yes to attend!  

Organise Your Downtime 

As busy as this quarter can be, you can also be faced with a sudden drop off in late December and over the Christmas break. For marketers, however, this is a perfect opportunity to invest some time into looking after your data. You can clear out disinterested or dead leads, highlight particularly fruitful contacts and finalising plans for next year. The groundwork now will pay dividends in the new year as you are able to hit the ground running.   

All of this planning can seem a little daunting at first, with many not knowing where to start or how to best optimise the assets available to them. That is why our last point for a successful last quarter is to ask for help.  

Many businesses are now recognising the benefits of outsourcing marketing or demand generations and using a digital agency that is best aligned to their needs.

Predictable Marketing has a proven track record of securing quality leads for software and technology businesses. If you would like help strategizing a successful last marketing quarter and beyond, get in touch to find out more.  

Marketing Automation vs Personalisation, Which is Best?

Marketing automation and personalisation are two of the biggest trends in business-to-business communication. At a glance, they might appear very similar, but the two approaches encompass completely different tactics and methods. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but which is right for you?

A sales team would argue that personalisation is the best approach. The process of personalising your campaigns can take many forms, but essential it encompasses any effort made to align your actions to an individual’s prospects, characteristics or needs. The idea being that in making your email personalised to the customer you are investing in and building a long-term relationship with them. With research suggesting it can be up to 25% more expensive to acquire a new customer, rather than retaining an existing one, it’s easy to see why it’s important to value and maintain long-term customer relationships.

Sales teams are always in favour of personalising an email because they generally only get one chance to be in front of a prospect. With this limitation, it is important their messaging appears personalised and relevant to the specific needs of that customer. It can also build recognition between the customer and your brand, making you stand out from the crowd. Personalisation does however have its drawbacks. It can be an expensive route, with the need to collect personalised data from all your potential customers and having a reactive team who can change materials quickly based on the customer’s needs. Within B2B marketing, businesses are very much aware of the technology available to allow mass-sent emails to look personalised, meaning your personalisation efforts might still be in vain.

Marketing automation encompasses a large range of marketing practises that can be executed and optimised with automation, these include data gathering, lead generating, email marketing, social media and more. Marketing teams are more in favour of an automated approach as it allows them to reach a vast number of people quickly and efficiently. As you know marketing is at times a numbers game, you’ll have to kiss 10 frogs before you find your prince and automation allows marketing teams to do this. Automation not only plays a key role in outbound marketing but can also be effectively used within an inbound lead generation strategy.  For example, to personally reply to every enquiry you have may be fine if you get 10 enquiries in a month, but what happens when you’re getting 50 in a week? Automating your replies to inbound messaging will help you direct your customer enquiries and allow you to use your time more effectively.

So, automation or personalisation, which is the correct approach?

The answer is a mixture of both.  The two approaches can be utilised in tandem with a number of intersections within a sales and marketing journey. If a sales team can segment their prospect data into small enough groups, matching up the pain points for each customer, then marketing is able to target these smaller groups with personalised messages.

Many of the services or platforms’ marketers use for automating content allow personalisation. There are however two important things that are critical when personalising content.  The first of these is the data you use. If you want to address your recipients by their first names, then you need to have the correct first names in your database beforehand. Personalisation however goes beyond just the first names on an email, it can include the contents of an email or social media messages that change from user to user. That is why the second thing needed is meticulous planning and configuring of automated campaigns, ensuring the content differs from person to person.

A Psychological Based Analysis of Marketing Email Subject Lines 

A Psychological Based Analysis of Marketing Email Subject Lines 

Since its inception in the early 1960s, email has gone on to radically transform our lives. As the technology has become more accessible, marketers have embraced the ability to directly communicate with their consumers, sending messages directly to the smartphone in their pockets. With this capacity, it’s easy to see why email marketing has become invaluable to businesses around the world.  

Email marketing could be classified as any email a business sends to a current or potential customer in which they send advertising material, request business, or solicit sales and donations. More recent marketing strategies have sent communications with the aim of building brand awareness, trust or loyalty. Email marketing has become so popular with businesses for a number of reasons. It is much cheaper than sending traditional mail and can appear almost instantly in front of their consumer. There are also more opportunities to gather analytics from emails. Marketers can analyse who opened their emails, when they opened them, which links they did or didn’t click and use this information to optimize their future messaging. Partnered with an effective marketing and sales funnel, email has become a powerful tool for businesses. 

To achieve any success with Email Marketing, you first need to persuade the reader to open the email. The main deciding factor in a reader’s choice, to open or delete, will be the subject line.  

At present, there has been little scientific research into what triggers a person into opening and reading an email. A recent study however used natural language processing, text analysis and computational linguistics to identify what these triggers were. The research analysed the email subject lines from a psychological point of view and determined what effect it would have on a person reading it and what decisions they would make to open that email or neglect it. The objective of the research was to develop methods that could quantify the psychological effects induced by an email subject line; and correlated this with the action performed by the email receiver.

To conduct the study the researchers used sentiment analysis and data mining on three large data sets from Enron Email, Spamdex Digital Spam Archive and Google Open Adwords. The study concluded that for a subject line to be successful it would need to follow a series of rules. These rules stated there were a series of elements that would contribute to the success or failure of an email. 

Emotion

One of the key factors was determined to be the emotion conveyed within the subject line. Unsurprisingly it was found that a subject line with a positive emotion word received more opens, while a negative emotion word received fewer opens. The study also looked at blending emotions within the subject line. It found that a mixture of joy, surprise, anticipation and trust could create an increase in opens, were as a blend of sad, fearful or angry emotions would result in fewer opens. Perhaps surprisingly it was found that blending negative emotions with surprise or anticipation could generate an increase in responses/replies to the original email. 

Polarity

Another factor found to contributed to the success of an email subject line was the use of polarity. The use of positive polarities such as “is” or “have:” were found to have a much better open rather when compared with negative polarities like “is not” or “have not”  

Phrasing

There are many opinions on the length and theme of phrasing to use in a subject line. This piece of research found that if a subject line is more subjective or personal to a reader it is more likely to hold their attention for longer. Including the name of your business, organisation or brand were also found to include open rates. Interestingly the research also found that starting an email with an adjective such as “many” “few” or “fast” would limit the number of clicks an email received. 

In terms of length, the study found that if the subject line had less than three phrases It would not generate a high level of clicks. The study also looked at some of the terms and related words that would affect the success of an email. It found that those containing business-related terms performed better than those that included terms relating to entertainment or travelling. 

Sometimes however the terms used for the same subject could achieve very different results. If we look at the term “Shopping” then including words like “% off” “sale” or including prices and discounts would result in a higher open rate. In contrast terms like “free” or “coupon” were found to limit the open rate. Looking at business terms, words like “turnover” or “millions” would have a much better impact on readers than words like “webinar”, “seminar” or “conference. ”

Words & Characters 

When looking into the number of words a subject line should use the study concluded that a subject line with between 7 and 8 words would get the most opens. Luckily for times when it’s not possible to have that many, the study also found that using more than 4 words would also draw a favourable number of clicks. It also found that the use of longer words, capitalising the first letter and separating the subject line with pipes (*-*-*-) would also generate a higher number of clicks. 

The study also drilled down into the number of characters to use within an email subject line. It found that having more than 80 characters was favourable. In comparison using between 50 to 80 characters would generate less click and using less than 15 would generate even fewer. 

From the research, we can see that there are many factors to consider when crafting your email subject line. It is important to remember it’s not possible to follow each finding that this study concluded would bring a higher rate of clicks. For example, it would be difficult to construct a subject line of 80 characters and 7 words! Their findings however can serve as a guideline for marketers when next selecting what to put in that all-important subject heading.