The place to be is B2B: The Drum Network meets Maxwell Painter of Unrival

“I find it funny that, traditionally, B2B marketing has been viewed as less dynamic, less creative, a little bit less ‘sexy’ than B2C, when, the truth is, B2B is leading the way in terms of the sophistication required to do it properly,” he says.

“Consumer marketers are only now getting to grips with many of the problems B2B marketers have already cracked.”

Painter argues that the very nature of the B2B business has given B2B marketers certain advantages over their B2C-focused colleagues.

“While B2C campaigns are often designed to reach mass audience with the goal of raising awareness, B2B campaigns are almost always focused on a much tighter audience with a view to ultimately delivering sales. The increased client focus on ROI within the broader marketing industry suits B2B marketers just fine as we’ve always worked that way.

“Likewise, we’ve always had a keen sense of customer lifetime value as the potential value of targets in B2B is so much greater than in B2C. For example, supposing you’re a TV manufacturer: an individual customer will maybe buy five to eight TVs in their lifetime, but a large hotel chain could potentially buy 100,000 units in a single sale.

For that reason B2B has always sought to focus marketing budgets on targets with the greatest potential value, which means spending much more time getting to know the customer properly and personalising your communications with those targets.”

One challenge B2B marketers face that their B2C counterparts do not, of course, is that, in most business organisations of scale, a variety of different individuals influence any major procurement decision. B2B marketers must try to identify and communicate with them all.

Painter says: “Various studies have suggested that at least 60 per cent of an organisation’s buying decision is already made by the time they make contact with a vendor. For that reason, B2B marketers must do everything they can to target the right people in those early stages. The goal is to identify the key decision makers and influencers inside a target organisation and provide them with marketing communications specifically tailored to their individual pains, priorities, motivations and interests. You need to pre-empt and influence the conversations the client is having inside their own organisation by recognising the different agendas at play and emphasising the different benefits of your product to each of the stakeholders, arming them with the information they need to further the conversation.

“So, how do they talk to each other? How do they influence each other? Who are the end users? Who are the people that will be your internal champions? And, crucially, who ultimately signs the cheque? There’s no point in targeting someone with a £100k product if they don’t signoff anything less than £5m.”

But how do you gather such information as an outsider? According to Painter there are simple methods of learning what you need to know without resorting to espionage. “At Unrival, we’ve developed a process to create detailed persona profiles for target individuals, giving clarity into their place in the organisational hierarchy, their personality traits and interests, their level of influence, their own range of influencers and their past career history.

“This last point is important simply because, every day, thousands of people change job. If you are targeting a business of scale, I guarantee you that someone inside your organisation will know someone inside the target business, perhaps from a few years ago, when they were both working for other firms. That sort of ‘in’ allows you to gather invaluable insight into the target. You can also talk to your client’s current suppliers and customers to find out what you need.”

For Unrival, the future of the industry lies in what B2B marketers call account based marketing (ABM), where intricate campaigns, made up of lots of different moving parts, are focused at a granular level on the key individuals and influencers within a specific target organisation.

“In simple terms, that means that you don’t invest in an Instagram campaign simply because it’s a hot new channel and your competitors already have a presence there. Unless you know for a fact that your target audience is there, there’s no point. I see our job at Unrival as developing and defining the insight and strategy for account based marketing campaigns that provide the right people with the right message, via the right channel, at the right time.

“It’s an approach that naturally delivers campaigns that are tightly-targeted, insight-led and focused firmly on boosting sales and ROI, which, when you think about, sounds a lot like what every marketer is trying to achieve right now. Ultimately, there will come a time when we don’t talk ABM with our clients anymore; it’ll just become the way they always approach marketing.”

This feature originally appeared in The Drum magazine dated 27 July 2016.

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