B2B marketing hot word inventory in the first half of 2019.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Chalk stewing marketing” (ID: Luandunyingxiao) , author Gao Yan.
When you are in a hurry, stop on the way to see the way back, so that you are more sure whether the direction of the move is correct and whether your steps are still attached.
Twenty-fourths of the time has passed since 2019, and various B2B companies have completed the mid-year inventory from business to internal capacity, looking back at the changes in the external market in the past six months, and marketing of B2B companies. What are the interesting insights, and how can the road in the second half be more emboldened? Today we are going to stew this topic~~~
In the first half of 2019, from offline to online, we will find some interesting phenomena in the B2B field:
The financing information for the circle of friends is more less,
B2B vendors are getting lower tune;
Getting a customer grows to become the boss’s challenge to the CMO’s head cannon,
But the content and technology that can help grow are still 寥…
Before looking forward to the B2B marketing trend in the second half of the year, we will first take a look at the ins and outs of these phenomena through several hot words with the highest rate of mention.
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The combination of product and effect, in short, means that the brand effect and actual sales results can be better synchronized.
It’s easier to understand its rationality and necessity from the B2C field:
First, from Taobao live sales to Chaoyin.com, the brand owners have seen the brand communication effect.The possibility of simultaneous sales and sales, and all of this first naturally benefits from the development of the Internet infrastructure to today, providing the possibility for the brand to shorten the conversion path.
Secondly, Consumer psychology is also changing, in the era of information flooding and oversupply, the brand side only has before consumers’ feelings and enthusiasm for brand exposure Try to get the sales conversion done, to maximize the value of all marketing investments.
Finally, in the period when the external economic situation is uncertain, the brand owners have tightened their budgets. It is not easy to make money. The money spent will naturally see more direct effects and returns. This series of internal and external reasons superimposed, product integration has become a new challenge and goal of market functions.
With the changes in the media environment, especially from the advent of the media era, there are more possibilities for access to the channel; coupled with the rise of B2B industry value, players have increased, and all-round competition has intensified and grown into The top priority of the B2B enterprise desk. “Growth” is not a simple goal, but a system of continuous optimization, so it is necessary to use the resources of the company to achieve. The marketing department, which has been criticized as “only spending money”, has naturally been asked for more requirements based on growth targets.
However, because B2B’s transaction process is generally relatively complex and the transaction period is relatively long, it involves the division of labor and cooperation between multiple teams from the acquisition of the customer to the transaction, so the B2B market function pursues the “integration of product efficiency”. The effect is not as simple as a B2C company, as a brand + sales conversion (at least the goal of revenue cannot be easily borne by market functions).
It should be sub-channels to define the “effects”, clues, business opportunities, sales can be different effects of different market play, one-size-fits-all approach is likely to lead to market functions Deviate from the most critical goals, especially ignoring the cultivation of the long-term market (if there is a need for this issue, please leave a message to us, follow up on possible topics to discuss this topic).
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“Skill sinking” is only a means. Therefore, it must be derived from the “target sinking” requirement of the combination of products and effects we mentioned earlier.
In the era of the last B2B marketing, the weapons in most marketers were mainly “PR, activities and search.”The three engines of the cable engine, so the B2B marketing department can be responsible for the target in addition to a small number of inbound leads, mainly the procedural indicators, such as the number of publications, Baidu index, number of activities, number of activities covered, etc. /p>
Under the goal of “integration of products and effects”, first of all, requires B2B market players to break the skill structure of the three axes and enter the professional deep water area that pays more attention to business understanding and operational capabilities. As mentioned above, it is possible to achieve the actual marketing effect while meeting the realization of the brand goal.
For example, when joining a SaaS company in 2014, in line with the strategic goal of the company’s SaaS business development, I took the initiative to set the number of “new business opportunities” as the most important assessment target of the marketing department, accounting for 60%. In the follow-up, by optimizing the search engine delivery strategy and refactoring the website architecture to improve the traffic conversion rate, the system establishes the content system to expand the organic customer access channel, and the online marketing automation system realizes the unified management of the omni-channel leads and the goal of deep cultivation. A series of measures.
There is a new challenge to the ability of the marketing department’s small partners. During this period, they have to undergo the challenge of introducing new capabilities and new talents and further improving the internal training mechanism.
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In 2019, the feeling of “more and more traffic” is more and more real, and the more cruel reality of B2B marketing featuring “accurate customer acquisition” is: even if you are willing to pay a higher cost to expand the new Guest, but every traffic channel will soon see the upper limit of traffic acquisition.
However, according to Forrester’s survey data: 90% of the traffic clues are wasted… It is not difficult to find a hatchback comparison. It turns out that for most B2B companies. Words, wasting the traffic and clues in your hands is a more deadly problem.
Therefore, people in the B2B market are beginning to realize: It’s better to spend more time trying to find out more about the new traffic when you spend all your thoughts on it all day long. It’s better to spend more time repairing the “breaking bamboo poles” at home. The traffic that has been obtained is less squandered. The concept of “private domain traffic” is thus accepted by more B2B companies and market players.
And In tactical play, it’s natural to start exploring more ways to convert public domain traffic to private domain traffic. More importantly, how to make private domain traffic more transformable through deep operations.For valuable business opportunities and business. It is not difficult to find that the acquisition and cultivation of private domain traffic still corresponds to the skill sinking of the aforementioned market functions.
Summary: The reason is so much, or not doing wellAfter a simple inventory, it is not difficult to find that the marketing field has never lacked new concepts and new terms. The B2B marketing circle that is busy seeking breakthroughs is no exception. But “the squandering of flowers is becoming more and more glamorous,” and the truth has been heard so much. Why are we still not doing our own work? Is it anxious to chaos, or want too much left and right?
Reviewing the peers who have had in-depth communication with us in the past few months, although each family has the “most painful” of each family, “continuous and healthy growth” is still the goal of all companies. Under the pressure of growth, most companies lack a set of B2B marketing system methodology that is suitable for the current stage of their own enterprise development. The core behind it is of course the ability. Enterprise development is the process of upgrading all the way. The problems are solved. Therefore, according to our experience and the experience of several B2B companies in the past six months, the B2B marketing function should be exerted in the second half of 2019. Looking forward to the direction, I hope to give some inspiration to the founders and market people in the exploration.
A while ago, a young B2B marketer commented in one of our surveys, “What is the result of B2B marketing making it too difficult, do we have a future?” Apply an old saying: The future is bright The road is indeed tortuous!
I often use the casserole as a metaphor for B2B marketing, and the casserole should be cooked slowly. The casserole is indeed slower than the iron pan, but the advantage is that it is slower and slower. It is like the development of B2B marketing ability. It takes time to form the method and practice that is most suitable for a company, but once It takes time to form an advantage and be caught up by others.
So, if you want to give the keywords of B2B marketing in the second half of 2019, I will give twelve words: Literary thinking, dimensionality reduction, focus on deep farming (Note: the first eight words It was the first time I made a speech in a speech in April this year. Time is also a friend of the B2B industry, and one day I will witness the results of our efforts. Looking forward to the second half of this year, this idea has not changed, but more experience.
Literature thinking means that we need to jump out of the narrow division of market functions to define the focus of our work, but to focus on the capabilities of B2B marketing and the core objectives that need to be focused on the perspective of the company’s life cycle. Going forward with the boss and thinking about what the boss thinks.
Practice sharing: Take a startup company that we coached as an example. At the beginning of the year, the company internally judged that it had successfully passed the seed period (the business life cycle is as shown in the following figure). Therefore, we planned 2019 against the capacity needs of the run-up period. In the first half of the year, the market function carried out the analysis of the core value proposition of system products, thus providing the company with a unified blueprint for the external education market and expanding customers. At the same time, the market should fully cooperate with the sales system to conduct market education. However, during the mid-year inventory, we found that the sales system of the sales system was quite behind the expectations of the beginning of the year. After the market acquired new customers, the sales conversion rate was very low. At this time, we advise our clients to stop, review the assumptions at the beginning of the year through case re-examination and data analysis, and study the market relatively conservatively, and combine the strategies of target customer targeting and pioneering customer acquisition. The focus is on the agenda. Behind this, it means that the most important thing in the market function is not to blindly expand the new, but to cherish the target customers of each library with the products, sales and even the founders, deepen the business scene, and work hard at home. Down, and then gain a deep understanding of the target customers, and more solidly through the MPF (market-product verification) stage.
Doing things right Very important, but more importantly, do the right thing!
Dimensionality reduction means that skills are sinking, the foundation of data is consolidated, and the results of data-driven operational transformations.
As mentioned earlier, B2B90% of the company’s clues are often wasted. why? Because the trading cycle is too long, sales will only focus on the clues that demand is already explicit and can be traced in the near future.
However, the clues that can’t be built in the current period are valuable to the company in the long run, and it is also the flow of real money from the company. It must be cultivated by the marketing team. If the marketing department wants to make this matter more detailed, it is necessary to ensure that only the most valuable clues of the current period are output to the sales team. All the work must be based on the analysis and monitoring of the data, and there must be a blessing of tools. .
So, in the implementation process, B2B marketing functions must be reduced in dimension, enough down-to-earth, use data to pay attention to details, and cherish every hard-won traffic and clues.
Practice sharing:
Because a comprehensive marketing digitalization system involves many links in the front, middle and back office, it is critical to plan a progressive roadmap in the implementation process according to the stage of enterprise development. For example, for a B2B company with a weak data analysis base, we have planned a three-stage path for their marketing digitization process. Among them, the core goal of the first phase is to target the front-end channels that spend money every day, so that the data can be tracked and bid farewell to the stage of the evaluation of the brain.The three key points are:
1, to ensure that the data source of the website can be traced back: natural + paid
2. Optimize the effectiveness of Baidu paid lead conversion through different creative tests
3. Optimize lead conversions by optimizing landing pages and optimizing site conversion logic
This step-by-step planning breaks down a complex system project, reducing the psychological barriers and actual thresholds for landing implementation, and making it easier to make each step a relatively solid foundation.
According to our experience, the process of marketing digitization has experienced almost the same process: 1 year to comb and deploy a marketing funnel, and then 1-2 years to run through a series of internal processes and verify the basic logic, to In the third and fourth years, I dare to say that marketing digitalization basically runs smoothly, and can gradually deepen the degree and value of data operation. This kind of process is really short-lived and a lot of things for most startups. But if the foundation is not broken, it is like pulling a broken car, and there is no way to reach the end with a quick horse. Therefore, there is no need to look at the ocean and sigh.
Difficult to do, doing and not doing often means a huge difference between us and our opponents!
Resources are always limited. For some people, life is only enough to make a bowl of good-looking goodies; but when opportunities are everywhere, we can easily think more.
However, in the 1990s, when the “diversification strategy” was most popular, countless cases were warning us of how dangerous it was to defocus due to “expansion”. Throughout the history of modern enterprise development, defocusing is almost a natural occurrence for many companies, which means that maintaining focus requires us to make extra efforts.
B2B marketing, because it is more precise, focus should not only be reflected in strategy, but also in tactical choices.
In particular, in determining the strategic objectives, we must define the strategic objectives of marketing according to the strategic key points in the current stage of the company mentioned in the “Successful Thinking”. (For example: Is it a Pioneer customer, or is it a new scale, or is it worth the value of an old customer?)
In terms of tactical choices, we encourage innovation and small-scale practice, but in the end we must do some subtraction based on data and results, and avoid doing things for the so-called “security.”
In order to complete more clues, I believe that many market players have made various attempts, ranging from self-media, traditional media to third-party cooperation organizations, in form from articles, planes, videos, events to SEM, but the final data. Will tell us where it is worth to focus more.
At the same time, B2B’s business complexity determines the ability of market personnel to be very demanding. It is difficult for a company to develop the capabilities required for each tactic at the same stage to the extreme. Relatively focused one by one Deep cultivation is more conducive to us to develop key marketing capabilities, and it is easier to see breakthroughs in results in a relatively short period of time.
Practice sharing:
Take a B2B company that we are coaching in a key span. For example, because the market-side customer access channel relies mainly on search engines, organic content acquisition is an urgent need for breakthroughs at this stage. But the original content team has only one person who is responsible for the operation of multiple content channels, and the actual effect has not been broken. During the coaching process, we found that the original brand communication team has a relatively high maturity, so we suggested to merge the product and content teams. The goal is to achieve brand synergy and content acquisition, and this module The current strategy focuses on the WeChat channel as the core. After two months of actual landing, we saw content marketing from the data.The effect after the remodeling of the system – WeChat end access and conversion efficiency is three times the previous.
Of course, because B2B companies have a limit on each of the customer channels, so go back, each company needs more trials. But because of this, to maximize the channels and play of value increments at each stage is the focus of B2B marketing.
Summary: Transforming thinking, focusing on deep farming requires investment and patienceWe have been fooled by those rushes for too long, it is time to step down and focus on the underlying capabilities of B2B marketing, so that we can develop our own killer tricks at different stages of the enterprise. This is like practicing the inner work method. If you don’t take the time to practice, then how to pursue a seemingly powerful move can’t beat the skill of the martial arts.
But focusing on deep-rooted is not an immediate event, B2B business complexity and overall market maturity, each organizational capacity needs to grow longer. As a result, because our patience is not enough, the investment is not deep enough, the development of organizational capabilities often become the biggest growth of B2B companies.
As a consultant who has been focusing on B2B marketing practice and research for many years, I want to take another look at the moment when I finish the book: The growth of B2B companies is a good friend of time! I urge everyone to calm down in the face of increasing pressure, to think slowly and act quickly, and to build a solid foundation. We are willing to build a high-rise building.
