According to 62% of B2B marketers surveyed, their roles are becoming more strategic. While this means more influence at C-suite level (woohoo), the change also puts pressure on teams to deliver great ROI and results in line with business goals.
Even if you’ve been in a senior marketing role for a while, the B2B market and buyers’ needs are shifting so quickly that your strategic approach needs to adapt. Working with complex B2B brands every day means our team knows how to prioritise the right areas and overcome challenges to create effective strategies. Here, they share their insights.
Before we dive into the strategic challenges and priorities across our centres of excellence, it’s important to get some foundations in place.
Millennials now make up 73% of all B2B buyers and 44% of final decision makers. As digital natives, they prefer to do their own online research, expect a smooth customer experience and prioritise efficiency as well as price.
Alongside adapting your strategy to meet these preferences and needs, it’s important to be aware of people who are influencing the buying decisions. Getting a full picture of the internal stakeholders and external influencers which may affect purchasing choices will help you build more effective strategies.
Several industry surveys have shown that B2B purchases are as emotionally driven as they are for typical consumers. So as well as focusing on pain points and commercial pressures, it’s important to consider your buyers’ emotional drivers too. By building this knowledge into your creatives, you can connect with prospects on a deeper level.
As marketers take up their place alongside senior executives, they’ll have the opportunity to better understand the goals of each department. Lining up marketing activities with these objectives, alongside the needs of the wider business, will help gain stakeholder buy-in and ensure strategies have more effective outcomes.
For more than 30% of businesses, deals take between one and three months to close. In many cases, sales cycles can be a lot longer. Taking this into account when setting KPIs and breaking down strategies into specific activations and plans is important to ensure they’re effective over these extended periods of time.
To maintain progress and ensure marketing performance is as effective as possible, regular reviews should be plotted into team’s diaries. Alongside a dashboard that pulls in data points from all your marketing channels, plotting in strategic audits at planned times will help you anticipate potential issues, adjust your strategy and maintain performance.
According to our Co-founder Jenny Hughes, putting buyers’ needs first is essential. She says, “The number one priority should always be understanding what problem you're solving for your customers. B2B marketing strategies that aren’t grounded in real, validated customer needs will always struggle to gain traction or build meaningful connections.
“Your messaging must be rooted in the challenges your audience faces, and how you solve them better than anyone else.
“That said, customer insight alone isn’t enough. You also can’t ignore brand power in B2B. We are all still consumers at the end of the day. Today, a strong brand creates distinction in crowded markets, builds trust over time, and makes the job of demand generation significantly easier. The best-performing B2B strategies balance both, deep customer relevance with strong, consistent brand equity.”
Both Jen and Head of Client Services Roz Wisdom agree, competition is the biggest challenge for today’s B2B marketers. “This constrains how much you can charge, when you can sell and how much you can sell,” Roz explains. “Everyone is going after the same pie and you just get a piece of it.”
Jen further explains, “Cutting through the noise with limited budgets and stretched resources, all while needing to prove ROI faster than ever is a major challenge. Channels are saturated, buying cycles are long, and decision-making units are complex, making it harder to land a clear, differentiated message with the right people at the right time.
“On top of that, many teams are navigating the shift from traditional lead generation thinking toward longer-term, full-funnel strategies that combine brand building with demand activation. It requires a different mindset, better integration across teams, and often a cultural shift in how success is measured.”
Being closer to the C-suite means marketers will have a stronger focus on their performance metrics. For Head of Design David Stokes, a brand’s creative is central to boosting marketing efforts.
He says, “A brand’s creative has to do a lot of heavy lifting. It has to ensure that key messaging is delivered in a way that’s characteristic of the brand, while being fresh and interesting enough to resonate with the audience and stay memorable over time. This is best achieved with a longer-term strategy.
“B2B buyers are time-poor people overwhelmed with choice and making emotional decisions. So repetitive or narrow campaigns which chase short-term returns by reusing successful elements and messages may very quickly start to fall flat.
“A bold, insight-driven creative plan would allow you to map out a brand story, show an understanding of your customers’ worlds, solve more of their real problems and form a deeper connection. Over time, and across a range of platforms and formats, this will build recognition, trust and eventually, action.”
Lead Developer Kris Bradbury says that alongside accessibility, the rise of AI generation tools and customer privacy blockers, market competition and meeting customer needs are two major challenges for B2B websites.
He explains, “In my opinion, the main priority for any website is to build trust with users and make them want to be customers by clearly demonstrating the value of a business’s proposition. With so much competition, this can be a challenge. It's important to communicate that you understand and can solve their problems, with proof that you have been successful in doing so.
“In the past, I’ve seen websites which talk about their product and how good it is but the messaging is forcing you to sign up and request a call back. I’m left thinking ‘I don't want to start engaging in a sales process, I just want to read about your product and decide for myself.’ To me, the best websites give me all the information I need to make a decision and it's all presented nicely with clear calls to actions.”
To make sure you fulfill these audience needs, Kris recommends having the following on your website:
With marketers placing greater focus on performance metrics, having accurate, informative data sets is essential for teams to make informed decisions. To get your business’s data in the best possible position for success, Raven Wheatley-Hawkins, Head of Data and Marketing Campaigns, suggests focusing on:
By doing this leg work, Raven says, “Doing the groundwork of cleaning data and ensuring we have the best model for the whole business means our attribution modelling won’t be flawed. After all, everyone wants accurate attribution.”
According to our Head of Content and PR, Emma Crofts the biggest challenge in developing and delivering an effective B2B content strategy is maintaining a consistent tone of voice and set of messages across multiple channels and touchpoints.
She says, “You can make your content investment work harder by laying the right value proposition and messaging foundations from the outset. This helps you get maximum mileage from assets by repurposing them across different formats. For example, you can use snippets from long-form pieces to create visuals with key facts or turning longer videos into short social content to grab the attention of time-poor prospects
“Also, when repurposing your content, make sure you build internal communications and sales enablement materials into the plan. By leveraging your content this way, you can get internal teams excited about the brand and advocating for it with every customer interaction.”
To kickstart your B2B marketing strategy supported by our expertise, get in touch with our team.