We live in an increasingly digital world where buyers spend almost 70% of their journey researching online before even contacting sales. Forging better relationships with your B2B buyers through content is more important than ever. But making those meaningful connections is also harder in today’s landscape. There are more brands competing for your buyers’ attention and more content for them to sift through than ever before. The truth is, simply marketing at people as we have in the past just won’t cut it anymore. What truly drives meaningful engagement is building relationships on a foundation of trust.
The Sales and Marketing teams that achieve this are the ones who will rise above the rest. But how can you cut through the noise and establish real connections with your buyers? Here are 3 ways to build trust with your buyer in order to establish long-lasting relationships.
1. Enable your buyer with less fluff and more meat
To earn your buyers’ trust, you must prove a deep understanding of who they are and what their specific challenges and needs are. Delivering high-value, relevant content is the best way to show your understanding.
However, many B2B vendors fall short when it comes to delivering consistently high quality and relevant content. According to PathFactory and Heinz Marketing’s report, Inside The Head Of A Marketing Leader: The Buyer’s Journey, over half of the marketing leaders say they find vendor content to be too fluffy and jargon-y. And 47.5% reported they find vendor content to be irrelevant to their pain points, challenges, and responsibilities.
Serving your buyers unhelpful content at the wrong time not only erodes trust, but it also encourages your buyers to look elsewhere for a solution to their problem (read: your competitor.)
Here’s where the proper use of personalization can give you a leg up. In order to stand out from the ever-growing B2B vendor crowd, it’s more important than ever to create hyper-personalized experiences for your buyers. And I’m not just talking about personalizing the front door with a {first.name} in a subject line. I’m talking about going beyond traditional macro-personalization techniques and aiming for personalization on a 1 to few, or 1 to 1 scale. To achieve this, you need an in-depth understanding of your buyers’ interests and level of intent at an individual level. Collecting the right kind of data is the key to making this happen.
2. Don’t just collect data. Collect the right kind of data
With the consumerization of today’s B2B buyer, collecting the right data is more important than ever because it will allow you to give your customers a better experience. The modern B2B buyer brings B2C expectations to their buying process. They are used to hyper-personalized, seamless, on-demand experiences in their everyday lives—ones they can truly see themselves in. Just like Netflix always knows what show to recommend or how Amazon tracks browsing and purchase history to suggest the best next purchase. This consumerization of B2B buyers means these experiences are—not just nice-to-haves—but must-haves in order to gain the trust of your buyers.
Brands like Netflix and Amazon aren’t just really good at guessing. They are collecting volumes of consumption and behavior data, in addition to user metadata, to understand the interests of their consumers and make highly relevant recommendations. B2B marketers must follow suite.
One of the most powerful ways to gain a deep understanding of your buyers’ interests and pain points is to collect content consumption data. Content consumption data reveals important information like the topics your buyer is interested in, how long they spend consuming specific assets, and how many assets they consume in a single session (we call this content bingeing).
Content consumption data impacts your marketing in 2 powerful ways:
- It helps you understand what topics your buyer is interested in and what stage they are at in their journey so you can serve them more of what they want at the moment they want it
- It is information Sales can use to have more productive and efficient conversations with prospects based on their actual interests and intent (more on this in the next section.)
Content consumption data allows you to enable your buyer with more of the information they crave. When you consistently meet (and exceed) buyers’ expectations in this way, the trust will follow.
3. Redefine what “sales and marketing alignment” means to you
Sales and marketing alignment can be an enigma for most B2B organizations. Marketing works hard launching campaigns and building content strategies to generate MQLs ‘til the cows come home. Yet sales teams often feel they aren’t receiving quality leads they can have good conversations with and go on to close. Why is there such a disconnect?
One reason is there is often a discrepancy as to what ‘qualified’ truly means. Qualification should directly relate to the level of interest a prospect has in your products or services. As mentioned in the section above, the most accurate way to identify true interest is by measuring the amount of time spent with content.
Once Marketing and Sales are aligned as to what qualifies as qualified, marketing must ensure Sales is equipped with the right information so that any momentum marketing builds through content is maintained once the prospect is sent to sales. Yet, according to a recent report by Sigstr and Heinz Marketing, The State Of Relationship Marketing, only 15% of sales reps are actually satisfied with the level of information they have on their accounts. This represents a huge opportunity for Sales and Marketing teams to redefine how they see alignment.
True Sales and Marketing alignment will only happen when both teams are speaking the same language and sharing the right information. Only then can you can create a cohesive conversation with the buyer and nurture a more trusting relationship all the way through the funnel.
This idea of building better buyer relationships is at the heart of an exciting webinar hosted by Sigstr’s VP of Marketing, Justin Keller, PathFactory’s VP of Marketing, Elle Woulfe, and Matt Heinz from Heinz Marketing. In How Sales And Marketing Can Work Together To Better Understand The B2B Buyer, we dive deep into how Marketing and Sales can better understand the interests and needs of their buyers and build better relationships through content.
Save your seat today for July 8th!
