Rohit Prabhakar

I build agentic revenue systems for Fortune 50 companies

Innovative B2B Marketing Strategies for 2022

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Many businesses experienced 2021 as a year of great uncertainty and volatility. These situations were fueled by epidemic situations and continued to affect the ways businesses operate globally. Whereas such uncertainties always pose challenges, they also lead to inevitable innovations. Here on this topic, we are excited to share with readers what the future holds with B2B marketing strategies. As you think about your plans for the upcoming years, consider these innovative B2B marketing strategies.

Digital Transitions 

The epidemics have changed the way a business interacts with its customers. The remote interactions have taken the place of in-person interactions. Therefore, the customers now like dealing with a business at the comfort of their home throughout their entire purchase journey. To fulfill this requirement, they request a high-quality digital experience.

  • Now 90% of B2B customers start their purchase journey by searching for a provider online.
  • Customers are already done with 50% of their purchase process before making their final selection for a potential provider.
  • 73% of the customers are millennial, and about a third of them are the sole decision-makers.

The concept has turned from digital marketing to market in the digital world. If your business has not yet realized your customer’s journey in the complete online manner or you haven’t adopted a digitalized marketing strategy, don’t be late anymore. Doing so is now too vital to ensure your business meets all the expectations of your B2B buyers and your service remains relevant in the digital market world.

The Opportunities

  • Upgrade your business website to meet customers’ expectations with their online journey. The website works as the most prominent tool for any business sale promotion. It is the biggest marketing asset in the current market that works over the internet mostly.
  • Build your website for optimum mobile experience as Google now ranks that website on the top mobile-friendly in the SERPs. Thus, most customers are online for their purchase needs using their mobiles only. So you have to ensure they have the best online experience when they visit your website.
  • Explore and refine digital event opportunities because they will not get off the market anytime soon. There are also hybrid events on the rise that facilitate both in-person and digital options together. 

Customer-Centric Content Prioritization

When you create content that assists your B2B customers in making decisions, you showcase your expertise and values. This shift towards a digital purchase journey makes customer-centric digital content more crucial to ascertain business growth. 

  • 41% of the customers read certain content first before contacting a business.
  • About 70% of customers search and read content directly from a business website.
  • 77% of B2B businesses follow a Customer-Centric Content marketing strategy.
Innovative Marketing Strategies

The customers now prefer to seek more and more content online. If your business fails to showcase its expertise with content marketing strategy, you will miss a grave business growth opportunity. Moreover, strategic and relevant content helps your customers understand that you understand and care about their needs at each step of their purchase journey.

The Opportunities

  • By conducting a content audit, you will understand what sorts of customer needs are being encountered with your current content and where you can make modifications.
  • Make content targeting each step of the purchase journey. Therefore, consider hitting the correct range of content to meet customers’ expectations anywhere in their purchase process.
  • Invest in search engine optimization and marketing to confirm your customers find your content online and make connections with you through it. 

 Ai-Enabled Marketing

Automated B2B marketing initiatives based on AI and machine learning is already benefiting marketers with more effective and faster insights and analytics. AI can assist with everything from targeting the right audience to segmentation, personalization, lead scoring, and content marketing insights.

  • 2/3 of the B2B marketers have been taking steps to evaluate and implement AI for marketing and sales initiatives.
  • AI and machine learning are here to generate more than $1.4 trillion in value by helping marketers solve marketing and sale concerns over the coming three years.
  • The implementation of AI by marketers soared between 2018 to 2020. It took a jump from 29% to 84% within these two years.

Corporate data and analytics have become gravely sophisticated, and they are converging with AI to unlock new customer insights so marketers can drive new marketing opportunities.

The Opportunities

  • Leverage AI’s predictive capabilities for analytics. The use of website cookies to track user activities has now become a customer privacy concern. New regulations resist you from doing so. AI can come in handy to fill that void by utilizing predictive analytics to tell marketers what customers are doing online.
  • AI content strategy tools offer a plethora of customer intent data. It helps target the right audience looking for your products in the market.
  • Custom-made campaigns based on AI can help reach people who conduct specific keyword searches when visiting a website. Therefore, this data can help you target potential customers using custom-made marketing campaigns.

Final Takeaway

The coming time is going to be exciting for innovative B2B marketing strategies. The marketing world is becoming increasingly digital. Also, it’s turning personal too. Hence, AI-driven initiatives provide more meaningful insights and help marketers create more effective and targeted campaigns and strategies. The key lies in figuring out how we can integrate these modern-day trends to lead us to our desired enterprise goals.

Leading Digital Transformation (Step 5)- Empower and Remove Barriers

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Removing Barriers

Image Source: NYTimes

The purpose of this stage is to overcome barriers to Digital Transformation. It is crucial to remove barriers to change, change systems or structures that pose threats to digital transformation. These barriers could be structure, skills, systems and supervisors. Three main best practices for removing barriers to change are:

Educate & Engage

When major changes are initiated we need to think about new behavior, skills and attitudes that are required in the new world. A good training with right kind of experience enables digital transformation in a big way. Always remember that encouraged and empowered employees make an enterprise win!

Inform & Negotiate

Every transformation will have it’s fair share of problem stakeholders. A huge category of such problem stakeholders can be influenced directly and indirectly. These stakeholders are not just against the change but also have huge organizational influence. There is no way that your change will be successful without including them in the process. Understanding the real needs/fears of such stakeholders is very critical as you try to negotiate with them to be the supporters of your change.

Every time after a successful negotiations I feel like this

Sucessful Digital transformation Negotiation

Ignore

Some of the problem stakeholders are completely against the change but don’t have huge influence on the organization. The best strategy for such stakeholders is to give them very high level information and keep them out of your routine. You may like to negotiate with such stakeholders but that may not be the best use of your time!

Related Articles:

8 steps to digital transformation

Leading Digital Transformation (Step 1) Creating Sense of Urgency

Leading Digital Transformation (Step 2) Build a Guiding Coalition 

Leading Digital Transformation (Step 3) Develop Vision & Strategy 

Leading Digital Transformation (Step 4) Communicate and Enlist volunteers

Leading Digital Transformation (Step 4) Communicate and Enlist volunteers

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“Change happens when it is done by the people and not to the people!”

communicate vision to enlist volunteers

Enlist Volunteers

In step 2 we talked about building a guiding coalition. Now is the time to take participation in Digital Transformation to new levels by enlisting volunteers. It is just like software moving from Alpha to a beta stage. The intent is to have more adopters who can participate, provide live feedback and become the change agents.

Raise a bigger force of people who are ready, willing and urgent to drive the Digital Transformation change. The other intent of this step is to make more co-authors of this Digital Transformation change. As more people will get engaged in the earlier stage hence they will become the true carriers of the vision and message. In order to expand use the power of communication.

Communicate Vision

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. -George Bernard Shaw

Communication seems to work best when it is direct and simple. Simple communication only comes through great clarity of thought plus courage to keep it simple. Even when this is a Digital Transformation All jargon and technical language must be avoided at any cost while you communicate vision.

Tip: If you are originally from technology background like me, this may be an area of improvement.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Well chosen words can make it memorable, even if it has to compete with hundreds of other communications for people’s attention. Always remember logic makes us think, emotion drives us to act. Emotion can also come from analogies, stories, or concrete examples that illustrate what success looks like while you communicate vision.

I am guilty of over communicating the technology infrastructure we plan to bring and invest into. Every time I did that I have seen faces in the room who leave without getting the vision of Digital Transformation.

Tip: Communicate vision in terms of business benefits and that too in a simple language that even a grandmother can understand. Analogy and examples are a great tool for that.

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space. -Orson Scott Card

We should use all the vehicles available to communicate vision. The message should come from all different channels. Big meetings and small, memos and newsletters, formal and by the coffee machine interaction – all are effective for spreading the message. We should continue to do this repeatedly as ideas sink in deeply only after they have been heard many times. If you are a marketer, you very well understand how many impressions lead to conversion. It hardly happens with just one impression!

You and other key players should live the vision in real time. Everything that is being done by the key team should be aligned to the vision and strategy for the Digital Transformation. Even repeated attempts to communicate vision cannot help if you and your key team are not acting as per the vision and strategy. If there are any inconsistencies, those should be addressed immediately and communicated.

“Swallow your pride and always be ready to accept that you may not be right” – Your Truly

As Digital Transformation lead, I have sometimes avoided two-way communication as I was afraid of a stakeholder not adopting my vision. Over these years I have learned that two-way communication is always more powerful than one-way communication. Two-way communication may suggest sometimes that we are on the wrong course and that vision needs to be revisited. Swallowing our pride and reworking the vision or strategy is far more productive that heading off in the wrong direction or with a wrong strategy for Digital Transformation.

The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.- J. B. Priestley

Previous Articles:

8 steps to digital transformation 

Leading Digital Transformation (Step 1) Creating Sense of Urgency 

Leading Digital Transformation (Step 2) Build a Guiding Coalition 

Leading Digital Transformation (Step 3) Develop Vision & Strategy

Leading Digital Transformation (Step 2) Build a Guiding Coalition

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Guiding Coalition

Building a Guiding Coalition

Assemble a diverse alliance of enthusiastic people with power, credibility and influence to think, design and support digital transformation. This alliance is what John Kotter refers to as build a guiding coalition.

It is a Coalition and not a Team for digital transformation

A coalition is a combination or alliance, especially a temporary one between persons, factions, states, etc . This alliance has a wide representation from
  • different silos/business divisions/departments
  • diverse background and different expertise
  • different organizational levels
The digital transformation coalition mostly starts small and becomes bigger over few months.

The coalition is to guide the digital transformation

This group should have the intellectual ability to design the digital transformation. The individuals should be able to understand the need for digital transformation. They should be able to help you create strategic vision. Members will share excitement with others and make them interested in this effort. They are the change agents that will help you enlist the volunteer army for the change.
“You win by working hard, making tough decisions and building coalitions” – John Engler

Perfect candidates for digital transformation guiding coalition

  1. Early Adopters: These individuals are opinion leaders who listen to new ideas and are open to trying them. They are socially connected in the organization and have credibility. They are key to adoption of digital transformation due to credibility and influence.
  2. Executive Stakeholders: It is critical that one of the early adopters is from the executive team. Positional strength besides credibility and influence is must for digital transformation success.

Avoid these

  1. Don’t engage Innovators in this group. They are the ones who are first to embrace the change, are bright, enthusiastic and open to new ideas. Unfortunately they lack social influence and credibility. Their inclusion in this step may lead to quick death of digital transformation.
  2. Avoid late adopters or laggards until you have created few wins.

This post is part of series of post on Digital Transformation.  You can read Step #1 of Digital Transformation at https://rohitprabhakar.com/sense-urgency-digital-transformation/

Leading Digital Transformation (Step 1) Creating Sense of Urgency

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Sense of Urgency

“Sense of urgency is not the natural state of affairs. It has to be created and recreated.”
– John Kotter from his book “A sense of Urgency”
 
Leading Digital Transformation at any level requires an ability to create an atmosphere of urgency. An atmosphere that can motivate and keep the team focused on a daily basis. Only in that atmosphere digital transformation becomes an urgent and highly needed change.

Why to create sense of urgency?

Without a sense of urgency, desire loses its value. — Jim Rohn
 
It will spark the initial motivation to get things moving and then keep the momentum going for digital transformation.
 

Who should you work with to create sense of urgency?

Ideally you should work with the top leadership and then it should come from top to bottom. This is only possible if currently a tornado like situation exists in your company.
 
Realistically, you will have to work with early adopters both at your level and some at senior leadership level. These are people who:
  • Trust you and your motives,
  • Willing to understand your vision for digital transformation to some extent,
  • Willing to work with you and
  • Have a good influence inside the organization.
I will talk more about this group in my post next week.
 
Please don’t go overboard and try to convince everybody. Start with creating sense of urgency with few who are critical and important to your digital transformation change.
 
Objections, low trust and demotivation are common to this phase. During this phase I hear things like:
  • Someone already tried this few years ago and they failed. Good luck!
  • This is going nowhere as we have seen similar things many times.
  • This organization will never do it that way.
  • We are already invested in IT and I cannot understand why we need a digital transformation.
Thanks to such advisors as it helps me to identify them as not early adopters.
 

How to establish sense of urgency

(all examples are from digital transformation of marketing use case)
 

Only crises, potential crises or big opportunities can help create a sense of urgency.

 

Identify crises/potential crises and use data to define the threat:

Here are some of the examples that you can focus on:
  • Examine market and competitive realities: Your competitors may already focusing on digital transformation. Best place to get this data is:
  • their job sites,
  • competitive analysis platforms like SimilarWeb,
  • SEO platforms like BrightEdge,
  • conferences where your competitors may be presenting digital insights e.g. MarTech
  • Vendors in your industry as they may be also serving your competitors.
  • Risk of disruption: Do I need to talk on this topic?? A good book on this topic is Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation by James McQuivey
  • Understand and quantify the risk of privacy or legal lawsuits: At large companies organizational and data silos may lead to vulnerability from privacy lawsuits. The case for digital transformation is worth alone just to handle this risk especially if you are in the European Union.
 

Identify major opportunities and define opportunity using the power of data:

The best place for marketing teams is to start with an opportunity assessment of all your digital properties. It is easy and can be achieved in 3-6 months. Tag all your digital properties with same analytics tag so that you can understand:
  • How the traffic flows within and outside your digital ecosystem
  • Type of customers/prospects that frequent your digital ecosystem
  • Identify some high value prospects
  • Identify the associated opportunity if you are able to properly engage them across all digital properties
I have seen this analysis work wonders and can alone help you get the buy in for digital transformation from the top executives.
 
Other sources of data for identifying and defining the opportunity are surveys/voice of customer, cross sell, up sell, cost savings from platform, agency spend etc.
 
Try to focus on opportunities that needs short timeline and has a strong ROI. I will talk more about this when I write about generating short-term wins.
 
This article is Part 1 of the 8 posts that I promised to publish in my recent post:

8 Essential steps to digital transformation

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I wish we could just call it business transformation but in the world full of buzzwords and keywords I will also call it digital transformation. Digital transformation is just a business transformation in the digital age. Some also call it digitization and digitalization (Read how they are different).

Leading Digital Transformation

  Digital transformation is less about technology but more about the transformation of business models, customer experience, employee experience and the overall business. The major success of the digital transformation projects is dependent on how well the organization adopts digital culture like Agile, Data lead decision making, failing fast, customer centricity and adoption of emerging technologies like Machine Learning, RPA and other branches of Artificial Intelligence across all departments.

The following is a framework that I have been successfully using to bring digital change for over a decade at large organizations:

  1. Create a sense of urgency
  2. Build a guiding coalition
  3. Develop a vision & strategy
  4. Enlist a volunteer army
  5. Enable action by removing barriers
  6. Generate short term wins
  7. Sustain acceleration
  8. Institute change

Some of the key points related to digital transformation success that senior leaders like CIOs, CTO, CMOs, CDOs and most primarily the CEO should keep in mind are: 

  1. Transformation of customer and employee experience will eventually lead to big business growth in revenue, profits and retention.
  2. Think about Customer Lifecycle Experience and not just Lead to Cash
  3. Don’t limit this to just Technology Transformation like the transformation of backend systems like ERP, CRM alone. Technology transformation should enable digital technologies in every part fo the organization.
  4. You must involve experts to not just produce Digital Strategy but also the execute the transformation
  5. Pricing and servicing models must be analyzed, simplified and revamped to support transformation at scale.
  6. Business processes must be minutely looked into to make execution easier and enable continuous optimization
  7. Leading indicators on Digital Transformation should start becoming visible in 2nd year while ROI of the investment should start in 3rd year for most programs.
  8. The digital transformation that is siloed to Marketing and Sales will never lead to long term business growth
  9. Always keep Amazon effect in mind
  10. Embrace long term mindset as most digital transformations are long term projects. At any organization bigger than $1Bn in revenue I will expect this to be 3+ years of effort.

Few years ago I was introduced to John P Kotter’s book on leading change by my mentor Mr. Andy Burtis who was Mr. Kotter’s student at Harvard Business School. Since then I have adopted his format as it matches what I have been already practicing and gives a better structure to my approach. If you like reading books, I highly recommend his book “Leading Change”.  

Leading Change by John Kotter
leading change by John Kotter

Digital Transformation Strategy

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I will not bore you with another post on what is digital transformation or digital transformation strategy. 
“The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.”
-Douglas Engelbart

Let me help you answer the question: How to build digital transformation strategy?

Digital Transformation

Digital transformation (source: http://cpicon.com/)

One of common perceptions about digital transformation is that it is all about technology. Technology is the biggest enabler but not the only ingredient for digital transformation. Digital transformation brings huge change to people and processes that organization has adopted. Change is the biggest challenge that can derail digital transformation. Digital transformation strategy should ensure enough investment into change management.
“The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.”
– Nathaniel Branden

4 key pillars of digital transformation strategy:

  1. People
  2. Technology
  3. Projects
  4. Processes

People

The first question that needs to be addressed well is how it will impact all stakeholders. Based on the impact build training programs to enable your workforce with skills that are required in the new environment. Ensure that the organization adopts the vision and goals of digital transformation. You may bring in fresh digital talent that can help you strike a balance between knowing your business and knowing digital.
 

Technology

I assume you already understand it well. Few recommendations:
  • Buying technology is not step #1
  • Buy technology once you are sure about condition of success for that technology
  • Your team and stakeholders should have control in selecting technology.

Projects

Before bringing in technology and enabling your workforce, digital transformation strategy should enlist projects that bring digital investment into life. Some of the high level categories that you should definitely focus on are:
  1. Understanding the customer and their journey: Customer journey is no more a vertical funnel. It is complex and convoluted due the digital age, many devices and channels. Better Customer Experience leads to better business conversions.
  2. Increasing conversion: For Marketing it can be creating more revenue or sales enablement, for HR it could be increasing quality resume submissions etc.

Processes

Digital transformation is not only applicable to your customer. Digital transformation should also enable your own workforce by digitizing the processes. This can ensure huge cost savings due to efficiencies, collaboration and reuse. Digital transformation strategy should also promote agile methodologies as it helps improving productive.