Insights into fostering trust, the role PR & marketing plays in supporting it, and what the future looks like for B2B brands.
Download The Question of Trust eBook:
Building trust has always been an important focus for marketers and increasingly so over the past few years. But what does it look like? How do brands tackle it, especially in a challenging environment? With today’s consumers inundated with options, how do use trust and loyalty to make sure that your brand stands out? How do you stick in the mind of the consumer, ensuring that they know you’re going to deliver what you promise?
This eBook delves into how PR & marketing helps build and maintain trust by interviewing senior marketing professionals at companies such as IFS, Pulsant, insightsoftware and Glen Dimplex Heating & Ventilation. Discover how it has changed over the last 12 months and what the future of trust building and customer loyalty looks like.
It is often said that consumers buy based on emotion and business buyers make decisions based on logic.
Consumers have more autonomy over their spending – if something makes them feel happy, excited, hungry or nostalgic it is usually their decision on whether to buy or not. Business buyers need to defend and justify their decisions. They need to be able to demonstrate the business case, value and ROI to their shareholders and employers, so take a more considered, rational approach.
But how true is this? While these assumptions are often taken as fact some studies suggest otherwise.
This eBook explores the changes in B2B buying drivers, the role of humanisation in B2B tech, and the impact this has on B2B PR and marketing strategies.
Are you looking for ways to maximise the ROI you’re getting on your PR & marketing investment?
Download this eBook to discover top tips across PR, social and digital:
One of the hardest things as a marketer is ensuring that every penny you spend is going towards your overall goal, such as generating new leads, reaching new audiences, increasing brand awareness, creating new content or improving customer value.
We’ve created this eBook to help give you some quick-fire ways to make sure you’re not missing a trick when it comes to boosting ROI. In this eBook you’ll find: – 5 steps to better PR ROI – 5 ways to succeed at media interviews – 4 ways to make social work harder for your business – 7 things to expect from your PR agency – 6 ways Whiteoaks is deliberately different
This eBook captures the thought-provoking insights and experiences of CEOs and CMOs of a range of technology businesses, highlighting both similarities and differences in their approach.
We set out to understand whether senior Sales and Marketing decision-makers working for B2B tech brands are truly operating within an Account-Based Sales (ABS) or Account-Based Marketing (ABM) framework. And if so, how it works best for them, what goals they have and the challenges they face. In our view, either structure can be summarised as a business-to-business (B2B) strategy that aligns both marketing, and/or sales resources and strategies, to categorise, build relationships and target companies or accounts into prioritised groups rather than on an individual leads basis.
The driver behind this research
So, why did we want to understand this area? ABM and ABS have become established buzzwords in the industry and within in the B2B technology space. We increasingly see the benefits of integrated, inter-dependent marketing and sales partnerships, co-ordinated with the same objectives from the top down. When that is in place, marketing communications professionals and their agencies can deliver true value for their brands. And, on a tactical level, we also wanted to know how companies’ marketing output influenced lead generation and which forms of marketing communications made the biggest difference. The result is what we believe to be the first study in the UK, examining both ABM and ABS, rather than just one or the other.
Critical to our intention was to understand the views from both Marketing and Sales leaders. To us, they are not functions to be viewed in isolation.
Highlights
This view is backed up by our research, with 87% of Sales and Marketing professionals stating that their department is very closely or closely aligned with their colleagues. This alignment directly challenges the myth that often rears its head: that Sales and Marketing teams are at odds, with different priorities, objectives and methods.
Our data shows that use of a CRM system is currently at 59% uptake for both prospects and clients and 88% for one or the other audience. This ability to capture, record and action information about both prospective and current client data, ideally in the cloud and complemented by a Marketing Automation Platform, goes much of the way to explaining why these two departments and their leaders are working in an ever more integrated way.
Yet, the CRM platform is only part of the story. The success of high-performing B2B tech brands operating in an account-based model to execute their sales strategy has, over the last few years, prompted some of those high-performing businesses to convert their marketing operations to run in the same way. In fact, 81% of the 202 professionals we surveyed said that they work to either an ABM or ABS operating model.
Our study shows that at a communications delivery level, social media and email marketing are viewed as the top two most effective ways to facilitate interactions with clients and prospects by both groups of professionals. Media relations, case studies and testimonials held stronger value for Marketers, demonstrating that more work is required by PR and communications experts in persuading Sales colleagues to understand their benefits in the overall marketing mix.
What really stands out from our research is that 89% of the 202 business professionals agreed that their company’s marketing efforts contribute to sales and lead generation. The value added was measured most widely by inbound sales enquiries to the website, the number of enquiries from social media channels and, interestingly, leads captured at events, either the company’s own or at industry conferences.
Our research continues
In a new blog focusing on the second part of our research project, ‘A Perfect Match: ABM and ABS’, I look in-depth at the goals and challenges of those 202 Marketing and Sales leaders to implementing an account-based way of working.
