B2B buyers are tough negotiators, often categorized as demanding and impatient. This is only fair, since these purchases are usually substantial investments. One survey shows that B2B buyers often refuse four offers before deciding on and product, and 80% say they have switched suppliers at least once within a 24-month period.
Marketing is key to getting eyeballs on your brand and advocating for its value proposition. But in the B2B space, where pricing standardization and uniformity is not a given and the details differ for every sale, marketing is not just about creating a catchy tagline or flashy advertisements. It requires a deep understanding of your customers’ needs and preferences, as well as a strong grasp of the latest industry trends and techniques.
Well-trained marketing teams, with a focus results-driven goals and a collaborative approach, can do much more than drive traffic and increase brand awareness. They can generate and nurture leads through the funnel to deliver measurable results directly improve a business’s bottom line. Like any other team in your organization, your marketing team needs to be properly trained and equipped with the best tools and expertise to craft powerful marketing strategies that resonate with your target audience, boost your brand awareness, and ultimately drive more revenue for your business.
So what does it take to build a highly effective and results-driven B2B marketing team? Let’s get into it.
The 2023 B2B Landscape: Current Challenges
In 2023, marketers are bracing themselves for the challenges ahead. According to a survey by Hubspot, keeping up with marketing trends was cited as a top concern, given the fast-paced nature of the industry and increased competition. Many marketing leaders are looking at leveraging CRM systems and pivoting marketing strategies. However, this is proving to be a challenge due to difficulties in hiring the right talent and adapting to potential economic downturn. While generating leads and traffic is understood as one of the prime focus of B2B marketing, this year, marketers are reporting difficulties in achieving this. In fact, 22% of social media marketers feel that “creating engaging content” will be a significant challenge going forward. This is because businesses are increasingly shifting their focus to social media platforms, fuelling stiff competition. It is essential for marketers to find unique ways to engage and target prospects.
Especially in the B2B SaaS space, the “air of looming recession” has presented unique challenges around the globe. According to a recent Gartner Digital Markets survey, at least 50% of the software buyer’s journey is now spent referring to “independent, third-party information sources,” leaving providers in the dark regarding how and to what extent they are influencing buyers’ decisions.
Skill Audit: Prepping Your Team for Training
Before getting down to drafting and executing training programs, it is essential to conduct a skill-gap assessment to identify the areas of improvement that need the most focus. Once you have identified the gaps in your team’s skill set, you can create a tailored training program. This may involve creating multiple tracks that cater to different skill levels, roles, focus areas, and learning styles. For example, some team members may require broad training, while others may need advanced niche training in specific areas such as data analysis, content marketing, or social media marketing.
Building a Future-Ready B2B Marketing Team
Ensuring your marketing team is equipped with the latest and most effective marketing trends is essential to achieving successful results. This means providing your team with the best tools and expertise to expand your B2B brand’s influence. The process of training your team in these essential skills starts with understanding your customers’ needs and experience lifecycle, and ends with a focus on engaging your audience through community building. Knowing the key techniques and tools that can benefit your team between these two points is what can give your company a competitive advantage.
Aligning with Business Goals & Customer Needs
To successfully train your marketing team, it’s crucial to ensure alignment between the marketing, business development, and sales teams. Without a thorough understanding of your company’s overall business strategy and sales goals, it’s difficult to set effective marketing targets and guide your team in the right direction. A top focus for marketers in 2023 is increasing revenue and sales. For this, teams must break silos and learn to look at the big-picture goals of the organization and create effective marketing strategies. In the order of importance the top marketing goals after Increasing revenue is improving customer experience and, through this, driving brand awareness, engagement, brand loyalty.
Once this internal alignment is achieved, the next step is to mapping the customer journey mapping and buyer personas: almost 50% of B2B marketers view customer insight, segmentation, and profiling as a top skill for their profession.
A customer journey training module can help your marketing team acquire a set of critical skills that will inform all other marketing efforts going forward. Such a module could cover topics such as:
- Utilizing a customer mapping tool to locate the areas where people interact with your product or service.
- Conducting customer research to identify target audience needs and pain points.
- Creating semi-fictional buyer personas.
Additionally, your team will learn to navigate the customer experience lifecycle to effectively guide customers from awareness to engagement and brand advocacy. These abilities offer a better comprehension of the actual needs that your product satisfies, allowing you to make informed marketing decisions about where to allocate your time and resources. By observing customer interactions across various platforms such as social media, company websites, email, and ads, you can create more effective marketing strategies.
Improving the Lead Generation Game
Learning the advanced ropes of quality B2B lead generation and conversions, requires expertise in several areas, including the ability to spark interest and engagement through content, campaigns, and customer relations. Your marketing team needs to be able to successfully engage potential customers, lead them through various stages of the sales funnel, address pain points, and educate leads on the value of the solution.
It is practical for the marketing team to receive training on lead nurturing, making use of proven lead-generation tools such as Salesforce or Marketo, and verifying quality leads in order to assess ROI.
A training workshop to develop lead nurturing skills could focus on how to create effective email campaigns that guide potential leads through the sales funnel. This workshop could cover topics such as:
- Understanding the stages of the sales funnel and crafting content tailored to each stage.
- Crafting subject lines that grab the recipient’s attention and improve your open rates.
- Writing a copy that is engaging, informative, and persuasive.
- Personalizing emails to create a sense of connection and build trust with potential leads.
- Using segmentation and automation tools to send targeted messages to specific groups.
- Measuring the success of email campaigns by analyzing metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
The workshop could include a mix of lecture-style teaching, hands-on exercises, and case studies of successful email campaigns from other companies. By the end of the workshop, participants should have a better understanding of how to create effective email campaigns that move potential leads through the sales funnel and contribute to the overall success of the marketing team.
Building Social Media Skills
Social media marketing is now a non-negotiable component in successful B2 marketing – essential for everything from creating brand awareness to generating new leads. Nowadays, social media is one of the most effective ways to bring prospects to your website, where the peer community plays a crucial role in influencing the buyer’s decision. Besides enhancing lead generation efforts, social media can be used to gather valuable information about your customers, the platforms they use, and feedback on your offerings or solutions that can inform product development.
Your team must know how to create a comprehensive B2B social media plan, regularly revise and adjust it to keep up with new trends, and carry out social media audits to evaluate objectives and achievements. Your marketing team must master how your company communicates on social media and other online outlets. This calls for training on the essential social media skills, including influencer marketing and social sharing. In 2023, influencer marketing has gained a lot of traction, and successful B2B marketers are often seen partnering with influencers to promote their products or services. According to a Hubspot survey, the influencer marketing industry is projected to be valued at $13.8 billion by the end of this year and 71% of B2B marketers are leaning towards investing more in this. One interesting finding has been that it is not necessarily influencers with large followings that contribute to success in the B2B space; often, micro-influencers with a strong credibility and authentic connections to target audiences are more impactful in influencing buying decisions.
A relevant training module for developing advanced social media skills can focus on influencer marketing, specifically how marketers can leverage micro-influencers and their authentic connections with target audiences for greater impact. This module could cover topics such as:
- The role of social media in B2B marketing
- Best practices for social media content creation and curation
- Effective strategies for social sharing and community building Identifying and engaging with relevant influencers in the industry
- Measuring the impact of influencer marketing on lead generation and sales
This kind of a training module can be delivered live or as recorded webinars for convenience. Group discussion and brainstorming, case studies and best practices, and practical exercises and assignments are some of the key materials that can be utilized. Other important areas for training can focus on format-specific skills, based on the current trends. In 2023, video is the preferred choice among a majority of marketers, with 50% of them using it as their go-to option, as data suggests that the video format provides maximum ROI compared to other formats.
Mastering B2B Copywriting
With the role of content marketing growing rapidly, creating winning copies is a critical skill. While a part of maximizing your B2B company’s social media presence, it’s important to share useful and appropriate content with potential customers. B2B copywriting skills can benefit your marketing team in achieving this and also improve the quality and impact of your content campaigns.
The skills to focus on include copywriting for B2B audiences, as well as for search engine optimization (SEO) and lead generation. A training course in copywriting should cover practical aspects, including:
- Content structuring, editing, and formatting.
- B2B language, style, and tone.
- Technical knowledge in SEO.
Beyond content writing, it is also important to help your content marketers master the art of B2B storytelling to gain a competitive edge in a digital space inundated with content. To effectively employ storytelling, your team must acquire knowledge in techniques such as finding your brand story, creating social media storytelling campaigns, and using narratives to build your brand.
Final Thoughts
Training a B2B marketing team is a resource-intensive task that requires careful planning and execution. It can be a significant investment in both time and money, and without proper guidance, it can be challenging to achieve the desired outcomes. An effective way to ensure that your in-house marketing team receives proper training is to bring in outside industry experts, like marketing consultants or agencies.
Industry experts are well-versed in the latest marketing trends and strategies, and they have experience working with a variety of businesses and industries. This makes them uniquely qualified to audit your team’s skill levels, develop tailored modules based on the existing gaps, and conduct training workshops for the specific needs of your team. They can help you identify knowledge gaps and design a training program that addresses those gaps while also aligning with your overall business goals and marketing strategy. What’s more, investing in expert-led training helps you save valuable company time and resources by bypassing the need to dedicate internal staff and freeing up your team to focus on other important initiatives!
At Heltr Skeltr, we help B2B brands upskill their marketers, develop winning marketing plans, and step in to get amibitious plans off the ground! Our hand-picked team of specialists can help you reach your goals – whether you want to align your teams, build a great go-to-market plan, get some help with your execution, achieve business growth, or train your team.