Bridging the Gaps: Linking ABX Experiences

B2B buying is becoming more complicated. Buying committees are growing larger, and buying decisions are taking longer. That’s frustrating for corporate decision makers looking to navigate financial controls and corporate hierarchies. It’s even more frustrating for B2B marketers who are finding their jobs much harder. Every campaign needs to speak to more personas over a longer period of time. That requires more content and more touch points across many more channels than in the past. Given all these difficulties, it’s no wonder that B2B marketing is becoming harder.

As a result of the increased complexity, every lead needs to be nurtured for longer. Furthermore, just speaking to the decision maker is no longer good enough. The entire buying committee needs to be considered, which means a wider range of messaging across a wider range of channels. In order to meet all these additional requirements, nurture programs need to become much more sophisticated. Yet, traditional marketing automation is struggling to keep up with the new approach.

Across the Funnel

At the top of the funnel, account based targeting is now commonplace. ABM has transformed how awareness campaigns are designed and executed. Marketers focus on heavily curated account lists across both advertising and social channels, with the expectation that a high degree of personalisation will lead to strong campaign performance. Demand generation still has its place, particularly when dealing with lower value audiences. However, account based marketing rules the roost when targeting niche verticals or large enterprises.

Yet, further down the funnel the old tactics still rule. While there has been plenty of focus on interactive content and personalised web experiences. Nurture strategies still rely heavily on email campaigns and local events. When marketing to known contacts, ABM becomes much less commonplace. Sure, event invites may be targeted to specific accounts, and email nurtures are frequently designed with ABM in mind. However, at the middle of the funnel, customer journeys are still overwhelmingly lead based, primarily because the technologies used to deliver them are also lead based. ABM is very much an afterthought within most marketing automation platforms. Sales outreach platforms aren’t much better.

Across Channels

Every nurture program should use a mix of tactics, but it can be difficult to reconcile email audiences with social retargeting campaigns. All this creates a disconnect that few marketing platforms can solve, leading to a misalignment between anonymous ad content and nurture email content. Both are personalised, but not necessarily with a consistent message. It’s common for prospects to receive awareness messages through one channel while simultaneously seeing conflicting consideration messages through another channel. That’s not the intended journey, but it happens because of overlapping audiences between the different channels. There’s generally no mechanism for automatically moving an entire account from a top-of-funnel ad campaign to a middle-of-funnel nurture program.

All this makes it very hard to manage the type of interconnected account based experiences that marketers want to deliver to their customers. There are too many missing links between channels and buying stages. In many organisations, triggering each stage of the customer journey requires manual intervention by marketing technology teams. That leads to substantial inefficiencies, which directly impact lead quality and revenue generation. After all, B2B buyers increasingly expect to navigate the buying process at their own pace. Yet, fragmented tech stacks frustrate customers and limit the ability of marketers to deliver on that promise.

Across the Tech Stack

CDPs were supposed to solve this challenge, unifying data in one location from which every touchpoint could be orchestrated. That vision never became a reality, at least not in B2B. Initially, that was because CDPs were not optimised for account-based data structures and B2B technology stacks. More recently, data warehouses and ABM platforms have started trying to solve the same problem. Why introduce a new technology to align your customer data, when your existing tools can do the same job? Demandbase have some fairly sophisticated campaign orchestration capabilities, which allows them to trigger campaigns within the leading marketing automation platforms and CRM systems. Meanwhile, data tools such as Snowflake are increasingly central to many marketing technology stacks.

Many enterprises claim to have an integrated tech stack and a unified customer journey. In practice, that typically means a shared executive vision and strategic alignment between departments. The practical reality on the ground is still very different, whether due to system limitations or process inefficiencies. Yet, it doesn’t have to be this way. We are starting to see fully integrated tech stacks becoming a reality in B2B. Which means that marketers will finally be able to deliver the award winning experiences they’ve always dreamt of.