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Learn how you can leverage B2B market insights for the maximum impact on your bottom line
In the B2B marketing world, it's all about identifying and reaching your target audience. Achieving a competitive advantage in B2B marketing is no easy feat, but there are several ways to get started with the right tools and techniques. Leveraging B2B market insights will help you identify opportunities for growth within your industry while also gaining valuable insight into how other companies are approaching their marketing strategies. In this post, we'll discuss some ways to leverage the knowledge you gain from B2B market insights in order to improve your overall marketing strategy and increase your ROI.
You know, that feeling where the customer could use some more information or a particular piece of data to make their decision. You’ve got all this amazing insight and research on who your target audience is and what they want or need or think, but it doesn’t really come together into one cohesive message. This might be because you are not leveraging B2B market insights that you gathered in a way that works best for you.
You can be sure that you’re not alone! Market research is all about understanding your customer, not only their needs but also their wants and pain points. And when it comes down to making a buying decision, sometimes having an extra nugget of information can push them over the edge from being just interested in becoming actual customers themselves.
B2B market insights start with understanding your audience: what their needs are, how they want to be reached, and why. This process of understanding the customer journey can be broken down into two phases:
It sounds simple, but many brands still don’t do it. They make assumptions about their audience and this leads to a suboptimal marketing mix that doesn’t resonate with the people they want to reach.
Market research is not just about selling products or services. It's also about understanding your audience and what makes them tick. That means it's important to know who your customers are and how you can best serve them. You must have a deep understanding of the competition, as well as the winning strategies used by other companies in your industry. And finally, you must understand the market for which you're marketing, how do B2B buyers behave? What do they value? How does technology affect their purchasing decisions?
In order to do this well, you need to know your B2B customer inside and out. This isn't just about knowing what they want; it's also about understanding their needs, motivations, and behaviours.
Market insights are the data and information you collect to gain a deeper understanding of your customers, competition, and the customer experience.
They’re used to determine what products and services you should offer, which channels you should use to deliver those products or services, who your target market should be, how to position yourself against competitors on a range of dimensions, where resources should be allocated in terms of budgeting and staffing etc.
B2B market insights are the foundation for strategy development and decision-making. Insights are not only about collecting data but also understanding how that data fits together, what patterns emerge and what insights can be gleaned.
Let's talk about the first kind of B2B market insights which are focused on products. The following are some examples of product-related B2B market insights.
Channel-related insights can help you identify and understand the most important channels for your business. This is critical because it’s impossible to know what channels are working best for you without knowing which ones aren’t performing as well.
For example, if a competitor has an effective distribution channel but you haven't taken advantage of it yet, then it might be time to start using these same channels as part of your strategy. Or if there's an area where your company has been weak so far (for example, lack of mobile apps), then augmenting this weakness with mobile applications could be another way forward.
You can get competitor-related insights from a variety of sources. Some of these sources include social media, trade shows, industry analysts, press releases or surveys conducted by third parties (e.g., Gartner).
It’s no secret that customer experience is the key to business success, growth, sustainability, and profitability.
But what about agility? How does customer experience contribute to a company's ability to quickly adapt to market conditions and disrupt competitive landscapes?
The answer is simple: customer experience is the foundation of agility. The ability to deliver on what customers want, when they want it, how they want it and at a price that makes sense for them, all while continuously improving those experiences, is what sets companies apart from their competitors in today's digital economy.
Industry analysts and research firms like Gartner, Forrester, and IDC are great sources of information for customer experience-related insights. They publish reports on market trends, competitive analyses, and more. You can find these reports online at the analyst firm's website.
You can use your market insights to inform your marketing, business and sales decisions.
In addition, you can use your market insights to inform customer service decisions. Some questions that you can address with B2B market insights are:
- What are the top competitors doing?
- How is their performance compared with yours?
- Do you need a new strategy or product feature that will help them beat out their competition, so that you can differentiate yourself from them more effectively at the same time as helping them grow as well (this might mean developing an entirely new offering)?
- Are there any new competitors that have entered the marketplace?
- What are they doing differently than your current competitors, and how can you leverage this new information to improve your products or services in order to stay ahead of them?
- How can you effectively respond to these changes in the market?
- Can you use market insights to inform your marketing decisions and help make them more effective?
To uncover the best B2B market insights, you have to understand what B2B customers expect from your company and why.
Leveraging B2B market insights is a key part of every business. This is because more or less every business will have B2B relationships. Marketing is crucial for sales, customer service, and brand building. Additionally, it can be especially effective if you use the right tools to gather insights about your customers.
Market insights are the key to successful business-to-business marketing. But they don't just happen by accident or luck, and they're not as hard to obtain as you might think.
Insight-driven marketing is based on audience intelligence: a deep understanding of your target market and its needs, wants, behaviours and preferences. This knowledge enables you to identify the right problems for your products or services; create messaging that speaks directly to them; develop compelling offers; deploy the right channels at the right time; measure success in real time; make ongoing improvements. At the same time, you need to do all those things cost-effectively while reaching greater numbers of qualified prospects with each campaign.
Market insights are the key to successful business-to-business marketing, but they're also a great aid in consumer marketing.
Insight-driven marketing is based on audience intelligence, which means that you learn everything you can about your target audience so that you can establish a relationship with them and create content that's relevant to them. You ask questions like: What do people want? How do they feel about certain products or services? How can I use these insights to help me sell my product or service?
The more comprehensive the information at your disposal is, the better off you'll be when it comes time to make decisions about how best to reach out to customers who may not yet know about what it is that you offer, or even if there's any point in doing so.
Data is the key to successful business-to-business marketing, but it’s also an underused tool that many B2B marketers aren’t taking full advantage of. It doesn't matter if you're a small business trying to reach new prospects or a global brand with a large sales team: no matter how much experience you have in the industry or how deep your expertise goes, if you don't have the right data at hand, then there's no way for you to know who your customers are and what they care about most.
Market research is a great way to find out what your customers want, and it’s also a great way to get in-depth information about your competitors. It’s hard enough to understand how consumers think, but when you add in the fact that they are constantly changing their minds, and the fact that there are so many different types of products and services on offer, it becomes even more difficult to predict what trends will emerge next.
However, with the right tools at your disposal, you can gain insight into current market trends as well as anticipated changes in consumer behaviour over time (for example by examining past data). This information can help companies plan product development cycles or identify potential new markets.
As you get started with B2B market insights, it's important to have a clear understanding of your goals and priorities. Here are some questions you might ask:
B2B market insights are the fuel that powers everything else, and they’re essential for all businesses to thrive.
Before you can begin to measure the success of your insights, it's important to first define what success looks like. What are your goals? Are they quantifiable in a way that allows for comparisons across time periods? For example, if one team wants to increase revenue by 10% per year and another team wants to reduce costs by 5%, how would you compare them? Are both goals achievable given the current resources available (e.g., budget)?
Once these questions have been answered, it's time for some planning! There are three metrics most companies use when determining whether or not their goals have been met: revenue growth, cost reduction, and customer satisfaction levels. These metrics are often referred to as KPIs (key performance indicators) because they help managers see how well each department is doing against its set objectives with respect to specific results. These results are then tracked over a period of time. Learn the basics of KPIs here.
Once you've defined your goals, it's time to determine what metrics will be used to measure them.
When determining which metrics to use for your goals, keep in mind that the more specific you can be about them, the better. For example, instead of saying "increase revenue by 10% per year," try something like: "increase revenue from $1 million to $1.25 million in 6 months." Instead of saying "reduce costs by 5%," try something like: "reduce headcount by 10% while maintaining customer satisfaction levels."
With these insights in hand, your sales team can leverage them to create highly-personalised messages that resonate with their prospects and clients. And your marketing team can use them to craft a more effective strategy for reaching out and engaging prospects at every stage of their buying journey.
So how do you get these crucial insights? You could start by asking your sales team what they think about their prospects and clients. But if you take this approach, you'll likely get a lot of basic information that isn't actionable or strategic. You also won't gain any insight into the deeper motivations behind their actions and behaviours. If you want to know what motivates B2B buyers, check out Bret Kinsella’s (CEO of Voicebot.ai) take on it here.
Business-to-business marketing is a complex and dynamic field. But it doesn’t have to be difficult or confusing if you have the right tools and know how to use them. Still curious to learn more about B2B market insights? Check out our article where we explain B2B market insights in 4 simple steps. You can also reach out to us here.
A 5-minute read on the process of gathering B2B market insights for your business
Here, we explain the difference between a B2B and a B2C survey
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