B2B marketing works when the pieces fit. Align your strategies, use data, and enhance the customer experience with native advertising.
Companies are being forced to drive growth and revenue through highly targeted, data-driven marketing strategies. Best practice is no longer doing one area well—digital marketing, demand generation (demand gen), or customer experience (CX)—but all those elements working in harmony together.
1. Understanding the Core Components: The Three Pillars of B2B Marketing
Given that it is hard to speak about how these business areas will be aligned without discussing what each does and fits in the larger strategy, let’s first identify what each one does and how they fit into the overall strategy.
1.1 Digital Marketing: The Voice of Your Brand
These include a whole myriad of things, from SEO and social media to e-marketing emails and various others such as content development and native advertising. Awareness and interest are generated. It simply captures attention without being intrusive—that is necessary in B2B—by means of native ads that are so nonintrusive to be almost seamless with editorial content.
1.2 Demand Generation (Demand Gen): Building the Pipeline
Demand generation creates leads and nurtures them. Essentially, the goal is to create interest in your products or services, which can then be used to take that lead further into a sales opportunity.
1.3 Customer Experience (CX): Creating Lasting Relationships
Customer experience is all about the sum total of what a customer experiences concerning your brand—from first engagement to post-purchase support. In B2B, superior CX usually means repeat business, renewals, and word-of-mouth referrals.
2. Native Advertising: The Glue That Holds It All Together
So, where does native advertising fit into all of this digital marketing, demand generation, and CX alignment?
2.1 Why Native Ads are Effective in B2B Marketing
In native advertising, paid media simulates the look, feel, and function of the platform on which it appears.. Native ads provide useful, valuable information in a format that they already enjoy, be it an article, video, or infographic.
2.2 Choosing the Right Native Ad Platforms
There are myriad native advertising platforms to choose from. There are the bigger, more popular networks like Taboola and Outbrain, as well as those with industry-specific focuses. The right platform will depend on who you are targeting, what kind of content you will be promoting, and what kind of engagement you want to generate.
3. Setting Shared Goals: A Unified Marketing Machine
In order to synergy those three areas, which are digital marketing, demand generation, and CX, it is very important that all these teams are aligned with their goals.
3.1 Common Objectives for Maximum Impact
Begin with ambitious objectives, like getting more leads, increasing conversion rates, and retaining existing customers. Such goals are supposed to guide campaigns and their associated activities. Align KPIs—CLV, conversion rates, and engagement metrics—across the organization and make people align on similar outcomes.
3.2 The Role of Data in Alignment
Data is your best friend in maintaining this alignment. The understanding from native ads and other digital marketing channels should shape the demand-gen approaches. And the same data can also be used to buttress CX efforts, as every touchpoint will reflect the expectations of your customers.
4. A Seamless Buyer Journey: Connecting the Dots Across Touchpoints
A B2B buying cycle can be long and very complex, comprising several stakeholders and decision-makers. To ensure a seamless experience, streamlined alignment of marketing efforts should reach all touchpoints.
Mapping the B2B Buyer Journey
- Top-of-Funnel (Awareness): Awareness Native marketing catches the attention of the audience by being relevant to one’s interest and challenge, such as in blog posts and sponsored articles and infographics.
- Mid-Funnel (Consideration): Moving into the consideration phase, you can reach out to the prospect using some demand-gen tactics like targeted email campaigns and webinars.
- Bottom-of-Funnel (Decision and Loyalty): CX here plays a significant role in ensuring that your messaging reaches the prospect’s buying intent and the post-purchase experience is seamless.
You create frictionless experiences, keeping prospects engaged and progressing toward a sale by ensuring the messaging, at all these stages, is maintained with consistency.
5. Cross-Functional Collaboration: The Secret Sauce to Success
When the digital marketing, demand generation, and CX teams operate fluidly together, their collaborations create more effective services across the board.
5.1 Data Sharing and Communication
Helping alignment might come in the form of working teams, and data being shared can come about through synchronization within CRM systems, utilizing marketing automation tools, or just native advertising platforms able to show content performance insight. Everyone is likely on the same page when everyone understands what is being conveyed to who and when.
5.2 A Unified Content Calendar
One of the easiest ways to ensure that groups are always in alignment is a shared content calendar: avoid overlap; ensure that messaging is consistent and not mixed and matched across various channels; improve tracking of performance metrics; and better allocate resources.
6. Measuring Success: Proving the ROI of Alignment
Measuring whether your alignment efforts are working is useful; therefore, track short-term as well as long-term metrics.
Key Metrics for Measuring Impact
Monitor click-through rates, conversion rates, and engagement metrics for your native ads. Monitor similar demand-gen outcomes such as lead quality and pipeline velocity. From a CX standpoint, track customer retention and satisfaction scores for long-term success.
Another powerful tool in measuring the effectiveness of every channel in the strategy is attribution modeling. With this, you would optimize and assure that you continue to sustain success.
Align for Growth
It’s not just a good idea; it’s essential for driving sustained growth in today’s competitive B2B landscape that demand generation and CX alignment will drive leads from awareness to loyalty. Implementing strategy-enablers like native advertising while keeping common goals and metrics will create the unifying experience that guides prospects through all stages of awareness.
The bottom line? Stronger connections, better conversion rates, and higher brand awareness. Need to crank up your marketing? Try native advertising and take it from there.
