How to Become a Successful B2B Marketer

B2B marketing is fulfilling, challenging, and ever changing particularly in dynamic industries like technology, finance, and healthcare. The field attracts people who are analytical, with strong problem-solving abilities and a great deal of patience. Successful B2B marketers must be data driven and tech savvy with the unique ability to extract the most important insights from multiple information streams. There’s huge pressure to deliver results, so they must understand and communicate the impact their programs are having on the business while guiding the interpretation of that data for multiple audiences (including the C-suite).

My path to B2B marketing is relatively unique. I started in consumer marketing after beginning my career in finance. While working at Virgin Money, my role expanded to take on B2B marketing responsibilities, where I supported key programs focused on reaching wholesale mortgage brokers. That’s when I discovered that while there are differences between the B2C and B2B marketing disciplines, at the end of the day both are really about connecting with people. In either discipline it’s important to understand an individual’s needs and challenges, and how the product you’re offering is uniquely positioned to solve their problem. The core of both disciplines is building a brand that stands out in a crowded marketplace and emotionally connects—whether it’s with a consumer or a business. Staying focused on the needs of the buyer and how our product is uniquely positioned to solve their problem has been a key to my success in both consumer and business marketing across the financial services, ecommerce, healthcare, and education technology industries.

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The right skill set for B2B marketing

Now is a fortuitous time to explore a career in B2B marketing for those with the right skill set. Perhaps above all else, it’s incredibly important to be proficient at working with data. Almost every marketing role today is data driven—there’s so much accessible information (along with the ever-increasing ability to generate meaningful insight from it) to inform decision-making. We look at market research to understand which buyers we might be targeting and what might make them buy. There’s campaign data to understand what’s generating a lead cost-effectively and conversion funnel metrics to see how people are buying. Engagement, retention, and renewal rates show how effectively customers are coming back. And customer satisfaction metrics help ensure our brand experience has left a positive impression for invaluable word-of-mouth recommendations.

For B2B marketers, knowing how to assess which of that information is important, draw insight from it, and take action on it is critical. And translating all of that knowledge into financial impact is key. This is particularly true with B2B organizations because they have longer sales cycles, so marketing investments can get well ahead of revenue or lifetime value returns. Additionally, B2B marketers must examine leading indicators to determine if their programs are performing, but also reassess once they have final sales results to understand if they need to change course.

And as you advance in your career, the ability to hire (and keep) the right talent is paramount. The functions within a marketing organization span from creative development to analytics and advertising to demand generation and retention marketing and ultimately to the tech stack powering it all. Few people have the skills to build award-winning creative campaigns and then go into the weeds on the technical implementation of the analytics platform and marketing automation tools. Success requires building a strong team with the skills and talents to lead other functions within marketing but also empowering them to do so and trusting that they’ll make the right decisions.

Tech-savvy skills are key to success

Marketing today is focused on results and impact, so marketers must be able to understand and communicate the effect their programs are having on the business by leveraging hard numbers—and also guiding the interpretation of that data. And that’s especially important for marketing programs like brand building that are trickier to measure and may not immediately drive sales results, but will pay off over the long term. A strong B2B marketer has to set expectations on how to measure a program, the time frame it will take to measure it, and the value it’s creating.

Luckily, new tools are emerging all the time to help target the right customer, nurture and engage prospects or existing customers, and measure results. And with generative AI, we can potentially even create images, ads, presentations, and copy on the fly. (Granted, there are still some hiccups that need to be smoothed out, but the tech is very promising.) Having an understanding of how these technologies work, integrate across tools, and help leverage available data is important for delivering results.

The differences and similarities of B2B and B2C marketing

Those pursuing B2B marketing careers (or looking to change paths) should understand how the discipline differs from consumer marketing. It’s worth repeating that the B2B sales cycle can be much longer than that of B2C and will often take more time to determine if the marketing programs are effective. B2C marketers often get more instant gratification with results, whereas B2B marketers know that patience is a virtue. Because of that, B2B marketers really need to look at leading indicators of marketing performance to assess short-term results, and make optimizations while examining long-term lead quality and conversion metrics to see the impact on sales results.

Ultimately, both B2B and B2C marketers are built on the same foundation. Both must have the ability to leverage data to help understand or break down problems, define solutions from the available marketing toolkit, and then determine whether or not those are working. They need to always know the answers to these questions: Who are we targeting? What unique problem do we solve for them? How do we do that better than alternatives on the market? Is the marketing that we’re doing for them working? Are we retaining them? Is it having the right financial impact?

The role of ongoing learning and development

Don’t underestimate the value of corporate training, learning, and development when it comes to career ascension. Marketing is constantly changing as technologies evolve, and it’s essential to keep up.

Early in my career, I consulted with financial services institutions on how to leverage digital marketing channels for customer acquisition. The majority of their budgets were spent on TV ads and billboards with just a fraction going to digital. However, in recent years, digital has become king because it’s more measurable, has strong targeting capabilities, and offers data to optimize and refine very quickly. But back then, who knew Google Analytics would be developed to offer such a wealth of real-time information? And who could’ve foreseen the advent of generative AI tools that are already empowering team members to do things faster and more independently?

Technology changes everything so quickly. B2B marketers have to learn how to use these new tools and technologies and understand the impact they have—not just to ensure overall program success (and outsmart the competition) but also to build and develop their careers over the long term.

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