The Science Behind A Successful B2B Marketing Strategy

In today’s media landscape, marketers can access more data about their audience than ever. As a result, companies have begun using those insights to create data-driven strategies that yield the best results.

With the direction the industry is heading, businesses need to learn how to make data work for them more effectively. At monday.com, through trial and error, we’ve learned how to leverage advanced analytics to measure activities that marketers have traditionally avoided – including long-term customer value, predicting and forecasting user behavior, and connecting marketing targets to company-level results.

If it ain’t broke, (do)n’t fix it

We’ve all been exposed to B2C marketing throughout our lives. But do the same marketing tactics work when a business wants to offer services or products to another company?

The short answer is no.

B2B marketing is an entirely different ball game where the B2B buyers’ purchasing decisions impact their entire company. Given the audience, B2B marketers must be more equipped in their industry as campaigns call for different expertise and more thorough research than in more traditional marketing. B2B marketing in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry also adds another layer. The commoditization of SaaS has transformed the tech landscape into a fierce competition where companies are vying for every inch of market share.

Since our founding, we’ve approached our campaigns more like a B2C company that exists in the B2B realm. Compared to traditional B2B marketing, we aim to speak to customers and potential customers directly at eye level in a human-to-human way. This means including more emotion in our campaigns and content in a fun, direct, and engaging tone across traditional B2C channels such as social networks, CTV, and podcasts. We communicate as people, providing the tools for other people to solve real challenges they face every day. Our marketing efforts address specific pain points that we all face in our daily work lives. This is vital because we’re selling software – which doesn’t typically elicit deep feelings from the general population.

Over the last few years, our team has executed thoughtful, engaging, and eye-catching global campaigns that have helped the company achieve over $835M in Annual recurring revenue (as of the end of 2023), reach over 225,000 customers, and launch countless successful Marketing campaigns—from hundreds of global OOH spots to a coveted Super Bowl ad placement.

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Time waits for no marketer

We put much effort into performance and brand marketing. Like other businesses, we started with online performance channels. However, over the last few years, we’ve expanded our scope to focus on brand marketing to reach new audiences. The pandemic catalyzed this change, and our ability to be agile with the unexpected was our superpower.

Taking the world by surprise, teams were suddenly ripped apart, and companies had to deal with a disjointed workforce in a new world of work previously unseen. From a marketer’s perspective, what we needed the most was visibility. Thrust into uncharted waters, businesses and their employees needed a simple, clean view of their workflow.

We realized that’s where monday.com came in.

As a work management platform and a solution to a global problem, we used this time to become even more creative and inspiring with our campaigns, keeping our audience and their needs at the forefront. This time was instrumental in driving conversions and brand awareness. We rapidly adapted to the new landscape and began experimenting with new channels to reach audiences that suddenly changed their media consumption behavior. As a result, we started using more offline channels: TV, a Super Bowl campaign, and CTV. We also started working with more audio channels, like offline and online radio, Spotify, Pandora, and podcasts.

The need for greater transparency in workforces during quarantine, a data-driven mission, and a measured advertising rollout helped propel us to new heights.

Data is king

Our overall acquisition strategy relies on an intent model powered by machine learning and data analysis from BigBrain, our internal Business Intelligence tool that informs all business operations. BigBrain provides a quality score for each signup we generate, accurately predicting conversion. The score is based on several factors, including initial engagement, how the customer signed up, and the day of the week.

All our digital advertising is managed through BigBrain. Our team of marketers closely monitors each campaign, paying close attention to engagement numbers. If a campaign isn’t performing well, they simply reallocate the budget to another channel. In 2024, we are also shifting the way we measure. With third-party cookie deprecation, we’ll increasingly rely on MMM (Marketing Mix Modeling), which allocates and predicts where to spend the next dollar.

Flexibility is the key to continual growth

B2B marketing is finding the perfect balance between understanding your customers’ needs, having the resources and know-how to cater to those needs, and finding the right tools to help. That said, there is always more work and more questions to be answered. For example, what are the differences between markets? How do we allocate media? What kind of messaging do we choose? How do we work harmoniously between acquisition and brand goals?

These are especially poignant for us as we scale into a multi-product platform and begin to ruminate on how we evolve our marketing strategy to convey our company’s growth. With this transition, it’s vital to continuously review our strategy now that we have additional products to market and to add to the MMM. Despite this new territory, we know we’ll stay true to our winning marketing formula, which is always powered by data.

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