Best Practices for B2B Marketers

Top marketers ground their growth strategies and employee value propositions in their brand purpose, Forrester Research asserts in a new report that offers 12 B2B marketing best practices.

Top marketers also have insight-driven, customer-centric growth strategies; ensure that product, marketing and sales are strategically aligned; and partner with sales to jointly prioritize market segments based on their propensity to buy.

Forrester broke down the 12 best marketing practices into three separate groups: strategy; operations and marketing campaigns; and programs and messaging.

Operational best practices include making marketing plans based on insights and data; prioritizing measurements of data for customers using uniform key performance indicators; and ensuring that product, marketing and sales processes, strategies, tech, data, etc., are operationally aligned.

Best practices for marketing campaigns, programs, and messaging include the following:

• Addressing the entire customer life cycle during marketing campaigns.
• Developing opportunities based on buying groups.
• Dynamically altering marketing programs based on buying signals and engagement.
• Focusing messaging on customer outcomes, not products and features.
• Using data to tailor content for personal experiences.

There is no single way to prioritize the above, according to Matthew Selheimer, Forrester’s vice president and research director for B2B marketing. “When we engage with our clients, the first thing that we ask is ‘What are you trying to do? Do you want to improve top-line growth, improve profitability, acquire new customers, retain and expand customers?’”

Each of the 12 best practices helps, but certain principles correlate more closely with certain priorities, according to Selheimer. “For example, leading marketers report faster revenue growth, but good marketing alone isn’t going to drive that growth. You need to have a good product, an effective sales function, etc.”

Three of the best practices focus on cross-functional collaboration and correlate with revenue growth, according to Selheimer. Marketing and sales need to focus on customer segments with the highest propensity to buy. Also needed is operational alignment between sales, marketing, and product teams around key company principles.

“If you’re just aligning strategically but that’s not following through to operational execution, that’s a problem. And if you’re just operationally aligning but you’re not strategically aligned, you will be less profitable and have less of a growth opportunity,” he says.

Customer research is another critical best practice on which marketing leaders focus, Selheimer says. “When companies are more customer-centric than company- or product-centric, they achieve much higher business results.”

Forrester’s research shows that customer-obsessed companies have 1.7 times higher revenue growth than those that aren’t, 1.5 times higher profit, 1.6 times better growth and customer retention, and two times higher employee retention.

“This is a key part of the dialogue that we have with our clients: how customer-obsessed are you vs. revenue-obsessed,” Selheimer says. “Everyone says they love their customers, but that just sounds like a bumper sticker.

“Being customer-obsessed means making decisions based on the best interest of the customer, not the internal stakeholder,” Selheimer adds.

Top-performing companies also ground their marketing plans and insights from the market and providers and customers and have adaptive programs that dynamically modify as buyers engage with marketing, according to Selheimer. “That’s going to make your marketing more efficient; that’s going to make your sales more efficient; that’s going to drive greater organizational profitability.”

Companies need to shift their focus to appreciating marketing as a co-equal partner with sales and go-to-market strategy for the best performance, says Selheimer, who cautions that this isn’t an easy transition for some companies. “In some cases, you may need to change your marketing leadership to someone who understands how to work with sales and drive segmentation and prioritization together.”

Beyond partnering with sales and go-to-market strategy, leading marketers also have a closer relationship with IT and a broader technology stack than marketing laggards, Selheimer points out. Three-quarters of the leaders use customer advocacy solutions, with 85 percent planning to increase those investments.

More than two-thirds (68 percent) of leading marketers work in organizations with dedicated IT teams for marketing or a mix of technical resources from IT and marketing departments to support technology initiatives.

“Partnering with IT is much more efficient and productive than trying to do it on your own,” the research firm says. “Leading marketers are much more likely to say that strong marketing and communication exist between IT and marketing.”

And finally, leading marketers are more likely to include artificial intelligence, including generative AI, as a central marketing strategy, according to Forrester. These marketers also are more likely to have operationalized AI in production.