Beyond Traffic, Trust: Time to Re-Strategize B2B engagement
New tech, heightened expectations, and noisy opinions are shifting B2B buying. Forrester reveals that on average, 13 people are now involved in making a purchasing decision (the range here is actually a lot more interesting!), and they certainly aren’t making time for cold calls. Today’s buyers are charting their own information sourcing course more than ever, conducting increasingly deep research before seriously considering a vendor. But what’s not growing is buyer confidence—and that’s still essential for any significant purchasing decision.
To be confident in a decision, today’s buying groups still need to feel comfortable, yet they’re increasingly overwhelmed by inputs. They’re hopping channels, comparing sources, and continuing to turn to industry voices they’ve comfortably relied upon. With so many hoops to jump through and inputs to process, it’s no wonder that as much as 86 percent of B2B purchases stall before reaching a decision.
Simply put, for vendors to drive forward momentum in scenarios like these, it’s going to take changes on how we plan and deliver messages into the marketplace. Taking a page from the B2C handbook, even in enterprise B2B, there’s abundant evidence that brands already possessing a strong positive reputation outpace their competitors in the race to category-beating growth. When a brand has established trust in its market, potential buyers have already developed a level of familiarity with them, before a buying motion even begins. And so, buyers require less convincing to consider them. These brands make more shortlists. Deals closer faster. There’s less discounting. All the things that drive up ROI.
With where things are headed, this kind of familiarity and trust is becoming a North Star objective that marketing teams need to adjust to. It’s very different—quite a bit deeper—than pursuing view and click volumes because it involves thinking for the longer term and about the reinforcing impact of everything you’re doing.
Beyond Simple Traffic: Evolving to Metrics that Matter
Executives and practitioners alike need to adjust the success indicators they’ve grown overly comfortable with. Not long ago, traffic and click rates were hailed as acceptable measurements of progress. Volume’s relationship to outcomes is becoming a lot more nuanced, especially when traffic may be going down but conversion rates are starting to tick up.
This isn’t to say that broad awareness isn’t beneficial; it just isn’t enough. Today’s marketers need to focus on indicators of growing familiarity, on the building of trust. Think repeat registrations, content subscriptions, and other high-value actions.
Trust building is not a simple measure, an output from some stage in a buyer’s journey framework. This is because creating trust-building impact starts well before a buyer is (very infrequently) in-market to buy. In the LinkedIn B2B Institute/Erenberg-Bass heuristic, 95 percent of your audience isn’t actively buying at any given time, but 5 percent of the time is really too infrequent and therefore too late to be readily considered when a buying motion visibly kicks off. So, despite a trending management preference towards “performance” metrics, we’re speaking here about metrics gathered in advance of or in the absence of a simple funnel construct.
Creating Value for a Targeted ICP: the Ultimate White Space
One of the key building blocks of trust is perceived competence. To establish it, B2B marketers must position their solutions directly in the context of actual buyer needs, think “searcher intent in a prompt-driven world.” Organizations that possess and leverage person-level intent data can enjoy a significant leg-up in this arena because they have clear access to search intent signals from the content being consumed. Expanding on this concept, with a more complete view of the individuals within typical buying groups—the individuals within them, and what each decision-maker cares about—they can build hyper-personalized content that resonates and stands out from the competition for direct and distributed delivery alike. They can build credible, tailored materials backed by recognized experts, to help the content be found and build the trust that’s necessary to propel purchasing decisions. The objective is to turn simple engagement in the moment into an ongoing, value-driven conversation—one that builds familiarity and strengthens preference for the source.
While direct-from-brand messaging remains useful for initiating familiarity, pursuit of trust benefits from thinking more broadly about how the B2B buying network actually operates. Oversimplified, the buying network is that web of influences that any given player in a buying group typically relies upon, both consciously and unconsciously, to validate how they think about a decision, a solution, and a vendor. The point is, that by understanding buying networks, marketers can make use of their influencing effects, the trust signals they put out that buyers rely on. Typical sources of strong influencer include network entities like known editors, respected analysts, successful channel players, and more. In short, skeptical buyers commonly trust what others say about you more than even your most meticulously crafted material.
Influencing the Influencers: Generating Trust by Association
Research shows that B2B buyers value third-party interactions at least 1.4 times more than digital supplier interactions, underscoring the importance of visibility and credibility beyond your own platforms. The better the chorus of trusted voices becomes for re-echoing your thinking, the easier it will be for buyers to trust you. Engaging, influencing and leveraging the buying network requires a thoughtful, aligned, and coordinated approach. You want to be positively effective anywhere information is exchanged or could be discovered.
Consider a few core tactics at a minimum. Co-create and distribute your content through credible, independent, category-specific media properties. Build relationships with respected analysts and vie for inclusion in their opinion-shaping reports. And always aim to secure customer testimonials and peer reviews and generate more social proof.
Layered Trust Signals Make a Buyer’s Decision Easier, Not Harder
In the age of information overload, it could easily become more difficult for buyers to find the decision-making validation they prefer. They want validation that you understand their unique needs and that your solution is worth taking on risk. They need evidence that the influential voices they rely on believe in you too. We’re seeing brands that are addressing trust building starting to accelerate in their spaces. They are generating consistently available and abundant trust-building signals for buyers to consume across complex influence networks and buyers’ journeys. We believe marketers should be prioritizing trust building in their engagement-focused marketing strategies; they should focus on building more trust reinforcement into the marketing mix, because by doing so, they will be directly addressing the natural uncertainty challenge that impedes B2B decision-making.
John Steinert is the chief marketing officer at Informa TechTarget, a global leader in accelerating tech company growth. As CMO, Steinert focuses on purchase intent-driven marketing and sales solutions, delivering measurable business impact for enterprise technology companies.