Editorial
The Gist
- Insight importance. Focusing on customer insights, not just demographics, can powerfully shape your B2B marketing strategies.
- Target value. Broad target audience analysis, especially using Ideal Customer Profiles, enhances almost every marketing tactic you employ.
- Intelligence impact. Leveraging customer intelligence provides a significant edge in lead generation, demand creation and brand building.
Who needs what we’re selling and why? Discover the answers to those two questions and it’ll shape your marketing strategy into something that has a direct and powerful impact on your bottom line.
Let's take a closer look at how these customer insights can specifically impact the bottom line.
Unlocking Actionable Customer Insights for B2B
Unlocking actionable customer insights is why businesses in every sector are trying to get closer to their customers. But not all customer intelligence is useful. Knowing that your customer is 37, female and likes ice hockey might make them appear more human, but it isn’t going to help you sell software, or accountancy services, or manufacturing equipment — and especially not when B2B sales involve multiple decision makers across different teams, departments and with varying priorities.
Unless marketing personas deliver the customer insights you need to improve how you market your business — and this is where pain points are critical — then it’s impossible to differentiate your offering from the competition in a way that resonates with your customer.
Mastering Target Audience Analysis in B2B With the Ideal Customer Profile
Let’s look at how the top performers are doing when it comes to gathering customer intelligence.
Considered Content’s B2B Effectiveness Engine, which shows marketers how they compare to their top-performing peers, surveyed over 1,000 B2B marketers to learn more about their customers across nine different options — from general research into customer views and the brand’s products to gaining a better understanding of the purchase group and constructing a data-backed ideal customer profile (ICP).
What we see is that broad-based research is not only likely to propel you into the top-performing group, but it’s also going to make pretty much every tactic you use perform better.
Related Article: Customer Data Management Is the Key to Consumer Trust, Profitability
Elevate Sales with Customer Intelligence Insights
In tech, for example, those who research the broad views of their customers are over a fifth more likely to say their PPC advertising is delivering for lead gen and over a third more likely to rate their media advertising as highly effective for demand gen.
Those who have researched their ICP are over 20% more likely to be a leader in lead generation, over 20% more likely to lead in demand generation and over 25% more likely to be a leader in brand-building.
This is why getting this right matters. A lot.
Related Article: Build a Buyer Persona in 5 Steps
Top Performers' Actionable Insights Unveiled
So, what actionable customer insights are these top performers collecting?
- They understand what’s happening in the market: They research the catalysts driving the broader market and any barriers to change.
- They have assessed the competition: They’ve explored who they’re up against (both direct and indirect competitors) and how competitors are positioning themselves in the market.
- They have determined their strengths, weaknesses and potential points of differentiation: They have a real-world view of how they stack up (and for different segments).
- They know where to focus their efforts: They’ve assessed which segments of the market should be the focus for their sales and marketing activity.
- They’ve created an actionable buyer profile: One they can use to sharpen who they target and what they say to them.
Harnessing 'Jobs To Be Done Framework' for Buyer Profiles
Once they know all this, buyer profiles can be produced. This is where the Jobs To Be Done framework is really useful — the theory that people don’t "buy products," they hire them to help them make progress on a problem. In other words, people don’t buy because of who they are (so "adieu" personas), they buy because of what they need to get done. JTBD helps marketers identify why customers make purchases, what motivates them and, therefore, how to win their business.
Related Article: Using Customer Journey Maps and Jobs to Be Done for a Better Customer Experience
Final Thoughts on B2B Customer Insights
Like these top B2B marketing performers, you’ll need to get under the skin of who your customers are to learn what’s really driving their behavior. And beyond the jobs they need to get done, you need to know how customers buy, who’s involved in the purchase, what real-world pressures they’re under and their motivations for making a change (or resisting it).
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The best way to gather meaningful customer insights? By undertaking and assessing customer interviews — past, present and almost — speaking to your sales team, and researching what’s driving change within your market.
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