Green Hat

What's the biggest mistake you see B2B companies make when choosing a marketing partner?

Focusing on price or cost as a primary factor for decision making. Find an agency that understands your business, your audiences and who can align with the company's goals and demonstrate marketing’s contribution to pipeline/revenue.

What’s the single best advice you would give to a new B2B tech startups that have not yet formalized their marketing strategy?

Apply startup mentality to marketing – keep trying things and if you fail, move on and try something else. Also, let’s assume you have a great product – build a great brand so that it’s distinctive and delivers on your product proposition.

How do you balance short-term demand generation with long-term brand building in B2B marketing?

Align both short-term and long-term to the buying cycle in your industry. The deals that are happening now didn’t just happen magically overnight – they happened because your brand made it to the shortlist of vendors (through brand building efforts). And your demand campaigns continue to nurture buyers through that cycle to the point where they are ready to speak to you.

This outreach from the buyers is typically 60-70% way through the buying journey. Make sure that your buyers have the right content and information they need to evaluate your product against competitors and their needs. And make it easy – remove the gates and personalise their experience.

Decide on the right metrics to measure and set up your tech and reporting to measure these metrics. There is no right split between brand and demand generation.

How do you measure and demonstrate ROI for your enterprise B2B clients, particularly for those with long sales cycles?

Set up your martech stack to track and measure buying group progression. Make sure your attribution models (multi-touch please) are well set up and that you are reporting on the right metrics with the right tools. Have good data hygiene and connectivity between platforms – I often see clients whose CRMs are not synced with their marketing automation platforms (MAPs) and struggle with attribution.

Make sure that your stakeholders understand that your marketing efforts/plans are an investment now for a conversion in the future – you would know how long a typical sales cycle takes based on historical data.

How can B2B brands stand out in the age of AI-generated content?

From our latest APAC B2B Buyer Journey Research Report, we’re seeing the buying journey changing substantially for the first time in more than 20 years. AI plays a role on two aspects.

1. AI is being used by 94% of B2B buyers for top and middle of the funnel journeys – this includes shortlisting vendors, synthesising information, comparing vendor offerings, preparing RFPs etc.

2. AI ‘inside’. With AI being inside most products/services, buyers are actually reaching out earlier in the journey (63% vs 73% last year) to find out more about AI. This includes features, pricing and questions about data security and privacy. Sellers are not giving enough info on this, so buyers need to reach out to find out.

Your brand needs to appear in AI search – and this is making sure that your content is accessible by AI bots and also written in a way that is aligned to how buyers are searching on LLMs/AI for solutions.

I think people are getting better at recognising AI-generated content and some of the principles of good creative – authenticity, distinctiveness – should apply to your brand platform.