To understand where we are in B2B marketing, we must also understand where we’ve been and the (often bad) habits picked up along the way. As Jared Fuller explained in Nearbound and the Rise of the Who Economy, B2B marketing has found itself miles away from its original purpose.
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REFLECTION ON THE NEARBOUND ERA
The state of B2B marketing
To understand where we are in B2B marketing, we must also understand where we’ve been and the (often bad) habits picked up along the way.
As Jared Fuller explained in Nearbound and the Rise of the Who Economy, B2B marketing has found itself miles away from its original purpose.
He writes:
The root of the word “marketing” is “market.” But today, the practice of B2B marketing has strayed from its foundation—over-indexing on the “ing.”
Without its roots, what is marketing?
Before we can answer that, we have to answer a more fundamental question: what is a market?
Marketing doesn’t create markets, the actors within a market are the ones who create it.
Marketing should be the bridge between what those actors need and the solution. This doesn’t mean just telling people about your product. It means living in market with them and those they trust, learning their language, and connecting with their problems.
Good marketing means participating in the market.
It’s understandable why so many marketers cling to old methods of marketing at people with product information. Because at one point it worked for them.
With the rise of data collection, the Outbound Era saw marketers and sellers using data to interrupt buyers, getting the right messaging in front of them until the buyer was finally convinced.
Then came the Inbound Era, born from the automation of information through content creation to attract customers. Inbound allowed sellers to focus on accounts that had an identified challenge and exposure to the brand without targeting them cold.
This changed the game for marketers, who quickly took their places among C-suite armed with their strategies for pushing buyers down the funnel by getting the right messages on the right channels at the right time.
They developed frameworks and disciplines to help validate and organize these strategies. Each segment of the digital marketing team had a purpose that was meant to use data to create content that shepherded buyers further down the pipe.
Marketers started tracking things like intent data and using it to funnel into the outbound machine. SEO became extremely important, forcing marketers to shape how they produced content to game search engines into listing their content first.
It’s also during this period that marketers started being held accountable to metrics like MQLs—an attribution model that suggested that the buyer’s path to purchase was a linear model.
Buyers see content→ The buyer is nurtured through more content and/or outreach→ Buyers express interest in a sign-up or demo→ The Sales team works their magic to close the deal.
Easy peasy, right?
At the beginning of the Inbound Era it might’ve been a bit easier to push buyers down this kind of path, but the rise of social media changed the game.
Now, buyers were empowered with access, not just to other buyers, but also to companies and their leaders. They started to value the human touch, what brands stood for, and who vouches for them.
Instead of being voiceless and powerless about what companies were doing, they could (very publicly) give feedback and express discontent. At the same time, the (mis)use of data started to spin out of control. Instead of receiving a few outbound emails per week, there are dozens daily. Instead of a targeted ad on Facebook or Google here or there, ads follow buyers wherever they go.
They are inundated with noise, with some Americans seeing nearly 10K ad impressions per day.
The result? B2B Marketing is in its most chaotic era. Trust has been lost. People are skeptical about what companies claim to do, and even more skeptical of what they do with buyers’ data.
In the How Economy of the Outbound and Inbound Eras, data was the new oil. Now, in the Nearbound Era, trust is the new data. And trust can only be found between buyers and the people and/or companies that have done the groundwork to earn it.
Learn exactly how to implement the nearbound mindset and strategies into marketing by downloading the FREE Nearbound Marketing Blueprint.
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