Event Wrap Up:

Mary Ellen Dugan, CMO at WP Engine, and Bruce Hershey II, CMO at Digital Hands, led a recent CMO Club Virtual Roundtable discussing some of the winning patterns that B2B marketing leaders can learn from B2C digital marketing:

Listen to the full Virtual Roundtable [55:18]
Listen to the Virtual Roundtable Highlights Trailer [1:19]

So what patterns can B2B marketing leaders adopt from B2C?

B2C marketing has more of a fail fast, agile mentality – constantly driving emotional interactions with buyers, and constantly iterating based on a data-driven feedback loop.

According to recent research by McKinsey, "similar to what we've seen in the B2C environment, the importance of digital channels for B2B companies has grown significantly in the past few years and has radically increased since the COVID-19 crisis began."

Create emotional interactions

• Often B2B is missing the "emotional" touch that B2C brands are so effective at creating.
• Your customer is the hero, not the product or technology.
• B2B needs to dig into the reasons to buy (RTBs) and get really clear on what those are for your targets.
• Your B2B targets already know what they need. They aren't going to read a long white paper – you have to earn their attention with an emotional interaction.

"When people hear emotional connection on the B2C side, we think about aspirational and prestigious. But the emotional interaction for B2B is how do I make my client a hero? What would it mean to feel like a hero in our solution set or in technology?" - Mary Ellen Dugan, CMO at WP Engine

Establish a feedback loop

• Use A/B tests to determine how you can most effectively go to market with your messages and data points.
• If your tests work, push the envelope with new approaches, and have greater confidence about outcomes.
• Not every new approach wins, but the process of continuously trying new things and iterating based on feedback is the winning pattern.

"When I walked into the B2B side, data was very limited. Especially from a marketing and even from a sales perspective. But I had to demand it. I even had to help architect it, to get the data points to me so I could start making what I could consider logical decisions and start testing and learning." - Bruce Hershey II, CMO, Digital Hands

Get the data you need

• It's about knowing your audience. You have to know them well enough to understand what's interesting or provocative to them.
• The winning pattern for B2B marketing is using a single source of truth that allows for A/B testing on personalized, segmented campaigns to generate test data.
• Leverage the insights you are generating to make sure you are communicating not only in real-time but through the proper channels.
• Fix the infrastructure if needed

"You have to have a single source of truth that lives between your platforms and your marketing automations" - Bruce Hershey II, CMO, Digital Hands

Listen to the full Virtual Roundtable as Dugan and Hershey II discuss winning patterns from B2C that every B2B marketer should be embracing.