B2B Marketing Intelligence

Part #2

Introduction

Marketing intelligence refers to the B2B marketing research, insight, and data you will collate and interpret to inform the development of your B2B marketing strategy. Commonly speaking, this process will take place early in the formulation of your strategy, and largely be directed by your overarching marketing goals (and objectives).

It’s very easy to become overwhelmed when it comes to B2B marketing research and marketing intelligence gathering, so you need a clear path on how to both plan and execute your research efforts.

There are four main areas that fall under the broader ‘marketing intelligence’ umbrella: with each focussing on its own major topic. Each of these will be explored in greater depth below, but at a high level this is what these relate to:

Customer: Your customer intelligence will profile who you’re competing for – here you will utilise the buyer personas model.
Industry: Your industry intelligence will profile where you compete – here you will utilise an industry/market analysis.
Competitor: Your competitor intelligence will profile who you compete with – here you will utilise a competitor analysis.
Function: Your function intelligence will profile how you’re currently competing – here you will utilise an internal analysis, specifically focussed on the marketing department.

1. Customer Intelligence (Buyer Personas)

The first component of B2B marketing research relates to your target customer base – or put another way, ‘who you’re competing for’. Ultimately, customer demand is a common yardstick for determining the health of a business and will commonly directly impact your ability to grow or even survive.

So, with the importance of the customer outlined, it stands to reason that in order to target or attract them to your company, brand, product or service – the first thing to do is learn as much as you possibly can about them. Only after you understand them, can you formulate a strategy of how you will position and market your offering to them.

There are several ways of capturing and interpreting this customer intelligence, but the most common way is through the usage of buyer personas.

Put simply, buyer personas are detailed descriptions of your target audiences and preferred customers for your products or services. You should have in mind a set of key targets that act as the starting point (for example, if you’re an IT services company you could include the CIO, CEO & Head of IT who will very likely be part of the buying unit/DMU). Once you have these, you then need to analyse each one independently against a set of data points – extracting as much insight as you can to formulate a complete view of this target persona.

This is a crucial step in any B2B marketing strategy. you absolutely must understand your customer before you can effectively target, engage, and convert them. You will find yourself constantly referring to your buyer personas and you should keep them updated when new information comes to light.

Customer Analysis (Buyer Persona) – Data Point Overview

1.1 – Demographic/General

Age Group: What age bracket does this persona fall under?
Education: What is their level of education and how often to do they complete qualifications to top-up their professional knowledge?
Income: Usually directly correlated to other areas such as job title and level of seniority, this metric is used to provide a well-rounded understanding of the persona you are targeting.
Skills & Abilities: What inherent talents does this persona have that allowed them to get to their position? And how can you leverage these as a marketer?

1.2 – Firmographic

Span of Control: How many employees/people report into this persona within a company’s hierarchy?
Level of Responsibility/Seniority: How much responsibility does this persona have?
Buying Influence/DMU Role: Related to the above point, but here you need to list their likely role within the decision-making unit (DMU). Is this person a decision influencer or a decision maker?
Typical Job Title: This refers directly to their job title and not their likely DMU position. This will close the loop when developing a professional understanding of this persona. Is this person gunning for C-suite or already there?
Role Overview: Any information is useful here that can support the understanding of this persona’s professional day-to-day life. What level is their competence and skillset?

1.3 – Professional Drivers

Strategic Goals: What must this persona accomplish to excel at their role? What are those big goals that drive their day-to-day activities?
Challenges/Pain Points: What friction points does this persona face when trying to accomplish their goals and what obstacles are causing frustrations?

1.4 – Professional Attributes

Values: These include both professional values and personal values that influence their actions and behaviour in the workplace.
Motivators: Tied into the point above, what exactly motivates this target persona daily?
Watering Holes/Content Preferences: Where does this persona gather research, insights and information related to their role?

1.5 – Context

Common Objections: Why would this persona say ‘no’ to your product or service?
Current Perceptions: What views does this persona have towards your product/service or how do they feel about your offering?
Level of Understanding: What is their current level of understanding with regards to the product/service you are offering?
Points of Resonance: What current components, elements or attributes of your product/service or business are likely to appeal?
Target Perceptions: What do you want this persona to think and feel with regards to your offering and of your business?

2. Industry Intelligence (Industry Analysis)

The second component of B2B marketing research relates to your industry – or put another way, ‘where you compete’. To remove any confusion, in this instance we are referring to the industry in which your business is located, and not the industries/segments you are looking to target with your products/service through your campaigns (although some of the data points will consider this so you can reuse this section within the campaign development stage).

This then is more about understanding the competitive landscape of the key industry (or the key segments) you belong too and compete within. When it comes to assembling this analysis, you could complete it for the industry as a whole and/or for several key segments. Its recommended you follow this type of approach to broaden your intelligence gathering and to extract the maximum amount of insight that you will need when crafting your B2B marketing strategy.

Industry Analysis – Data Point Overview

2.1 – Market

Market Size: What is the industry valuation and general makeup of companies, customers, and partners?
Market/Industry Trends & Outlook: What does the short, medium, and long-term future look like within this industry?
Market Segments: Can the market be broken down into key segments or groups?
Market Geography: What is the territorial breakdown of the market and key segments?
Market Growth: What are the projected figures for revenue and total market valuation? Is this market in growth or decline?
Technology/Innovation Trends: Similar to the market/industry trends data point, but this will provide an overview as to the current level of digitisation and innovation within an industry.

2.2 – Dynamics

Key Success Factors: What do the most successful companies within a chosen market have in common?
Key Challenges: What obstacles and pain points are all competing companies within an industry facing?
Product/Service Breakdown: What are the most popular products and services within an industry?
Competitive Overview: Is this industry fiercely competitive and currently undergoing rapid disruption? Or is it slow-moving and conservative?
Expert Opinions: What are industry peers saying about the future of this industry?
External Forces: What are the key things this industry needs to keep an eye out for? Is there source of both positive and negative disruption close by?

3. Competitor Intelligence (Competitor Analysis)

The third component of B2B marketing research relates to your competitors – or put another way, ‘who you compete with’. It’s crucial to understand the competitive landscape, as without this you will be unable to effectively differentiate and contend in the marketplace.

But it goes much further than just being able to stand out. After you have completed your competitor analysis, you will be able to spot gaps, weaknesses, strengths, common themes, and a variety of other highly valuable data points that you can use to your advantage.

It’s your decision on how many competitors you choose to analyse, but its recommended that you categorise multiple similar competitors into groups – that will provide the ability to analyse on a segment level.

Competitor Analysis – Data Point Overview

3.1 – General/Financial

Market Share: How much of the market do they currently own? How expansive is their customer base?
Company Size/Geography: How expansive is their employee and operations network? And in which territories are they the strong or weak?
Pricing Structure: What is the general pricing structure for this competitor’s product/service? What does this tell you about their strategy?
Revenue: How much income or profit does this competitor generate? Are they on an upward or downward trend?
Number of Clients/Partners: How many large customers does this competitor have? How strong are their case studies?
Number of Employees/Hiring Plans: How many employees do they have and what kind of job roles are they currently advertising for?
Target Industries/Segments: What markets and segments do they compete in? Are they particularly strong or weak in certain areas?
Company History: How long has this company been competing? Are there any notable milestones in their history?
Strengths & Weaknesses: In simple terms, what are they great at and what are they bad at?

3.2 – Products/Services

Product/Service Benchmarking: What products/services do they offer and how are they categorised?
Technology/Innovation Analysis: How capable are their products/services? What is their R&D capacity and likely rate of innovation?

3.3 – Brand/Commercial

Key Targeting: What segments or buyer personas are they targeting?
Brand Analysis: What is their brand position, mission, and values? How does this differentiate them from other competitors?
Content Marketing Analysis: How strong is their content marketing function? How broad is their topic base and are they high performing?
Marketing Channel Analysis: How strong is their inbound (and outbound) marketing channels? How broad is their channel mix?

4. Function Intelligence (Internal Audit)

The fourth component of B2B marketing research relates to the current performance of your internal marketing function – or put another way ‘how you’re currently competing’. This element will focus on the marketing function – and will primarily be used for existing businesses.

You don’t always need to cover this area, and you may already be reporting on a range of metrics frequently that answers the question ‘how are we competing’? That being said, if you want to maximise the performance of your marketing function, or perform a deep dive to uncover strengths, weakness and any gaps or opportunity – then this internal audit or functional analysis is worthwhile.

4.1 – Brand

Analysing key elements of your brand development, and strategy execution in the marketplace. This is a difficult category to cover as it involves collating qualitative data primarily from current and potential customers.

Example Data Points Include: Brand Awareness, Brand Equity, Value Proposition Strength, Brand Attributes, Brand Preference etc…

4.2 – Content

Analysing key elements of your content marketing function including processes, strategy, and execution.

Example Data Points Include: Shares/Republishes, Content Throughput, Comments, Likes, Views, Downloads, Leads Generated etc…

4.3 – Channels

Analysing the performance and effectiveness of your marketing channel mix – and the individual strategies associated to each.

Example Website Data Points Include: Bounce Rate, Exit Pages, Popular Pages, Channel Breakdown, Average Session Duration, Unique Visits, New/Return Visitor Breakdown, Converting Pages, User Flows, Page/Site Load Speed, Page Views etc…
Example SEO Data Points Include: Keyword Ranking, Keyword CTR%, Keyword Impressions, Keyword Clicks, Number of Backlinks, Quality of Backlinks, Domain Authority etc…
Example PPC/Online Ads/Remarketing Data Points Include: Ad Position, Ad/Keyword CTR%, Ad/Keyword Impressions, Ad/Keyword Clicks, Cost per Click, Cost per Conversion/Acquisition, Quality Score, Conversion Rate etc…
Example Social Media/PR Data Points Include: Follower Count, Engagement Rate, Engagement Breakdown, Brand Mentions, Media Views, Generated Backlinks, Click-Through Rate, Inbound Traffic etc…
Example Email Data Points Include: Open Rate, Click-Through Rate, Time on Email, Conversion Rate, List Growth Rate, Unsubscribe Rate etc…

4.4 – Campaigns

Analysing the performance and effectiveness of your marketing campaign strategy. As B2B marketing campaigns are largely driven by content and channels – you could take a higher-level view and analyse each key element more broadly (or cherry-pick key datapoints from above).

Example Data Points Include: Landing Page Performance, Email Performance, Ad Performance, Content Performance, Lead-Generation Performance, Funnel Performance, Return on Investment (ROI) etc…

4.5 – Funnel & Automation

Analysing the performance and effectiveness of your marketing automation, nurturing and funnel.

Example Data Points Include: Lead Velocity, Avg Time at Stage, Lead to Opportunity Rate, MQL to SQL Rate, Return on Investment (ROI), Avg Deal Revenue etc…

5. Intelligence Gathering

With a multitude of data points identified above for the customer analysis, industry analysis, competitor analysis and function audit; now it’s time to outline the key ways in which you can actually gather this B2B marketing research and data. It would be possible to extend the below list, but these following sources should enable ample intelligence gathering.

Surveys & Interviews: Very few of the other sources come close to this in terms of its ease to setup and the sheer amount of valuable data you can extract. Surveys and interviews should be well structured and formulated and can be used for your customers, partners, suppliers, industry experts, employees, and sales team.
Focus Groups: These are somewhat similar to interviews but tend to include multiple people (of similar demographics) to test their reaction and gauge their opinions on a specific area of your company (for example a new product or service).
Observations: Another powerful research method – this is where you observe human interaction of your product or service in a controlled environment.
Analytics Platforms/Tools: There is a myriad of marketing software platforms and tools that can be used to analyse the effectiveness of your internal marketing activities.
Company Direct (Annual/Financial Reports): Never underestimate how much you can learn about a company by spending time on their website and consuming their reports.
Public Domain Data/Info: There are few more powerful tools than the internet when it comes to B2B marketing research gathering. With nothing more than a search engine, you can discover and consume a range of resources such as articles, trade/industry publications, whitepapers, and case studies to provide an almost endless stream of data and information on your market and competitors.
Professional Services: There are a range of professional service firms who collate and interpret research data on almost all industries, markets, and segments.
Expert Opinions/Publications: All industries contain respect and influential people who hold a wealth of knowledge on that particular sector.