2024 is fast approaching, and with it comes a host of marketing challenges and uncertainties—the demands of doing more with less looms large. There is a constant reminder that when budgets get trimmed, marketing often takes the initial hit. With limited resources, tight budgets, and the unforgiving constraints of time, the weight of responsibility on your shoulders has never felt heavier.

Each decision in these critical moments can significantly influence your organization’s path in the coming year and beyond. It’s an intimidating prospect, but you are determined to craft a strategy that addresses these challenges.

The good news is that there’s a way forward. We’ve carefully selected four advanced B2B marketing tactics to assist you in navigating these challenges. These tactics are not just about survival; they’re about thriving, gaining an edge over the competition, and discovering new opportunities in 2024. As you embark on this journey, you’ll gain valuable tools and insights to make 2024 a year marked by exceptional achievements, all while overcoming the obstacles that may arise along the way.

2024 B2B Marketing Opportunity #1: Account-Based Marketing 

As we explore B2B marketing opportunities in 2024, we begin with a powerful strategy that could be your secret weapon: Account-Based Marketing (ABM). ABM isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach; it’s a versatile strategy that focuses marketing efforts on high-value accounts, personalized messaging, and tailored campaigns, ultimately increasing ROI and closing rates. Most companies report at least a 10% increase in revenue in the first year of a new ABM program, with a 208% increase in marketing revenue reported by some companies. If you have yet to consider adding this to your marketing strategy, you are missing out. 

Benefits of an ABM Program

1. Get Personal: ABM empowers you to reach out to key contacts in target accounts with a tailored approach, ensuring your message stands out from the sea of communication they receive.

2. Building and Nurturing Relationships: ABM fosters the establishment and maintenance of relationships with key contacts in your target accounts, fostering trust and deeper insights into your prospects and customers.

3. Identify Interested Prospects Faster: ABM accelerates decision-making by establishing a direct line to key decision-makers, educating and guiding prospects through the buyer’s journey faster.

4. Increased Return on Investment (ROI): ABM, when targeted accurately and personalized, is cost-effective with a shorter sales cycle. It focuses on the most attractive target accounts, reducing time wastage and saving costs.

5. Clearer Results: Measuring ABM results is straightforward, with fewer metrics to track. Specific goals for specific accounts make it easier to determine success and improve your ABM efforts.

Types of ABM Programs

Understanding the type of ABM you’re employing is crucial. It allows for efficient targeting and successful marketing efforts that resonate with your audience. Consider which ABM approach aligns best with your marketing goals and organizational needs.

ABM comes in three distinct flavors: Strategic ABM, ABM Lite, and Programmatic ABM. 

• Strategic ABM is like a laser-focused spotlight on individual enterprise accounts, often with substantial deal sizes. It requires high customization and a dedicated approach to each account.
• ABM Lite, or one-to-few ABM, targets a smaller group of similar accounts, often with medium-sized deals, customizing strategies mostly at the industry level. 
• Programmatic ABM handles hundreds or thousands of accounts concurrently, with minimal and automated personalization.

By incorporating these advanced ABM strategies into your marketing arsenal, you’ll be equipped to deliver on Sales’s need for marketing-qualified leads.  

2024 B2B Marketing Opportunity #2: B2B IP Targeting

A second opportunity emerges in the B2B marketing arena with B2B IP targeting. B2B IP targeting is a sophisticated digital marketing tactic that identifies and targets the IP addresses of specific businesses. This approach is particularly effective in the B2B sector due to its precision in reaching the right audience. When a potential business client visits your website, their IP address is logged. Later, this information is used to direct customized ads to them as they browse the internet. This direct targeting ensures that your marketing efforts are focused specifically on businesses that have already demonstrated interest in your products or services.

Efficiency of B2B IP Targeting

B2B IP targeting stands out for its unparalleled efficiency in reaching not just individual leads, but entire business accounts. This aspect is crucial in the B2B sector, where purchasing decisions are rarely made by a single individual. Instead, they involve a group of decision-makers and influencers within a company. By targeting an entire business through its IP address, your marketing efforts encompass everyone connected to that network. This means your ads are not just seen by the initial visitor to your site, but potentially by every individual involved in the decision-making process within that business.

This comprehensive reach is essential for several reasons:

1. It aligns with the account-based marketing (ABM) approach, which focuses on targeting entire accounts rather than individual leads. 
2. It ensures that your messaging resonates across various levels and departments within a company, increasing the likelihood of your message influencing the collective decision-making process. 
3. By broadening your reach within each targeted business, you maximize the impact of your marketing spend, leading to a more efficient and effective marketing strategy.

Advantages of Adopting a Digital-First Stance

With the increasing digitization of the B2B buyer’s journey, businesses now conduct a significant portion of their research, evaluation, and purchasing processes online. Buyers rely less on sales reps to provide information and more on their research, with 67% of the buyer’s journey being done digitally. Combine that with the fact that the buyer’s journey is getting longer and more complex, with more people involved in the decision-making process, and your ability to stay top of mind with the prospect is more important than ever. By adopting a digital-first strategy, you align your marketing efforts with the behaviors and preferences of modern B2B buyers.

A digital-first approach, particularly through B2B IP targeting, offers several advantages. It ensures real-time engagement with potential clients, as your ads reach them during their active online research phases. It also allows for greater flexibility and adaptability in your marketing tactics, as digital programs can be adjusted quickly based on performance data. Moreover, digital-first strategies, through their inherent measurability, provide valuable insights into buyer behavior and preferences, enabling you to refine and personalize your marketing efforts continually.

2024 B2B Marketing Opportunity #3: Mapping the Buyer’s Journey

Now, let’s turn our attention to an essential opportunity that not only stands on its own but also lays the foundation for success in all the strategies we’ll discuss. We’re talking about uncovering the buyer’s journey, and it’s a game-changer.

The Significance of Uncovering the Buyer’s Journey

Imagine having a roadmap that guides you through the twists and turns of your customer’s decision-making process. That’s precisely what uncovering the buyer’s journey is all about. It’s your backstage pass to understanding your potential customers’ thoughts and needs as they progress from awareness to consideration and finally to making a purchase.

Why It Matters

Uncovering the buyer’s journey matters because it empowers you to create highly personalized content that resonates with your prospects on the channels and platforms they’re using. It’s like having a secret code that allows you to reach your audience with the right message at the right time. Understanding the different stages and the specific needs and questions your prospects have at each step is invaluable. It allows you to tailor your content and messaging accordingly.

Creating Highly Personalized Content

By uncovering the buyer’s journey, you gain insights into the pain points, questions, and preferences of your potential customers. With this knowledge, you can create content that speaks directly to them, addressing their concerns and lighting a path toward a solution.

But here’s the real beauty: this understanding benefits more than just your buyer’s journey strategy. It sets the stage for success in all the advanced tactics we’re discussing. Whether diving into account-based marketing, IP targeting, or interactive content, knowing your audience’s journey is like having a superpower that enhances the effectiveness of every move you make.

2024 B2B Marketing Opportunity #4: Interactive Content

Interactive content is an incredibly powerful tool in the B2B marketing landscape. Let’s dive into what makes interactive content so dynamic and why it should be a fundamental part of your 2024 marketing strategy.

Defining Interactive Content

Interactive content is precisely what it sounds like – it actively engages your audience. Instead of being passive observers, your prospects become participants, interacting with your content in meaningful ways. This interaction can take various forms, including quizzes, calculators, ebooks, interactive infographics, white papers, landing pages, lookbooks, questionnaires, resource libraries, solution finders, videos, and more.

The Benefits of Interactive Content

Interactive content is a game-changer for B2B marketers. Here’s a quick rundown of its benefits:

1. Engagement: Interactive content grabs and maintains your audience’s attention. It invites the prospect to participate actively, creating a two-way interaction that keeps them engaged. For marketers, this means more meaningful interactions and more chances to deliver your message effectively.

2. Data Gathering: Through interactive content like quizzes and questionnaires, you can collect valuable data about your audience’s preferences, needs, and behaviors. This not only helps you tailor your content but also provides valuable insights for your marketing strategy.

3. Personalization: Armed with the data collected, you can deliver highly personalized content that speaks directly to each individual’s interests and needs. This level of personalization can significantly increase conversion rates.

4. Shareability: Interactive content tends to be more shareable. When your audience interacts with content they find valuable or entertaining, they’re more likely to share it with their networks, extending your reach and potentially attracting new prospects.

5. AI Resistance: Interactive content is special because, at the time of this writing, AI tools like ChatGPt and Google’s newly developed AI-enabled SGE do not have the ability to produce interactive content. So, despite the ever-increasing amount of AI-generated content on the internet, your interactive content will stand out and be more interesting. 

Examples and the Key to Interactive Content

To illustrate the versatility of interactive content, here are some real-world examples:

• Interactive Quiz: A food service equipment manufacturer developed a quiz for restaurant owners, helping them identify the right equipment based on their needs. It provided utility to prospects while delivering valuable data to the sales team.
• Decision Tree: At Brilliant Metrics, we crafted a decision tree to help marketers decide when to retire underperforming marketing tactics. This interactive tool not only serves as a practical resource but also establishes authority and thought leadership.

The key to interactive content lies in its ability to entertain or provide utility to your audience. Whether it’s a quiz that helps prospects solve a problem or a decision tree that simplifies complex decisions, the goal is to create content that deeply resonates with your audience, leaving a lasting impression.

Propel Your B2B Marketing Forward in 2024

Throughout this exploration of advanced tactics, we’ve uncovered four key opportunities that can propel your marketing efforts forward in the new fiscal year:

1. Account-based marketing (ABM) allows you to focus your resources on target accounts, delivering tailored campaigns that resonate with key decision-makers. 
2. B2B IP targeting programs allow you increase your reach within target accounts, expanding beyond the person who browsed your site to everyone involved in the decision-making process. 
3. Uncovering the buyer’s journey not only enhances your understanding of your audience but also informs all your marketing strategies, enabling highly personalized content. 
4. Interactive content engages your audience actively and gathers valuable insights while increasing shareability.

As you prepare to tackle the uncertainties and demands of 2024, remember that these opportunities are more than just tactics – they are the keys to your success. By applying these strategies, experimenting, and adapting them to your unique goals, you’ll not only navigate the challenges but thrive and achieve remarkable results. 

Next Steps

Ready to put these advanced B2B marketing tactics into action? If you need help implementing these strategies, we can guide you. Brilliant Metrics is your trusted partner in B2B, Digital-First Marketing. Our clients rely on us to continuously break through to the next level, and we’re here to help you do the same.

Take the first step towards your marketing success in 2024 by scheduling a free strategy session with us. Let’s discuss your unique goals and explore how these tactics can be tailored to drive your business forward.