Identity-driven marketing isn’t new, but it has incredible potential for B2B marketers.
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Conventional marketing wisdom says the key to sales and profit is to create as much awareness for your product or service as possible. This may be a great approach for a consumer product with a broad appeal like Pepsi or Coke, but this same approach is not a great fit in the vast majority of B2B marketing applications. Often it is the quality of leads, not the quantity, that drives B2B marketers. Not to mention, a ton of unqualified leads will just make your sales team frustrated!
Converting a high-quality B2B lead may take months or years. It likely will require continuous communication and dozens of interactions between a company and a prospect. This communication may come through ads, content marketing, social media, personal interaction, or various other channels. Eventually, through grit, determination, and a lot of planning and strategy, you’ll land those ideal clients with larger budgets to spend.
Are you interested in using Identity-Driven Marketing strategies within your ABM methods?
Why Do Great Prospects Slip Away?
How often have you been using your marketing efforts to get a prospect, but they never convert into a lead despite your best efforts? What usually happens is that prospects are identified and then dropped into a standard marketing funnel. No matter what product or service a prospect is interested in, they get the same email newsletter, the same brand-focused advertising, and the same dull, generic experience as every other prospect independent of interest or quality.
Before too long, they’ve lost interest and stopped paying attention to your messaging. They have unsubscribed, opted-out, or at the very least, checked-out, making it nearly impossible to convert them into a customer.
The idea of targeting all of your marketing to one audience can be appealing. You’ll have a bigger list of prospects, you can cast a wider net, and you can do less work.
However, when you neglect to differentiate your audiences and sort your prospects into different groups or segments, you’re missing out on unique opportunities to target them individually, pinpointing them with the exact messages that will be most useful to them.
Solve Your Prospects’ Pain Points
The key to keeping your prospects engaged is to tailor your content, advertising, and experiences directly to your prospect’s needs and desires. In marketing, the term we use to identify needs is “pain points.” Every prospect has a pain point or pain points that they are trying to fix. Your job is to figure out a solution that will fix the pain point the most successfully.
Think of it this way. If you break your ankle, you’ll go to the doctor. The doctor will give you an X-ray, and then they will likely fit a cast or brace to your ankle to help it heal. You don’t go to the doctor for a broken ankle, and they put you in a full-body cast. That would be downright silly and a waste!
Identity-driven marketing is a very specific way to solve the particular pain point versus attempting to solve for needs that may not exist for that individual customer. Identity-driven marketing aims to understand and recognize the needs, wants, and desires of a prospect and then present them with tailored and consistent messaging through all channels and interactions.
The amount of data and the complexity of your identity-driven marketing program can be as simple or complex as your products and services required and your systems can support. But the more data, and the more personalized a prospect’s experience, the more likely you are to keep them engaged and ultimately convert them into a customer.
How is identity-driven marketing different from account-based marketing?
So much of modern B2B marketing is interpolated. Identity-driven marketing and account-based marketing are not techniques at odds but actually two different related methodologies that can be used in conjunction.
Account-based marketing aims to identify key accounts and then strategically communicate with multiple contacts or prospects within that target account to create engagement and ultimately sales from that account.
Identity-marketing takes strategic communication a step further. You may have multiple identities within a target account, and each of those identities gets strategic communication based on what you know about them. For example, instead of talking solely about the benefits of your products and services to the CFO, who only cares about cost and return, you can send communication and messaging about the financial benefits and impacts of engaging with your product or service. Similarly, you can shift gears and connect with the CTO on the technical benefits and the security improvements your product or service can bring to that account.
With identity-driven marketing, you’re not just speaking generically to a prospect or an account. You’re talking to each individual person, using your intelligence on the account, as well as their individual identity signals to send a message so compelling that your prospect cannot say no. Most importantly, that message is consistently and effectively personalized and communicated to your prospects across any channel where they interact with your marketing.
How To Implement Identity-Driven Marketing
Identity-driven marketing can get extremely complex. True implementation of identity-driven marketing often uses a customer data platform (CDP) to capture, store, and organize data and intelligence across a number of channels, making it available for personalization and customization. This approach gives you incredible intelligence on your prospects and how and where they engage, as well as the ability to finely tune your messaging to an individual person.
While this may be the ideal approach, don’t let the technical complexities hold you back. It is likely that your customer relationship management software (CRM) already has some useful data on your prospects and plenty of room to expand, segment, and customize that data. Many popular CRM and marketing automation platforms like Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot, ClickDimensions and ActiveCampaign also provide the ability to customize web pages and messaging, creating unique, personalized experiences.
Your CRM data can be extracted and used to create powerful custom audiences and target your prospects on social channels like LinkedIn and Facebook or through strategic advertising on ad networks like the Google Display Network. This approach may be more manual and a bit less personalized, but it does what is important with identity-driven marketing; it gives each person the messaging that will resonate and inspire them to take action.
If you’re a B2B marketer looking for a pathway to reach, nurture, and convert high-dollar prospects, then identity-driven marketing is a tactic that you should absolutely be leveraging today. It is also a tactic that can easily be leveraged in conjunction with many other marketing and communication strategies you already have in motion. With a little thought, a little strategy, and some focused effort, identity-driven marketing can help you start landing your ideal, money-making clients.
Account-based marketing aims to identify key accounts and then strategically communicate with multiple contacts or prospects within that target account to create engagement and ultimately sales from that account.
Identity-marketing takes strategic communication a step further. You may have multiple identities within a target account, and each of those identities gets strategic communication based on what you know about them. For example, instead of talking solely about the benefits of your products and services to the CFO, who only cares about cost and return, you can send communication and messaging about the financial benefits and impacts of engaging with your product or service. Similarly, you can shift gears and connect with the CTO on the technical benefits and the security improvements your product or service can bring to that account.
Are you ready for a full-funnel B2B marketing and sales strategy?
Identity-driven marketing is one great tool that can help you drive more leads and deepen engagement across channels. See how you can start targeting and building relationships with high-value prospects and accounts today.
