“The state of B2B advertising” is the name of a recent report from ABM advertising, customer intelligence and data platform Demandbase. But what about the state of B2B marketing itself? People don’t seem to be sure about what works any more.
“That’s our new reality, that’s for sure,” said Demandbase CMO Kelly Hopping. “It’s definitely a moving target in terms of what works today versus what worked six months ago.”
In particular, there’s a growing question mark over what counts as successful demand generation. A pipe to close conversion rate of around 20% to 30% was once considered a good average. “Now it’s like 12% to 17%,” said Hopping. “You need twice as much pipeline as you thought you needed to hit the same revenue. And that pipeline is harder to get than it used to be. People are smarter; they know not to click on things so attribution is tough; they’re doing more searching before putting their head above water.”
Indeed, Hopping says that just over half of companies (54%) are hitting their pipe targets.
When Hopping was at Gartner, just a few years ago, the simple way to grow pipeline was to crank up paid search. That’s not an easy solution any more. “With Google SERPs being completely dominated by genAI, your organic is falling, your paid is falling. Google doesn’t work as hard as it used to,” she said.
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Account-based marketing is not the magic bullet
Chris Golec founded Demandbase in 2006, very much under the ABM banner, and along with competitors like Engagio and Terminus, set about explaining the importance of an account-based approach to the B2B marketing audience. The message got through. By 2019, Terminus co-founders Sangram Vajre and Eric Spett were publishing a book with the triumphant title “ABM is B2B.”
Indeed, with just about every B2B operation organizing its strategy around accounts, ABM has arguably become taken for granted. Hopping had recently attended an event hosted by GTM Partners (where Vajre is now CEO). One of the slides shown read: “Is GTM the new ABM?”
“Everybody is running account-based,” said Hopping, “whether on a platform like Demandbase or by piecing together some unbundled solution — this data source, this intent source, this AI to read it, combined with this email platform, like trying to DIY your ABM.” Looking at Google searches, Hopping found that the number of queries around the term “account-based” has slightly declined; the number around “go-to-market,” while lower, is growing.
“We’ve talked about account-based GTM [at Demandbase],” said Hopping. “Really I think it’s all about the automation and efficiency and insights of GTM. B2B, GTM, AI — if I could like throw in 12 more acronyms, that seems like where the market is probably moving.” It’s not a question of abandoning ABM. On the contrary, that remains “a given for your go-to-market strategy,” as Hopping puts it. But there is a sense that a new category is developing.
Partly, this is all about that pesky “M” in ABM. “It implies it’s a marketing function rather than a go-to-market function with a critical sales-marketing alignment component,” she said. Indeed, Demandbase several years ago adopted the term ABX (account-based experience) and to some extent it has caught on; Hopping recalls meeting directors of ABX. The thinking behind ABX was “to include marketing, sales, RevOps and the whole engine. Trying to mitigate that weird ‘M’.”
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What is working in 2024
Despite all the above challenges, Demandbase is identifying strategies that are proving beneficial in the B2B space. Hopping ran through some highlights.
Cross-channel campaigns and CTV
“We’re using all channels and we’re encouraging our customers to do the same,” Hopping said. “I think CTV has been really interesting because it operates like a brand channel with the attribution and metrics that you get from digital.” What’s important, she said, is to look at the impact of that channel when combined with other channels. “So if a customer is running CTV, display, LinkedIn and paid search, is the combination working harder than any individual one so that the CPC goes down but the ROI goes up?”
She added that B2B needs good and appropriate video content for CTV and doesn’t always have it.
Syndication
A cross-channel strategy leads immediately to thoughts of syndicated content. “I push my content team a lot in terms of milking content for all it’s worth,” said Hopping, “creating every derivative you can possibly create out of a piece of content. If it’s an e-book, can you create a webinar series, can we make it into a video, can it be a carousel on LinkedIn, can it be a CTV ad?”
The impact of influencers
The role of influencers in the B2B marketing space is steadily growing. “A few years ago it was pretty much just B2C and it was pretty random — like someone who got kicked off “The Bachelor” doing unboxing videos. You were going where the followers go.” B2B is different. “It’s a channel for authenticity; it almost serves like a G2 or a Peer Insights, a third-party reviewer, even though you can see influencers are getting paid to some extent. It allows you to reach a segment of the market you can’t reach otherwise,” she said.
Influencers make a difference for Demandbase itself. “We are an account-based, go-to-market platform, so we cross sales and marketing. The reality, though, is that our brand recognition is primarily among marketers. We really need sales adoption so that the product remains super-sticky.” The solution: Work with influencers that have a large sales following. “They’re going to trust hearing from that guy, versus the Demandbase brand — which is a marketing thing and they don’t really listen to marketers.”
Manual is making way for programmatic
“Maybe five to eight years ago,” said Hopping, “programmatic was basically a crapshoot on the leftover inventory. Remember that?” An ad could show up in a 3 a.m. search for fried chicken or by an actual B2B article from the New York Times. Now, it’s so targeted.”
Using Demandbase’s advertising solution, you can put an ad in front of 100 customers with pinpoint precision, Hopping told us. “Programmatic has become a much more intentional model of targeting versus the old pray-and-spray. Programmatic is probably our No. 1 differentiator versus our competition. We built the DSP ourselves specifically for B2B midmarket and enterprise audiences. Our competitors tend to use The Trade Desk, so you pick up some consumer.”
Finding the right account-based audience
There was concern when B2B buyers retreated to remote locations during the pandemic that IP addresses would no longer be useful identifiers. “They weren’t answering office phones any more,” observed Hopping. Now cookies are going away. But, says Hopping: “Demandbase has built mitigation into the product that allows us to target folks through a lot of other ways. There’s enough robust data in there that even without cookies you can piece together robust identification.”
Intimate events
Finally, something that’s working for Demandbase at least, is events. Hopping identifies them as the company’s No. 1 driver of pipeline, although she also says they support deal acceleration rather than prospecting. “Not 20,000-person trade shows so much as the small, intimate dinners.” Or the ABM certification courses that have long been a Demandbase signature.
The full report on B2B advertising in 2024 can be downloaded here (registration required).