Under­stand­ing some key B2B mar­ket­ing principles

The 95 – 5 Rule

In a time when web­sites are no longer brows­ing tools but shop­ping tools, eCom­merce sites are main­ly trans­ac­tion­al. They must be. But that in itself is not enough. While the pri­ma­ry goal of an eCom­merce site is to facil­i­tate trans­ac­tions, it must also inform — and pro­vide rich, inter­est­ing con­tent.
 

It’s a prin­ci­ple, a chal­lenge, and an oppor­tu­ni­ty: to con­vey lifestyle and brand­ing con­tent for cus­tomers, cater­ing to the ROPO (research online, pur­chase offline) behav­ior, where­by cus­tomers seek to edu­cate them­selves and engage with the brand’s style and val­ues before mak­ing a pur­chase deci­sion. Way before. Men­tal avail­abil­i­ty takes time to build.
 

You know the fun­nel? OK. Let’s flip it.

95% of poten­tial buy­ers aren’t ready to buy today. Today, they are ​“out-mar­ket”. but will be ​“in-mar­ket” some­time in the future. 

The way adver­tis­ing ​‘works’ isn’t by stim­u­lat­ing us to buy. How can it, if most peo­ple who see an ad aren’t going to buy the prod­uct for per­haps a year or more. There­fore, the way it works must prin­ci­pal­ly be by build­ing a mem­o­ry link for the brand in buy­ers’ minds. And this mem­o­ry link will be acti­vat­ed when the buy­er does come into the mar­ket. Adver­tis­ing impres­sions, accu­mu­lat­ed over time, affect our mem­o­ries. So, your adver­tis­ing must be designed to cre­ate dis­tinct impres­sions about your brand in people’s minds — to be acti­vat­ed later.

John Dawes, 2021

The 95 – 5 prin­ci­ple implies adver­tis­ing most­ly to buy­ers who aren’t like­ly to buy from you today. It means pro­vid­ing rel­e­vant con­tent that will help your brand be more eas­i­ly remem­bered when the moment final­ly comes.

How much con­tent, you may ask. Accord­ing to the 2023 Con­tent Pref­er­ences Sur­vey Report from Demand Gen 71% of buy­ers down­load and con­sume mul­ti­ple assets to help with the deci­sion-mak­ing process and 46% increased the amount of con­tent they con­sumed recently.

And what kind of con­tent? Well, the report states that the most appeal­ing for­mat is​“short-form con­tent, such as info­graph­ics and blog posts (65%), close­ly fol­lowed by webi­na­rs and dig­i­tal events (52%). About half of the respon­dents also said they favor long form, foun­da­tion­al con­tent, such as white papers and E‑books (50%), and oth­er inter­ac­tive mul­ti­me­dia con­tent and case stud­ies or user gen­er­at­ed con­tent (42%)”.

Get­ting 95 – 5 right in practice

The 95 – 5 Rule sounds good on slides. It gets hard­er when your CFO asks where the mon­ey goes next quarter.

Here’s the rough shape. Rough­ly 5% of your poten­tial buy­ers are in-mar­ket today — they have bud­get, they have author­i­ty, and they’re typ­ing things into Google that sig­nal intent. You cap­ture them with direct response: paid search, com­par­i­son pages, demo gat­ing, the clas­sics. Every­one knows this part. Every­one spends here.

The oth­er 95% is where most B2B com­pa­nies starve them­selves. These are buy­ers who will need what you sell in six months, eigh­teen months, three years. You don’t con­vert them today. You make sure you’re the name that sur­faces when they final­ly ask their team ​“who do we call about this?”

The work looks dif­fer­ent. Less MQL chase. More con­sis­tent point of view on your cat­e­go­ry. Pod­casts where you actu­al­ly say some­thing. A newslet­ter that peo­ple for­ward. Thought lead­er­ship that isn’t a gat­ed 12-page PDF nobody reads.

The mea­sure­ment looks dif­fer­ent too. Click-through rates don’t tell you much about mem­o­ry for­ma­tion. Brand search vol­ume, share of voice, unaid­ed recall, direct-to-site traf­fic — those do.

Here’s the hon­est ver­sion: you need both. Per­for­mance cap­tures the 5%. Brand feeds the 95%. The com­pa­nies that grow with­out burn­ing them­selves out are the ones that stopped treat­ing these as an either/​or.

When 95 – 5 does­n’t apply

A few sit­u­a­tions where the rule gets messy:

• Very small address­able mar­kets. If there are 400 com­pa­nies in the world who buy what you sell, you’re not adver­tis­ing to 95% of a mar­ket — you’re run­ning account-based every­thing. Dif­fer­ent playbook.
• Net-new cat­e­gories. If you’re sell­ing some­thing nobody knows they need yet, you’re not wait­ing for the 5% to become in-mar­ket. You’re cre­at­ing the mar­ket. More edu­ca­tion, less brand.
• Emer­gency pur­chas­es. Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty after a breach. Replat­form­ing after an out­age. When buy­ing cycles com­press to weeks, the 95 – 5 ratio flat­tens. In-mar­ket spikes. Be there or be forgotten.
• Post-launch moments. When you’ve just put a bet in the ground, you need to ring the bell. A short-term per­for­mance push has a legit­i­mate role.

Treat 95 – 5 as a default, not a dog­ma. Check which mode you’re in before you com­mit a budget.

Per­for­mance Mar­ket­ing vs. Per­for­mance Branding

You’ve prob­a­bly heard of Per­for­mance Mar­ket­ing, a high­ly tar­get­ed, data-dri­ven approach that involves pay­ing for spe­cif­ic actions, such as clicks, con­ver­sions, or sales, rather than poten­tial expo­sure, allow­ing busi­ness­es to mea­sure the impact of their mar­ket­ing efforts in real-time and make adjust­ments as need­ed to opti­mize return on invest­ment (ROI). 

The essence of per­for­mance mar­ket­ing lies in its account­abil­i­ty, with every dol­lar spent expect­ed to pro­duce a mea­sur­able return. The focus is to gen­er­ate imme­di­ate, quan­tifi­able results, pri­mar­i­ly sales leads, through tac­tics that are easy to mea­sure and opti­mize for short-term gains. This approach is about cap­tur­ing exist­ing demand with­in the market.

Also, as we’ve just seen, the approach oper­ates under the lim­i­ta­tion of only engag­ing the 5% of buy­ers active­ly seek­ing prod­ucts or ser­vices, thus neglect­ing the vast major­i­ty who are not yet ready to make a pur­chase. There are more strate­gic approach­es, like for instance, Per­for­mance Branding.

Who’s sell­ing you what

Not every agency pitch­ing B2B mar­ket­ing is hon­est about what works. A short list of things to lis­ten for:

• “We’ll dri­ve qual­i­fied leads in 30 days.” Some­one will. Whether they’ll still be dri­ving them in twelve months is a dif­fer­ent question.
• “You don’t need brand, you need pipeline.” Trans­la­tion: we don’t know how to mea­sure brand, so we don’t sell it.
• “Pro­gram­mat­ic han­dles the long game.” Pro­gram­mat­ic han­dles impres­sions. Whether those impres­sions form mem­o­ry depends on the cre­ative, not the channel.
• “Attri­bu­tion explains every­thing.” No mul­ti-touch attri­bu­tion mod­el has ever sur­vived con­tact with a B2B buy­er who asks their LinkedIn net­work for recommendations.

Hon­est mar­ket­ing is hon­est about what it does­n’t know. Beware the ven­dor who isn’t.

Enter Per­for­mance Branding

Per­for­mance brand­ing aims to estab­lish a brand’s pres­ence in the minds of future cus­tomers. It does­n’t cap­ture demand, but builds it, by reach­ing out to the 95% of poten­tial buy­ers who are not imme­di­ate­ly look­ing to pur­chase but will be in the future. By invest­ing in cre­at­ing a mem­o­rable brand, com­pa­nies ensure that when poten­tial buy­ers become ready to pur­chase, their brand is at the fore­front of cus­tomers’ minds. 

It’s a pow­er­ful mar­ket­ing tool that empha­sizes the impor­tance of reach­ing beyond the imme­di­ate, trans­ac­tion­al engage­ments of per­for­mance mar­ket­ing and seek­ing to build a last­ing rela­tion­ship with the vast major­i­ty of poten­tial buy­ers who are cur­rent­ly out-market. 

The dis­tinc­tion between per­for­mance brand­ing and per­for­mance mar­ket­ing is piv­otal in the B2B sec­tor. This long-term strat­e­gy empha­sizes cre­at­ing a con­sis­tent, com­pelling brand nar­ra­tive that res­onates with the tar­get audi­ence, ulti­mate­ly influ­enc­ing their pur­chas­ing decisions. 

Under­stand­ing the impor­tance of per­for­mance brand­ing is cru­cial for mod­ern B2B busi­ness­es aim­ing to estab­lish a strong mar­ket pres­ence and fos­ter last­ing cus­tomer relationships.

The Val­ue of UX in mod­ern B2B ecommerce

In every sce­nario, but espe­cial­ly in B2B, where deci­sion-mak­ing involves greater com­plex­i­ty and longer cycles, UX is cen­tral to ecom­merce strat­e­gy. It’s not only about looks but cre­at­ing an easy, direct route to your offer­ings. An excep­tion­al UX design is what sparks the busi­ness rela­tion­ship on a pos­i­tive note.

B2B buy­ers are on a quest, not for prod­ucts, but for solu­tions. They nav­i­gate a labyrinth of options, and of course, val­ue clar­i­ty and trust. A well-craft­ed UX turns com­plex into comprehensible. 

Under­stand­ing the unique chal­lenges B2B buy­ers face – from eval­u­at­ing prod­uct specs to secur­ing buy-in from mul­ti­ple stake­hold­ers – and offer­ing a dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence that feels less like a trans­ac­tion and more like a part­ner­ship is paramount.

Accord­ing to BigCommerce’s Glob­al B2B buy­er behav­ior report, B2B buy­ers val­ue UX fea­tures such as accu­rate prod­uct and ship­ping infor­ma­tion, quick-load­ing web­sites, and qual­i­ty cus­tomer sup­port. They also pri­or­i­tize dis­play­ing com­plete and accu­rate pric­ing infor­ma­tion dur­ing the check­out process.

The ben­e­fits of invest­ing in UX are tan­gi­ble: increased trust, loy­al­ty, and sat­is­fac­tion that encour­age last­ing con­nec­tions. A well-designed UX not only facil­i­tates smoother trans­ac­tions but also sig­nif­i­cant­ly enhances cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion and loyalty.

There are more dif­fer­ences, of course, but for now, we’ll be focus­ing on ecom­merce tools and strate­gies in the light of the above principles.

What comes next

But prin­ci­ples are the easy part. Apply­ing them at the scale of an eCom­merce oper­a­tion is where most teams get stuck. 

Check out our oth­er posts cov­er­ing why imple­ment­ing B2B eCom­merce is worth the trou­ble, what to look for when shop­ping for a plat­form, whether com­pos­able archi­tec­ture is right for you, and the nuts and bolts of B2B eCom­merce web­site devel­op­ment.