In the second part of our series on telco marketing by telecoms writer Stewart Baines, we take a longer look at how telcos get their marketing wrong when they target new sources or revenue.
Too many B2B telco marketing plans are built as three-month sprints: a burst of media, targeting ads, nurture emails, a webinar, then on to the next. The reality is that most buyers aren’t shopping for SD-WAN or CASB this quarter; buying groups form opinions long before budgets are released; and individuals don’t act alone. When sales demands “more leads by Q2,” marketing needs to push back and protect the long-term brand and education work that creates future pipeline. The alternative is a pile of ‘marketing qualified leads’ which don’t map to ‘sales qualified leads’.
Invest in brand
Research from LinkedIn found that 71% of B2B ads are likely to generate no sales, while another study found that 48% of B2B purchasers found B2B advertising boring. And yet B2B marketing keeps returning to ‘performance marketing’ a.k.a digital advertising, because they find it easier than brand building.
Advertising will remain essential. It’s the nature of the ads that needs to change. In a study for LinkedIn, marketing researchers Les Binet and Peter Field found that the most effective split of B2B marketing budget should be 46% brand building to 56% sales activation. One cannot exist without the other. If your organisation is too focused on short-term activation tactics, you’ll be burning through budget and unable to achieve “mental availability”, which is critical when we look at who buys and how they do it.
Selling without selling
There’s an oft-quoted rule that 95% of businesses are not in-market at any given time, or 80% in any given year. Therefore the cacophony of sales emails, calls and adverts bombarding buyers will only be relevant to a few people leading to a significant, inevitable wasted effort. That’s particularly the case for legacy telecoms contracts, which are long and rigid.
And so the emphasis on short-term marketing tactics will be less effective in helping telcos move up the stack and sell more complex products. The industry’s conversation needs to move beyond feeds and speeds or vague promises to “increase revenue, reduce costs and improve agility.”
Customer journeys are not A to B
Marketing strategists like to neatly plot the buyer journey running through a funnel – from awareness to consideration to evaluation to decision. It looks good on a PowerPoint slide, but in real life, purchasing decisions are not so linear.
Firstly, tech services are typically complex, with multiple stakeholders with different pain points. According to Forrester, there are 13 people involved in a typical B2B buying group. These might be technologists such as CIOs and CTOs, but executives from security, ops, sales, procurement, HR and sustainability may also be involved, each with their own business priorities. You will need to demonstrate that you understand these challenges and have a solution.
This is only going to get more complicated. Forrester reckons that 89% of B2B buyers use GenAI during their self-guided phase of buying, particularly for complex purchases.
Patience required
Secondly, it’s a long game. B2B procurement decisions take on average 11.5 months, according to 6Sense, and roughly 70% of the buying journey is conducted before buyers engage with sales. This means that all those hundreds of touch points with your brand – in the press, webinars, whitepaper downloads, analyst reports, calculators and customer references – will help build a picture of who can be trusted and what problems you solve. This concept suggests that branding is more than just logo recognition. A committed effort in the ‘awareness’ and ‘consideration’ phases, where you create genuine thought-leadership and useful insights or actionable advice, will increase “mental availability” and contribute to getting you on a shortlist.
Digital journeys
Buyers research on their terms, at their pace, and often prefer not to talk until they’re sure you’re credible. A McKinsey survey found that tech buyers increasingly want remote and self-service across all stages of the buyer journey, including researching, evaluation and buying. And this is not limited to low-ticket items. The McKinsey survey of large enterprise buyers found that 55% would order tech products and services worth more than €500,000 purely through an end-to-end digital service.
Customer centric
Marketing always claims to be customer-centric but often returns to a “speeds and feeds” mindset. With all the digital tools, CRM insights and GenAI support at our disposal, we can now target our audience with personalisation at scale. That could be one-to-many ABM campaigns for your priority verticals, or using insights from your service desk and CRM to understand the challenges customer actually face. We can offer calculators that buyers can use to understand their maturity or options and deliver them personalised reports on where they sit against benchmarks. There are so many tools in the box, we need to use all of them appropriately.
Brand and demand
So the takeaway for telecoms marketers is that if they want to help their organisations move up the stack, they can’t rely on short-term activation alone. We need long-term sales and digital marketing strategies for influencing buyers before they even reach out. We need to shape our audience much earlier in the process, when they are not in-market, but be ready to activate when they are.
Stewart Baines