The Ultimate Guide to B2B Omnichannel Marketing

If you work in the B2B space, you know that customer expectations are constantly rising. The smooth buying experience they have in their personal lives sparks a desire for the same seamless interactions at work.

Does this mean you have to be the Amazon of your industry, either in size or experience? No. But moving toward an omnichannel marketing approach, delivering relevant information in the places accounts expect to find you, will help them see you as a knowledgeable and capable partner.

In this guide, you’ll discover all you need to know about omnichannel marketing to improve your sales and marketing efforts and ultimately open new doors for accounts to buy across channels.

What is B2B omnichannel marketing?

B2B omnichannel marketing is the coordination of all sales, marketing, and customer success channels that organizations use to interact with prospective and existing accounts — creating a dependable brand experience. This customer-centric approach often requires integrating multiple platforms, making an account’s journey with your company fluid and seamless.

The primary goal of B2B omnichannel marketing is to deliver relevant information and offerings where your target accounts expect you to be. Whether through email, social media, retargeted display ads, or another method, an omnichannel approach ensures an account has a positive encounter on every channel by offering a consistent positioning of your brand, personalized messaging, and content informed by their stage in the buyer journey.

Why is omnichannel marketing important for B2B businesses?

Marketing exists to drive sales, and revenue teams want to know the ROI of any resources your organization spends on tactics.

An omnichannel marketing approach helps B2B sales professionals and marketers show proof of value with all channels linked in one platform for a single source of truth. Additionally, this framework empowers go-to-market (GTM) teams to recognize what is or isn’t working more quickly and make changes accordingly.

It’s also worth noting that the B2B customer is more complicated than in the old cold-call days. Over the past few years, the number of channels B2B buyers use has doubled, from five in 2016 to ten in 2021. Sales professionals and marketers should see every platform a prospect uses as an entry point for meaningful interaction.

How to create a B2B omnichannel marketing strategy

Accounts want it. The benefits are a no-brainer. But how do you create a B2B omnichannel marketing strategy if you don’t already have one?

Here are five steps that will help you get it up and running:

1. Identify your target accounts

There’s often a small but significant difference between starting and starting well. To help your omnichannel marketing practice take off quickly, identify existing accounts to target.

The factors that qualify an account worthy of targeting depend on your sales and marketing teams’ goals. It might be company size, what technology they currently use, or stage in the buyer journey. Whatever elements help build your target accounts list (TAL), focusing on optimal accounts will improve the performance of your omnichannel marketing and give you a chance to scale in the future.

This step is also an excellent time to segment your total addressable market (TAM). B2B market segmentation — finding similarities between accounts and grouping them where appropriate—will inform how you approach different groups and which ones might be ideal for your particular offering.

And, if you’re looking for extra credit, dusting off your buyer personas can help ensure you develop effective messaging. In B2B marketing, it can be easy to forget that there’s another human at the end of your GTM efforts, so keeping their priorities and situation in mind is critical.

2. Ensure you have clean data

Omnichannel marketing is only as strong as the data it’s pulling from. Poor data hygiene can derail a project, while clean data can push it to the next level. So it’s essential to be vigilant about the quality of your data.

Ask yourself a few questions:

• Is your data current? Trends change quickly, so only capturing old behaviors won’t help much.
• Are there gaps in the contact info you have for accounts? Missing or wrong data can hinder campaign performance.
• Is there duplicate data in your CRM? Not only is duplicate data a quick way to cause friction within the sales team, but it also means inefficient use of marketing resources and possibly redundant communication with prospects or customers.

When you clean and manage your CRM data by filling in missing fields, checking account territories, and removing all redundancies, you’ll set up your omnichannel marketing strategy for success.

3. Align sales and marketing

Creating a B2B omnichannel marketing strategy goes much more smoothly when sales and marketing teams are in a close partnership. Note that they’re not simply “on the same page” or “working together” but wholly aligned and pursuing the same goals.

When sales professionals and marketers focus only on their channels, both efforts can yield fruit but will always have limited potency. When the two groups row in the same direction from the get-go, they have a mutually beneficial back-and-forth. Additionally, prospects and existing accounts feel like they’re interacting with one company rather than two departments — producing a consistent brand experience.

When sales and marketing unite and work as one, they promote relevant programs to only the essential accounts. They can do this by narrowing down their TAL to the ICP and, finally, to the target businesses they decide are necessary for a specific campaign based on journey stage and intent signals.

This approach creates a powerful omnichannel marketing strategy for your revenue team and a relevant experience for your prospect accounts.

4. Determine customer and prospect touchpoints

When creating your GTM strategy, it’s essential to determine what touchpoints or places of brand engagement are the most important for each customer segment and journey stage.

Here are just a few critical touchpoints and how to use them effectively in your omnichannel marketing practice.

• Site visits: With accounts increasingly conducting heavy research, a website is often the first customer touchpoint. Finding ways to do more than simply make a good first impression and instead turn visitors into warm opportunities is essential. How you do this depends on your business area but can include offering valuable resources (i.e., white papers or eBooks) or the process of giving an online quote.

• Sales engagement: Although digital tools are essential mediums for business, the human element of high-quality sales support is often the most crucial customer touchpoint. Sales teams can be even more dynamic with their approach to incoming opportunities based on how customers engage through omnichannel marketing methods.

• Relationship building: Ongoing account management can’t just be picking up the phone when a customer calls. Take a broader view of what can be involved in this touchpoint. You can use all channels: personalized and nurture emails, engaging social media content, and relevant retargeted display ads are just a few options.

Segmentation further helps in the process of tailoring each of these touchpoints. For example, if you’ve identified and segmented accounts based on their intent signals and recent behavior with your brand, your messaging will look different for each segment in terms of tone and timing.

5. Measure and refine

The ongoing success of omnichannel marketing will rely on constant measurement, testing, and refinement. To see positive ROI, you must determine the KPIs for each channel. For further accuracy, connect KPIs to the specific stages in the account journey:

1. Qualified: The account fits your ideal customer profile but may not know your brand.
2. Aware: The account is aware of your brand but is not fully engaged.
3. Engaged: The account engages with your brand but is not yet showing buying intent.
4. Marketing Qualified Account (MQA): The account is showing signs of being in-market.
5. Opportunity: The account is close to the finish line, and you’ve engaged their buying committee.
6. Customer: You did it! The account is a customer.
7. Post-sale: Identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

Whether you’re measuring web forms that visitors fill out during the “Qualified” stage or repeat orders in the “Post-sale” stage, keeping your thumb on the pulse of each KPI will maintain the health of your B2B omnichannel marketing.

It also bears repeating: omnichannel marketing is only as strong as your data integrity. Continue refining and assessing the quality of the data that feeds your marketing efforts.

Ready to take advantage of every marketing channel?

Anything that starts with “omni” is bound to feel enormous and overwhelming at first glance, but B2B omnichannel marketing is more attainable than you might think. It doesn’t have to be confined to the consumer space and can quickly revolutionize your B2B sales and marketing efforts. It can keep you relevant when and where customers want you to be.

Demandbase is obsessed with helping you master relevance. We do this with omnichannel marketing solutions built explicitly for B2B businesses. We empower you with the clean data you need to recognize opportunities early and move them along faster.