Transforming B2B Marketing: How a Leading eTailer Moved from Product-Centric to Buyer-Centric

A buyer more in control than ever.

Closely tied to today’s unprecedented access to information and an abundance of independent reviews and evaluations, today’s buyer is more in control of the buyer-vendor relationship than ever – a trend that shows no sign of slowing down.

One of Demand Spring’s most compelling transformations can be found in the form of the business to business (B2B) division of a top 5 eTailer. With more than 250,000 product offerings, the company has nearly every product a business could possibly need in its inventory. Just as buyers have changed purchasing behavior, the eTailer has dramatically transformed its revenue marketing strategy, along with the content and underlying technology that supports it.

Five elements of revenue marketing performance.

The recognition came from the eTailer’s Director of Online Marketing, who joined the team in 2014. The Director quickly identified several key elements that would drive the kind of revenue marketing performance the unit needed:

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  A persona based go-to-market strategy to create relevance and engage buyers on a personal level.

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  Buyer journey research to create a foundation for executing marketing programs.

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  A content marketing strategy to drive engagement throughout the buyer journey.

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  An aggressive use of technology to enable scale and manage leads.

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  A true partnership with Sales and a holistic lead management strategy that was focused on creating demand, capturing contact details, and nurturing leads until they’re qualified and ready to be handed to Sales.

Operationalizing around the buyer.

With right strategy in place, the eTailer’s transformation process was underway. Demand Spring helped the eTailer examine their buyer journey, going beyond the typical academic exercise of documenting demographic and firmographic information. Demand Spring’s experienced team of consultants worked closely with the eTailer’s B2B marketing team to develop a comprehensive blueprint, one that went beyond two dimensions, helping the eTailer operationalize around their buyer personas.

Through Demand Spring’s buyer persona analysis services, a deep understanding of four different buyers was developed. This knowledge directly informed the strategies and tactics, and marketing technologies (MarTech) the eTailer would use to engage buyers in a much more personal, relevant manner across multiple channels, including email, website, and paid media.

It was the Director who recognized the importance of marketing automation, and its crucial position at the center of its technology stack. In 2014, the eTailer implemented Marketo, and partnered with Demand Spring in 2015 to optimize the platform. To address gaps in funnel performance, complementary marketing technology apps were added to the mix.

To validate, cleanse, and enrich its database, Reachforce was deployed, helping normalize firmographic data while noticeably improving personalized communications to known leads. Next came Marketo’s Real-time Personalization (RTP), implemented first on the blog, and later across the eTailer’s website. RTP allowed the company to start talking to prospects in a manner that reflected their deep knowledge they accumulated and analyzed during the buyer journey research phase of their transformation.

Since video was one of the key content types used to engage prospects, the eTailer made an investment in Vidyard. This leading video marketing platform fully integrated video into their marketing programs more by helping drive attribution, deepening their understanding of what resonates with buyers. To strengthen customer relationships and turn customers into advocates, Demand Spring introduced Influitive’s AdvocateHub to the mix – a critical priority for a company competing in a space loaded with worthy alternatives.

Taking a modern, digital approach to demand generation required buy-in across the organization, and especially from Sales. By moving away from a quantitative view of leads and adopting new processes, buyers are streamlined through their journey, from initial engagement through to conversion. There are three steps to marketing transformation:

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  Engage to create demand and capture essential buyer details and to help form the foundations of buyer personalization.

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  Nurture to foster a two-way dialogue, guiding the buyer through the sales cycle to develop the prospect into a qualified lead.

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  Convert prospective buyers, passing qualified leads seamlessly to sales for conversion into a customer.

A marketing transformation of this magnitude shifted the mindset across the eTailer’s entire organization, impacting every department. Traditional divides between Marketing and Sales were bridged and specialized teams were established and assigned to specific buyer personas.

From laggard to leader in a single year.

With help from Demand Spring, the Director’s vision of a new approach to marketing came to fruition. Leads and closed won deals initiated by marketing are up substantially, year over year. The company has gone from a laggard in marketing best practices and technology implementation to a leader in a single year.

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  50% increase in marketing’s contribution to pipeline.

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  40% reduction in the average deal close time of a marketing lead since implementing Marketo and nurturing.

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  Every lead flowing through Marketo is now enrolled in a recycle program.

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  More than half cut from the cost per lead.

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  50-70% more profitable digitally sourced accounts than traditionally sourced accounts.

Thanks to this engagement, the company now knows its buyer personas, and strategically leverages technologies to engage buyers across all channels in a customized, buyer-relevant manner.