This demand for B2B brands to step up spending on advertising and marketing has been driven by challenges such as:

• an increasingly crowded market
• growing sales cycles
• stretched budgets
• complex buyer decision-making units
• difficulty tracking lead sources

B2B buyers are behaving more like consumers, wanting their personal needs to be better understood, and therefore there is a need for brands to build awareness to establish trust, and invest in customer insights and personalisation tools.

Dentsu study into B2B buying decisions

The study shows that marketing has “never been more important”. The research also suggested the need for brands to be seen as thought leaders is rapidly rising, rising from the 20th most important to third most important decision factor for B2B buyers, yet just 26% of B2B brands ranked highly by buyers for their thought leadership.

The top consideration for B2B buyers was ‘feeling safe signing a contract’ which includes ‘making it easy to convince colleagues of a brand’s credentials’. This requires strong brand awareness and communication of the business’ key offering and success stories.

The research found a blend of ‘strong human and digital interactions’ helped shave off decision-making time, and that personalisation was a strong factor. This means there could be a heightened demand for B2B brand in-person experiences as well as marketing technology that helps initiate strong digital interactions and personalisation. Marketing research and customer insight is ever important for B2B brands to understand the decision-making unit and what keeps them up at night.

Why target B2B brands?

There are several reasons why pitching to B2B brands could prove to be more fruitful than focusing solely on B2C prospects. B2B client-agency relationships are usually longer lasting, B2B brands have more unique needs so there is the opportunity to create a specialism within the services you provide, and these unique needs offer the opportunity to create a very effective tailored pitch to win clients.

A full version of this Industry Insights article is available to ALF subscribers here.