Advancing the New B2B Buyer Through Events

Purpose-Built Tactics for the Industrial Event Marketer

Like all facets of life, the pandemic has shifted purchasing behaviors in the B2B sector — requiring brands to rethink their approach to customer interaction. The “New B2B Buyer” and their evolved preferences are driving transformations across the customer lifecycle. As a result, manufacturing companies, like many sectors, are reexamining their overall marketing mix to meet the new consumer demands. This article details how event marketers, in support of greater corporate initiatives, can optimize their events portfolio to meet the characteristics of the transformed buyer.

Prior to introducing strategies that will enhance events, the new B2B decision-making process must be defined. There are four key customer preferences that should be factored into every event portfolio strategy:

Quantity of touchpoints: The number of interactions required to make buying decisions increased from 17 in 2019 to 27 in 2021 indicating a new level of customer due diligence. (Forrester, 2021)
Involvement of peers: The majority of B2B buyers say the number of team members involved in the purchase decision had increased in 2020 over 2019. (Demand Gen, 2020)
Decision Drivers: A solely rational approach to B2B marketing achieves minimal resonance with audiences. (WARC, 2021)
Channel Mix: Omnichannel is a far more successful way to prospect and secure new business than traditional, “face-to-face only” sales approaches. (McKinsey, 2021)

Events will always be an opportunity for brands to generate engagement, demand, and deals—but in our marketing chameleon-like way, we can shift our approach to meet our audience where they are at now and where they are headed in the future. As we continue to emerge from the pandemic, here are several actionable strategies to meaningfully engage with this new B2B audience.

Quantity of Touchpoints
With more brand interactions required to reach a decision-making state, audience experiences must be connected, even if they are owned separately within your organization. What do we mean by this? We’re talking about coordinated activities that optimize the audience experience across multiple channels that not only tell a cohesive story about an organization’s service but also achieve better business results.

Let’s take marketers in the manufacturing sector for example. Events are a prime opportunity to gather data that can connect and increase personalized touchpoints further down the sales cycle post-event. For example, if a tractor customer attended a Dealer conference and highly ranked a session like “Agriculture meets Industry 4.0,” your organization could use that insight to follow up with a white paper that details how your product or service advances agricultural sustainability.

More broadly than session rankings, event marketers can also capture registration data to identify what topics audiences prioritize and share those insights with the wider organization. Customers are willing to part with personal data (preferences, interests, contact information) in exchange for personalized content. Events are the prime opportunity for brands to attain that data and personalize those increased touchpoints B2B buyers need to make a purchasing decision. This simultaneously achieves both breadth and depth in the connected touchpoint ecosystem.

Involvement of Peers
In addition to B2B buyers increasing the need for brand due diligence through additional touchpoints, B2B buyers are also involving more peers in the decision-making cycle. To satisfy this shift, marketers can deepen the integration of Account-Based Marketing (ABM) into their events portfolio. Unlike traditional one-to-many user events, account-centric events are designed to address a client’s unique challenges.

With additional purchasers required in the B2B decision-making process, re-examining how ABM fits into your portfolio is critical. For in-person and virtual events, consider hosting ½ day account-based experience before a user event. Use the content and messaging created for the larger event and tailor a workshop that connects with an account’s priorities. Then, provide each account a customized agenda that showcases which sessions at the user event would be most relevant to them.

In addition to re-examining account-based programming, consider transitioning Executive Briefing Centers (EBC’s) from solely in-person hubs to hybrid experiences to include more decision-makers with minimal effort. Digitally enabled experience centers allow industrial companies to realize all the benefits of physical centers, plus greater accessibility and broader reach. Without the expense and time involved in traveling to a physical center, far more customers and prospects can engage in an experience. Additionally, hybrid experience centers allow for asynchronous engagement opportunities—customers don’t have to engage with all content at a specific moment in time, they (and their peers) can revisit content at any time. This approach has the dual advantage of disseminating information to a broad audience while also acting as a brand touchpoint.

Decision Drivers
Content that resonates with B2B buyers is emotionally driven, supported by rational and financial figures. Because of this, storytelling is more critical for B2B marketers than ever before. However, even more effective than telling a story, is involving the audience to participate in the development of the story. Co-creation does just that. It allows the customer to participate with a brand and develop a mutual point of view that can't be accessed elsewhere.

At InVision, we’ve introduced a “content capture” initiative to help clients co-create during a customer’s peak level of engagement, during an event. Our approach involves man-on-the-street video teams facilitating both scheduled and ad hoc interviews with customers and partners. Rooted in a strategic discussion guide, these interviews give attendees an opportunity to share their challenges and articulate in real-time how a company’s products/solutions helped advance specific priorities. The captured footage is then leveraged to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’ what a brand’s unique benefits are across channels post-event.

Channel Mix
The last new B2B buyer preference ignited by the pandemic is the increase in digital buying. Unlike face-to-face programming, hybrid events enable the seamless online experience that industrial buyers are gravitating towards. Emerging from the pandemic, event marketers will need to ensure their portfolio is optimized to meet customers in their preferred digital medium. As we’ve learned, a virtual event should not be a replication of a physical experience--but a standalone experience with equally weighted value to a live event. To determine the optimal blending of digital and live components for an event, consider sending out a pre-experience survey that asks participants which elements are valuable in-person and which have the most impact digitally. Based on the results, scale your experience and investment accordingly.

Each audience is different, and measurement is key to your brand’s ability to meet and exceed their needs. Attaining insight early on in the planning process puts customers in the driver’s seat for when and how they want to buy and which elements of an event support their priorities.

Additionally, as B2B buying shifts to omnichannel, sales capabilities will have to evolve as well. With the evolution of Sales, the objectives of internal event strategies (Sales Kick-Off’s, technical trainings) will need to be re-examined as well. To start this process, consider conducting an alignment session with internal stakeholders to understand how internal objectives, audiences, and KPIs have shifted. Use the collected sentiment to scrutinize which elements of internal events are still advancing organizational priorities and which need to be modified.

Take Action
The evolved B2B buyer is driving change across all facets of business. As a key touchpoint in the decision-making cycle, marketers must reassess their event strategy to ensure the portfolio is optimized to best engage customers and prospects. At InVision, we’re here to help. For further detail on how to impact the new B2B buyer, contact your account director or info@iv.com.

Advancing the New B2B Buyer Through Events

08.16.2021