Stop Marketing. Start Growing.

Attention leaders of Private Equity-backed, B2B companies intent on growing your business: stop marketing.

It’s time to think differently. Things have changed.

Marketing was a dinosaur years before digital business gained overnight inertia from the global pandemic that delivered a meteoric impact on business. The fallout of the global pandemic has forever altered how people conduct business, hastening the irrelevancy and ultimate demise of conventional marketing.

Every B2B business needs to market, right? If yes, then why do so many leaders feel, deep down inside, that marketing is something they have to do, despite no tangible results? Maybe it’s not the marketing plan that is wrong, but that marketing is the wrong plan.

So, what’s wrong with marketing?

It’s not just that marketing carries too much baggage, it’s irrelevant. Therefore, it’s not a productive use of company resources to continue to invest in marketing.

Examples of old tactics that don’t work in the new world:

Branding, Awareness Advertising, and Mass Marketing — B2B buyers now reject interruptions and attempts to “tell” them the superiority of a brand or product. Instead, they search for what they need and form their own brand impression based solely on their experience in acquiring what they need.

Lead Generation — If lead generation is all about a phone conversation or a face-to-face meeting, you’re doing it wrong. Today’s tech-savvy, relationship-neutral B2B buyer prefers to conduct their own online research, transactions, and customer service—at least initially, with minimum human interaction.

B2B buyers have changed and it’s time for a new strategy: digital growth.

Digital growth vs. marketing

Digital growth is not a “thing”; it’s a new way of doing business that creates value for both customers and enterprises. In doing so, it enables companies to harness growth created by the radical shift to digital B2B buying and away from marketing. Digital goes hand-in-hand with growth and bridges all company functions to deliver a unified, customer experience.

For most organizations, digital growth requires a new way of thinking.

A willingness to rethink every belief and process is essential. Here are a few fundamental digital growth concepts to tackle:

Be present when buyers are most likely to connect
Customer acquisition peaks when your company connects with a prospect who is in an active buying mode. That’s why search presence, including search engine optimization (SEO) and other search-related activities, are of paramount importance. Be there with self-service information, solutions, or products that accomplish buyers’ tasks.

Be the company that helps buyers buy
B2B buyers presented with a website that functions as a tool to quickly accomplish their tasks will use it again and again! Your website has just become a business application that turns a prospect into a buyer and sets the stage for digital customer retention.

Be the experience buyers want
The highest priority for any customer experience should be providing a path-of-least-resistance. Remove all the friction, distractions, delays, and needless requirements from the buying process and customer relationship. Once that’s done, use digital data to predict customer needs, then fulfill needs before they are wanted.

Make digital growth your future

Breakout growth is happening across all B2B market segments. However, you won’t find traditional marketing and sales mentioned. These success stories are a direct result of digital growth and you don’t have to be an Amazon to make it happen.

Leave old terminology and tactics behind. There’s a new way of doing things. Start your digital growth transformation.

Start growing.