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Marketing Edge Report: State of B2B Marketing in DTCTB Retail
Who are these marketers?
In this report, Anteriad analyzed the 144 responses from marketers at Direct-to-Consumer retail companies with a business presence (DTCTB).
Think brands like Lands' End: built for individual shoppers, but also selling into businesses through wholesale, bulk orders, or corporate programs. We wanted to see if their approach to marketing was different from other B2B marketers. It turns out, it is.
- Many DTCTB businesses rely heavily on an automated, online customer journey, with a need to provide lots of information about products.
- Sales cycles for retail can be shorter than categories like software.
- DTCTB retail businesses can have much bigger target audiences than highly specialized B2B products that are for only one industry or one kind of buyer.
These differences influence how DTCTB marketers build their strategies, especially how they use data. Overall, we found that DTCTB marketers are more confident users of data, refresh data more often, and as a result, have different challenges compared to other marketers.
DTCTB Marketers Are More Likely to Be Data Heroes
We asked marketers “Do you feel you have the right data to convert your audience?” We found that DTCTB marketers are more likely to agree that they do, and it shows up in their pipeline. That's our definition of Data Heroes.
Do you feel you have the right data to convert your audience?
Yes and it's proven in pipeline
DTCTB businesses have the benefit of online search and shopping activity to track, but they don’t just stop at engagement data. DTCTB Marketers are more likely to use every type of marketing data we asked about, from basic demographic data to intent data and buying group data.
Even these Data Heroes have their challenges. While they ultimately get to the right data, more than half (51%) cited a lack of high quality or reliable data sources as a challenge, more than other marketers. And they are just as challenged meeting data privacy requirements as other marketers at 44%.
Which of the following are you currently utilizing when targeting audiences?
Buying Groups: Opportunities and Challenges
DTCTB marketers are more likely than other B2B marketers to have fully implemented buying groups (44% compared to 38% of all marketers.)
DTCTB marketers are also updating buying group data more regularly. While they are about as likely as other marketers to use dynamic data updates, they are much more likely to update daily (33% vs. 22%) while most other marketers update much less frequently.
Their heavy use of buying group data is also a likely reason why their top challenge with buying groups is budget constraints (40% vs 34%). That tells us DTCTB marketers want to invest more in buying groups.
To what extent has your organization implemented buying groups as part of your marketing and sales strategy?
Your business buying group isn't your consumer audience
Buying groups can turn over 25-40% in just six months in fast-moving industries. That's a real risk when the person who buys your product for themselves and the person who signs off on a corporate order are rarely the same person. Corporate buyers care about vendor reliability, pricing terms, and fulfillment consistency, not the brand story that built your following. Map that group separately from your consumer base, and refresh it just as often.A Bright Data-Driven Future
When we asked marketers how confident they were in their organization's process for making marketing budget decisions, DTCTB marketers were more likely than other marketers to agree with the statement “Very confident — we have a clear, data-driven process that connects spend to business outcomes” 52% vs. 47%.)
With a heavy focus on data, DTCTB marketers are in good shape. Their added confidence and clarity could be why they have plans to increase spend across more media channels than other marketers, particularly in search, social and content syndication.
How confident are you in your organization's process for making marketing budget decisions?
DTCTB marketers already know the pattern: test, refresh, repeat.
The ones who apply it to buying groups and intent data will keep pulling ahead of the marketers still working off last quarter's list.
Methodology
Ascend2 benchmarks the performance of business strategies and the tactics and technology that drives them. Anteriad partnered with Ascend2 to survey 631 marketing decision-makers across all levels of marketing leadership, located across the United States, United Kingdom, and APAC. These marketers represent B2B and B2B/B2C organizations with 250 or more employees. The survey was fielded in March 2026.